Introduction

The Author

Saint Theophan the Recluse was born Georgy Vasilievich Govorov on 10 January 1815, in the village of Chernavsk in the Oryol governorate of central Russia, the son of a parish priest. His was the ordinary path of a clergyman’s gifted son: the district church school at Livny, then the seminary at Oryol, and from 1837 the Kiev Theological Academy, whose lecture halls stood within reach of the ancient Monastery of the Caves. It was there, before he had finished his studies, that the young man asked for the monastic tonsure, receiving in 1840 the name Theophan, “manifestation of God.” He completed the Academy in 1841 with a master’s degree, and for the next two decades moved through the teaching and administrative posts that a promising monk was given: rector of the church schools of Kiev, of the seminary at Novgorod, professor at the Petersburg Academy. He served with the Russian ecclesiastical mission in Jerusalem and, later, at the embassy church in Constantinople, journeys that brought him into direct contact with the Christian East and its libraries of the Fathers.

In 1859 he was consecrated bishop, first of Tambov and Shatsk and then, from 1863, of Vladimir. He proved a diligent pastor—founding schools, preaching, visiting his parishes—but the pull of solitude never left him. In 1866 he petitioned to be released from the government of a diocese and withdrew to the quiet Vysha Hermitage in the Tambov region, a place he had come to love. There, from 1872, he entered a stricter seclusion still, ceasing to leave his cell, arranging a small chapel where he celebrated the Liturgy alone, and giving the remaining years wholly to prayer, study, and the pen. His reclusion was not a retreat from the Church but a new form of service to it. From that single room came a stream of writing that shaped Russian spiritual life for generations: his manuals of the interior life, The Path to Salvation and The Spiritual Life and How to Be Attuned to It, thousands of letters of counsel, his volumes of daily reflections on the Scripture readings, sustained commentaries on the epistles of the Apostle Paul, and—perhaps his greatest labor of love—the rendering of the Philokalia from Church Slavonic into accessible Russian. He reposed at Vysha on 6 January 1894. When his cell was opened his face was found serene, and his memory as a teacher of prayer only grew. The Russian Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints at its Local Council of 1988, and he is commemorated chiefly on 10 January.

The Work: Occasion and Purpose

The Commentary on Psalm 118 belongs to the years of the reclusion, and bears their stamp on every page. It was composed at Vysha and first appeared in print at Moscow near the end of Theophan’s life; the edition that reached the widest audience carried on its title page the description “an interpretation in the manner of a spoken discourse”—a homiletic, conversational commentary rather than a technical one. That description is exact. Theophan does not write for the lecture hall. He writes as a shepherd who has walked the road himself and turns back to describe it to those still climbing, pausing over each verse to ask what it requires of the reader’s own conscience.

He chose this psalm deliberately, and the choice is revealing. Of all the one hundred and fifty psalms, the hundred-and-eighteenth is the longest, and its subject is the narrowest: from first verse to last it speaks of one thing only, the law of God and the soul’s love for it. For a bishop who had given his life to the formation of souls, no text could have been more congenial. Here was the whole of the moral and religious life gathered into a single unbroken meditation, and Theophan set out to unfold it not as a scholar dissecting an ancient poem but as a physician of souls opening a treasury he believed inexhaustible. He tells his readers plainly that little in the work will be his own invention; everything, he says, is borrowed from the Fathers and teachers of the Church who had labored on this psalm before him. His task, as he understood it, was to gather their exposition into one continuous guide and press it home.

The work stands among the largest of Theophan’s exegetical writings and is the most substantial he devoted to the Psalter. In it the two sides of his mature vocation meet: the interpreter of Scripture and the director of the inner life. Where his letters answer particular souls in particular difficulties, this commentary offers the same counsel systematically, verse by verse, as a map of the whole ascent from the first turning toward God to the heights of unbroken communion with Him.

