Metropolitan Callistus (Ware) on the most pressing ethical issues of our time
A meeting was held in Moscow with the famous English theologian, hierarch of the Orthodox Church of Constantinople, Metropolitan Callistos of Diocleus (Uer). Metropolitan Callistus answered questions from Miloserdiya.ru about acute ethical problems of our time.
Metropolitan Callistus of Diocleus (in the world Timothy Ware) was born into a believing Anglican family, but at the age of 17 he became acquainted with the Orthodox Church, was soon baptized and became a monk. Vladyka Callistus is the author of many fundamental works on Orthodoxy, for many it was these works that paved the way for the Orthodox faith. Vladyka Callistus was personally acquainted with the great Orthodox saints, for example, with Paisius the Holy Mountain and Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco. For more than 60 years Metropolitan Callistus taught at Oxford University, and many of his students became Orthodox priests around the world.
The Church is sinless - the members of the Church on earth are sinful
- You need to understand that the Church is a divine-human organism, and Orthodoxy is for everyone. From the divine side, the Church is the body of Christ, and there is no evil or sin in it. On the human side, it consists of people like you or me, and we are not perfect, we make mistakes. So, as human beings, we have to fall and get up, fall again and get up again - and so on until the end. Our life in the Church is full of ups and downs.
Photo: Anastasia PROSCHENKO / miloserdie.ru
Promotional video:
If you doubt the truthfulness of the Orthodox Church, don't look at me, don't judge the Church by me, learn to look deeper and learn to see the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church. Look not at what is visible, but at what is invisible. As a church on earth, we are bad testimonies of the faith of Christ.
Are there open questions for you in life, questions to which you do not know the answer?
- Of course, I have many such questions. For example, I am very interested in what happens to a person after death. I am already 81 years old, and I am very curious about what will happen next, especially since my death will probably not keep itself waiting long.
As a Christian, I believe not only in the resurrection of the soul, but also in the resurrection of the body. But how will this happen? How does the soul continue to exist without a body after death? And are there any differences between our resurrected body and the one we have now? There are many such questions, the answer to which we do not know now, but personally I believe that life after death exists, and that this life will be fuller and more beautiful than the earthly one.
“Listening to people, sympathizing with their troubles and pains, I recover in faith”
- To be honest, I have hesitation in faith, doubts. There are such people - I knew such people - who kept their childish faith throughout their lives and never doubted. But for many of us, unfortunately, this is impossible. And this is especially impossible for those, including me, who have studied modern philosophy.
Photo: Anastasia PROSCHENKO / miloserdie.ru
My doubts were connected not so much with certain aspects of the doctrine, but rather with more general concepts: what if there is no meaning in life? What if there is no God either? Yes, I asked myself this. What answer did I find?
My fight against doubt has always been accompanied by my faith. I know that in spite of my doubts, I have the duties of a bishop: to come to church, serve the liturgy, confess and receive communion … At such moments, I push all doubts into the background and just pray. Listening to people during confession, compassion for their troubles and pains, helping them in a pastoral way, I myself recover in faith.
Faith is a conscious decision of a person to be faithful
- The particular difficulty of such existential questions is that we cannot prove them in the same exact way as a theorem in geometry.
Photo: Anastasia PROSCHENKO / miloserdie.ru
The truth of our faith is proven differently: we choose what we believe in. That is, faith is not just a person's consent to accept religious doctrines. Faith is a conscious decision of a person to be faithful and to remain faithful to those answers to existential questions that the Church gives us.
Despite all my doubts, I cannot imagine myself anywhere else except Christianity and Orthodoxy. Faith illuminates all aspects of my life.
Each person, sooner or later, must make this conscious "leap of faith" to a deeper understanding of the most complex and most important issues of our existence.
After death, the soul of a person exists without a body until it is resurrected for eternal life. In this case, how to treat a person who has changed their gender? Who will he be resurrected - who he was or who he has become? Does the soul have a floor?
- What is a man? This is the unity of body and soul. Both our bodies and our souls are given to us by God, and God chooses them for us. We are not omnipotent: there are things that are not for us to decide. This is, for example, whether we live or die, suffer or not suffer, be a woman or a man. God gives us gender at birth with life, body and soul. The soul has no sex, but the body does. A person is not only his body, and therefore we have no right to dispose of what gender this body has and when this body dies.
For those who have already changed their sex, I would advise you to treat them in a Christian way, not as a man or a woman, but first of all as a person, with love.
If a person is suffering painfully and wants to end his suffering - is it a crime to commit euthanasia? Will such a person be suicidal, will he go to hell?
- We cannot stop our life. Life is a gift from God, and we have no right to take it away from ourselves in spite of any suffering. There are certain decisions that we cannot make.
On the other hand, we also should not impose on a person his existence artificially. We should not kill people, but sometimes we can allow a person to die - that is, not to force him to exist with the help of technology and medicine, if his body and he himself are already ready to die. But we also have no right to hasten the death of a person.
As for the question, whether it is suicide or not, whether such a person will go to hell, we cannot know. This, again, is up to God, not us. I would even say that God does not send anyone to hell - we send ourselves there.
Anastasia PROSCHENKO
