Introduction

The Author

Saint Theophan the Recluse was born Georgy Vasilyevich Govorov on the tenth of January, 1815, in the village of Chernavsk in the Oryol province of central Russia, the son of a parish priest. He was schooled at Oryol and then at the Kiev Theological Academy, and while still a student received monastic tonsure, taking the name Theophan when he became a monk in 1841. Two decades of teaching, administration, and service followed—as rector of seminaries, as a member of the Russian ecclesiastical mission in Jerusalem, as chaplain at the embassy church in Constantinople, and finally as rector of the Saint Petersburg Academy. In 1859 he was consecrated bishop, serving first the diocese of Tambov and then, from 1863, that of Vladimir.

None of this satisfied the pull he felt toward stillness. In 1866 he asked to be relieved of his see and withdrew to the secluded Vysha Hermitage in the Tambov diocese, and about 1872 he entered strict reclusion, shutting himself away for the remaining twenty-two years of his life. He would call his cell not a hermitage but a place of glad incarceration. Those years were the most fruitful of his life. From that seclusion came the Russian Philokalia, the adaptation of Unseen Warfare, his letters of spiritual counsel by the thousand, and the great sequence of expositions of the Apostle Paul from which the present volume is drawn. He died on the sixth of January, 1894, on the feast of Theophany, still at his writing table. The Russian Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints in 1988, and he is commemorated on the tenth of January. This same Saint Theophan is the author whose reading of Second Corinthians the reader now holds; a fuller account of his life stands at the close of the volume.

The Work: Occasion and Purpose

Nowhere does the Apostle Paul lay his own heart so bare as in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians. It is the most personal and least guarded of his letters, and to read it is to overhear a father speaking to children who have wounded him and whom he loves past all reckoning. Saint Theophan takes it up as one member of a still larger undertaking: during his years at Vysha he set out to expound the whole of the Pauline corpus in Russian, epistle by epistle, and this commentary on Second Corinthians takes its place in that sequence beside his readings of Romans, First Corinthians, Galatians, and the rest. It was published in the early 1880s, the work of a man who had spent decades inside these texts and who now had nothing to do but dwell in them.

To understand the letter, Theophan first reconstructs the circumstances that called it forth, and he does so at length before he touches a single verse. The letter is a sequel. Paul had written to Corinth from Ephesus—the epistle we know as First Corinthians—to correct grave disorders in a young and turbulent church, and had then waited in acute anxiety to learn how the rebuke had been received. His plans miscarried; the uproar stirred up by Demetrius the silversmith drove him from Ephesus sooner than he had intended. He sent Titus ahead to Corinth to gather news and to oversee the collection of alms, arranged to meet him at Troas, and pressed on when Titus did not appear—so troubled in spirit that, as he tells us, he could not settle even to preach where a door had been opened to him, but hurried into Macedonia. There at last Titus met him, and the news was good: the Corinthians had taken the correction to heart and set about mending their faults with zeal.

Out of that relief the letter was written, from Macedonia—Theophan judges from Philippi—and carried back by Titus in the company of two brethren. But the news Titus brought was not all consolation. Around the edges of a sound and faithful community there ran murmurs against the Apostle himself: that he was fickle, promising a visit and then changing his route; that he was bold enough on paper but weak and unimpressive in person; even that he was no true Apostle at all. So the letter answers to a double occasion. Paul writes to seal his reconciliation with a church now restored to him, and at the same time to disarm the whispering that would set that church against him before he could arrive in person. Theophan reads the whole epistle as the meeting of these two currents—overflowing tenderness and unbending self-defense—and finds in that very tension the key to its swings of tone. On the older chronology that Theophan follows, he dates the letter to the year 58 or 59; readers should note that modern reckonings more often place it in the middle of that decade, but the difference touches only the calendar, not the story.

