Kallistos Ware: Orthodoxy and the Jesus Prayer in an Age of Anxiety

[Music] hi welcome to Martha Roxy this is channel dedicated to Catholics Protestants in Orthodox alike today I'm joined by metropolitan calestous where he's a bishop and theologian of the Eastern Orthodox Church and one of the best-known and most beloved Orthodox tire racks and the theologians in the world he's held a since 1982 in the titular bishopric off a diet layer in frigate leader military metropolitan bishopric in late 2007 he's proven to be a seminal figure in my own spiritual journey and that of many others so blessed he was Spaulding lecture of Eastern Orthodox Studies at the University of Oxford from 1966 it's in 2001 and has written popular classics such as the Orthodox way in the Orthodox Church just to start off your eminence could you tell us first a bit about your background so you have an atypical and fascinating background for an Orthodox Bishop and tell us perhaps with some of the key events and movements that helped form you in the mana to RNA yes I'm very pleased to talk with you today and first of all to tell you a little about myself I am entirely English and I was brought up in the Anglican Church in this country when I was 17 I had what was probably a turning point in my life the most important single experience I went inside the Russian Orthodox Church in London which at that time was near Victoria railway station and this was on a Saturday afternoon and the vigil service was in progress and I remember going into the church which was a former Anglican Church my first impression was this building is entirely empty because of a new Pew more I could see was a large expanse of polished floor but then I realized the church was not entirely empty that there were icons on the walls with lamps in front of them that at the east end there was an icon screen gain with lamps burning there were a few worshipers not very many standing coast of them near the walls and some were out of sight there was a choir singing and then I had a feeling entirely contrary to my initial feeling instead of my sense of the church was empty I had an overwhelming conviction that the church was full full of invisible worshipers full of persons whom I could not see but I could feel their presence and I had the conviction that we this small congregation on Saturday afternoon were being taken up into an action far greater than ourselves I had the conviction that along with us the visible congregation there are the Saints praying with us the angels praying and watching over us the mother of God praying for us and indeed Christ himself blessing us I had a sense that this service that I was taking part in was heaven on earth that there was no division between the world about of the world below that we were being taken up into the worship of the total church but church in heaven as well as on earth and it was that conviction of act of worship which I attended as heaven on which drew me to the Orthodox Church and did that sense it altered my whole life beautiful thank you and so I think that definitely comes across in your work and whenever you write about tradition and I would say this part is living through the tradition rather than some dead and stagnant thing I think that's one of the create far too so if you work for me and share many other people do and you've also introduced a lot of english-speaking people to the church and people like myself who never grew up with any real knowledge of the Orthodox Church and why is the English begin orthodoxy so important do you think and what sort of distinct role does it have to play for the wider Church I believe that the Orthodox Church is the one true Church of Christ I recognize that the Holy Spirit is at work among non Orthodox Christians and I certainly don't favor an aggressive polit proselytism attacking other Christians not at all but I do believe that in orthodoxy alone there is the fullness of the Christian faith I would emphasize the word fullness I'm not denying the presence of Christ to the Holy Spirit among other Christians but I believe that in all humility despite our human failings we Orthodox are members of true Church of Christ which has preserved the living tradition of the church in its full integrity and in that sense I believe that orthodoxy is a faith for everyone doesn't mean we're going to attack other Christians but I would still say those who wish to draw in the Orthodox Church it all is open you are welcome amazing thank you for that so and then back to your own life as a worry is there any person or persons that have been especially inspirational or influential for you and that you'd like to tell us about yes first of all I would like to mention two people who influenced me before I became Orthodox they were Anglicans I was Anglican at the time they were members of the Anglin religious community known as the Society of San Francis Father Algie who was one of the heads of the SSF and his pupil and disciple brother Peter and both of them whom I got to know when I was around 17 both of them influenced me very deeply and it was from them that I first learnt about the Catholic tradition within the Anglican Church and under their guidance I began to go much more regularly for Holy Communion and I learned to go to confession so though eventually