Introduction

1. The Author

Saint Theophan the Recluse was born Georgy Vasilievich Govorov on the tenth of 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 seminaries of his native region and then, from 1837 to 1841, at the Kiev Theological Academy, one of the great centers of Russian church learning, close by the ancient Monastery of the Caves whose ascetic memory shaped him. Before completing his course he received the monastic tonsure and the name Theophan; ordination followed in 1841. There opened before him the ordinary career of a gifted churchman of his day: rector of church schools in Kiev, teaching posts and rectorships at Novgorod and at the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy, where he lectured in moral and pastoral theology. A period with the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem widened his horizon; there he studied the languages of Scripture and of the Christian East, learned iconography, and began the labor of translation that would occupy much of his life.

Academic administration did not answer the deepest bent of his soul, which was contemplative. In 1859 he was consecrated Bishop of Tambov, and in 1863 translated to the see of Vladimir; in both dioceses he governed conscientiously and founded schools, including schools for girls. Yet the pull toward stillness only grew, and he had come to love a small, secluded monastery in his Tambov diocese, the Vyshensky Hermitage. In 1866, after only a few years as a bishop, he asked to be released from the administration of a diocese and was permitted to retire to Vysha. There, in 1872, he withdrew into strict reclusion, closing his cell to visitors and giving the remaining years to prayer, the Liturgy, and an immense correspondence and literary output. He wrote unceasingly on the inner Christian life — The Path to Salvation, the Letters on the Spiritual Life, guidance on prayer of the heart—and produced the standard Russian rendering of the Philokalia, the Dobrotolyubie, the anthology of ascetic Fathers that formed generations of Orthodox Christians. Alongside these he composed a series of verse-by-verse commentaries covering nearly the whole of the Apostle Paul’s epistles. He reposed on the sixth of January, 1894, having lived some twenty-two years in seclusion. The Russian Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints in 1988. He is honored across the Orthodox world, and increasingly beyond it, as one of the surest guides to the interior life that the modern age has produced.

2. The Work: Occasion and Purpose

The Commentary on the Epistle to the Philippians belongs to Theophan’s Vysha years and to his great project of expounding Saint Paul; it dates from the early 1870s, when he was applying his settled method, one epistle at a time, to the letters of the Apostle he loved. Its subject is the shortest and warmest of the “prison epistles,” the letter Paul wrote to the Christians of Philippi from his captivity at Rome.

Theophan opens, as he does throughout, by setting the scene, and he devotes his prologue to the history that the letter presupposes. Philippi was a city of Macedonia near the Thracian coast, refounded and named by Philip of Macedon and later dignified by Rome with the jus italicum after the battle fought there between the heirs of Caesar and the last defenders of the Republic. Its church was the first the Apostle planted on European soil, born on his second missionary journey after the vision at Troas of a man of Macedonia pleading, “Come over and help us.” Theophan retells from the Acts the conversion of Lydia the seller of purple and her household, the casting out of the spirit of divination from the slave girl, the beating and imprisonment of Paul and Silas, the midnight earthquake and the jailer who believed with all his house—the whole vivid founding narrative that binds the Apostle to this congregation more tenderly than to any other.

That bond is the occasion of the letter. Learning that Paul was a prisoner, the Philippians had sent one of their own, Epaphroditus, with a gift for his support, which Paul received “as a fragrant offering, a sacrifice acceptable and well-pleasing to God.” Epaphroditus then fell gravely ill, nearly to death, and word of it reached Philippi; when he recovered, the Apostle sent him home, and, as Theophan puts it, “on this occasion wrote to them.” The purpose is therefore first of all one of thanksgiving and reassurance—to acknowledge the gift, to set the Philippians’ minds at rest about the Apostle’s own state and about their envoy, and to answer love with love. But because it was Paul who wrote, he could not send a letter of mere courtesy. Into it he wove what he judged his beloved children still needed: encouragement not to fear their adversaries, a summons to concord and humility, a warning against the Judaizing teachers who might yet reach them, and the setting before them of an ever-higher goal. The result, Theophan observes, follows no “preconceived plan” but the movement of the Apostle’s heart, and this is the key to reading it aright.