A word on the psalm’s number will spare the reader confusion. Throughout, the numbering follows the Greek Septuagint and the Slavonic Psalter used in the Christian East, where this is Psalm 118. In Hebrew-numbered Bibles, and so in most modern English translations, the same psalm is numbered 119. The two are one and the same text; only the count differs. In the worship of the Eastern Church the psalm holds a place of unusual honor. It forms the whole of the seventeenth kathisma of the Psalter and is appointed for the daily Midnight Office—a point Theophan notes with satisfaction, remarking that the Church evidently wishes her children to know this psalm firmly, setting it at the hour when a mind refreshed by sleep receives most keenly. Taking its name from its opening word, it is sung as “the Blameless” at funerals and memorial services, and, divided into portions with verses of praise woven between them, it stands at the heart of the Matins of Holy Saturday before the empty tomb. The psalm the reader is about to study is thus one the Church prays over her living and her dead alike.

Argument and Structure

Theophan lets the psalm dictate the shape of his commentary, and the psalm has a remarkable shape of its own. In the Hebrew it is an alphabetic acrostic, but of an unusual kind: not one verse to each letter, but eight. The first eight verses all begin with the first letter, the next eight with the second, and so on through the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet—twenty-two stanzas of eight verses, one hundred and seventy-six in all. This structure is invisible in the Greek and Slavonic, where the acrostic cannot be reproduced, and Theophan opens his work with a preface explaining it, along with the psalm’s other distinctive features and the tradition, reported by the Fathers, that David composed it to teach his son Solomon the law of God, and that Jewish children learned it together with their letters.

From the preface onward he follows the division into stanzas of eight, which he calls octets, taking each verse in order within them. This was a deliberate decision. The division into eights appears in neither the Slavonic nor the Greek text, yet Theophan retains it—following, he tells us, the example of Saint Ambrose and of Patriarch Anthimus of Jerusalem—because closer study convinced him that it is more than a convenience for the reader’s attention. Each octet, he found, is governed by a single ruling thought, upon which its eight verses are strung “like beads on a single thread.” Much of the freshness of the commentary lies here. Before expounding the verses of a stanza he pauses to name its controlling idea, and often draws meaning from the very Hebrew letter that heads it: the octet under beth, “house,” on the ordering of one’s inner dwelling; the octet under heth, which he glosses as “sin,” on how the sinner breaks free of its bonds; the octet under ayin, “eye,” on spiritual sight; and so through the alphabet. The reader who follows the whole receives, stanza by stanza, a series of connected meditations rather than a heap of disconnected verses.

The larger movement of the work traces an ascent. From the opening beatitude—“Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord”—Theophan reads the psalm as a ladder of the interior life, distinguishing the stages the Fathers had mapped: the active life of keeping the commandments, which purifies the heart, and the contemplative life that a purified heart opens onto, in which the mind beholds the mysteries of God. He is careful to present these as degrees through which a real soul passes, not as abstractions, and he returns to the ascent again and again as the psalm circles back to its one theme from ever new angles. The many names the psalm gives to the will of God—law, testimonies, statutes, judgments, words, ways, paths, commandments—he treats not as poetic variety but as facets of a single jewel, each catching the light differently; where a particular name colors the meaning of a verse, he says so. The one hundred and seventy-six verses thus become a single sustained prayer, offered from every condition of the soul, that God would enlighten, strengthen, raise up, and keep the one who longs to please Him.

Theological and Spiritual Significance

The abiding worth of this commentary lies in what it does with a theme that can seem, to a modern reader, forbidding. “The law” easily suggests mere rule-keeping, an external burden. Theophan will not allow the reduction. For him, as for the psalmist he expounds, the law of God is the revealed shape of a life lived toward God, and love for it is the whole health of the soul. The commandments are not a cage but a road home; blessedness is not deferred to some future reward but begins now, in the peace of a conscience at rest and a gaze that need not fall before the face of God. This is why the psalm says the blameless are blessed, not that they shall be — a distinction Theophan lingers over, insisting that the delight of walking with God is already given, here, amid every outward hardship.