I left the Anglican Church and joined the Orthodox I still remember the two of them as persons who introduced me not only to their teaching but through their personal example to what we could call in the broad sense the Catholic tradition of the Christian Church but then after I became Orthodox I was considerably influenced by my spiritual father who was a Russian priest I myself became Orthodox in the Greek Cathedral in London under the ecumenical Patriarchate but the vision who received me sent me to a Russian priest for my spiritual father and he was father George shed a meteor who was at the Russian Church outside Russia the exile Church in London he died a good many years ago but certainly I owe him a great debt for his guidance his personal love towards me during my early years as an Orthodox another Orthodox who has greatly inspired me is father Angelo Chios of Patmos who was recently glorified as a saint I was sent to Patmos by the Greek Archbishop athenagoras and I there joined the monastery I lived for about a year in the monastery before returning to Oxford to teach and there I got to know father and fenokee us who had been Abbot of the monastery of Patmos Wilson John but he had been driven out by the Italians this would have been in the 1930s when the Greek islands were under Italian occupation and in his later years he lived in a monastery for women that he had founded which was also in the island of Patmos about 20 minutes walk away from the main monastery and I used to go and see him so he along with father George Arimathea but two people who have had a lot of influence upon me all members of the clergy me laypeople also played a part marvelous thank you that so and then regarding your own works and endeavors is there anything that you have been involved in that you think is borne particularly which fruit and why do you think those things have had such a positive impact I'm now 85 and so at this point in my life I thought I was look back on the past and looking back I couldn't see that there have been three areas in which I've been particularly occupied with closely-related and indeed overlapping first of all for 35 years I was a teacher in the University of Oxford I taught Eastern Orthodox Studies as a member of the theology of faculty and I worked in particular with graduate students who were preparing their doctorates so that was my first area I gave lectures as well of course in the university but then there's a second area and that would be as a writer you've mentioned two of my books more popular books that have had a wide distribution my penguin book the Orthodox Church and then my later book the Orthodox way but alongside those and other books I've been particularly occupied with two tasks during my life and that first was the translation of the Orthodox service books the liturgical books of Orthodoxy I worked on translations with an Orthodox non a Scottish background mother Mary and three volumes of translations have appeared on which we collaborated the first Romanian the lenten triodion and supplementary texts of the tree of the on so that occupied a lot of my time during the past decades and this second area in which i've been very much occupied literary work has been the english translation of the filler Kalea hello Kalia as no doubt you know is a collection of orthodox ascetic a mystical writings collected in the 18th century by saint Nicodemus of the holy mountain and st. Macarius of corinth a partial translation into english of the Filioque alia appeared back in the nineteen fifties but i have been involved in a translation which has been going on since the nineteen seventies of the complete greek sri locally uh translated directly from the Greek I have be collaborating with two others Orthodox friends Gerald Parma and Phillip Sherrod we produced four volumes out of five of our English translation the fifth volume which has been much delayed because my two colleagues Gerald Palmer and Philip Sharad have both died and I will remain and because of I've been distracted with other tasks it's taken me some time to complete this but the fifth volume is now entirely ready and I hope will come out next year that will complete the English translation of the Greek free local ear so those are the two main areas on which I've worked I've mentioned two areas so far of my life university teaching and a writing and translating but a third area is that for most of my life I have been a parish priest when I returned to Oxford in 1966 to teach in the university I was deported by the Greek Archbishop of Thyatira Great Britain methen aghoris the second to start a Greek parish in Oxford there was already a Russian parish and we in the Greek parish worked closely with them and continue to do so so for a great many years I was in addition to being a university teacher a parish priest and that took up a lot of my time more than I had expected that looking back on it I recognized that usually I would have spent up to 30 hours each week on my parish work so that was a third area as a parish priest celebrating the liturgy preaching and I spent a lot of my time hearing confessions now I don't do that very much and now of course I am retired from being parish priest I've handed over to follow Ian Graham who was my assistant for many years and he's now in charge