Introduction

1. The Author

Saint Theophan the Recluse was born George Govorov on the tenth of January, 1815, in the village of Chernavsk in the Orlov province of central Russia, the son of a village priest. He was schooled first at Livny and then at the seminary in Orel, and from 1837 to 1841 studied at the Kiev Theological Academy, within reach of the ancient Monastery of the Caves. While still a student he received the monastic tonsure and the name Theophan, and it was there that an elder gave him the counsel he carried for the rest of his life: that the one thing needful is to pray, and to pray unceasingly in the mind and the heart. The whole of his later work can be read as an unfolding of that single charge.

Ordination led him through a succession of teaching posts—rector of church schools in Kiev, of the seminary at Novgorod, professor at the Saint Petersburg Academy—and through a term with the Russian ecclesiastical mission in Jerusalem and the Near East, where he came to know the manuscripts and the living tradition of the Christian East at close hand. In 1859 he was consecrated bishop of Tambov, and in 1863 was translated to the see of Vladimir. He proved a diligent pastor, founding schools and preaching tirelessly; yet the summons he had received as a young monk pressed on him, and in 1866 he asked to lay down the burden of a diocese and withdrew to the secluded Vysha Hermitage. From 1872 until his death he lived in strict reclusion, serving the Liturgy alone, giving away nearly everything he received, and pouring himself into prayer, into a vast correspondence with those who sought his guidance, and into writing.

Those years of silence were, paradoxically, the most productive of his life. From the cell at Vysha came the works that made him one of the most beloved teachers of the Russian Church: guides to the interior life such as The Path to Salvation and What the Spiritual Life Is, his Russian rendering of the Philokalia, and the long series of commentaries on the Epistles of the Apostle Paul, of which the exposition of Ephesians is one. He reposed on the feast of Theophany, the sixth of January (Old Style), 1894, having spent some twenty-eight years at Vysha. The Russian Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints in 1988, and he is honored across the Orthodox world as a teacher of prayer whose particular gift was to set the wisdom of the Fathers in language that ordinary Christians of his own age, and of ours, could take to heart.

2. The Work: Occasion and Purpose

Theophan’s commentary on Ephesians belongs to the great exegetical project of his reclusion, in which he worked patiently through the Pauline corpus, letter by letter, alongside expositions of several Psalms. He did not write for scholars. His readers were faithful people who wished to understand the Apostle and to follow him, and his aim throughout was double: to open the sense of the sacred text with all the care of the Church’s learning, and to press that sense home upon the conscience and the prayer of the one reading. The result is a book that instructs and examines at once—as much a school of the Christian life as a study of a single letter.

Ephesians gave him an unusual occasion. Alone among Paul’s major letters it answers no crisis and rebukes no scandal; the Apostle is not putting out a fire in a troubled congregation but, as Theophan puts it, is “wholly absorbed in the great mystery of God.” Paul writes as a prisoner—“the prisoner of the Lord,” bound in chains—to the church of Ephesus, among whom he had labored longer than in almost any other place. Theophan opens his commentary with a full account of that labor drawn from the Acts of the Apostles: the founding of the Ephesian church, the two years of daily preaching, the burning of the books of magic, the tearful farewell to the elders at Miletus. He does this deliberately, so that the reader should feel the depth of affection out of which the letter is written. Paul wishes to share with his “beloved spiritual children” the contemplations that fill him, “that they too might become partakers of this knowledge and be gladdened by it.”

On one point of introduction Theophan takes a considered position. Ephesians is one of the “captivity” letters, written from prison, and the Apostle’s imprisonments were two—the first at Caesarea, the second at Rome. Theophan weighs the question at length and judges that the letter was most likely written from Caesarea, soon after Paul’s parting from the Ephesians, reasoning from the letter’s silence about any change in the Ephesian church and from the Apostle’s request that they pray for boldness of speech, which he thinks fits the stricter Caesarean confinement. Here he differs from the many interpreters who assign all the prison letters to the Roman captivity; the letter itself names only the Apostle’s chains, and Theophan presents his conclusion as the more probable reading rather than a settled certainty. The disagreement is worth noticing because it shows his method in miniature: he reasons from the text, canvasses the tradition, and states his judgment plainly while leaving the reader free.

