Kallistos Ware – författare

Jesusbönen hör till hjärtat av den ortodoxa traditionen och blir alltmer uppskattad i väst. Genom den stilla och enkla upprepningen av Jesu heliga namn öppnas en väg till Guds barmhärtighet och till ett liv i ständig bön, i linje med apostelns ord: »Be ständigt« (1 Thess 5:17). I en värld som blir alltmer högljudd och splittrad erbjuder Jesusbönen en inre oas av frid – en livlina tillbaka till Gud. Biskop Kallistos Ware (1934–2022), var under decennier en av de mest inflytelserika ortodoxa teologerna och författarna i Europa. Han var professor i ortodox teologi i Oxford och var känd för att kunna förmedla djup teologisk kunskap på ett pedagogiskt enkelt sätt. Några av hans böcker finns på svenska.

The Jesus Prayer is the most popular devotional prayer in the Orthodox Church and increasingly popular in the West. A simple and direct method of invoking the mercy of Jesus Christ by repeating his Holy Name, it is a way of obeying St Paul’s instruction to “pray always”. In an increasingly noisy and frenetic world, the Jesus Prayer offers us an oasis of inner peace and a lifeline back to God.

This is an important contribution to the virtually non-existent history of Orthodox theology of the "e;post-Patristic"e; age. Mr. Ware is right in stating in his introduction that "e;four centuries of Turkish rule have left -- for good or evil -- a permanent mark upon the Greek Orthodox world"e; and that "e;without taking into account the way Greeks thought and felt under Turkish domination, and the way their theology developed between 1453 and 1821, it is all but impossible to understand the present condition of Greek Orthodoxy."e;The book begins with an extremely valuable and well-documented chapter on the general state of Orthodoxy under Islam, with a special emphasis on the relations between the Greeks and the Latins. A modern "e;ecumenicist"e; will discover here many puzzling facts that could help him overcome some of the current oversimplifications. Chapter 2 gives us an exhaustive biography of Argenti and in chapter 3 through 4 the main theological problems debated by Argenti -- Baptism, Eucharist, purgatory, and papacy--are presented in a clear and penetrating way. Finally, a list of Argenti's writings and a bibliography crown this scholarly book. As said above, the importance of the book goes beyond the personal case of Argenti: it helps us understand the tragedy of Eastern Orthodoxy at the time when the West was reaching the climax of its religious and cultural development. "e;Squeezed"e; between Latin and Protestant influences, deprived of academic centers, Orthodox theology often surrendered to pressure. Mr. Ware's point is that in the case of Argenti it avoided such a surrender and preserved its tradition from deviations and errors. -- Alexander Schmemann, St. Vladimir Seminary Quarterly 9.2 (1965)

Spiritual guidance is the serious business of Mount Athos, the principal service that the Fathers offer to each other and to the world. Athonites have been purveyors of spiritual guidance for more than a thousand years in a tradition that goes back to the fourth-century desert fathers. The recent monastic renewal on the Mountain is testimony to the Fathers’ continuing power to attract disciples and pilgrims to listen to what they have to say. The papers included in this volume examine some of the many aspects of this venerable tradition, as it has developed on Mount Athos, and as it has devolved upon monks and nuns, spiritual fathers and confessors, lay men and women, in other parts of Greece and in the world. Most of the papers were originally delivered at a conference convened by the Friends of Mount Athos at Madingley Hall, Cambridge, in 2013.