so that was the third area on which I worked beautiful thank you for that and so just back to a few of those academic works that you have completed I think the Orthodox Church which we might attend is perhaps maybe the the classic introduction in the English language I was wondering why D why did you think it was so important to write it and why do you think it is kept such a way to pale after all these years I did not take the initiative I was invited to write it the publishers Penguin Books back in the late 1950s planned to publish a series of books about different branches of the Christian Church and indeed on non-christian faiths and somebody gave my name to Penguin Books so they wrote to me and out of the blue and they said would I like to write a book to be published in the series that they were initiating in what were then known as Pelican books on the Orthodox Church I was still in my twenties at that time and I'd only been Orthodox for quite a short time and my initial reaction was I cannot possibly do that I'm certainly not qualified to write such a book but a friend of mine who had a lot of influence on me a fellow English Orthodox Bill Kris Brooke he said to me you have not taken the initiative they've invited you why don't you accept the invitation and see what you can do and I took his advice and the result was that first I wrote two or three specimen chapters and then penguins were quite pleased with that and so I wrote the whole book and it was duly published in 1963 I never imagined that some fifty five or more years after its publication it would still be in print in fact since its publication in 63 it's never been out of print and from time to time I have revised it a friend of mine said that it was an old warhorse beginning to show its age not long ago well that may be so but I've tried to keep it up to date but I haven't substantially rewritten it after all if I want to say something different I'll write another book so that is the story of why I came to write this book on the Orthodox Church something I would not have done on my own initiative but there was a response to it far exceeded my expectations well I'm glad you're invited and it's my favorite so a much less known perhaps is important my pronunciation if I get this wrong a strategy of sargent a a study of the Greek Church on interpreter I was wondering if you could tell us some important points about the church on the Turkish rule and what compels you to write this book by that Hubert yes you are referring to book on a Greek theologian of the 18th century if stateõs Argenti and it had a subtitle study of the Greek Church and the Turkish rule now again I came to write that book as a result of an invitation it was published just one year after my penguin book in 1964 a descendant of this 18th century Greek theologian a historian Philip argent I had written many books about his native Island Chios and he was interested in seeing a book about his ancestor if Sorachi Oh sergeant II but he himself was a historian not a theologian and so he wanted somebody who was a theologian to write this study and he invited me so that was my second book after my first book on the Orthodox Church my penguin book and that was much more specialized it was published by the Oxford University Press it's been reprinted and indeed it there's a new edition by the American publisher width and stock and it has a new introduction so rather to my surprise that work also remains in print Argenti if star Joe Sargent II was a polemical writer most of his works are attacks on the Roman Catholic Church so one might think that it was a slightly negative area but I combined it with a study of the more general situation of Orthodoxy under Ottoman rule and so in that way I tried to put him in his historical context and I found that though he was polemically writing against the Roman Catholics yet he had many positive things to say so I enjoyed his company mm-hmm excellent do you think there are any lessons that are still relevant and that people need to know about the the church on the Turkish road today how's it working yes the most impressive factor about the Orthodox Church and the Turkish rule was its faithfulness the Turkish rule lasted well from 1453 the fall of Constantinople up to 1821 the beginning of the Greek war of independence and indeed much of the Greek Orthodox world came under the Ottoman Turks before 1453 and much of it remained under Turkish rule after the establishment of the state of Greece so the experience of living under Turkish rule has deeply marked the story of Greek orthodoxy now the attitude of the Ottoman authorities from the 15th century onwards and indeed before the 15th century was to tolerate Christianity the normal view of Muslims towards Christian faith is that the Christians are people of the book that is to say of the Bible and of course the Muslims honor the Old Testament but they regard the Christian faith as defective because we don't accept Muhammad as our prophet but this meant that in the Ottoman period the Christians were tolerated but they were second-class citizens they were in a position of disadvantage they were allowed to worship but under many restrictions and one particular thing was that any act of conversion from Christianity to Islam from Islam to Christianity was absolutely