Introduction

The Author

Saint Theophan the Recluse was born Georgy Vasilyevich Govorov in 1815, the son of a village priest in the Oryol region of central Russia. He passed through the seminary at Oryol and then the Kiev Theological Academy, where he graduated with distinction and, in 1841, received monastic tonsure with the name Theophan. Years of teaching and administration in the Church’s schools followed, together with a formative period of service with the Russian ecclesiastical mission in the Holy Land and a posting in Constantinople—an immersion in the living Greek East and its libraries that left a permanent mark on his reading of the Fathers. In 1859 he was consecrated Bishop of Tambov, and in 1863 he was transferred to the ancient see of Vladimir. He proved an energetic pastor, founding schools and preaching widely; but the labors of administration drew him away from the inner life he most desired.

In 1866 he asked to be released from the government of a diocese, and his request was granted. He withdrew to the Vysha Hermitage in the Tambov province, and from 1872 he entered upon the strict reclusion from which his name is drawn. For more than twenty years he did not leave his cell, saw almost no one apart from his confessor, and served the Liturgy alone in a small chapel he had built within his quarters. Yet his solitude was anything but idle or cut off from the Church. He received a great volume of letters—by the accounts that survive, twenty to forty a day—and answered them all, so that his cell became a center of spiritual direction for correspondents across Russia. Alongside this correspondence he produced the immense body of writing for which he is remembered: translations, ascetical and devotional treatises, his great Russian rendering of the Philokalia, and a series of running commentaries on the Epistles of the Apostle Paul. He reposed at Vysha in 1894. In 1988, at the Local Council that marked the millennium of the Baptism of Rus, the Russian Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints, and he is commemorated on the tenth of January. He is honored as one of the foremost teachers of the interior Christian life in the modern Orthodox world, and his influence has reached well beyond it, into the wider Christian readership that has found in him a sober and experienced guide.

The Work: Occasion and Purpose

This volume is Saint Theophan’s exposition of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, composed at Vysha in the early 1880s and belonging to the ordered series in which he worked, letter by letter, through nearly the whole Pauline corpus. That series was not an academic project. Theophan wrote for believers who wished to understand the Apostle and to live by what they understood, and he chose the Epistles of Paul precisely because in them the doctrine of salvation is set out and pressed home upon the conscience. Among those letters, First Corinthians offered him a field of extraordinary breadth, for no other letter of Paul touches so many of the concrete questions of Christian living.

To read the exposition rightly, it helps to recall the situation the Apostle himself was addressing. Corinth was a great commercial city of Greece—wealthy, cosmopolitan, and long notorious for its moral laxity. Paul had founded the church there during his second missionary journey, remaining a year and a half to establish it. Some years afterward, while he was laboring at Ephesus on his third journey, disquieting news reached him. Members of the household of a certain Chloe reported that the young church was splitting into rival parties, each rallying to a favorite teacher; other grave disorders had come to light as well; and the Corinthians had themselves sent a letter putting a series of practical questions to their founder. The Epistle is Paul’s answer to all of this, written from Ephesus around the middle of the first century. Its subjects were handed to him by events, and this is why the letter moves as it does, turning from one urgent matter to the next as the condition of the community required.

The moral condition of the city pressed on the young church from every side. Corinth was a port and a crossroads, restless and prosperous, its religious life crowded with cults and its reputation for licentiousness proverbial in the ancient world. Converts drawn from such a setting brought its habits of mind with them—a taste for rhetorical display, a readiness to prize the clever over the humble, an uncertainty about how the new faith bore on the ordinary business of eating, marrying, and worshiping. Many of the difficulties Paul addresses arise just here, at the meeting of the Gospel with a way of life it had begun to transform but not yet remade. This is part of what gives the letter its lasting usefulness, for the pressures of Corinth are recognizably those of any believer living in a great city and among many competing goods.

