Introduction

1. The Author

Saint Theophan the Recluse was born George Vasilievich Govorov in 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, where, before completing his studies, he received monastic tonsure and the name Theophan, in memory of Saint Theophanes the Confessor. Ordained a hieromonk, he spent his first years teaching and governing schools—rector of church schools in Kiev, rector of the seminary at Novgorod, professor and assistant inspector at the Saint Petersburg Academy—and served for a time with the Russian ecclesiastical mission in the Holy Land and at the embassy church in Constantinople, where he came to know the manuscripts and the living monastic tradition of the Christian East at first hand.

In 1859 he was consecrated bishop and given the see of Tambov, and in 1863 he was transferred to Vladimir. He was, by every account, an energetic and beloved pastor, a tireless preacher, and a shepherd attentive to the poor and to the many who had drifted from the Church. Yet his heart drew him elsewhere. In 1866 his petition to be released from the burdens of a diocese was granted, and he withdrew to the Vysha Hermitage in the Tambov province, a quiet monastery he had loved from his first years as its diocesan. There he laid down every administrative office in order to give himself to prayer, study, and writing. From 1872 he entered upon a strict reclusion: he ceased to leave his cell for the monastery church, built a small chapel within his own quarters, and for the remaining two decades of his life saw almost no one except his confessor. This seclusion was not a retreat from the Church but a more concentrated service to it. He received and answered twenty to forty letters a day, guiding countless souls he never met; he translated, compiled, and composed a library of spiritual books; and in the intervals he worked with his hands at carpentry and the painting of icons. He reposed at Vysha in 1894, and is commemorated on the tenth of January. The Russian Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints in 1988.

Two labors of his reclusion shaped Orthodox piety for generations: his Russian rendering of the Philokalia, which carried the ascetical and contemplative teaching of the Eastern Fathers to a wide lay readership, and his running expositions of the letters of the Apostle Paul. Alongside such classics as The Path to Salvation and What the Spiritual Life Is, the Pauline commentaries form the great scholarly monument of his hidden years—an attempt to place the whole mind of the Apostle within reach of an ordinary believer. The commentary on Colossians belongs to this set.

2. The Work: Occasion and Purpose

Theophan’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Colossians is a verse-by-verse exposition of one of the shortest and most concentrated of Saint Paul’s letters. It was composed during the years at Vysha and published, with its companions on the other epistles, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Its purpose is exactly the purpose Theophan assigns to all his biblical work: to open the Apostle’s meaning for readers who are not scholars but who wish to understand the sacred text and to live by it. He writes for the conscience as much as for the mind, and he assumes a reader who has the Epistle open before him.

To interpret the letter, Theophan first reconstructs its occasion, and here he follows the account the letter itself suggests. The church at Colossae, a city of Phrygia in Asia Minor, had not been founded by Paul in person—whether the Apostle ever visited it, Theophan leaves an open question—but through his fellow-workers, chief among them Epaphras. When strange teachers began to unsettle that young and flourishing community, Epaphras carried his alarm to Paul, then a prisoner, and the Apostle answered with this letter, sent (Theophan holds) from Rome about the year 61 or 62, in the early days of that imprisonment, and dispatched by the hand of Tychicus together with the note to Philemon.

The danger at Colossae, as Theophan reads it, was a would-be higher wisdom—a mixture of Jewish observance with the speculations of Eastern religion and Greek philosophy—that promised access to God by a road running around Christ. Its adepts sought the divine through the mediation of angels, through reverence for “the elements of the world,” and through a harsh discipline of the body, as though the Saviour were not enough and had to be supplemented by a secret knowledge and a rigorous asceticism. Because these tenets were still unformed and shifting, Theophan observes, Paul does not trouble to refute them one by one. He strikes instead at their single root, the attempt to reach God apart from Christ, and he overturns it by unfolding the boundless sufficiency of the Saviour. Every promised benefit of the new wisdom, the Apostle answers, the believer already possesses in Christ, and possesses it in the surest and most perfect form. The whole letter is built to make that one point unanswerable.