forbidden and the long series of new martyrs in most cases it was society because they had in this way converted from Islam to Christianity and in this way what is impressive about the Orthodox under Turkish rule is their faithfulness despite the many pressures put upon them despite every encouragement to convert from Christianity to Islam the great majority of Greek Christians remained faithful to their Christianity did not abandon their faiths so that this is to be the most impressive feature of Orthodoxy under Turkish rule it was under many restrictions it was not a period of particularly impressive theology but the Greeks did not abandon their faith there were many martyrs there were Saints there was a continuing practice the traditions of the spiritual life of Orthodoxy advanced the Jesus Prayer and so this is what impresses me most of all that the Greeks did not abandon the Christian faith excellent thank you so you've already mentioned the FASTA mignon and for those who are unsure what is feminine and where books like this so important for this faithful church yes the service books that mother Mary and I translated together and came out in three large volumes were first of all the first woman a on and this is the texts for the nine great feasts which fall on fixed dates in the church calendar there are some feasts which depend on the date of Easter and they move about but there are other feasts such as Christmas and the Annunciation which always come on the same date each year so the crystal mignon contains the texts for the nine great feasts that are fixed and the principle on which mother Mary and I worked was to translate the liturgical texts in full the orthodox church services as you will know our extremely long and complex but they are only done in their fullness in certain monasteries however mother bear and I thought we will not just publish a selection of texts but we will translate the full range of the special texts for each of these feasts and what is used in parishes will depend on the practice of those parishes perhaps monasteries will want to use the whole texts now our faiths as Christians is expressed above all through our prayer and alongside private personal prayer there are the liturgical services of the church it seemed to us mother Mary and myself essential that these texts should be made available in their integrity there were partial translations before and some rather unfortunate translations by people whose knowledge of the English language was let us say defective so we wanted to produce translations which we hoped would be accurate and also in good English and we wanted to translate the texts in their integrity so that parents could use what they needed monasteries could use the whole range if they wanted but it seemed to us essential that english-speaking Orthodox should have access to the liturgical prayer of the church because Christianity is a liturgical religion our prayer is expressed through our worship and therefore we hope that this would be a contribution to the life of the evering creasing number of english-speaking Orthodox God well thank you for that so um you've mentioned your Anglican upbringing and some of those influences including the Anglicans that have formula and you've also written many years ago a book on the Anglican Orthodox dialog and have been involved in different discussions of worth and what are some of the key issues between Anglicans and Orthodox a many years ago and then however they developed since the enter today I was indeed for many years a member of the International Commission for dialogue between the Orthodox and the Anglicans indeed for part of that time I was the theological secretary on the Orthodox side and I learned many things from this dialogue as well as warming with both Orthodox and Anglican fellow delegates a number of valuable friendships to me the most elusive but also difficult thing from the Orthodox view point is the comprehensiveness of Anglicanism in the Anglican Communion there are many different points of view the Hydra chiang lichens are very close to the orthodox indeed if the agnes church consisted only of hydra chang lichens it would be an easy thing for us to unite but as we know within Anglicanism there are also evangelical Anglicans who are basically protestant in their approach who are influenced by Lutheranism and Calvinism and indeed in the last 50 years the evangelical influence in the Church of England has increased and in the third place alongside the high church and the low church the evangelicals there are also the liberal Anglicans those Anglicans who call in doubt many of the fundamental teachings the Christian faith such as the Godhead of Jesus Christ and his bodily resurrection now with the evangelical Anglicans we often have friendly relations but of course they do not share our view about the sacrament of the Eucharist that it is the true body and blood of Christ not made an icon but the very true body in blood and of course they also would not agree with the veneration that we show towards the mother of God and the Saints where we ask them to pray for us the way we pray for the departed and the use of icons all these things of course would not be acceptable to the Anglican to the evangelicals and therefore with the evangelicals for all our friendly