Editor’s Introduction

Saint Theophan the Recluse (1815–1894) was a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church who, in 1866, laid down the government of his diocese and withdrew to the Vyshensky Hermitage. There he spent his last decades in prayer and unceasing work, and from that seclusion came the writings for which he is remembered: guides to the spiritual life, his Russian recasting of the Philokalia, a vast pastoral correspondence, and the long series of commentaries on the letters of the Apostle Paul that is gathered in this book.

The commentaries were not composed as a single treatise but written and published over many years, one epistle at a time, each addressed to the believers who wrote to him for guidance. Read together, they form something their author never quite assembled in his own lifetime: a continuous Orthodox reading of nearly the whole Pauline corpus, from the towering argument of Romans to the brief and tender note to Philemon. To set them side by side is to watch one steady mind move through the entire mind of the Apostle.

The book contains Saint Theophan’s commentaries on all fourteen letters that tradition ascribes to the Apostle Paul, arranged in their customary order: Romans; the two letters to the Corinthians; Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians; the two letters to the Thessalonians; the two to Timothy, then Titus and Philemon; and last of all Hebrews. To these is added his commentary on Psalm 118, the great meditation on the law of God that he loved and expounded in the same spirit. Each work keeps its own introduction, so the reader may take up any single epistle and find it whole.

After Psalm 118 comes a short appendix of Theophan’s other exegetical labors, gathered here so that his commentary on Scripture may be found whole in one place. First are his expositions of selected psalms—Psalms 1, 2, 33, and 51 in the Slavonic numbering, together with two of the psalms sung at Matins, Psalms 37 and 3—read in the same union of close attention and ascetical warmth. Then comes an essay of a different kind: A Resolution of Perplexities, in which he turns from the Apostle to the Gospel and untangles two of its hardest knots—the parable of the unjust steward (Luke 16) and the Lord’s promise of a hundredfold reward to those who forsake all (Matthew 19)—showing how even their difficulties open onto the way of salvation. Last of all stands a work Theophan compiled rather than wrote: An Interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer in the Words of the Holy Fathers, which carries the reader through the Our Father petition by petition, letting the ancient Fathers expound each clause in their own words. It is a fitting close—a book that has followed Theophan across the whole of Scripture ends with the prayer the Lord Himself gave, opened by the Church he served.

One work stands apart. The commentary on Hebrews is the one Theophan did not live to complete: he left a full introduction to the Epistle and an exposition that breaks off early in the first chapter. It is placed last among the epistles and printed as he left it, with his editor’s note that the work remained unfinished. What survives is still a rich guide, for in the introduction he sets out the whole design of the letter before the close exposition begins.

Throughout, Theophan reads Paul in the company of the Fathers. On almost every page he draws together the great interpreters of the Apostle—above all Saint John Chrysostom, whose homilies he quotes at length, together with Blessed Theodoret of Cyrus, Theophylact of Ohrid, Oecumenius, Photius, and the Latin commentator known as Ambrosiaster. In the manner of a patristic catena, a “chain” of excerpts from earlier authorities, he lets each witness speak, weighs them where they differ, and draws their common mind into one continuous reading. His own labor is to bind their comments to the flow of Paul’s reasoning and to make the whole intelligible.

To this inherited learning he adds the distinctive warmth of Russian spiritual writing. He is never content to leave a doctrine in the abstract; he presses it upon the conscience, upon prayer, upon the daily struggle against sin. Grace, faith, justification, and the life in the Spirit are for him truths to be defended and powers to be lived. This union of exact exegesis with ascetical earnestness gives the commentaries their particular character, and it is why they have nourished Orthodox readers far beyond the study.

There is no need to read the epistles in order, though the reader who begins with Romans will find in it the fullest statement of the gospel and a key to much that follows. Theophan takes the text in short portions, pausing over a verse or a few verses to open the argument, clear away difficulties, and turn the sense toward the reader’s own soul. It helps to keep a copy of the Epistle itself close at hand and to read his comment only after the Apostle’s own words; the many quotations from the Fathers are not digressions but the substance of the exposition, the Church’s long memory of how these words have been understood.

Above all, the commentaries ask to be read as Theophan wrote them—not merely to master Paul’s teaching but to be changed by it. For him the letters of the Apostle are finally an account of the soul’s passage from the death of sin to peace with God and life in the Spirit. Read in that spirit, this is not a book about the past but a companion for the reader’s own way to salvation.