Introduction

1. The Author

Saint Theophan the Recluse (1815–1894) is among the most beloved spiritual teachers of the Russian Church, and one of the great expositors of Scripture that century produced. He was born Georgy Vasilievich Govorov in the village of Chernavsk, in the Oryol region, the son of a parish priest. Schooled first at the Oryol seminary and then, from 1837, at the Kiev Theological Academy, he was tonsured a monk in 1841 and given the name Theophan, “manifestation of God.” Years of teaching and administration in the Church’s schools followed, and in 1859 he was consecrated bishop of Tambov and Shatsk, moving in 1863 to the see of Vladimir.

He might have remained a diocesan bishop to the end, honored and busy. Instead, in 1866, at his own request, he laid down the pastoral staff and withdrew to the Vysha Hermitage in the Tambov region. After a few years of ordinary monastic life there he took a further and decisive step: about 1872 he entered strict reclusion, shutting himself into a small suite of rooms, building a chapel where he served the Liturgy alone, and receiving almost no visitors. He was not idle in that solitude. For more than twenty years his pen never rested. An immense correspondence went out from Vysha—by his own account some tens of letters a day—answering the questions of bishops and peasants alike; and alongside the letters came the books on which his fame rests: works of ascetical theology such as The Path to Salvation and What the Spiritual Life Is, the great Russian Philokalia he translated and edited, the adaptation known as Unseen Warfare, and a sustained labor of biblical commentary.

That commentary was the crown of his exegetical work. Over the years of his reclusion Theophan expounded, verse by verse, nearly the whole body of the Apostle Paul’s letters, together with certain of the Psalms. The commentary on the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, composed in the early 1870s, belongs to this Pauline series and shares its character throughout. Theophan died at Vysha on the feast of the Theophany, in January 1894, and was numbered among the saints by the Russian Church in 1988. He is remembered, with his contemporary Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov, as one of the two teachers who carried the ancient patristic tradition of prayer and inner watchfulness into the modern age and made it speak to ordinary Christian lives.

2. The Work: Occasion and Purpose

The letter Theophan sets out to explain is, by the common reckoning of readers ancient and modern, the earliest of the Apostle Paul’s surviving letters, and so among the oldest Christian documents in existence. Its occasion is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles and rehearsed by Paul himself in the letter’s opening chapters. During his second missionary journey Paul crossed from Asia into Europe and, after his beating and imprisonment at Philippi, came down the great Roman highway, the Via Egnatia, to Thessalonica, the wealthy and populous chief city of Macedonia. There he preached, first in the synagogue and then more widely, and in a short span of weeks a church was gathered—some Jews, a great number of God-fearing Greeks, and many of the leading women. The success provoked a hostile faction, which raised a tumult, dragged Paul’s host Jason before the magistrates on a charge of proclaiming “another king, Jesus,” and made the Apostle’s continued presence impossible. He was hurried away by night, first to Berea and then to Athens, cut off from converts he had scarcely finished teaching.

Distance did not cool his care. Twice, he tells them, he tried to return, and twice was hindered. At length, unable to bear the suspense, he sent Timothy back from Athens to strengthen the young church and bring word of it. Timothy rejoined Paul at Corinth with news that was, on the whole, deeply consoling: the Thessalonians stood firm under persecution, held their teacher in loving memory, and had become a byword for faith throughout the region. Out of the joy and relief of that report the letter was written, from Corinth, in the early fifties. Modern scholarship, anchored by an inscription that fixes the proconsulship of Gallio at Corinth to the year 51, places it about 50 or 51. Theophan, weighing the same evidence from Acts and the Roman historians, sets it a little later, in the closing months of 53 or the beginning of 54; the difference is small and turns on the chronology of Paul’s arrival at Corinth.

Timothy’s report had also disclosed shadows. Some converts had not wholly shaken off the habits of their pagan past—a few in the matter of bodily purity, some in covetousness, some in an idleness that neglected honest work. And a graver perplexity had taken hold: the Thessalonians were grieving over fellow believers who had died, fearing that the dead would somehow miss the glory of the Lord’s return. The letter answers all of this. Its purpose, as Theophan draws it out, is threefold—to confirm the church in faithfulness amid affliction by recalling the grace of God shown in their conversion; to correct the faults left over from their former life and to give order to the new one; and, above all, to quiet their fear for the departed by a precise teaching on the coming of Christ and the resurrection of the dead. Among Paul’s letters this one is the most personal and the most tender. It argues no great controversy and lays no doctrinal foundation in the manner of Romans or Galatians; it is the letter of a father to children lately won and suddenly parted from, and its warmth is its substance.

3. Argument and Structure

Theophan reads the letter as falling cleanly into two halves, with a greeting set before them and a cluster of blessings appended at the end. The first half, chapters one through three, he calls the historical part; the second, chapters four and five, the moral and dogmatic part.

The historical half is almost wholly taken up with the bond of love between the Apostle and the church he had begotten. Paul gives thanks for their faith, their labor of love, and their patience of hope; he recalls how the gospel had come to them not in word only but in power; he reminds them of his own conduct among them—how he had worked night and day so as to burden no one, dealing with each of them as a father with his own children. He speaks of his grief at being torn away, of his repeated longing to return, of the relief Timothy’s news had brought. Theophan lingers here with evident pleasure, finding in these chapters the truest portrait of a shepherd’s heart, and drawing from them a pattern for all who must care for souls.

