Writing History With H.A.H. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew

History is a process which starts from an event, entering memory before being written down through a painstaking effort of abstraction. In the case of Fr. John Chryssavgis’s book, the event is a person, the memory is an inspiration, and history is the global destiny of H.A.H. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, to whom this biography is consecrated. A quote from Churchill used in the book – “The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see” – echoes a central aspect of the Ecumenical Patriarch’s identity: he stands at the crossroads of past and future, leading the Orthodox Church into the third millennium, reminding the world of the eschatological nature of the Church: at the crossroads of time, but also of space, “being in the world, yet not of the world.”

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