Introduction

1. The Author

Saint Theophan the Recluse was born George Vasilyevich Govorov on 10 January 1815, in the village of Chernavsk in the Oryol province of central Russia, the son of a parish priest. He was schooled in the seminary at Oryol and then at the Kiev Theological Academy, one of the great centers of Russian ecclesiastical learning, and there, on the eve of completing his studies, he received monastic tonsure in 1840 and the name Theophan, “revealer of God.” He taught and served as rector in a succession of seminaries and academies, spent formative years with the Russian ecclesiastical mission in the Holy Land and at Constantinople—where he immersed himself in the Greek Fathers and the manuscripts of the ascetic tradition—and in 1859 was consecrated bishop, first of Tambov and then, from 1863, of Vladimir.

In 1866, at the age of fifty-one, he asked to be released from the cares of a diocese and withdrew to the Vysha Hermitage in the Tambov province. For six years he lived there as an ordinary monk; then, in 1872, he entered strict reclusion, shutting himself into a few small rooms, serving the Liturgy alone in a chapel he built with his own hands, and giving the remaining twenty-two years of his life to prayer, to a vast correspondence of spiritual counsel, and to writing. He died on 6 January 1894, on the feast of the Theophany whose name he bore. Those years of seclusion were the most fruitful of his life: from them came The Path to Salvation, his Russian rendering of the Philokalia, the adaptation of Unseen Warfare, and—at the center of his labors on Scripture—a series of running commentaries covering nearly the whole body of the Apostle Paul’s letters. The Russian Church numbers him among its teaching saints and glorified him in 1988; he is commemorated on 10 January. His authority has never been confined to one communion, and readers across the Christian world have come to him as to a sure and gentle guide. The commentary on the First Epistle to Timothy belongs to his Pauline set; the Russian text our edition follows carries the date 1882.

2. The Work: Occasion and Purpose

The First Epistle to Timothy is the first, and the fullest, of the three letters the Church has long grouped together as the Pastoral Epistles—1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus—so named because they are addressed not to congregations but to individual shepherds, and are taken up almost wholly with the care and government of the Church. The letter presents itself as the Apostle Paul’s, written to his own disciple, and it is as Paul’s that the Church has always read it and that Theophan expounds it throughout; a strand of modern criticism has questioned that authorship, but the tradition in which this commentary stands receives the letter as it stands, from the Apostle’s own hand.

Theophan sets the letter carefully in the life of its recipient. Timothy was a native of Lystra in Lycaonia, the son of a Greek father and a devout Jewish mother, Eunice, whose own faith—with that of the grandmother Lois—had shaped him from childhood in the Scriptures. From the second missionary journey he became Paul’s inseparable companion, sharing his labors and journeys, carried on his errands to Thessalonica, to Corinth, from city to city, until, near the end, Paul ordained him bishop and left him at Ephesus to hold and order that great church. It is at this point that the Epistle is written. Following the ancient reckoning, Theophan places the letter after Paul’s release from his first Roman imprisonment—about the years 64–65—when the Apostle, travelling on toward Macedonia, had left Timothy behind at Ephesus and wrote to him, most probably from Philippi, a detailed guide for the work that now lay on him alone.

Theophan is unusually attentive to why such a guide was needed, and here his own pastoral heart shows. Timothy had never before acted independently; he had always worked at Paul’s side and under his eye, and now the whole weight of a church’s governance rested on him, and he was left alone. Paul, Theophan says, bearing a fatherly love for him, could see how his disciple’s soul must be cast down, and how hard it would be to carry out demanding tasks under the pressure of grief; and so, not long after their parting, he wrote—partly to comfort and strengthen a lonely man by the assurance that his spiritual father remembered him, and chiefly to set down in writing what he had had no time to say, or needed to confirm, about the exercise of the pastoral office. The letter thus freed Timothy from having to guess how to act, steadying him to keep good order without hesitation or fear of erring. The occasion, in other words, was not a single crisis but the permanent need of a young shepherd for a rule; and this is why the letter reads, from beginning to end, as a handbook of the pastoral life.

Theophan did not compose his exposition for scholars. He wrote it for believers—and here especially for pastors—who wished to understand the Apostle and to live by him. He works through the letter in small portions, a verse or a few verses at a time, giving the plain sense, gathering what the Fathers before him had said, clearing away difficulties, and then turning the passage back upon the conscience. Before the verse-by-verse exposition proper he sets, in the manner of the ancient introductions, several chapters on the life of Saint Timothy and on the two Epistles addressed to him—where and when they were written, their occasion, their content, and their division—so that the reader comes to the first verse already knowing the man and the situation into which the Apostle speaks.

