Beginning theology in the spiritually and doctrinally arid Western Catholicism of the 1970s, I was lucky to have Bishop Kallistos induct me into the sources of the Christian ascetical tradition, as well as the dogmatic writings of the Greek fathers. So it is a particular pleasure to draw to the attention of readers of New Blackfriars this Festschrift in his honour.
After gracious salutations from the Ecumenical Patriarch and his London exarch, the book opens with a biographical sketch from Professor Andrew Louth of Durham. This is a well-balanced account which does justice to Bishop Kallistos's varied priorities. In a nutshell, these are: in research, the patristic and Byzantine spiritual writers; in translation work, the wonderful Propers – to use a Western term – of the Byzantine Liturgy as well as that classic Orthodox spiritual anthology, the Philokalia; in lecturing, Christology and theological anthropology; in ecumenism, the Anglican-Orthodox bilateral dialogue, and its older-established supporting networks; and in pastoralia the creation at Oxford of a parish of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, as well as the laying of some wider foundations for a distinctively English Orthodoxy. For as Louth points out, what holds all this together is a desire to communicate, at every level, the riches of Orthodoxy to a British audience. The labour seems sufficient for several lifetimes, but it flowed with seeming effortlessness, and a charm at once very English and definitely exotic, from a North Oxford house and garden where the present reviewer netted raspberries with Brigadier Ware (the Bishop's father) in intervals of presenting to the recipient of this Festschrift an essay on the Pseudo-Denys. As Graham Speake mentions in a short piece on Mount Athos, one of Bishop Kallistos’ most attractive theological ideas is ‘sacred geography’.
The main body of these essays falls into three parts: historical, theological, spiritual. The historical group do not form an especially coherent collection. Of the six, two are devoted to Ephrem Syrus who, it has to be said, does not figure prominently in Bishop Kallistos’oeuvre. The first, by Sebastian Brock, considers on the basis of the author's encyclopaedic knowledge of all things Syriac, how Ephrem has been viewed down the centuries in West; the second, by Ephrem Lash, looks at the pseudonymous writings which explain a good deal of Brock's narrative, and helpfully identifies if not three Pseudo-Ephrems then three sub-species of the breed. An essay on early Egyptian asceticism by Norman Russell, one of two Catholic contributors, charts the uncertain relations, in the Nile Valley, between bishops and monks who might sometimes practise an intellectual mysticism that was insufficiently baptised, but could equally remain stubbornly attached to older forms of biblical expression when the doctrinal consciousness of the Church had moved on. Light is thrown on this by a fascinating contribution from Fr Alexander Golitzin in the ‘spiritual’ section, on which more in a moment. These essays are framed by two pieces from Orthodox bishops, one on the early history of theological education in the Christian East (actually a plea for a more spiritually integrated priestly formation in present-day seminaries), the other a study of the history of Orthodoxy in Britain (it turns out to be chiefly pre-Conquest). An unusual piece on ‘music as religious propaganda’, which looks at how a pro-Union Greek composer brought elements of early Western polyphony into his writing for a (never realised) post-Union Byzantine Liturgy, is a suitable tribute to Bishop Kallistos’ own love of musica sacra.
The theological essays fit better together. They consider in turn what in Catholic parlance would be fundamental theology, soteriology, Mariology, theological anthropology and cosmology. The first of these, by John Behr, argues in subtle fashion that an Irenaean account of the Scripture-Tradition relation would see Tradition as Scripture transmitted in a particular fashion that corresponds to its own ‘hypothesis’ or internal principle – a principle, however, needing reference to the apostolic preaching, and thus to the Church, for its discernment. Behr evidently considers that much contemporary Orthodox theology is insufficiently Scriptural and Christ-centred, too much taken up with Trinitarian metaphysics, the ontology of communion and the like. Thomas Hopko on theodicy passes Behr's test – though it is notable that his essay could just as well have come from the pen of an Evangelical writer. Possibly the remaining three doctrinal essays could have benefited from a more ‘Irenaean’ approach in these regards, though Wendy Robinson on our Lady is both touching and sharp, Nonna Verna Harrison has produced the clearest account of how the unity of human nature is to be married with the uniqueness of human persons and the mutual relatedness of human beings I have come across, and Elizabeth Theokritoff provides a theology of the cosmos, from Anglophone Orthodox sources, which is the just the kind of thing a Western Christianity unhappily positioned between uncontrolled anthropocentrism and excessive ecologism needs to learn.
So, finally, to the spiritual essays. Louth on the prayer of the heart and the rationale of the Philokalia makes out a good case for this being in no way an anti-dogmatic, anti-sacramental work (just look at the other writings of Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, for a start!); Dom Columba Stewart takes a new look at the spiritual teaching of one of the Philokalia's sources, Evagrius Ponticus, but considered as monastic pedagogy simply (this enables him to avoid a current controversy over the ultimate doctrinal bearings of Evagrius’‘system’); John Chryssagvis considers how certain of the Fathers anthologised in the Philokalia(or known from other sources) approached spiritual direction, treating their counsel as more non-directive, in fact, than has generally been supposed; Peter Bouteneff revisits a topic on which Bishop Kallistos has also written: holy folly (the Russian tradition is by and large just ultra-serious asceticism, the Byzantine is truly zany, and perhaps sometimes this was grace making salvific use of not so much apostolic strategy as mental disorder). An odd man out is the only (I think) Anglican contributor, Donald Allchin, the Bishop's erstwhile prefect at Westminster School. Allchin has elected to write on early medieval Welsh Christian poetry. Some of these texts seem rather thin, but two, from around 1200, are more substantial and even in translation very fine. The pièce de résistance of the whole Festschrift, to my mind, is Fr Alexander Golitzin's essay on the Anthropomorphite controversy in late fourth century Egypt. In a breath-taking sweep of reference, he argues that those Coptic Christians who considered that God was (before the Incarnation) in the form of man were not theological illiterates but drawing on the Old Testament theophany tradition as continud in the inter-Testamental literature and various ancient Christian sources. The question is whether the divine ‘form of glory’ can be considered to bear some relation to the transfigured human being. If man is the image of God, is there some sense in which God is the archetype of man? This is one of the many respects in which help could be sought from the sophiology of Father Sergei Bulgakov – a figure whom many Orthodox avoid as still overshadowed by the charges of heterodoxy brought against him in the 1930s. Western Catholics who have since known far less reliable theological guides might take up the point. Meanwhile, they can salute in Bishop Kallistos a beacon who has taught some of us to receive a great deal of light from the East.
There is a full bibliography of Bishop Kallistos’ writings, but I could find no notes on the contributors.