contacts there are obvious differences and the liberal Anglicans will call in doubt fundamental teachings of the Christian faith with them we sympathize with their sincerity but we cannot agree with the conclusions that they draw so this I think is the most difficult element in the Anglican Orthodox dialogue and this is what makes the dialogue so elusive that for more than a century the Orthodox have had friendly contacts with the Anglicans and yet no reunion has come about the extreme diversity of viewpoints within Anglicanism excellent so just to return to something we might have previously there for the clear and why do you think it has played such a seminal role in Orthodox history and theology and why are some of the sacred places that are set aside such as my gothis still so important for the church the influence of the fellow Kalia since its first publication in 1782 is indeed astonishing the fellow Kalia contains as I've mentioned ascetic and mystical texts from a variety of authors from the fourth to the fifteenth century all of them with one exception were Greeks and the Greek fellow Kalia of 1782 publishes these texts in the original Greek and without commentary or explanatory notes just with very brief introductory comment notes on each author now by the 18th century the Greek language had changed a good deal from what it had been an early Christian and Byzantine times and the original text therefore of these Greek writings would have been quite difficult for people to understand but except for a few texts in the fellow Kalia everything is given in the original early Christian and Byzantine Greek which would certainly have been difficult to understand and in that way one might have thought that the fellow Kalia would have a limited effect and indeed more than a century passed before the Greek fellow Kalia was reprinted at the end of the nineteenth century and a third edition of the fellow Kalia in Greek did not appear until to the Second World War in the years 1957 onwards so one could not say that in Greek the villa Kalia was entirely a best-seller but there's a different story when we look at the Slavonic world quite early the villa Kalia or parts of it were translated into Slavonic and then in the 19th century an addition was produced in five volumes in Russian and this was Russian Edition was reprinted a number of times and it had a popularity far greater than that of the Greek fellow Kalia in the Greek world what is more since the Second World War translations of the fellow Kalia in whole or in part have began to appear in all kinds of other languages not only in English but in French German Italian Finnish Arabic and other languages Romania and certainly so that since the Second World War the fellow Kalia has come to be for what more widely distributed next then if we might look at the Orthodox way which was obviously very well received by many people I was wondering about this book it introduces us to some of the distinct features of Orthodoxy that people might not still might not know and what are some of the key distinct a distinct features of Orthodoxy that you think are important and they do you think we can share with people the fundamental theme in my book the Orthodox way is the relationship between theology and prayer I tried to show how the Orthodox faith is not just a set of doctrines to be understood in part by the reasoning brain but that it is a way of prayer and that if you divorce the Christian doctrines from the practice of prayer the whole thing becomes distorted so this was the basic idea behind my book the Orthodox way to show how Orthodox Christian faith is expressed in Orthodox prayer therefore along with the text that I myself had written I included many acts extracts from different Orthodox spiritual writers so this was the fundamental theme to show how theology and prayer are essentially linked and that each presupposes the other beautiful I think a to your other book the power of the neom and in the role of Jesus the Jesus Prayer in Orthodox spirituality brings us across beautifully and I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about the Jesus Prayer and why it's so central to our third oxi the Jesus Prayer the short invocation to Christ under his human name Jesus which usually takes the form Lord Jesus Christ son of God have mercy on me but there are many variants this short invocation addressed to Christ under his name Jesus has played a very important part in orthodoxy its origins go back to the fourth century and even earlier but probably the Jesus Prayer is being used today by more people than was ever done in the past now prayer is a personal matter and therefore there is personal freedom in prayer we do not say the Orthodox Church but there is only one way of praying I do not say the Jesus Prayer is the only way of praying nor do I say that it is that's really the best way I would merely say that I myself have used it ever since I became Orthodox and before that and that it has benefited me very greatly and perhaps it would benefit you as well so yes why does the Jesus Prayer appeal to people it is short and simple it does not require any special knowledge any elaborate preparation if anybody's interested in practicing the Jesus Prayer one can say to them simply begin and then the prayer itself will