3. Argument and Structure

Theophan divides the letter as he divides all the Epistles: between an opening greeting (1:1–2) and a brief closing charge (6:20–21) lies the main body of instruction, and that body he shows moving through three great concerns.

The first is the guarding of the faith against error (chapter 1). Paul opens by charging Timothy to silence those who “teach a different doctrine” and give their minds to “myths and endless genealogies,” and then, lest zeal against error harden into a wooden legalism, he sets out the right use of the Law—good if used lawfully, as a curb for the lawless, but not the gospel—and grounds the whole charge in his own case, the chief of sinners saved by mercy, so that sound doctrine is bound from the start to the mercy that is its heart.

The second concern is the order to be kept among Christians (2:1–3:13). Here Paul turns to the assembly and its worship: prayer is to be made for all men, and first of all for kings and those in authority, because God “desires all men to be saved”; men are to pray lifting up holy hands without wrath, and women to adorn themselves with modesty and good works and to learn in quietness. From the conduct of the assembly the Apostle passes to those who are to lead it, laying down the qualities required of the man who would be a bishop—blameless, temperate, apt to teach, well governing his own house—and of the deacons, grave, tested, and holding the mystery of the faith in a pure conscience.

The third and longest concern is how the shepherd is to bear himself toward the various sorts of those he shepherds (3:14–6:19). It opens at the letter’s summit—the Church as “the pillar and ground of the truth” and the “great mystery of godliness” it guards—and then unfolds into the most practical counsel of the whole Epistle: warnings of those who in latter times shall depart from the faith, forbidding marriage and foods; the charge that Timothy be himself an example in word and life and give heed to reading, exhortation, and teaching; directions for dealing with the different states of the flock—older men and younger, widows truly in need and younger widows, the presbyters who rule well, servants and masters; and, at the close, the great counsels on contentment and on the love of money, before the final charge to the man of God to fight the good fight and keep the commandment without spot. Holding this threefold shape in view—faith, order, pastoral conduct—is the surest way through a letter that can otherwise seem a string of loosely joined directions.

4. Theological and Spiritual Significance

For all its practical bent, the letter carries at its center some of the most concentrated doctrine in the New Testament, and Theophan expounds it with the Fathers close at hand and the reader’s soul closer still.

Its first great burden is sound doctrine against false teaching. From the opening charge Theophan draws out the Apostle’s own rule: what is merely “different” from the faith once delivered is, by that very difference, not the truth. This is no abstract principle for him. He shows it worked out concretely when Paul warns that “in the latter times some shall depart from the faith,” forbidding marriage and commanding abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving—and Theophan, with Chrysostom and the others, reads such counsels as measures of a discernment the shepherd must keep alive, testing every teaching against the mystery the Church confesses and rejecting whatever is inconsistent with it, whether it has appeared already or is yet to come.

That mystery is the letter’s doctrinal summit, and Theophan gives it his fullest attention. “There is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (2:5): here he expounds, with Chrysostom, Theodoret, and Oecumenius, how a mediator must partake of both sides he would reconcile, so that the Son of God, the eternal Word, became the one Mediator precisely by becoming incarnate—God of God and man of men, yet one Person, one Hypostasis of two natures. Against Arius and Eunomius he presses the point that unless Christ shares fully the nature of the Father, He cannot mediate at all; the confession of “the man Christ Jesus” affirms not that He is only man but how He became our Mediator. The same confession returns, compressed into a single verse, at “great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifested in the flesh … received up into glory” (3:16), which Theophan reads as the whole Christian faith in miniature. The Word who is God “became flesh and dwelt among us,” taking our nature into His own Person without ceasing to be God. “This is truly a great mystery,” he quotes Chrysostom, “for man became God, God became man”; and with Theodoret he finds “the two natures” of the one Christ named in the Apostle’s words. From this mystery, he teaches, the believer’s whole life takes its light and strength.

Bound up with this Christology is the reach of God’s saving will. God “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth”—yet, Theophan insists with Oecumenius and Ambrosiaster, “God does nothing here by compulsion.” He saves no one against his will; He offers salvation to all and grants it to those who freely turn to Him, as a physician stands ready to heal all who will come to him. This is the synergy—the working together of divine grace and human freedom—that runs through the whole of Theophan’s teaching, and it is why he can command the faithful to pray even for unbelievers, whom God still desires to save.