Argument and Structure

Theophan divides the epistle into three unequal parts, and this scheme governs his whole exposition. The first and longest part runs through chapters one to seven; he calls it the theological. It opens with thanksgiving to God for comfort granted in affliction, moves through Paul’s explanation of why his travel plans had changed, and then rises—prompted, Theophan observes, by the flood of relief at Titus’s report—into a sustained contemplation of the dignity of the gospel ministry: the treasure carried in earthen vessels, the surpassing glory of the new covenant, the ministry of reconciliation, the appeal for open and undivided hearts. The part closes as it began, in the language of joy, with Paul rehearsing the comfort that the Corinthians’ repentance had brought him.

The second part, chapters eight and nine, Theophan calls the practical. Here the register drops from contemplation to counsel: two whole chapters on the collection of alms being gathered for the impoverished believers in Jerusalem. Paul holds up the generosity of the Macedonian churches as a spur, sets out the measure of what is owed and what is freely given, and surrounds the whole business of money with the motives of grace, so that a matter of practical charity becomes an occasion for teaching on cheerful and abundant giving.

The third part, chapters ten to thirteen, is the defensive. The tone hardens. Paul answers the murmurers directly, insists that he will prove as bold in person as in his letters when necessity demands it, and—driven to it against his own inclination—enters upon the reluctant “boasting” by which he vindicates his apostleship: his labors, his sufferings, his visions, and the thorn in the flesh through which he learned that God’s strength is made perfect in weakness. He ends with a warning that when he comes he will not spare, and with the summons to self-examination that leads into the letter’s closing benediction. Theophan sums the three parts up in a single stroke: the first is warmhearted to just the degree that the last is sternly sobering, and the fatherly care of the Apostle required both.

Within this frame Theophan proceeds as he does throughout his Pauline work—a few verses at a time. He prints the passage, lays bare the thread of the argument, clears away what is obscure, and then presses the sense home upon the reader’s own conscience. He is unhurried where Paul is dense and swift where Paul is plain, and he never loses the connective tissue of the letter, the “why here and not elsewhere” that makes a string of exhortations into a single sustained address.

Theological and Spiritual Significance

The governing theme of the epistle, and of Theophan’s reading of it, is the apostolic ministry itself—its glory and its suffering held together in one hand. Paul carries the treasure of the gospel, in the words Theophan dwells upon, “in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.” His afflictions are not evidence against his calling but the very seal of it, for it is in a body given over to death that the life of Jesus is made manifest. God, Paul says, “comforteth us in all our tribulation,” and the comfort received becomes comfort to be passed on; strength is perfected in weakness, and the servant’s helplessness is the theater of his Lord’s power. Theophan handles this paradox not as a doctrine to be admired from without but as a condition to be entered—the pattern, as he understands it, of every Christian life and not of apostles only.

At the center of the theological part stands the contrast of the two covenants in chapter three. The old covenant was written and engraved on stone, “for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life”; the new is the “ministration of the spirit,” whose glory, unlike the fading brightness on the face of Moses, does not pass away. When the heart turns to the Lord the veil is lifted, and believers “beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory.” Theophan reads this transformation as the very substance of the life of grace—not a metaphor for moral improvement but the real remaking of the person from within by the Spirit.

From this flows what is perhaps the letter’s most luminous teaching, the ministry of reconciliation. In Christ there is a new creation: “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature.” God has reconciled the world to himself through Christ and has entrusted to the Apostles the word of reconciliation, so that they stand as ambassadors and plead in Christ’s own stead, “be ye reconciled to God.” Theophan lingers here on the astonishing courtesy of it—that the offended party should be the one to entreat—and on the weight it lays upon those who carry the message.

The practical chapters give the theology hands. The collection for Jerusalem is no mere fundraising; Theophan takes it as an enactment of the same reconciliation, the Gentile churches binding themselves in love to the mother church in Judea, and he draws out Paul’s teaching that God loves a cheerful giver and that giving, done in grace, enriches the giver more than the recipient.