3. Argument and Structure

Theophan expounds the Epistle in the divisions the ancient commentators had marked out, and his own commentary follows them like a map. After introductory chapters on the Colossian community, the reason for the letter, its content, and the time and place of its writing, he takes the text in four movements.

A short preface (Colossians 1:1–11) carries the greeting, the Apostle’s thanksgiving for the faith and love reported of the Colossians, and his prayer that they be filled with the knowledge of God’s will and grow in every good work.

The doctrinal part (Colossians 1:12–2:23) is the heart of the letter and of the commentary. Here Paul sets forth the person and work of Christ in language of unmatched height: the Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, the one in whom and for whom all things were made and in whom all things hold together; He is the head of the body, the Church; in Him the whole fullness of the Godhead was pleased to dwell, and through the blood of His cross all things are reconciled. From this summit the Apostle turns to the Colossians’ peril directly, warning them not to be taken captive through philosophy and empty deception, and reminding them that in Christ dwells all the fullness of deity bodily, so that they are complete in Him. The elaborate scruples of the false teachers—questions of food and festival, the worship of angels, the mortifications of a self-made religion—are only a shadow, he argues, of which the body is Christ.

The moral part (Colossians 3:1–4:6) draws the consequence for daily life. Since the believer has died with Christ and been raised with Him, he is to seek the things that are above, to put to death what is earthly in him, to strip off the old self and put on the new, renewed after the image of its Creator, and to clothe himself in compassion, humility, forbearance, and love, the bond of perfection. Theophan follows the Apostle as the counsel descends into the ordinary textures of life—the mutual duties of husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants; perseverance in prayer; wise and gracious conduct toward those outside the faith.

A brief conclusion (Colossians 4:7–18) commends the messengers Tychicus and Onesimus, conveys greetings from the Apostle’s companions, gives final charges about the reading of the letter, and closes with Paul’s own hand: “Remember my chains.”

4. Theological and Spiritual Significance

The abiding weight of Colossians lies in its confession of Christ, and Theophan brings the whole force of his exposition to bear there. Against every attempt to approach God around the Saviour, Paul answers with the great declaration that the Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. Theophan weighs each phrase with care, because each had become, in the centuries after the Apostle, a contested word. “Image,” he explains, does not mean a lesser copy but signifies that the Son is the Father’s exact likeness, of one being with Him, differing in nothing. “Firstborn of all creation” does not enroll the Son among creatures; it means begotten before every creature, and one who is begotten shares the nature of the one who begets Him. Had the Apostle meant that the Son was made, Theophan argues, he would have written “first-created”; he wrote “firstborn,” and the difference is the whole of the faith. Because this verse had been pressed into the service of the Arian denial of Christ’s divinity, Theophan reads it in company with Saint Athanasius the Great, and shows how the words that were made to serve error in fact exclude it.

The confession reaches its height where Paul declares that in Christ the whole fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily. Theophan takes the word in its full force: not merely the divine energy or operation is present in Christ, but the very essence, God Himself in His entire hypostasis, and present in a real human body. From this fullness the practical argument of the letter follows of necessity. If all the fullness of God is in Christ, and the believer is complete in Him, then to seek some further mediation—through angels, through the elements, through a rigorous knowledge or a punishing asceticism—is not devotion but subtraction; it turns from the fullness to a shadow. This is why Theophan can say, with the Apostle, that the entire heresy was answered in advance the moment the supremacy of Christ was truly seen.

Yet Theophan never lets the doctrine remain a matter of debate. As everywhere in his writing, the truth is turned toward the reader’s own life. The believer has died and risen with Christ, and the new life is the practical form of the letter’s theology. To “seek the things that are above” is not, he explains, a matter of place but of dignity and desire—to strive to remain always in living communion with God, where Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father. The stripping off of the old self and the putting on of the new, the mortifying of the earthly members, the clothing in love, are the outworking in conduct of a death and resurrection already accomplished in baptism. Even the counsel to households and the charge to persevere in prayer are shown to flow from the same source. The whole letter, in Theophan’s hands, becomes a single movement: from the fullness of Christ confessed, to the fullness of Christ lived.

