Amsterdam Lectures 2013-14:

The Ways of Modern Orthodox Theology: Part II

1. Lecture V: Lay theologians: I. Philip Sherrard

Born 23 September 1922 in Oxford. 1940: went up to Peterhouse, Cambridge, to read History. 1942–6: in the army, latterly in Italy and Greece. 1946: read a book of poems by George Seferis, and began a correspondence with him that was to prove of great importance. 1948: began research on Greek poetry at King’s College London. In the 50s and 60s, held various academic positions in Athens and Oxford; 1970–7, , attached to Kings and the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies.

1956: baptized into the Orthodox Church.

Late 1950s: came across and bought a group of houses, connected to a defunct magnesite mine in Katounia, a tiny village near Limni, on Evia (Euboea). This became his home for the rest of his life (save for periods in England), which he shared with his second wife, Denise Harvey, and his daughters, Selga and Liadain, by his first marriage. Remote and simple, between the Eubaean gulf and the steep pine forests.

30 May, 1995: died

Philip Sherrard was a man of many parts, though they all coinhered in him.

Greek poetry and culture

Translator, mostly with Edmund Keeley, of several modern Greek poets: Cavafy, Seferis, Elytis, Sikelianos, Gatsos

Literary critic: The Marble Threshing Floor, The Wound of Greece Writer on Greece: Athos: The Holy Mountain (1982, later called Athos: The

Mountain of Silence), Constantinople: the Iconography of a Sacred City (1965); an anthology, The Pursuit of Greece (1964); Edward Lear: the Corfu Years (1988)

Poet

Orientation and Descent, Motets for a Sunflower, and a collection, In the Sign of the Rainbow (1994)

Orthodox thinker

On the Schism between East and West: The Greek East and the Latin West (1959), Church, Papacy and Schism (1978)

On love and the sacred: Christianity and Eros (1976), The Sacred in Life and Art (1990), Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition (1998)

Translation of the Philokalia

Concern with Ecology and the Environment

The Rape of Man and Nature (1987) Human Image: World Image. The Death and Resurrection of Sacred

Cosmology (1992)

Temenos and Temenos Academy

Founding member, with Kathleen Raine, and others of the Temenos Institute with its journal, Temenos, and the later Temenos Academy, concerned with the maintenance and understanding of the revered, sacred traditions of mankind.

Bibliography:

For his life see: Metropolitan Kallistos’ obituary: Sobornost/ECR 17:2 (1995), 45–52; also Kathleen Raine, Philip Sherrard (1922–1995): A Tribute (Birmingham & Clun, 1996). There are also further studies by Metropolitan Kallistos: Philip Sherrard: A Prophet for our Time, First Annual Sherrard Lecture 2003 (Friends of Mount Athos, 2008), and his introduction to Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition, ix–xlv.

Most of his books are mentioned above. His correspondence with George Seferis is forthcoming.

There are many articles scattered over various journals. I have made no systematic search, but mention the following:

‘Yeats, Homer and the Heroic’, Temenos 12 (1991), 76–93

‘Kathleen Raine and the Symbolic Art’, Temenos Academy Review 11 (2008), 180–208