Introduction

The Author

Saint Theophan the Recluse was born Georgy Vasilievich Govorov in 1815, in the village of Chernavsk in the Oryol region of central Russia, the son of a parish priest. His schooling followed the ordinary path of a gifted clerical son—the local theological college, the Oryol seminary, and then the Kiev Theological Academy, where in 1841 he received monastic tonsure and the name Theophan, in honor of Saint Theophanes the Confessor. The years that followed carried him across the breadth of the Church’s life. He taught in the theological schools, served with the Russian ecclesiastical mission in Jerusalem, where he deepened his knowledge of Greek and of the ancient monastic literature of the Christian East, and represented the Russian Church for a time in Constantinople. In 1859 he was consecrated Bishop of Tambov, and in 1863 translated to the see of Vladimir.

Yet the office of a ruling bishop was never where his heart lay. In 1866, at the age of fifty-one, he asked to be released from the administration of his diocese and withdrew to the Vyshensky Hermitage in the Tambov region. There, after some years in the common life of the monastery, he entered the strict reclusion from which his name is drawn: from about 1872 he lived apart, seeing almost no one, keeping the cycle of services in a small private chapel, and giving the whole of his day to prayer, study, and the pen. From that seclusion flowed one of the great bodies of spiritual writing in the Russian language—works on the Christian life such as The Path to Salvation, an immense correspondence with those who wrote to him for counsel, his Russian rendering of the Philokalia, and a long series of commentaries on the Epistles of the Apostle Paul. He reposed at Vysha in 1894. The Russian Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints in 1988, and he is commemorated in January, near the days of his repose and of his monastic name. It is enough here to say that he wrote as a bishop and a hermit who had spent his life reading the Fathers and directing souls; the reader will meet that pastor at every turn of the present book. A fuller account of his life is given elsewhere in this volume.

The Work: Occasion and Purpose

The commentary printed here belongs to the last and largest of Theophan’s scholarly labors: his exposition of the fourteen Epistles traditionally received under the name of the Apostle Paul. Working through his years of seclusion, he treated them one after another—Romans, the Corinthian letters, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, the Thessalonian letters, the Pastoral Epistles, Philemon—reading each verse slowly and gathering around it the comments of the ancient interpreters. The Epistle to the Hebrews stood at the end of that sequence, and it was the one he did not live to complete.

This must be said plainly at the outset, because it shapes everything the reader will find. The commentary on Hebrews is authentically Theophan’s own—it is transmitted, published, and received under his name in his collected works, and nothing in its manner or matter suggests another hand—but it is a fragment. He finished a full and self-standing introduction to the Epistle, and then began the verse-by-verse exposition; the exposition breaks off early in the first chapter, in the midst of his comment on the opening verses. What survives, then, is a magnificent torso: a complete essay on the letter as a whole, followed by the first movements of the close reading he intended to carry through all thirteen chapters. The reader should come to the book knowing this, and value it for what it is rather than lament what it is not.

Theophan opens where the Epistle’s first readers, and its every reader since, are bound to begin. Alone among the letters gathered under Paul’s name, Hebrews carries no opening salutation naming its writer or its recipients, and from Christian antiquity a question was therefore raised about its origin. Theophan devotes the whole first part of his introduction to that question, and answers it as the Eastern Church has always answered it: the letter is the Apostle Paul’s, numbered among his Epistles by the councils the Church received and read as his in her worship. He argues the point at length—from the letter’s own contents and its personal postscript, and then from a patient muster of ancient witnesses, beginning with the Apostle Peter’s reference to Paul’s writing “to you,” and moving through Clement of Rome, the teachers of Alexandria, the Syrian Church and the Peshitta, the Eastern Fathers, and at last the Latin West. It is worth noting simply, and without controversy, that the human authorship of Hebrews has been discussed since the early centuries and remains an open question in modern scholarship; the Church’s liturgical and canonical reception has long numbered it among the Epistles of Paul, and it is from within that reception that Theophan writes.