5. Theophan’s Method and Place in His Pauline Set

Theophan does not expound Colossians alone. He reads it, as he read every epistle, shoulder to shoulder with the interpreters the Church had received before him. He cites Saint John Chrysostom continually, and with him Blessed Theodoret of Cyrus, Ecumenius, Theophylact of Ohrid among the Greek commentators, and the Latin expositor known as Ambrosiaster; and where the argument turns on the person of Christ, he calls in Saint Athanasius against the Arian misreading. He arranges these voices as a catena — a linked chain of excerpts—but he is no mere compiler. He weighs one witness against another, binds them to the sequence of Paul’s own reasoning, and renders the result in plain Russian for a reader of his own day. To this inherited learning he adds the distinctive note of the Russian ascetical tradition he had drawn from the Philokalia: the habit of pressing every truth toward the conscience, toward repentance, and toward the practice of prayer.

The commentary on Colossians is one panel of a larger work. During his reclusion Theophan set out to expound the whole Pauline corpus in this fashion, and the resulting series—running from Romans through the Corinthian letters, Galatians, and the prison epistles, to the Pastorals—is the most sustained work of biblical interpretation produced in nineteenth-century Russia. Colossians, brief and Christological, occupies a natural place beside its close companion Ephesians and beside Philippians and Philemon. Read within that set, it shows Theophan’s governing conviction in miniature: that Scripture is one continuous school of salvation, and that the task of the interpreter is to make its saving sense audible to the ordinary faithful.

6. The Text and This Edition

This edition presents a fresh, modern English translation of Saint Theophan’s Russian commentary, prepared for study and for continuous reading. It is an English-only edition. The translation was made from the public-domain Russian text of Theophan’s exposition of Colossians—the exposition as gathered in the collected editions of his interpretations of the Pauline epistles and preserved in the digital archive at azbyka.ru—and it aims throughout at clear, contemporary prose that keeps the substance and the pastoral warmth of the original while setting aside the archaisms that can distance a present-day reader.

Scripture is handled as Theophan himself handled it. He read and quoted the Bible of the Slavonic and Russian Church, whose Old Testament follows the Greek Septuagint tradition; the Scripture in this edition is rendered faithfully to the readings he cites, in the same register as the surrounding commentary, rather than conformed to any one English version. The many voices of the Fathers that Theophan weaves into his exposition—Chrysostom, Theodoret, Athanasius, and the rest—are carried over as he presents them.

The edition follows the house conventions used across this series. The author is named as the Church has always received him, Saint Theophan the Recluse; those who have rendered his words into English are credited as translators, never as authors. Chapter and verse citations and internal numbering are given in the ordinary Arabic style familiar to modern readers—“Colossians 2:9”—for ease of reference. The commentary’s own architecture has been preserved: the introductory chapters, the fourfold division into preface, doctrinal part, moral part, and conclusion, and the verse-by-verse headings that guide the reader through the Epistle. The result is intended to let an English reader follow Saint Theophan exactly as a Russian reader would—one small stretch of the Apostle at a time, with the whole tradition of the Church attending the words.

7. Suggestions for Reading

Colossians is short but densely woven, and it rewards patience. The most fruitful way to use this commentary is the way its author intended: keep the Epistle open beside you, read the Apostle’s own words first, and only then turn to Theophan’s exposition of them. Because so much of the letter’s meaning gathers around a few great verses—the Son as the image of the invisible God, the fullness of deity dwelling bodily, the believer raised with Christ to seek the things above—a reader new to the letter may find it helpful to sit longest with the doctrinal chapters before following the moral counsel that flows from them.

The many patristic citations are not digressions to be skimmed. In Theophan’s design they are the substance of the exposition, the Church’s long memory of how these words have been understood, and they repay slow reading. Above all, the commentary asks to be received as Theophan wrote it: not as information about an ancient controversy, but as a guide to the reader’s own road. Colossians tells the believer who already has all things in Christ to seek nothing outside Him—to rise with Him toward the things that are above, and to let that risen life show itself in the plainest duties of every day.