Theophan takes up this occasional and practical character as the key to the whole. Because the Apostle is answering real troubles in a real church, the letter can seem, at first glance, to lack a single thread. Theophan’s purpose is to show that the thread is there—that beneath the succession of particular questions runs a consistent pastoral wisdom, and that the disorders of Corinth are, at bottom, the disorders that beset every Christian community and every soul. His commentary therefore has a double aim: to make the argument of each passage plain, and to draw that argument home to the reader’s own inner life, so that a close reading of First Corinthians becomes at the same time a manual of the Christian struggle.

Argument and Structure

Theophan follows the Apostle’s own order, dividing the letter into a sequence of clearly marked parts and leading the reader through them in small portions—a verse, or a few verses together—so that the movement of Paul’s thought is never lost in detail.

The letter opens, after its greeting, with the checking of the parties and disputes that had provoked it (chapters one through four). Here Paul confronts the two roots of the Corinthian faction: an inflated trust in human wisdom and eloquence, and a corresponding overvaluation of the Church’s ministers, around whom the parties had formed. Against the pride of worldly cleverness he sets the word of the cross, foolishness to those who are perishing but to the saved the very power of God; and he reminds the Corinthians that their teachers are only servants and stewards, through whom they came to believe.

From this the Apostle turns to grave moral faults that had been tolerated in the community, and to the scandal of believers dragging one another before pagan courts (chapters five and six). He then answers, one by one, the questions the Corinthians had raised: the ordering of marriage and the single life (chapter seven); the vexed problem of food that had been offered to idols, with all it involved of conscience and of care for the weaker brother (from chapter eight through the opening of chapter eleven); and the correction of disorders in the church’s own assemblies, including the grave abuses that had crept into their keeping of the Lord’s Supper (the remainder of chapter eleven).

The letter then rises to its two great climaxes. The first is the teaching on the gifts of the Holy Spirit (chapters twelve through fourteen): the many gifts are given by one and the same Spirit for the common good; the Church is one body of many members, no one of which may despise another; and at the heart of this teaching stands the hymn of chapter thirteen, in which love is set above every gift as the more excellent way, the one thing that abides when prophecy and tongues and knowledge have passed away. The second climax is the teaching on the resurrection of the dead (chapter fifteen), Paul’s sustained answer to those in Corinth who denied it: our hope is grounded in the risen Christ, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep, and the chapter unfolds the mystery of the last Adam and of the spiritual body that shall be raised incorruptible. A short conclusion, with its practical directions and greetings, closes the letter (chapter sixteen). The reader who keeps this ordered sequence in view will follow the Epistle without losing its thread, and will see how each section answers a definite need of the church at Corinth.

Theological and Spiritual Significance

The abiding power of Theophan’s commentary lies in the way it joins precise exegesis to spiritual earnestness, so that doctrine never remains an abstraction but is carried at once to the conscience, to prayer, and to the daily fight against sin.

This is felt most strongly at the letter’s high points. On the word of the cross, Theophan follows the Apostle in exposing the perennial temptation to prefer human wisdom to the humility of faith, and he presses the lesson upon a reader of any age who is tempted to measure the Gospel by the standards of the learned. On the sanctity of the body, he takes up Paul’s teaching that the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit and makes of it a summons to purity of life. He is especially full where the Apostle treats the Lord’s Supper. Expounding Paul’s account of the institution and his warning against eating and drinking unworthily, Theophan teaches the reality of the Body and Blood of the Lord without reserve: what is set forth at the holy table is the Lord’s own gift, to be approached with reverence and self-examination—a passage that shows how naturally his exegesis passes into the Church’s sacramental life.

The middle chapters, where Paul answers the Corinthians’ own questions, show Theophan’s pastoral judgment at its most careful. On marriage and celibacy he refuses to let the Apostle’s evident esteem for the unmarried state be turned into a disparagement of marriage, holding both callings within the one honor of a life ordered toward God, and reading Paul’s counsel as a physician reads a case—with an eye to the particular condition and strength of each person. On the meat that had been sacrificed to idols he unfolds the delicate balance the Apostle strikes: the idol is nothing, and so the food is in itself indifferent, yet knowledge is not the last word, for love may require the strong to forgo their liberty rather than wound the conscience of a weaker brother. In such passages Theophan draws out a principle that runs through the whole letter and through his own spiritual teaching—that Christian freedom is completed in charity, and that the measure of an action is not merely whether it is permitted but whether it builds up.