3. Argument and Structure

Theophan divides the letter in the ancient manner, and his outline is a reliable map for any reader. After the inscription and greeting (1:1–2), a long doctrinal part unfolds the whole economy of salvation and the mystery of the Church (1:3–3:21); a moral part then draws out the manner of life worthy of that calling (4:1–6:18); and a brief conclusion closes the whole (6:19–24). The hinge between the two halves is the Apostle’s own “therefore”: I beseech you, walk worthily of the calling wherewith you were called. Everything Paul has contemplated in the first three chapters becomes, in the last three, a summons to live.

The doctrinal half begins with a single soaring sentence of blessing that gathers up the entire plan of God—election before the foundation of the world, adoption as sons, redemption through Christ’s blood, the sealing of believers with the Holy Spirit, and the design “to gather together in one all things in Christ.” Paul then prays that his readers may have the eyes of their heart enlightened to know the hope of their calling and the surpassing greatness of God’s power, the same power that raised Christ from the dead and set him as head over all things to the Church. The second chapter descends from that height to the human condition: dead in trespasses, we are made alive by grace through faith; and the two peoples, Jew and Gentile, once divided by a wall of enmity, are reconciled in one body through the cross. In the third chapter Paul unveils “the mystery” entrusted to him—that the Gentiles are fellow heirs—and closes the doctrinal part with a prayer that Christ may dwell in his readers’ hearts and a doxology to the God who is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think.

The moral half applies all this to the texture of a life. Its keynote is unity: one body and one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. From the diversity of gifts given for the building up of the body, Paul turns to the putting off of the old man and the putting on of the new, and to a series of concrete exhortations—truthfulness, honest labor, wholesome speech, kindness, the imitation of God, walking as children of light. There follows the ordering of the Christian household—the mutual duties of husbands and wives, children and parents, servants and masters—in which the marriage bond is lifted up as an image of Christ and the Church. The letter then rises to its famous close, the summons to put on “the whole armor of God”—the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, the sword of the Spirit—for the Christian’s struggle is not against flesh and blood but against the spiritual powers of wickedness. Theophan follows each of these movements at his characteristic pace, a verse or two at a time, so that the letter’s long and freighted sentences open out one clause at a time.

4. Theological and Spiritual Significance

The commentary’s deepest theme is the one Paul announces at the outset: God’s eternal purpose “to gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth.” Ephesians is the letter of the great design, the plan hidden in God from before the ages and now made known—and Theophan reads it as such, never letting the reader lose sight of the whole even while lingering over a phrase. Election and adoption stand at the doorway, and here he is especially careful. To be chosen “in Christ before the foundation of the world” is not, on his reading, the arbitrary selection of some and rejection of others, but God’s eternal resolve to save the human race through the Incarnation of his Son; God chooses us in Christ, the head of redeemed humanity, and time and history only fulfill that pre-eternal election. The sealing of believers with the Holy Spirit, the pledge of the inheritance, he treats as the very mark of the Christian, the grace from which the name itself derives.

From this design flows the letter’s crowning subject, the Church as the body of Christ. God gave him “as head over all things to the Church, which is his body, the fullness of him that fills all in all”; and because the dignity of the head is shared with the body, Theophan dwells with wonder—following Saint John Chrysostom, whom he cites above all others—on the height to which the Church has been raised, seated with her Head, “for where the head is, there the body is also.” Bound up with this is the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile, which he presents not as a bygone episode but as the reader’s own story. Christ “is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the middle wall of partition,” creating “in himself one new man” out of the two. The Gentiles, once “strangers to the covenants of promise,” are made “fellow citizens with the saints”—and this, Theophan insists, is a word for every later believer who is not from the Jews, “consequently, for us as well.”

The doctrine of grace he holds in the balance Paul himself keeps. “By grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God.” Salvation is wholly God’s gift, owed to no work of ours; and yet faith is genuinely asked of us, so that we should not be altogether passive in the matter of our salvation but might be found to contribute something of our own—a formula he takes from Chrysostom and presses without either diminishing grace or excusing the will. And when the moral part reaches the household, he reads the marriage of husband and wife as the icon of a deeper union still: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the Church and gave himself for her.” The bond between Christ and the Church, he explains, is more inward than any natural tie—“not an external one, of one alongside another, but the most inward, of one in the other”—and marriage is honored precisely because it images that mystery.