Having settled to his own satisfaction the question of authorship, he sets out the letter’s circumstances. It is addressed, he explains, to Hebrew believers—Jewish Christians who had already suffered for the faith and now stood in danger of drifting back to the Judaism they had left, worn down by pressure from their own people and from the pagan authorities alike. Following the ancient commentators, Theophan thinks first of the Christians of Jerusalem and Palestine, while allowing that the letter was meant to circulate more widely among Hebrew believers everywhere. Its occasion is that peril of apostasy, and its purpose is to meet it: to hold the wavering fast by displaying, from every side, the surpassing greatness of what has come in Christ, and to nerve them to endure. Theophan places the writing in Rome, near the close of Paul’s first imprisonment, about the year 63 or 64.

Argument and Structure

The book has two faces, and the reader profits most by keeping both in view. The first is Theophan’s introduction, which is whole and finished. The second is his exposition, which is rich but brief.

The introduction proceeds by orderly questions: who wrote the Epistle, to whom it was written, on what occasion and for what purpose, where and when, and finally how it is built. That last question yields the map Theophan would have followed through the entire commentary, and it is the map the reader should carry through the letter itself. He divides Hebrews into two unequal parts. The first and longer part—chapters one through ten—he calls the doctrinal part, and its single theme is the superiority of the new covenant over the old, a superiority he traces along two lines at once: the greater dignity of the Mediator, and the greater power of His work. The shorter second part—chapters eleven through the end of thirteen—turns from doctrine to life, exhorting the faithful to the endurance and the holy conduct that such a salvation requires, and closing with a brief personal postscript.

Within the doctrinal part the letter mounts a single sustained argument, and Theophan lays out its stages before his exposition begins. Christ is shown greater than the prophets through whom God spoke of old, for now God has spoken “in these last days” through a Son who is the Heir of all things and the Maker of the ages. He is greater than the angels, who are ministering spirits, while the Son is seated at the right hand of God. He is greater than Moses, faithful as a servant in God’s house, whereas Christ is faithful as a Son over it. And He is greater than the whole order of the Law and its Levitical priesthood, for He is a High Priest of another kind—“after the order of Melchizedek,” a title, Theophan observes from Saint Justin Martyr, that the Fathers applied to the Lord long before. This High Priest does not repeat the daily sacrifices of the old sanctuary; by one sacrifice, once offered, He entered the true and heavenly sanctuary with His own blood and obtained an eternal redemption. Hence the covenant He mediates is a new and better covenant, founded on better promises, which makes the first “old” and “ready to vanish away.”

The exposition that survives carries the reader only into the first of these stages. Theophan comments closely on the opening verses—God’s speaking through the Son, the Son appointed Heir of all things, the ages made through Him—before the text breaks off. Even in these few pages his method is fully on display. He reads Hebrews as the Fathers read it, keeping constant company with Saint John Chrysostom, Blessed Theodoret of Cyrus, Blessed Theophylact of Ohrid, Oecumenius, and Photius, quoting and comparing their comments on each phrase. This is the method of the catena, the patristic “chain” of testimonies woven into a continuous reading; but the aim is never antiquarian. At every point Theophan turns the doctrine toward the reader’s own salvation, drawing from the exalted Person of the Son the same practical summons the Apostle presses upon his Hebrews: Take heed, therefore. The final word has been spoken in the Son, and there is no further messenger to await.

Theological and Spiritual Significance

The value of this fragment lies partly in its subject and partly in its treatment. Its subject is one of the summits of the New Testament. Hebrews sets before the Church the fullest scriptural meditation on the priesthood of Christ and on the relation of the two Testaments—how the shadows and figures of the old worship, the tabernacle and its ordinances, the sacrifices and the Levitical priesthood, were true and God-given in their season, and yet were a preparation for and a pointing toward the one great High Priest who fulfills and supersedes them. To read the Epistle with Theophan is to be taught how the Church has always read her own Old Testament: not as a discarded thing, but as a word of God whose hidden meaning is opened by the light of Christ. He states the principle exactly in his comment on the first verses—that the ancient word and the new confirm one another, and that the one who enters the old carrying the lamp of the new comprehends the mysteries hidden there.

