Kallistos Ware QUOTES

41 " Our human task as craftsmen or manufacturers is to discern this logos dwelling in each thing and to render it manifest; we seek not to dominate but to co-operate. "

― Kallistos Ware , The Orthodox Way

42 " The Incarnation, then, is not simply a way of undoing the effects of original sin, but it is an essential stage upon man's journey from the divine image to the divine likeness. The "

― Kallistos Ware , The Orthodox Way

43 " According to his divine nature Christ is “one in essence” (homoousios) with God the Father; according to his human nature he is homoousios with us men. According "

― Kallistos Ware , The Orthodox Way

44 " The purpose of the creation doctrine, then, is not to ascribe a chronological starting-point to the world, but to affirm that at this present moment, as at all moments, the world depends for its existence upon God. When "

― Kallistos Ware , The Orthodox Way

45 " to seek what is for the benefit of all”, "

― Kallistos Ware , The Orthodox Way

46 " to the end, and without exceptions: then all is justified and life is illumined, whereas otherwise it is an abomination and a burden "

― Kallistos Ware , The Orthodox Way

47 " In the words of John Scotus Eriugena, "Every visible or invisible creature is a theophany or appearance of God." The Christian is the one who, wherever he looks, sees God everywhere and rejoices in him. Not without reason did the early Christians attribute to Christ this saying: "Lift the stone and you will find me; cut the wood in two and there am I. "

― Kallistos Ware , The Orthodox Way

48 " The power of God is shown, not so much in his creation of the world or in any of his miracles, but rather in the fact that out of love God has “emptied himself” (Phil. 2:7), has poured himself out in generous self-giving, by his own free choice consenting to suffer and to die. And this self-emptying is a self-fulfillment: kenosis is plerosis. "

― Kallistos Ware , The Orthodox Way

49 " These three “pointers”—in the world around us, in the world within us, and in our inter-personal relationships—can serve together as a way of approach, bringing us to the threshold of faith in God. None of these “pointers” constitutes a logical proof. But what is the alternative? Are we to say that the apparent order in the universe is mere coincidence; that conscience is simply the result of social conditioning; and that, when life on this planet finally becomes extinct, all that humankind has experienced and all our potentialities will be as though they had never existed? Such an answer seems to me not only unsatisfying and inhuman, but also extremely unreasonable. "

― Kallistos Ware , The Orthodox Way

50 " St Isaac urges, God's taking of our humanity is to be understood not only as an act of restoration, not only as a response to man's sin, but also and more fundamentally as an act of love, an expression of God's own nature. Even had there been no fall, God in his own limitless, outgoing love would still have chosen to identify himself with his creation by becoming man. The Incarnation of Christ, looked at in this way, effects more than a reversal of the fall, more than a restoration of man to his original state in Paradise. When God becomes man, this marks the beginning of an essentially new stage in the history of man, and not just a return to the past. The Incarnation raises man to a new level; the last state is higher than the first. Only in Jesus Christ do we see revealed the full possibilities of our human nature; until he is born, the true implications of our personhood are still hidden from us. Christ's birth, as St Basil puts it, is “the birthday of the whole human race”;4 Christ is the first perfect man—perfect, that is to say, not just in a potential sense, as Adam was in his innocence before the fall, but in the sense of the completely realized “likeness”. The Incarnation, then, is not simply a way of undoing the effects of original sin, but it is an essential stage upon man's journey from the divine image to the divine likeness. The true image and likeness of God is Christ himself; and so, from the very first moment of man's creation in the image, the Incarnation of Christ was in some way already implied. The true reason for the Incarnation, then, lies not in man's sinfulness but in his unfallen nature as a being made in the divine image and capable of union with God. "

― Kallistos Ware , The Orthodox Way

51 " But these self-appointed teachers lack personal experience, and do not even listen when others speak to them. Relying solely on their own self-assurance, they order their brethren to wait on them like slaves. They glory in this one thing: to have many disciples. Their main objective is to ensure that, when they go about in public, their retinue of followers is no smaller than those of their rivals. They behave like mountebanks rather than teachers. They think nothing of giving orders, however burdensome, but they fail to teach others by their own conduct. Thus they make their purpose obvious to all: they have insinuated themselves into a position of leadership, not for the benefit of their disciples, but to promote their own pleasure. "

― Kallistos Ware , The Philokalia Vol 1

52 " The Christian God is not just a unit but a union, not just unity but community. There "

― Kallistos Ware , The Orthodox Way

53 " The victory of his suffering love upon the Cross does not merely set me an example, showing me what I myself may achieve if by my own efforts I imitate him. Much more than this, his suffering love has a creative effect upon me, transforming my own heart and will, releasing me from bondage, making me whole, rendering it possible for me to love in a way that would lie altogether beyond my powers, had I not first been loved by him. Because in love he has identified himself with me, his victory is my victory. And so Christ's death upon the Cross is truly, as the Liturgy of St Basil describes it, a “life-creating death”. "

― Kallistos Ware , The Orthodox Way

54 " To be a Christian is to be a traveller. Our situation, say the Greek Fathers, is like that of the Israelite people in the desert of Sinai: we live in tents, not houses, for spiritually we are always on the move. We are on a journey through the inward space of the heart, a journey not measured by the hours of our watch or the days of the calendar, for it is a journey out of time into eternity. "

― Kallistos Ware , The Orthodox Way

55 " However oppressed by my own or others' anguish, I am not to forget that there is more in the world than this, there is much more. "

― Kallistos Ware , The Orthodox Way

56 " to celebrate the Eucharist, ‘the medicine of immortality’.* "

― Kallistos Ware , The Orthodox Church

57 " We think the Trinity, speak the Trinity, breathe the Trinity. "

― Kallistos Ware , The Orthodox Way

58 " There is in God something analogous to “society”. He is not a single person, loving himself alone, not a self-contained monad or “The One”. He is triunity: three equal persons, each one dwelling in the other two by virtue of an unceasing movement of mutual love. "

― Kallistos Ware , The Orthodox Way

59 " The Jesus Prayer is not only Christ-centered but Trinitarian. "

― Kallistos Ware , The Orthodox Way

60 " So far from being pushed into the corner and treated as a piece of abstruse theologizing of interest only to specialists, the doctrine of the Trinity ought to have upon our daily life an effect that is nothing less than revolutionary. Made after the image of God the Trinity, human beings are called to reproduce on earth the mystery of mutual love that the Trinity lives in heaven. In "

― Kallistos Ware , The Orthodox Way