The letter’s practical wisdom Theophan expounds with the same seriousness, refusing to let it fall beneath the doctrine. “Godliness with contentment is great gain” (6:6) he reads not as godliness plus a sufficiency of goods but as godliness together with the felt contentment that so fills a man’s heart that he needs nothing—the godly man rich because he is satisfied with all things, the wealthy man poor when he still feels a lack. And over against contentment stands the letter’s most quoted warning, that “the love of money is the root of all evils” (6:10), on which Theophan sets down a searching homily of Chrysostom’s on how covetousness arms the soul with countless swords and devastates the world like fire through a forest—and how, since it was kindled by our own will, by our will it may be quenched. Throughout, the mark of Theophan’s reading is that no doctrine is left as mere information: the “example” required of Timothy in word, conduct, love, faith, and purity becomes a summons to every reader, and the ordering of the household of God becomes a map of the ordering of the soul.

5. Reception and Influence

Theophan writes from within the tradition rather than over against it, and his commentary is a work of transmission as much as of interpretation. At nearly every step he calls up the Church’s earlier readers of the Apostle—Saint John Chrysostom most of all, and with him Blessed Theodoret of Cyrus, Blessed Theophylact of Ohrid, Oecumenius, and the Latin commentator Ambrosiaster—quoting them at length and setting one beside another until their common mind appears. This is the old art of the catena, the patristic “chain” of excerpts; but Theophan is no mere compiler. His own work is to fasten the Fathers’ comments to the movement of Paul’s argument, and then, in the manner of Russian spiritual writing, to carry each doctrine past the understanding and into the conscience, into prayer, and into the daily struggle against sin.

The letter he expounds has left deep marks on the Church’s life and self-understanding. Its portrait of the bishop and the deacon has shaped the qualifications for ordination in every age; its charge to “hold the mystery of the faith in a pure conscience” and its confession that God “was manifested in the flesh” fed the Church’s Christological reflection; and its counsel on the care of widows stands near the root of the Church’s ordered charity. The Apostle Timothy himself, to whom it is addressed, the Church honors as one of the Seventy and as the first bishop of Ephesus, martyred there while opposing a pagan festal procession, his relics later translated to Constantinople and laid in the Church of the Holy Apostles beside those of Saint Andrew and Saint Luke. So woven is this letter into the pastoral office that in Russian practice the reverse of a priest’s cross is inscribed with its very words: “Be an example to the believers in word, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity” (4:12). Theophan’s exposition gathers up the Church’s long memory of how these words have been read and hands it on—to a nineteenth-century Russian readership, and through this edition to a modern English one.

6. The Text and This Edition

Theophan wrote his commentary in Russian, as part of his multi-volume exposition of the Pauline epistles composed during his reclusion at Vysha and first published, in the pre-revolutionary era, by the Russian monastery of Saint Panteleimon on Mount Athos. That Russian text—long in the public domain—is the basis of the present volume. What is offered here is a fresh modern English translation made directly from the Russian: a clean, readable rendering that aims to carry Theophan’s voice, at once learned and pastoral, into contemporary English without the archaism of an older ecclesiastical style, while keeping intact the substance of his argument and the many quotations from the Fathers that form its body.

A few conventions of this edition are worth noting. Names of authors and saints follow traditional usage, and the persons who prepared the translation are credited as translators, never as authors of the work. Scripture is quoted in a register faithful to the text Theophan himself used, following the wording and versification of the Slavonic and Septuagint tradition where his exposition depends on it, so that the reader meets the verses as the commentator read them—including his frequent recourse to the Greek words of the Apostle, which he weighs and turns as part of the exposition. Citations of chapter and verse are given in the ordinary modern style—“1 Timothy 3:16,” and so on—for ease of reference. The result is meant to stand on its own: an English reader with no Russian and no Greek can follow the whole of Theophan’s exposition, and the Apostle’s letter through him, from the opening greeting to the closing charge.

7. Suggestions for Reading

Though addressed to a bishop, this is not a book only for the clergy. Theophan reads the Apostle’s directions for the household of God as directions for every Christian conscience, and his comments on order, prayer, contentment, and the love of money speak straight to ordinary life. His habit of taking a little at a time is the reader’s best safeguard against being swept past the turns of a densely packed letter; it helps to keep a copy of the Epistle open alongside the commentary and to come to Theophan’s comment only after reading the Apostle’s own words for the passage. The frequent citations of Chrysostom, Theodoret, and the rest are not digressions but the very matter of the commentary, and are worth slowing over. Above all, the book asks to be read as Theophan wrote it—not merely to learn how the Church is ordered, but to be formed by the faith she guards; for the charge laid on Timothy is finally laid on every reader: to keep whole “that which is committed to your trust,” and so to walk oneself in the way of salvation.