At the heart of the doctrinal argument stands the figure that gives Hebrews its distinctive place in the New Testament: Christ the great High Priest “after the order of Melchizedek.” The Epistle draws out, as no other book of Scripture does, what it means that the priest and the sacrifice are one—that the Lord offered not the blood of bulls and goats, repeated year by year, but Himself, once for all, and so passed through the true tabernacle into the presence of God on behalf of His people. The Epistle’s recurring word is better: a better hope, a better covenant, better promises, a better sacrifice, a better and abiding possession. Theophan seizes on that comparative note as the organizing thread of the whole, and he is careful, as the Fathers are, to hold the two Testaments together even while insisting on the surpassing greatness of the second—the priesthood of Aaron and the ordinances of the tabernacle were the appointed shadow, and the shadow is honored precisely in being fulfilled by the body that cast it. Nowhere is the Church’s reading of the Old Testament as a preparation for Christ set out with more scriptural authority, and Theophan expounds it as settled doctrine rather than as a thesis to be defended.

The Epistle’s second great theme, which Theophan expounds in his introduction though he did not reach it in his commentary, is faith and endurance. The eleventh chapter, with its long roll of the faithful—Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and the prophets, who lived and suffered “as seeing him who is invisible”—is Scripture’s own portrait gallery of persevering faith, and it flows directly into the summons of the twelfth chapter to “run with patience the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.” Theophan understood this as the Apostle’s second and inseparable purpose: having shown the greatness of the salvation given in Christ, to move the persecuted to bear their sufferings with courage, and so not to let it slip. That union of doctrine and life is the very signature of his own spiritual writing, and it is why his handling of Hebrews, even in fragment, reads less as commentary than as pastoral direction addressed to the soul.

There is a further and quieter significance in the long introduction itself. Few treatments in any language weigh the ancient testimony to the origin of Hebrews so patiently or so charitably. Theophan is not defensive; he lays out the evidence of the earliest centuries—the echoes of the Epistle in Clement of Rome, the constant witness of Alexandria, the reception of the Syrian and Latin Churches—and lets it accumulate toward the conviction the Church has always held. The passage is, in effect, a small model of how tradition receives, tests, and hands on a sacred book, and it repays the reader who cares how the Scriptures came to be the Scriptures.

The Text and This Edition

Theophan wrote in Russian, for Russian readers, and quoted the Scriptures in the Church Slavonic of the Russian Bible he had prayed all his life. The present edition offers a fresh, complete English translation made directly from that Russian text, as it is preserved in his collected works—the volume of the Pauline commentaries gathering his expositions of the Thessalonian letters, Philemon, and Hebrews, reproduced from the standard modern Russian printings of his writings and drawn from the public-domain digital text at azbyka.ru. The translation is English-only; it is not a parallel or bilingual edition, and it does not set the English against the Russian on the page.

In rendering the work, the translation follows the conventions of this series. Theophan is named as the author, as the Church receives him and as his own works have always borne his name; those who carried his Russian into English are credited as translators, never as authors. His Scripture citations, quoted in his Slavonic register, are rendered faithfully into a dignified English that preserves their liturgical weight rather than silently conforming them to any familiar modern version; where he follows the Greek Old Testament and its numbering, that reading is kept. The English is a modern, readable prose that clears away archaism without flattening the fullness of his style, and references to chapter, verse, and division are given in the ordinary Arabic form (Heb. 1:1–2) for ease of use. The unfinished character of the work is preserved and marked, not disguised: the reader is told where Theophan’s own labor ends.

Suggestions for Reading

Come to this book knowing what it is—a complete essay on the Epistle to the Hebrews, followed by the opening pages of an exposition that death left unfinished. Read the introduction first and read it whole; it is self-contained, and it is the part of the work Theophan brought to completion. It will give you the letter’s argument entire before you begin, and it will teach you how the Fathers weighed the letter’s origin. Then keep the Epistle itself open beside the commentary, and turn to Theophan’s comment only after the Apostle’s own words, letting the many citations of the Fathers stand not as digressions but as the very substance of the reading. Above all, read the letter and its commentary as Theophan read them: not as an argument against a vanished past, but as the Church’s abiding call not to let slip so great a salvation. Take heed, therefore, he repeats after the Apostle—for the final word has been spoken in the Son, and to hold fast to Him is the reader’s own way of salvation.