The two crowning chapters draw from him some of his richest pages. The teaching on spiritual gifts becomes, in his hands, an instruction on the ordering of every charism to love and to the good of the whole body, a corrective to spiritual competitiveness in any generation. The hymn to love he reads not as a set piece of eloquence but as the description of the one disposition that gives worth to every other gift and alone endures. And the great chapter on the resurrection he expounds as the Church’s sure answer to death itself, tracing Paul’s argument from the historical fact of Christ’s rising to the promise of the believer’s own incorruption. Throughout, the unity of the Church, the holiness of the body, the right ordering of gifts, and the hope of rising again are treated as realities to be lived rather than as positions merely to be argued—and it is this that gives the commentary its enduring character as a guide for the Christian soul.

Reception and Method

Theophan’s exposition is, before all else, a work of tradition. He never reads First Corinthians in isolation. On nearly every page he sets beside the sacred text the great expositors of Paul who preceded him—Saint John Chrysostom above all, whose homilies on this Epistle he quotes at length and follows closely, and with him Theodoret of Cyrus, Oecumenius, Photius, and Theophylact of Ohrid. He does not simply pile up their opinions. He compares them, weighs them where they differ, and draws out the reading the Church has held in common, adding his own labor chiefly to bind their comments to the movement of Paul’s argument and to make the whole intelligible to a modern reader. In this he stands consciously within the patristic stream, offering not a fresh and independent theory of the letter but the distilled wisdom of the Fathers, ordered and applied.

Upon this patristic foundation he lays the warmth of the Russian ascetical tradition in which he was formed and to which he so greatly contributed. The commentary is of a piece with the rest of his teaching on the inner life: the same insistence that knowledge must pass into practice, the same attention to the movements of the heart, the same conviction that Scripture is given for the healing of the soul. Read alongside his commentaries on the other Epistles of Paul, it forms part of a single sustained effort to place the whole Apostle within reach of the ordinary believer, as a school of Christian living rather than an object of study.

The Text and This Edition

This edition presents a fresh modern English translation of Saint Theophan’s commentary, rendered from his original Russian. The underlying text is the public-domain Russian of his exposition of First Corinthians, as preserved in the collected editions of his commentaries on the Epistles of the Apostle Paul issued by the Russian monastery of Saint Panteleimon on Mount Athos and long circulated in Russia. The aim of the translation has been to carry Theophan’s meaning faithfully into clear, readable contemporary English, keeping the pastoral directness of his voice while making his exposition accessible to readers who do not have the Russian.

A few conventions of the edition are worth noting. In keeping with the practice of this series, the author is named as the Church has received him—Saint Theophan the Recluse—and those who have prepared the English are credited as translators, never as authors. Scripture is quoted in a modern English register faithful to the Slavonic and Russian Synodal text that Theophan himself expounds, so that the wording the commentary comments upon and the wording the reader sees remain in accord; Old Testament citations follow the versification of the Greek and Slavonic tradition where it differs from other numbering. Chapter, verse, and section references are given in ordinary Arabic figures in the modern style, so that a citation such as 1 Corinthians 13:4 appears as the reader would expect to find it. The result is intended to be a clean, single-volume English reading text—the work of a great spiritual teacher of the modern Orthodox world, offered to a wider Christian readership in a form that lets his exposition speak plainly for itself.

Suggestions for Reading

First Corinthians repays patience. Because its arguments answer particular situations, a difficulty raised in one verse is often resolved a little further on, and Theophan’s habit of advancing in small, ordered portions is designed to lead the reader through without haste. It is best to keep the Epistle itself close at hand and to turn to the comment only after reading the Apostle’s own words; the citations of Chrysostom, Theodoret, and the others are not digressions but the substance of the exposition, the Church’s long memory of how these words have been understood. Above all, the book asks to be received as Theophan meant it—not merely as a means of mastering Paul’s teaching, but as a companion for the reader’s own road, since the remedies the Apostle applies to Corinth are held out no less to every soul that takes up the letter today.