He is equally clear-eyed about the difficulty of the road. The path of the commandments is clean in itself, he grants, but those who walk it walk under a constant fall of temptation, and to remain undefiled a soul must be willing to count itself already dead, ready, as the ancient image has it, to be offered like a lamb for sacrifice. He weaves through his exposition a sober psychology of the inner life: the difference between a knowledge of God’s word that stops at the intellect and a knowledge won by doing it; the way small, half-noticed sins gather weight even in those who guard against great ones; the subtle counterfeits of true joy and true sorrow, of godly fear and empty dread, that only spiritual experience learns to tell apart. On the vexed question of whether the saints truly become sinless, he lets the Fathers speak on both sides—Macarius on the freedom that grace does not overrule, Augustine on the sin that dwells in a man even as he walks in God’s ways—and leaves the tension standing rather than flattening it, so that the reader is instructed by the fullness of the tradition rather than by a single tidy answer.

What gives the work its particular authority is that Theophan writes as a catenist, gathering the exegesis of the Church into one voice. Around every verse he assembles Ambrose, who devoted an entire book to this psalm; Augustine, who preached on it publicly and confessed that its very simplicity had long deterred him, so deep did it prove; Athanasius, who read it as a portrait of the saints in their unseen warfare; Theodoret, Hilary, the Byzantine commentators Euthymius Zigabenus and Patriarch Anthimus of Jerusalem, with Origen, Eusebius, Isaac the Syrian, and Macarius drawn in as occasion warrants. The reader receives, in effect, a distilled patristic commentary on the greatest of the psalms of the law, filtered through the discernment of a nineteenth-century master of prayer and pressed always toward practice. It is this union of ancient exegesis and living spiritual counsel that has kept the work in print and in use, and that makes it as much a book to pray as a book to study.

Reception and Influence

Long before Theophan took it up, Psalm 118 held a singular place in Christian devotion, East and West alike, precisely as the psalm of the law of God and of longing for it. In the Latin tradition Ambrose and Augustine each gave it extended treatment, and in the East it entered the daily and funeral prayer of the Church. Theophan writes consciously within that stream, and his commentary has itself become, for Russian-speaking readers, the standard spiritual reading of the psalm—reprinted many times since its first appearance and drawn on by later teachers of the interior life. Because it is built so largely from the Fathers, it has also served as a doorway through which readers with no access to Ambrose or Zigabenus have met the patristic mind on this text. Its influence is thus twofold: it carries forward the ancient exposition it gathers, and it carries the stamp of one of the most widely loved spiritual guides of the modern Orthodox world.

The Text and This Edition

This edition presents a fresh, modern English translation of Saint Theophan’s commentary, made from the Russian. The Russian text is the public-domain original as preserved in the modern reading edition Psalm 118, an Interpretation in the Manner of a Discourse (Moscow: Pravilo Very, 2008), a re-typesetting of the nineteenth-century work whose typography carries no new copyright; the digital source consulted is the public-domain corpus at azbyka.ru. The translation renders Theophan’s Russian into clear contemporary English, aiming to keep the warmth and directness of his “conversational” manner while making it readable for those coming to him for the first time.

The edition follows the conventions of this series. Authorship is given as the Church has always received it: the commentary is Saint Theophan’s, and the many Fathers he quotes—Ambrose, Augustine, Athanasius, Theodoret, Hilary, Euthymius Zigabenus, Anthimus of Jerusalem, and the rest—appear as the authorities he cites within the text, credited where he credits them. The psalm’s numbering is kept as Theophan gives it, in the Greek and Slavonic reckoning (Psalm 118, equivalent to Psalm 119 of Hebrew-numbered Bibles), so that the commentary and the verses it treats always agree. Scripture citations are set in the familiar modern form, with chapter and verse in Arabic numerals. Inline emphasis in the original—the psalm’s lemmata, scriptural quotations, and the words Theophan stresses—is preserved. The structure of the work is retained in full: the preface, the twenty-two octets in their order through the alphabet, gathered into the three larger spans (verses 1–56, 57–120, and 121–176) in which the exposition unfolds.

Suggestions for Reading

The newcomer need not read this long commentary straight through to profit from it. Theophan himself points the way: take a single verse, he counsels, and meditate on it through the day, as one digs in a field where treasure is buried—keep digging, and you will find. The preface repays reading first, for it explains the psalm’s structure and sets out the spirit in which the whole is offered. After that, the octets may be taken up one at a time, each with its ruling thought named at the outset. Read slowly, and with the psalm’s own words open alongside, the work becomes what its author intended: less a book about prayer than an entrance into it.