3. Argument and Structure

Because the letter was written “as the heart prompted,” its order is affective rather than schematic, and one of the services of Theophan’s commentary is to make its coherence visible without imposing a false system upon it. After the opening greeting and thanksgiving, in which Paul assures the Philippians of his constant prayer and confidence in them (1:1–11), the letter moves through several loosely joined movements.

The Apostle first speaks of himself and of the progress of the Gospel, telling them how even his imprisonment has served to spread the word, and confessing that he is torn between the desire “to depart and be with Christ, which is far better” and the need to remain in the flesh for their sake (1:12–26). From his own example he draws an exhortation to them: to stand fast, to fear no adversary, and above all to be of one mind and one love (1:27–2:18). It is here, grounding the call to humility, that Paul sets before them the great hymn of Christ, who, “being in the form of God,” emptied Himself and was obedient unto death, and was therefore exalted above every name (2:5–11)—the doctrinal summit of the letter, to which we shall return. The Apostle then turns to practical arrangements, announcing that he hopes to send Timothy and is now returning Epaphroditus, whose devotion he warmly commends (2:19–30).

A fresh movement opens in the third chapter with a warning against the Judaizers, those who would bind the Gentile Christians to the works and boasts of the Law. Paul meets the danger not with argument but with his own testimony: whatever advantages he once counted gain—his lineage, his zeal, his blameless legal righteousness—he now counts loss “for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus,” desiring to be found in Him “not having my own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ” (3:1–11). From this he presses on to the image of the runner who forgets what lies behind and strains “toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus” (3:12–4:1). The letter closes with personal admonitions—the plea to Euodia and Syntyche to be of one mind, the charge to “rejoice in the Lord always,” and the counsel to fill the mind with whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, and of good report (4:2–9)—before the Apostle’s grateful and delicate acknowledgment of the gift itself, with the confession that he has “learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content” (4:10–20), and a final benediction.

Through all of this Theophan proceeds in short steps, taking a verse or a clause at a time, laying open its sense, meeting its difficulties, and drawing each point toward the reader’s own soul. The commentary thus reads at once as exposition and as a rule of life, tracing the letter’s argument while never letting it remain a matter of the page alone.

4. Theological and Spiritual Significance

At the center of the epistle, and of Theophan’s exposition, stands one of the loftiest passages in all of Scripture: the hymn of Christ’s self-emptying. “Let this mind be in you,” Paul writes, “which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant… and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (2:5–8). Paul offers it to the Philippians as the pattern of the humility he is urging on them; Theophan expounds it as nothing less than “the dogma of the incarnation and the redemption, and of the person of Jesus Christ as the God-man.” The “form of God,” he explains with the Greek Fathers, means that Christ’s “very nature is divine”—He is God by nature, equal with the Father. To “empty Himself” is not to cease to be God but voluntarily to lay aside “the visible glory and majesty proper to the Godhead” and to take a created human nature; and He took it “as God,” so that “after the taking He remained God, the One who took the form of a servant.” This self-abasement reached its depth in the death of the cross and was answered by the exaltation at which “every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth.” Theophan handles this passage with special care, for he knows that over its words a single misjudged term has bred whole controversies; he weighs the Fathers against one another precisely where they part, so that the reader is neither confused nor misled.

Around this doctrinal center the letter’s practical treasures gather, and Theophan draws them out one by one. There is the joy for which Philippians is famous—“Rejoice in the Lord always: and again I say, Rejoice” (4:4)—a gladness commended, astonishingly, from a prison cell, and rooted not in circumstance but in the Lord Himself. There is the contentment Paul has learned in abundance and in want, the peace of God “which passeth all understanding” set as a garrison over the heart. And there is the righteousness of faith, unfolded in the third chapter, where the Apostle renounces his own legal righteousness for “the righteousness which is of God by faith.” Theophan reads this in the mind of the Church: the legal righteousness was “outward and material,” while that which faith bestows is “spiritual and inward, which is built up in the spirit” through the grace of the Holy Spirit. He is careful to add that in setting faith over against the Law the Apostle “does not deny the obligation to live a righteous life,” but calls the believer past mere outward correctness to a real inward holiness—and then onward, forgetting what is behind, “toward the prize of the high calling.”