show you the path you are to follow so I think that the fact that it is short and simple appeals to very many people particularly perhaps today which is an age of anxiety and distraction when many people find it very difficult to allow for a place of silence in their life because the Jesus Prayer is so short and simple to use [Music] it is particularly appropriate for our modern society but there it is short and simple it leads us into the deepest mysteries of Chris Faith's beautiful can recommend that book to anybody so I'm saying the Jesus program whether it's that I'm just a constant one or rather you set aside time as you mentioned in the book so you've also written the inner kingdom collected works and that's the first volume I wonder what were some of the most pressing questions you hope to address in the inner kingdom and Jim perhaps you can tell us a bit about their fourth common volumes if there's any coming along yes the inner kingdom appeared a long time ago in the year 2000 and the publishers st. Vladimir's seminary press saw does the first volume of what they were pleased to call my collected works and they hoped that perhaps I would produce a volume every year well those hopes have not been realized I have been engaged in lots of other tasks and I'm alarmed to think how many years were passed but I do now have a sequel more or less ready I'm just working on the revision of the texts for a second volume assembling articles that I've written about the trilogy about Jesus Christ the Holy Spirit and the human person I've chosen as the provisional title in the image of the Trinity so that is very nearly ready to go to st. Vladimir's if they're still interested which I hope they are because ever Goodley the sales of the inner kingdom have pleased them so a third volume looking to the future which I hope to work on would probably contain my different writings on the Jesus Prayer I wrote a short piece on the Jesus Prayer the power of the name many years ago but I've also written a number of most specialized articles and I think that could make bog 3 well that's enough for the moment live to produced volume 4 & 5 I doubt but I'll try my best excellent so am just lastly then you've written Orthodox theology in the 21st century I was wondering what do you think are some of the greatest challenges and opportunities for our third oxi today looking at the 19th century first and indeed the 20th century probably the chief question before orthodox was what is the church what is the church shell for what does the church do which nobody and nothing else can do what holds the church together in unity those I think were the leading questions during the 20th century for Orthodox theology and in particular the contacts that Orthodox were having with Western Christians in the movement for Christian unity put this quite you what is the church to the forefront now I believe there's been a certain shift of interest in all achieve the question what is the church still remains important and we assume must go on reflecting on this and writing about it but probably the key question in the 21st century is what is the human person what do we mean by a human being what do we mean by the fact that we are created in the image and likeness of God what are the potentialities of our human person what are its limits what is our special vocation as human beings these I think are the questions that we Orthodox and Western Christians likewise are addressing at the present moment so I would see the key question for the 21st century as what is a human person what does it mean to be human do you think there are any particularly strong theologians that are dealing with those concerns know that you'd like to recommend for people or is it does anybody come to me yes among theologians from the fairly recent past from the 20th century I recommend particularly to Russians george florovsky and recently there has been published an anthology of his writings I rare the second person who I would see as of particular importance in the 20th century is the Russian theologian vladimir lossky and here i think particularly of his classic work the mystical theology of the Eastern Church they of course do not stand alone but if ridiculously far the Dimitra stand in our way coming on to the press most important remind the Orthodox is Greek and that is John's azules who is titular metropolitan of Pergamum and he has written about both the Eucharist and the human purse and he is still very much alive though he's some years older than I am so perhaps we mustn't expect too many more books from him but he is certainly in my view of the greatest among living Orthodox theologians on the Russian side I see a important contribution being made by hilarion al shares who is met a Metropolitan in the Russian Church and he was indeed my pupil at Oxford and I would see him as one of the more creative and original Russian theologians of today marvelous thank you for that your eminence and thank you very much for joining me to discuss your life and work out you greatly appreciate it it's been a pleasure to talk to you [Music]

Channel: More Christ

Views: 2,521

Rating: 4.8823528 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: WxBp1KnVlZ4

Length: 52min 23sec (3143 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 12 2020