Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia as historian of the Eastern Orthodox Church

ABSTRACT

Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia treats the history of the Eastern Orthodox Church not as a mere academic account of separate events, but rather as a means of manifesting the self-understanding of being Orthodox in unbreakable continuity with the Early Church. He seeks also to present this identification in language suitable to an audience living in the modern West. In this task he outlines the historical background of important theological or canonical aspects of the life of the Orthodox Church (e.g. ministry, synodality etc.) in his publications and the more important critical moments of the relations between East and West, especially the so-called ‘rebaptism controversy’ in the second half of the eighteenth century. In so doing, he manages to state the distinct position of Eastern Orthodoxy without taking a polemical or biased position.

KEYWORDS:

• Rebaptism
• prayer
• Orthodoxy
• Kollyvades
• Nicodeme Hagiorite
• Macarian Homilies
• Philokalia

Acknowlegements

This article first appeared as ‘Ho Mētropolitēs Kallistos Ware hōs historikos tēs Anatolikēs Orthodoxēs Ekklēsias’ in Hē martyria tēs Orthodoxias stē Dysē. Synaxis Eucharistias pros timēn tou Mētropolitē Diokleias Kallistou Ware [The witness of Orthodoxy in the West. A conference of thanksgiving in honour of Metropolitan of Diokleia Kallistos Ware], ed. Pantelis Kalaitzidis and Nikolaos Asproulis, 39–48 (Volos: Ekdotiki Dimitriados, 2018). The English translation is by Norman Russell.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Ware, The Orthodox Church.

² Ware, ‘The Light that Enlightens Everyone’.

³ Ware, ‘L’exercice de l’autorité dans l’Église orthodoxe’.

⁴ Ware, ‘Patterns of Episcopacy in the Early Church and Today’.

⁵ See, for example, Ware, ‘God of the Fathers’.

⁶ See Ware and Palmer, ‘The Philokalia and the Holy Mountain’.

⁷ Ware, ‘The Sacrament of Baptism and the Ascetic Life’.

⁸ Ware, ‘Ways of Prayer and Contemplation.’

⁹ Ware, ‘The Jesus Prayer in St. Diadochos of Photice’.

¹⁰ Cf. Ware, ‘The Jesus Prayer in St. Gregory of Sinai’.

¹¹ Ware, ‘St. Maximos of Kapsokalyvia and Fourteenth-Century Athonite Hesychasm’.

¹² Cf. Ware, A Fourteenth-Century Manual of Hesychast Prayer.

¹³ E.g. Ware, ‘Praying with the Body’.

¹⁴ E.g. Ware, ‘The Jesus Prayer and the Mother of God’.

¹⁵ Cf. the ‘contrast’ between Evagrius and Gregory of Nyssa which is compared with the historical dynamic of the currents and tendencies which they represented also being discussed in Ware, ‘Ways of Prayer and Contemplation’, 401–2.

¹⁶ Cf. the difference between the Syriac versions S1 and S2 of Evagrius’ Gnostic Chapters, the second of which has a much more developed Origenistic anthropology and cosmology: A. Guillaumont, Les «Kephalaia gnostica», esp. 200–6.

¹⁷ Ware, ‘Scholasticism and Orthodoxy’.

¹⁸ Ware, ‘Orthodox and Catholics in the Seventeenth Century’.

¹⁹ Karmiris, Dogmatica et symbolica monumenta Orthodoxae Catholicae Ecclesiae.

²⁰ Hering, Ökumenisches Patriarchat und euoropäische politik 1620–1638; and Tsourkas, Les débuts de l’enseignement philosophique et de la libre pensée dans les Balkans.

²¹ Podskalsky, Griechische Theologie in der Zeit der Türkenherrschaft (1453–1821).

²² The Kollyvades were an eighteenth-century movement of spiritual renewal that advocated frequent communion and emphasised the cultivation of the interior life. For a sober approach to the historical development of the Kollyvades enterprise, without, however, a positive evaluation of its theology, see Tzogas, Hē peri mnēmosynōn eris en tō Hagiō Orei kata ton IH aiōna.

²³ Rhalles and Potles, Syntagma theiōn kai hierōn kanonōn, vol. 2, 187–91.

²⁴ Ibid., 531–3.

²⁵ See the interesting material from the late Byzantine period which Mitsiou and Preiser-Kappeller have drawn from the patriarchal registers: ‘Übertritte zur byzantinisch-orthodoxen Kirche in den Urkunden des Patriarchatsregisters von Konstantinopel’.

²⁶ For a good discussion of the whole problem, see Yangou, ‘To baptisma kai ho tropos apodochēs tōn hairetikōn kai schismatikōn stēn Ekklēsia’.

²⁷ Dragas, ‘The Manner of Reception of Roman Catholic Converts into the Orthodox Church’.

²⁸ See, e.g., Kalliakmanis, Methodologika protera tēs Poimantikēs, 75.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dimitrios Moschos

Dimitrios Moschos graduated in theology from the Universities of Athens and Erlangen and, in Byzantine studies, from the University of Munich, then gained a doctorate at the University of Athens for a thesis on the antihesychast philosophy of Nikephoros Gregoras, published in Greek (Athens: Parousia, 1998). Appointed lecturer in 2007 at the University of Rostock on the eschatology of Egyptian monasticism, he published as a result Eschatologie im ägyptischen Mönchtum, Die Rolle christlicher eschatologischer Denkvarianten in der Geschichte des frühen ägyptischen Mönchtums und seiner sozialen Funktion (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010). From 2007 to 2010 he also taught at the Higher Ecclesiastical School of Athens. He currently teaches Church History as Associate Professor in the Department of Theology of the University of Athens, and also as Privatdozent in the Theological School of the University of Rostock.