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 it was there, on the eve of completing his studies, that he received monastic tonsure in 1840 and the name Theophan, “revealer of God.” Ordained soon after, 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 steeped 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. He governed his dioceses with energy and tenderness, but the pull of the contemplative life never left him.

In 1866, at the age of fifty-one, he asked to be released from the burdens of a diocese and withdrew to the Vysha Hermitage in the Tambov province. For six years he lived there as an ordinary monk, attending the services of the church. Then, in 1872, he entered strict reclusion. He shut himself into a few small rooms, saw almost no one but his confessor, built with his own hands a little chapel where he served the Liturgy alone, and gave the remaining twenty-two years of his life to prayer, to a vast correspondence with people who wrote to him for 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 productive of his life. From them came the works for which he is best known: the moral and ascetical treatises such as The Path to Salvation and What the Spiritual Life Is and How to Be Attuned to It; the Russian rendering of the Philokalia, the anthology of Greek ascetic masters that he did more than anyone to make available to his countrymen; 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 commentary on Galatians belongs to this Pauline set and was composed at Vysha in the mid-1870s. The Russian Church numbers Theophan among its teaching saints and glorified him in 1988; he is commemorated on 10 January and, for the translation of his relics, in the summer. But 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.

2. The Work: Occasion and Purpose

Theophan did not write his commentary for scholars. He wrote it for believers who wanted to understand the Apostle and, more than that, to live by him. His method throughout the Pauline set is the same: he takes a letter in small portions—a verse, or a handful of verses at a time—gives its plain sense, gathers what the Fathers before him had said of it, clears away the difficulties a reader might stumble over, and then turns the passage back upon the conscience, so that exposition passes almost imperceptibly into a summons to the Christian life. The Galatians commentary opens, in the manner of the ancient introductions, with several chapters that set the stage: a sketch of the region of Galatia and its mixed population of Greeks, Celtic settlers, and Jews; an account of how Paul founded the Galatian churches on his missionary journeys; a careful reconstruction of the crisis that provoked the letter; and a survey of its argument and audience. Only then does he begin the verse-by-verse exposition itself.

The crisis he reconstructs is the one that gives Galatians its heat. Paul had preached the gospel in Galatia and had been received, as he recalls, “as an angel of God”; the Galatians had believed with such fervor that they would have plucked out their own eyes for him. Then, after he had moved on, other teachers arrived. Theophan is careful to say who they were and who they were not: they were not unbelieving Jews, but men who had themselves accepted faith in Christ while remaining convinced that circumcision and the other ordinances of the ancient Law were still necessary for salvation. What they preached to the Gentile Galatians was that faith in Christ was not enough—that they must also be circumcised and keep the Law of Moses if they hoped to be saved. To make this teaching stick they undermined the man who had taught otherwise, whispering that Paul was no true apostle, that he ranked below the “pillars” in Jerusalem who had walked with the Lord, and that he trimmed his message to his hearers. The Galatians were beginning to waver.

This was not a new question in the early Church, and Theophan sets it in its history without rancor. The status of the Mosaic Law for Gentile believers had first been raised when the Gentiles began to come to faith, had been settled from above at the conversion of the centurion Cornelius, and had been settled again, formally, by the apostles and elders gathered in council at Jerusalem, who declined to lay the “yoke of the Law” upon Gentile converts. The dispute, in other words, was an internal one about how the new covenant stood to the old—not a quarrel with the Jewish people or their piety, which Paul himself never ceased to honor. A party unreconciled to the council’s decision pressed on, and their first real success came in Galatia. Learning of it, Paul wrote at once, “marveling” that the Galatians were so quickly turning away, and wrote, Theophan notes, in his own hand and in a single continuous rush of argument and feeling, to catch the disease in its early stages before it could spread. Theophan places the letter during Paul’s stay at Ephesus, about the year 56.

3. Argument and Structure

Following the ancient commentators, Theophan reads Galatians as an oration in well-marked parts, and holding this shape in view is the surest way through the letter. After a preface of greeting and rebuke, in which Paul withholds his usual thanksgiving and comes straight to his astonishment (1:1–10), the letter falls into three movements.

The first is a defense of Paul’s own apostleship (1:11–2:21). Because the false teachers had made his authority the wedge for their doctrine, he must first show that the gospel he preaches is not of human origin but came to him by revelation of Jesus Christ. He tells the story of his calling and of his dealings with the apostles at Jerusalem, recounts how he withstood even Peter to his face at Antioch when the truth of the gospel was at stake, and lays down the principle that will govern everything that follows: a man is not justified by works of the Law, but through faith in Jesus Christ.

The second movement is doctrinal (chapters 3–4). Here Paul proves from Scripture and from the Galatians’ own experience of the Spirit that righteousness comes not from the Law but from grace received through faith. He appeals to Abraham, who was justified by faith before the Law was given; he explains why the Law was given at all, as a temporary guardian leading to Christ; and he draws the great contrasts of the letter—slavery and freedom, the bondwoman and the free, the child under a tutor and the son who has come of age. To go back under the Law now, he argues, is to abandon the freedom Christ has won and to fall from grace into a servitude Christ died to end.

