Inner Kingdom: Volume 1 of the Collected Works of Metropolitan Kallistos Ware

The Inner Kingdom focuses on the themes central to Eastern Christian worship and spiritual life. The opening chapter recounts the author’s journey to Orthodoxy. The next two chapters provide profound and illuminating insights on death, bereavement, and resurrection in Christ, as well as repentance. The following four chapters bring us into the world of the desert ascetics and hesychast monks. Combining scholarly rigor with practical counsels on prayer, Metropolitan Kallistos makes the wealth of the Orthodox tradition accessible to today’s Christians. The next three chapters concern personal vocation, martyrdom, spiritual guidance, and the strange path of the fool for Christ’s sake, followed by a brief essay on time and eternity. The final chapter discusses the legacy of Origen in relation to Saints Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac the Syrian, and Silouan the Athonite, and in conversation with them Metropolitan Kallistos asks, “Dare we hope for the salvation of all?”

Required book for PCA 5356 The Spiritual Father as the Axiom of the Orthodox Church