Introduction

1. The Author

Saint Theophan the Recluse was born Georgy Vasilyevich Govorov in 1815, in the village of Chernavsk in the Orel province of central Russia, the son of a parish priest. He was schooled first at home, then in the diocesan seminary at Orel, and finally at the Kiev Theological Academy, from which he graduated with distinction. It was there, in 1841, that he received monastic tonsure and the name Theophan—“manifested by God”—and was ordained to the priesthood the same year. There followed two decades of service to the Church that touched nearly every kind of ecclesiastical labor: he taught and governed in the theological schools, served with the Russian mission in Jerusalem, and spent a season attached to the embassy church in Constantinople, where his lifelong love of the Greek Fathers and of the ascetic tradition of the Christian East took firm root.

In 1859 he was consecrated bishop of Tambov, and in 1863 he was transferred to the see of Vladimir. He proved a diligent and much-loved shepherd, founding schools and preaching tirelessly. Yet the pull toward stillness never left him, and in 1866 he asked to be relieved of the burden of a diocese. His request granted, he withdrew to the Vyshensky Hermitage in the Tambov region—the only bishop-recluse in the Russian Church of his age. For a few years he lived there in ordinary monastic community; then, in 1872, he sealed himself into strict reclusion, and did not leave it for the remaining twenty-two years of his life. He built a small chapel with his own hands within his cell, celebrated the Liturgy there alone, and saw almost no one but his confessor and the abbot.

This solitude was anything but idle. From behind the closed door flowed a steady stream of letters—he answered every correspondent who wrote to him, sometimes dozens in a day—and an extraordinary body of books: works of moral and ascetic theology such as The Path to Salvation and What the Spiritual Life Is, translations that gave the Russian-speaking Church its Philokalia and Unseen Warfare, and a great series of commentaries on the Pauline Epistles. He reposed in his cell on the feast of the Theophany, in January 1894, having lived twenty-eight years at Vysha, twenty-two of them in complete seclusion. The Russian Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints in 1988, and he is commemorated on the tenth of January. He is remembered above all as one of the great teachers of the interior life—a hierarch who left the world’s business not to escape it but to pray for it, and who gave the Church a way of reading Scripture that is at once deeply patristic and warmly practical.

2. The Work: Occasion and Purpose

The Epistle to Philemon is the shortest of Saint Paul’s letters—a single chapter of twenty-five verses—and among the most personal documents in the New Testament. It is not addressed to a congregation wrestling with doctrine or discord, but to one man, about one man, on one delicate matter of the heart.

Philemon was a Christian of some standing in Colossae, converted by Paul himself and so bound to the Apostle, as Paul reminds him, that he owes him “even his own self.” His house served as the gathering place of the local believers—in the phrase from Saint John Chrysostom that Theophan loves to repeat, it was “a haven for all the saints.” Philemon owned a slave named Onesimus, who had wronged him in some way—the letter hints at theft or loss—and had run away, fleeing all the way to Rome, where Paul was then a prisoner. There, whether drawn by others to hear the Apostle or led to him by Epaphras, Onesimus came under the preaching of the Gospel, believed, and was baptized. He became so dear to Paul in his imprisonment that the Apostle calls him “my own heart.”

By the law of that world a runaway slave was wholly at his master’s mercy, and the penalties were severe. Paul will not simply keep the man, useful as he has become; nor will he command Philemon, though as an apostle he could. Instead he sends Onesimus back—now a brother in the faith—carrying this letter and travelling in the company of Tychicus, who bore the Epistle to the Colossians at the same time. Theophan therefore places the writing of Philemon exactly where he places Colossians: during Paul’s Roman imprisonment, about the years 60 to 62. The letter’s single purpose is to move Philemon to receive his returning slave not with the punishment law allowed, but with forgiveness—to receive him “not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved.”

In his own opening remarks Theophan notes that although the letter travelled with Colossians, its subject matter sets it naturally beside the Pastoral Epistles, for it offers pastors “a most edifying example of care for the salvation of souls” and of how one ought to act in such circumstances. That pastoral reading governs his whole treatment of the book.

3. Argument and Structure

Short as it is, Theophan observes, the letter has the full architecture of a Pauline epistle, and he divides it into three parts. There is a preface (verses 1–7), containing the salutation and a warm thanksgiving for Philemon’s faith and love; the body (verses 8–21), which is the appeal itself for the merciful reception of Onesimus; and a postscript (verses 22–25), with Paul’s request for lodging, final greetings, and blessing. Because the whole is a single chapter, references throughout are to verse numbers alone.

Theophan then moves through the text a verse or two at a time, and the reader watches him trace the Apostle’s extraordinary tact. Paul opens not by asserting his office but by naming himself “a prisoner of Jesus Christ,” lending his chains their full weight of persuasion—who, Chrysostom asks, hearing of the bonds Paul bears for Christ, could refuse him even a single slave? He gathers co-petitioners: Timothy, and Apphia (probably Philemon’s wife), and Archippus, and even the whole church that meets in the house, so that the request comes from many and is addressed to many. He praises Philemon’s love and faith before he asks anything, and reminds him that the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through him—a man so ready to comfort others will surely wish to comfort the Apostle now.

Only then does Paul make his plea, and Theophan lingers over its artfulness. Paul plays gently on the very name Onesimus, which means “useful”: once useless, he is now useful indeed, both to Paul and to Philemon. He offers to repay from his own hand whatever the runaway owes—“put that on mine account”—while quietly reminding Philemon that he owes Paul a far greater debt, his own soul. He asks confident of more than he asks, sure that Philemon will do even beyond his word. Every touch is calculated not to compel but to win, so that Philemon’s goodness may be, as Paul says, “not as it were of necessity, but willingly.”