The third movement is moral (5:1–6:10). Having established Christian freedom, Paul guards it against the opposite error. Freedom is “not an indulgence to the passions”; the believer set loose from external ordinances is freed precisely so that he may turn his whole attention to the purifying of the heart. Here stand the letter’s most quoted lines: the summons to stand fast in liberty and serve one another through love, the warning that “a little leaven leavens the whole lump,” the somber catalogue of the works of the flesh set over against the fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Paul closes with counsels on bearing one another’s burdens, on doing good to all, and on glorying in nothing but the cross.

One thing must be said plainly to the reader. The commentary as it has come down to us breaks off at Galatians 6:6, in the middle of this third movement; the closing pages, which would have carried Theophan’s exposition through the letter’s final verses and conclusion, have not been preserved. What survives is complete and self-contained through the great body of the argument, but the reader should not expect it to reach the last verse.

4. Theological and Spiritual Significance

The doctrinal heart of Galatians is the truth that “a man is not justified by works of the Law, but only through faith in Jesus Christ,” and everything in Theophan’s reading turns on how that truth is understood. He reads justification not as a mere verdict laid over an unchanged life, but as a real transformation. The righteousness the Law could confer was only outward; it “brought no peace to conscience and gave no power to resist sin.” Faith in Christ gives both—the forgiveness of sins, and the grace by which the believer is “clothed with power from above to resist sin and do all righteousness,” attaining the “internal righteousness in thoughts, feelings and dispositions which alone makes us righteous before God.” Faith, on this reading, is never idle. It binds the believer to an inward holiness that grows, and this is why for Theophan the argument of Galatians and its closing moral exhortation are not two subjects but one.

From this center the letter’s other themes open out. There is the great theme of freedom in Christ: by His cross and the grace of the Spirit the Lord has freed those who believe in Him from the yoke of the Law’s precepts, so that to return to that yoke is to fall backward from grace into bondage. Yet freedom, Theophan insists with Paul, is no license. The same Spirit who liberates also demands the crucifixion of the flesh, and so the letter ends by setting the works of the flesh against the fruit of the Spirit. On this last theme Theophan draws out the ancient teaching of synergy—the working together of divine grace and human freedom. Evil, he says with Chrysostom, comes from us alone; but the good dispositions require both our effort and the loving-kindness of God, and it is “by the cooperation of the Spirit,” as Theodoret adds, that the soul makes progress in each of them. The fruit of the Spirit is truly a gift, and yet, Theophan is candid, it “cannot be accomplished without struggle with oneself.” Grace does not spare the labor; it makes the labor fruitful.

What keeps all of this from being a dispute over an old controversy is the ascetical seriousness Theophan brings to it from the Russian and Greek spiritual traditions he had made his own. A doctrine is never left as information. He carries it into the conscience, into prayer, into the daily war with the passions, and in the later chapters of the commentary the exposition broadens into some of his most searching practical counsel—on how to discern the roots of anger and desire in the heart, on the stages by which a passion is starved and finally uprooted, on the remembrance of the divine judgment as a remedy against pride. The dispute at Galatia becomes, in his hands, a map of the reader’s own road: freedom, faith, and life in the Spirit are not positions to be defended but a life to be entered, and this is what gives his Galatians its warmth.

5. Reception and Influence

Galatians has never been a quiet book. Its declaration that righteousness comes through faith made it a touchstone in every later age that returned to the question of grace, and the Fathers whom Theophan follows had already made it a battleground and a treasure. Saint John Chrysostom devoted to it one of his most vigorous commentaries; Blessed Jerome wrote his own; and Theodoret, Ecumenius, Theophylact, Ambrosiaster, and Augustine all left their readings of it. Theophan expounds the letter in the company of exactly these interpreters, quoting Chrysostom above all and setting the Greek and Latin Fathers side by side. Where they agree he lets their agreement stand; where they differ he lays their comments out and adds only what is needed to make Paul’s swift argument clear. His commentary is thus a work of transmission as much as of interpretation—the Church’s long memory of how these verses have been read, gathered up and handed on to a nineteenth-century Russian readership, and through this edition to a modern English one. That it circulated widely, and that Theophan’s Pauline commentaries as a body earned him a doctorate in theology and the honor of the Russian academies in his own lifetime, is a measure of how surely they filled a need.

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 versification and wording of the Slavonic and Septuagint tradition where his exposition depends on it, so that the reader meets the verses as the commentator read them. Citations of chapter and verse are given in the ordinary modern style—“Galatians 6:6,” and so on—for ease of reference. Where the underlying commentary is itself incomplete, breaking off at Galatians 6:6, the edition preserves that ending faithfully rather than supplying what Theophan did not leave. 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 argument through him, from the first verse to the last that survives.

7. Suggestions for Reading

Galatians is short but tightly argued, and Paul’s tone shifts quickly from reproach to tenderness to close reasoning from Scripture. Theophan’s habit of taking a little at a time is the reader’s best safeguard against being swept past the turns. 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 quotations from Chrysostom, Theodoret, and Jerome are not ornament but the very substance of the exposition, and are worth slowing down over. Above all, the book asks to be read as it was written—to win the old argument against the Law, to be freed by it, and to take that freedom as the beginning of the labor of a purified heart.