What gives the commentary its particular character is the meeting of two things that are often kept apart. Theophan reads Ephesians as the Church has always read it, with the Fathers open beside the text. His pages are thick with citation—Chrysostom first, and with him Theodoret of Cyrus, John of Damascus, Ecumenius, Theophylact, and the Latin commentator known as Ambrosiaster—assembled in the manner of a catena, the old “chain” of patristic excerpts, weighed one against another until their common sense emerges. What reaches the reader is thus not a single modern opinion but the long consent of the tradition. To that inheritance he joins the temper of Russian spiritual writing, which will not let a truth remain merely admired. Election, grace, the unity of the one Church—each is turned back upon the reader’s own soul, its prayer and its struggle against sin. Exact exegesis and ascetical earnestness meet in these pages, and it is their meeting that makes the book more than a study of doctrine. The closing image of the armor of God is, in his hands, no mere metaphor but a description of the Christian’s daily warfare, and the whole letter becomes what he takes it to be: a call to live worthily of so high a calling.

5. Reception and Influence

Ephesians has held a place of honor in Christian teaching out of all proportion to its length. Its vision of the Church as one body, its confession of “one Lord, one faith, one baptism,” and its portrait of marriage as a great mystery have shaped the theology, the liturgy, and the prayer of Christians East and West for as long as the letter has been read. The exegetical tradition on which Theophan chiefly draws—above all the homilies of Chrysostom—stands among the most influential patristic expositions of any New Testament book. Theophan’s own contribution belongs to a nineteenth-century renewal of Russian biblical and spiritual writing, and his interpretations of the Pauline letters were quickly recognized as a valuable addition to Russian scriptural learning; in his last years the theological academies elected him an honorary member, and Saint Petersburg conferred on him a doctorate in theology. In the generations since his glorification his commentaries and spiritual writings have continued to be read and reprinted widely, and a number of them have reached English-speaking readers, for whom his gift of translating the Fathers’ wisdom into plain and searching counsel has lost none of its force.

6. The Text and This Edition

This edition presents Saint Theophan’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians in a fresh, modern English translation made directly from his Russian. The underlying text is his own verse-by-verse exposition, composed during the years of reclusion at Vysha and published in the closing decades of the nineteenth century; the translation was prepared from the public-domain Russian text as transmitted in the collected edition of his works, The Works of Our Father among the Saints Theophan the Recluse: Interpretations of the Epistles of the Apostle Paul (the Athonite Russian St. Panteleimon Monastery edition), in the modern re-typeset digital form served by azbyka.ru. It is an English edition throughout, not a bilingual or parallel one; the Russian is its source, not a facing column.

The translation aims to render Theophan’s Russian faithfully and readably, keeping the movement of his thought and the warmth of his address while presenting it in natural contemporary English. Scripture is given in a dignified modern register consistent with the Slavonic and Synodal tradition Theophan himself used, so that the verses he expounds read as he read them; his quotations from the Fathers are preserved as he gives them. Chapter and verse citations, and the numbering of divisions, are set in the ordinary Arabic style now familiar to readers (for example, Eph. 2:14–16). In keeping with the conventions of this series, the author is named as the Church receives him—Saint Theophan the Recluse—and those who have carried his work into English are credited as translators, never as authors. Doctrine-critical passages—the opening blessing on election, adoption, and the seal of the Spirit; salvation by grace through faith; the two made one in Christ; the confession of one body and one Spirit; and the great mystery of marriage—were checked against the Russian to keep the sense exact. The reader may therefore take this volume as a trustworthy presentation, in readable English, of what Theophan wrote for his own spiritual children.

7. Suggestions for Reading

Ephesians moves in long, weighty sentences that fold whole doctrines into a phrase, and its opening chapters can overwhelm anyone who hurries. Theophan’s practice of pausing over each small portion is precisely what allows them to open out one clause at a time, so it rewards a slow reading. Keep the Epistle itself at hand, and turn to the commentary only after the Apostle’s own words have been heard; then let Theophan lead you back through them. The many quotations from Chrysostom, Theodoret, and the rest are not a detour but the exposition itself—the Church remembering, across the centuries, how these words have been understood. Read this way, the commentary asks to be inhabited as well as admired: it is, finally, a guide to the reader’s own place within the one body of Christ, and an invitation to give thanks for a salvation prepared before the world was made and to walk in the unity, humility, and love to which the whole letter calls.