What gives Theophan’s commentary its distinctive savor is the marriage of two things not always found together. On one side is a scrupulous fidelity to the exegetical tradition: he expounds this letter almost entirely through the Greek East, taking Saint John Chrysostom as his chief guide and gathering with him Blessed Theodoret of Cyrus, Saint John of Damascus, Ecumenius, and Theophylact, comparing their readings and weaving them into a single continuous thread. On the other side is the unmistakable note of Russian ascetical teaching, the pastoral realism of a man who had spent decades in prayer and the direction of souls. Theophan will not leave humility, joy, or righteousness standing as fine ideas; he presses each into the reader’s own labor of repentance and prayer. Close reading and spiritual warmth are held together throughout, and that union is the commentary’s signature.

5. Reception and Place in Theophan’s Work

The commentary on Philippians is one panel of a larger achievement. During his years at Vysha, Theophan set himself to expound nearly the whole Pauline corpus—Romans and the two letters to the Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians, the letters to the Thessalonians, and the Pastoral Epistles—verse by verse, in the same manner throughout. Among modern Orthodox interpreters he stands out for the sheer scope of this labor and for the skill with which, as later readers have said, he weaves disparate patristic comments into a single continuous exposition with an aim that is above all pastoral and devotional. His Scriptural commentaries became a lasting resource for the Russian Church and beyond, drawn upon by later expositors and prized by clergy and laity alike as a way of acquiring the mind of the Fathers without a scholar’s apparatus. The Philippians volume, treating the most personal of Paul’s letters, shows this gift at its most attractive: warm where the Apostle is warm, exact where he is doctrinally exact, and everywhere turned toward the reader’s own growth in Christ.

6. The Text and This Edition

Theophan wrote his commentary in Russian, for Russian believers, in the prose of the later nineteenth century. This edition presents it in a fresh, readable modern English translation, made from the public-domain Russian text of his exposition of Philippians as issued in the pre-revolutionary editions of his collected works (the printing of the Russian Saint Panteleimon Monastery of Mount Athos). The aim has been faithfulness to Theophan’s sense and to his voice—his patient step-by-step movement, his gathering of the Fathers, his turn toward the soul—in clear present-day English that keeps the substance intact without archaism.

A few conventions of this edition should be noted. Scripture is quoted in an English register consonant with the Church’s traditional text, following Theophan’s own citations; where he cites the Fathers, their words are given as he gives them, carrying the exposition rather than interrupting it. Scriptural references are set in the modern form familiar to readers today—book, chapter, and verse in Arabic numerals (for example, Philippians 2:5–11)—for ease of use. In keeping with the practices of this series, the author is named as the Church receives him, Saint Theophan the Recluse; those who have rendered his work into English are credited as translators, never as authors; and no critical or dismissive labels are attached to the tradition he transmits. This is an English-language edition intended for study and devotion, offering to the wider Christian world a commentary long treasured in Russia but until recently little known outside it.

7. Suggestions for Reading

Philippians reads like a letter from a friend, and Theophan’s commentary keeps that intimacy while opening the letter’s depths. The reader is best served by keeping the epistle itself at hand and reading Theophan’s comment only after the Apostle’s own words on each short passage; the exposition is meant to accompany the text, not to replace it. The one place that asks for slower attention is the hymn of Christ’s self-emptying in the second chapter, where a little patience with the Fathers Theophan cites repays itself many times over. Above all, the commentary asks to be read as it was written—to be understood and to be lived. Taken so, the letter teaches the soul, in Theophan’s hands, to go down with Christ into humility and to rise with Him into joy, seeking no righteousness but the one that is of God by faith.