Out of this bond of love the second half raises its moral demand. “This is the will of God,” Paul writes, “your sanctification”—and the word governs everything that follows. The Thessalonians are called to holiness of body, keeping themselves from the sexual license that saturated pagan life; to a brotherly love that already marks them but must abound yet more; and to a quiet, industrious life, working with their own hands, so that their conduct commends the faith to those outside. Then comes the passage that is the letter’s doctrinal heart, and the reason many of its first readers most needed it: the teaching on the resurrection and the coming of the Lord. They must not grieve for the dead, Paul says, as those who have no hope; for as surely as Jesus died and rose, so God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. The dead in Christ will rise first; then the living will be caught up together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so—this is the whole comfort—they will always be with the Lord. These are words, the Apostle adds, with which the faithful are to console one another.

Because that day comes like a thief in the night, unannounced, the letter turns from comfort to vigilance. Christians are children of the day, not of the darkness; they are to keep awake and sober, armed with faith, love, and the hope of salvation. The closing chapter gathers a shower of short commands—to esteem their leaders, to be at peace, to warn the idle and support the weak, to render no one evil for evil, to rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in everything, and not to quench the Spirit or despise prophecy but to test all things and hold fast the good. The letter ends with the prayer that has become one of its treasures: that the God of peace would sanctify them wholly, and keep their whole spirit and soul and body blameless at the coming of the Lord. Theophan carries the reader through all of this in short, ordered steps, pausing at each turn to settle what is difficult and to press the sense home upon the conscience.

4. Theological and Spiritual Significance

The lasting weight of this small letter lies in two places, and Theophan gives his fullest attention to both.

The first is its teaching on the last things. First Thessalonians is the earliest written witness to the Church’s hope in the resurrection of the dead and the return of Christ, and it frames that hope not as speculation about dates but as consolation for those who grieve. The Thessalonians’ fear—that death might sever a believer from the promised glory—is answered by the plain assurance that death has no such power: the departed are not lost but asleep, and will rise first of all. Theophan handles the passage as pastoral medicine, exactly as Paul intended it, drawing out the tenderness by which mourning is turned to hope without being forbidden. At the same time he insists, with the Apostle, that the very uncertainty of the day is a summons to readiness. The Christian does not calculate the hour; he lives so as to be found awake at any hour. In an age already curious about prophecy and prone to alarm, Theophan’s steadiness here—hope without fever, watchfulness without fear—is itself a theological correction.

The second is the letter’s vision of sanctification. If the coming of the Lord is the letter’s horizon, holiness is the road to it. Theophan seizes on Paul’s threefold naming of the human person—spirit and soul and body, all to be kept blameless—and reads it in the light of the ascetic Fathers, for whom the whole of a person, and not the soul alone, is called to be made holy. The commands of the last chapter, so easily passed over as a list, become in his hands a rule of daily life: unceasing prayer, constant thanksgiving, sobriety, brotherly forbearance, obedience to those set over the Church. Here the exegete and the spiritual director are one and the same man. The reclusion at Vysha, the Philokalia he was editing in those same years, and this commentary all breathe a single conviction—that doctrine is given to be lived, and that the expectation of Christ’s coming is meant to shape the ordinary hours of a working, praying, waiting Christian.

5. Reception and Influence

Theophan did not read First Thessalonians alone, and he did not wish his readers to. His commentary stands consciously within the stream of patristic interpretation, and its authority is in large part the authority of the tradition it gathers. Above all others he leans on Saint John Chrysostom, whose homilies on the Thessalonian letters are the great patristic treatment of them; alongside Chrysostom he cites Blessed Theodoret of Cyrus, Oecumenius, Theophylact of Ohrid, and Saint John of Damascus. He does not merely stack their opinions; he weighs them, notes where they differ, and binds their remarks to the thread of Paul’s argument for a reader of his own century. The result is that a modern reader receives, through Theophan, not one man’s reading but the settled memory of the Church.

The commentary itself has become a standard of Russian biblical exposition. Together with Theophan’s other Pauline volumes it marked a significant contribution to the biblical scholarship of nineteenth-century Russia, and it has been read ever since as much for its spiritual counsel as for its learning. In the Russian tradition his name is spoken in the same breath as Ignatius Brianchaninov’s, the two of them the recognized masters of the interior life for the modern Orthodox world; and his exegetical works remain in print and in devotional use to this day.

6. The Text and This Edition

Theophan wrote this commentary in Russian, for believers rather than for specialists—for anyone who wished to understand the Apostle and to order a life by him. The present edition offers a fresh, modern English translation made directly from that Russian text, in the pre-revolutionary edition of his collected expositions of the Pauline epistles. It is an English-only reading edition: the translation aims to carry Theophan’s clarity and pastoral warmth into readable contemporary prose, without archaism, while keeping the substance and the ordered, verse-by-verse movement of the original intact.

A few editorial conventions should be noted. Theophan quotes Scripture in the Church Slavonic and Russian Synodal forms familiar to his readers, which follow the Greek Septuagint tradition of the Old Testament; where his exposition turns on the wording of a verse, the translation renders that wording faithfully rather than substituting a standard English version, so that the point he is making remains visible. Chapter and section numbers and scriptural citations are given in the ordinary modern style. In keeping with this series’ practice, the work is presented under the author’s name as the Church has always received him—Saint Theophan the Recluse—and those who have prepared the English text are credited as translators, never as authors. Nothing of Theophan’s own argument has been abridged; the modernization touches the language, not the content.

7. Suggestions for Reading

First Thessalonians is short, intimate, and quickly read, and its strength lies as much in its affection as in its teaching. The commentary is best approached with the letter itself open beside it: read a passage of Paul first, then Theophan’s remarks on it, and the exposition will fall into place. The quotations from Chrysostom, Theodoret, and the rest are not digressions to be skimmed but the very substance of the reading—the Church’s long memory of how these words were understood. Above all, the book asks to be read as its author wrote it: to learn what Paul taught the Thessalonians and to be shaped by it. The holiness to which that young church was summoned, and the hope by which it was comforted in the face of death, are held out to the reader no less than to them.