The defensive chapters, for all their sharpness, yield the letter’s most intimate disclosures. Caught up to the third heaven, Paul will not boast of the vision but only of the thorn given him lest he be exalted above measure—the messenger of Satan to buffet him, which three times he begged the Lord to remove, and to which came the answer, “my grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.” Theophan finds in this the summit of the whole epistle, the point where its argument about ministry and its argument about weakness become one confession. And the letter closes, as no other of Paul’s does, with the full Trinitarian blessing: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all.” Theophan expounds this as a compressed creed—the one God confessed in three Persons—and as a summary of all the gifts of salvation, grace from the Son, love from the Father, communion from the Spirit.

Reception and Place in Theophan’s Pauline Work

Before it is anything of Theophan’s own, this exposition belongs to the Church’s continuous tradition of reading Paul. Theophan sets himself among the earlier interpreters and quotes them on page after page: Saint John Chrysostom above all, whose homilies on Second Corinthians he treats as the indispensable foundation, and beside him Blessed Theodoret of Cyrus, Oecumenius, Photius, and Theophylact of Ohrid. Where these authorities agree, he lets their consensus carry the weight; where they diverge, he sets their readings side by side and judges between them, reserving his own labor for tracing the movement of Paul’s thought and rendering it plain to a nineteenth-century reader. To that inherited learning he adds the unmistakable note of Russian spiritual writing: he will not let a truth stand as mere theory but drives it toward prayer, toward the heart, toward the daily struggle against the passions. This marriage of patient, catena-fed interpretation with ascetic urgency is what distinguishes the commentary and what has kept it in use.

Its place is within the larger monument of Theophan’s Pauline expositions, composed across his years of reclusion and received in Russia as a major contribution to the study of Scripture—the labors for which the theological academies elected him an honored member and the Saint Petersburg Academy, in 1890, conferred on him a doctorate in theology. Read alongside his commentary on First Corinthians, this volume completes his account of Paul’s long and stormy dealings with that one difficult, beloved church, and shows the Apostle in the aftermath of conflict, wounded and reconciled at once.

The Text and This Edition

This edition presents a fresh, modern English translation of Saint Theophan’s commentary, rendered from his Russian text. The source is the public-domain Russian edition of his Expositions of the Epistles of the Apostle Paul, as issued by the Russian Panteleimon Monastery on Mount Athos in the pre-revolutionary period and preserved in the digital text of that edition. Theophan wrote in Russian for ordinary believers rather than for scholars, and this translation keeps that plainness, aiming at clear and dignified contemporary English while preserving the movement of his exposition and the many voices—Chrysostom, Theodoret, and the rest—that he weaves into it.

The scriptural text within the commentary follows Theophan’s own citations, which rest on the Church’s Greek and Slavonic tradition; where his readings reflect that tradition rather than a later critical text, the translation stays faithful to what he actually comments upon, so that the exposition and the verse before it always agree. Chapter and verse references, and the internal divisions of the work, are given in the plain Arabic style now standard for reference, so that a reader may move quickly between the commentary and a Bible.

In keeping with the conventions of this series, the author is named as the Church has always received him, Saint Theophan the Recluse; those who prepared this English text are credited as translators and never as authors. The aim throughout has been an edition that a reader with no Russian and no specialist training can take up and follow—the very readers Theophan wrote for—and through which the Apostle’s most personal letter may be heard again in its own accents of severity and love.

Suggestions for Reading

Second Corinthians is Paul at his most exposed, and its abrupt turns from tenderness to self-defense can bewilder a reader who does not know the history behind them. Theophan’s opening chapters exist precisely to supply that history; it is worth reading them first and unhurriedly, for they are the map to everything that follows. Keep the Apostle’s own text open beside the commentary and read the exposition just after the verse it treats, remembering that the quotations from Chrysostom and the others are not digressions but the substance of the reading. Above all, take the book as Theophan meant it to be taken—not merely to understand Paul but to be changed by him. The Apostle’s readiness to spend himself for his children, his boast made only in his weakness, and his unwearied plea that men be reconciled to God stand here not as ancient history but as the shape of the Christian life itself.