The postscript keeps the same warm and confident tone. Paul asks that a lodging be made ready for him, in the hope of being restored to the Colossian believers through their prayers—a hope, Theophan notes, that binds Philemon still closer, since the Apostle he loves may soon be his guest. Greetings follow from his fellow-workers, and a closing blessing of grace. Tradition, Theophan reports, holds that Philemon did just as the Apostle hoped, receiving Onesimus in love and sending him back to Paul a free man; both master and slave are honored by the Church as saints, and the received accounts number each of them, in his own place, among the later bishops and martyrs of the apostolic generation.

4. Theological and Spiritual Significance

For all its brevity and its private occasion, the letter carries a great weight of meaning, and Theophan draws it out along two lines.

The first is intercession. This little epistle is, in his reading, a masterpiece of how a Christian pleads for the fallen—how one who has power to command chooses instead to entreat, covers the debt of the guilty with his own credit, and stakes his own love on the reconciliation of another. Paul stands here, as more than one Father noticed, in the very posture of Christ, who intercedes for sinners before the Father and pays a debt not His own. Read this way the letter becomes a school of mercy, teaching the reader to welcome the penitent, to answer another’s fault with generosity rather than reckoning, and to see the recovery of one soul as worth the full attention of an apostle.

The second is the transformation the Gospel works within the bonds of ordinary life—and here the letter’s treatment of slavery must be read on its own terms rather than through the debates of a later age. Onesimus returns still, in law, a slave, and still answerable to his master; Paul does not annul that legal fact. What the Gospel changes is the deeper relation beneath it. Master and slave are now brothers, members of one body, sons of one spiritual father. Paul asks Philemon to receive Onesimus “above a servant, a brother beloved,” and behind the request stands the word Theophan quotes again and again: “in Christ Jesus there is neither slave nor free.” Christianity, he explains, does not overturn the outward order of society by force or by decree; it transforms that order from within, planting a new spirit in master and slave alike, so that a believing household already lives as a company of kin before God whatever the world’s rankings may say. The Church, Chrysostom adds in a line Theophan preserves, knows no distinction between master and slave except the distinction of virtue and vice.

Theophan is careful, and his sources are careful, to draw this without anachronism. Paul counsels the slave who can gain his freedom to do so, yet tells the one who cannot not to be troubled by his condition, for his true standing is secure in Christ; and he warns against seizing slaves from their masters “under the pretext of piety,” lest the Gospel be blasphemed as a solvent of all social bonds. The point is not indifference to the man’s outward lot—Paul’s whole letter labors for Onesimus’s good—but the conviction that the decisive freedom is interior, and that from that inner renewal the outward relations of life are quietly and surely remade.

5. Reception and Influence

The Fathers found far more in this brief note than its small compass might suggest, and Theophan reads it in their company throughout—chiefly with Saint John Chrysostom, whose homilies on Philemon he quotes at length, but also with Blessed Theodoret of Cyrus, Theophylact of Ohrid, Oecumenius, and Ambrosiaster. From Chrysostom he takes up and answers an old objection: whether a letter of such private content deserved a place in the canon of Scripture at all. Chrysostom’s reply, which Theophan endorses with evident pleasure, is that nothing an apostle did was too small to profit the Church—we would gladly know even where they walked and what they ate—and that this letter in particular teaches lessons of the first importance: to care for those the world counts of no account, never to despair of any soul’s conversion, not to wrest slaves from their masters under cover of religion, and not to despise the faithful of low estate. That the Church did in fact receive the letter, and has treasured it ever since, is itself the vindication of Chrysostom’s argument, and it supplies the frame within which Theophan hands the book to his own readers.

6. The Text and This Edition

Theophan composed his commentary on Philemon in Russian, as part of the great series of expositions of the Pauline Epistles that he wrote in his reclusion at Vysha; it circulated within his collected commentaries on the letters to the Thessalonians, to Philemon, and to the Hebrews, and has long stood in the public domain. The present volume offers a fresh, readable English translation made directly from that public-domain Russian text, prepared for study and for unhurried devotional reading.

A few conventions of this edition are worth noting. The translation follows the house practice of traditional attribution: Theophan is named as the Church receives him, and those who rendered his words into English are credited as translators, never as authors. Scripture is given faithfully in the forms Theophan himself used, and the Fathers he weaves into his exposition—Chrysostom, Theodoret, Theophylact, Oecumenius, Ambrosiaster—are preserved in their place, since for Theophan their voices are not ornament but the substance of the reading. Chapter and verse citations are set in the modern Arabic style familiar to today’s reader. Because the epistle is a single chapter, all references within the commentary are to verse numbers alone. The aim throughout has been to let Theophan speak plainly to a modern English audience while keeping intact the patristic texture and the warm pastoral voice that are the whole character of his work.

7. Suggestions for Reading

Philemon can be read at a single sitting, and this commentary is best read the same way, with the short letter open alongside it and Theophan’s comment taken verse by verse. Let the words he draws from Chrysostom and the others stand as the heart of the reading rather than as digression; they are why the exposition is so rich for so slight a text. Above all, take the letter as Theophan intends it—not as a curiosity of the apostolic past but as a living pattern for the present: of interceding for those who have fallen, of welcoming the one who returns in repentance, and of learning to see in every person, whatever his station, a brother for whom Christ died.