Introduction

The Author

Georgy Vasilievich Govorov was born on 10 January 1815 in the village of Chernavsk, in the Oryol province of central Russia, the son of a parish priest. A clergyman’s household in that time and place was a school of prayer before it was anything else, and the boy grew up inside the daily round of services that would later shape everything he wrote. He was educated in the local ecclesiastical college at Livny, then at the seminary in Oryol, and finally at the Kiev Theological Academy, from which he graduated in 1841 having already, the year before, received monastic tonsure with the name Theophan—taken in honour of an earlier confessor of the same name. The young monk who set out from Kiev would spend the next quarter-century in almost every kind of churchly work the age offered.

He taught and administered in the theological schools; he served abroad with the Russian ecclesiastical mission in Jerusalem, where he learned Greek and other languages and steeped himself in the manuscripts and iconography of the Christian East, and afterward at the embassy church in Constantinople. In 1857 he was made rector of the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy, the most prominent teaching post in the Russian Church. Two years later he was consecrated bishop of Tambov, and in 1863 he was translated to the see of Vladimir. By every outward measure he was a successful and rising churchman. Yet from his youth he had been drawn toward stillness, and in 1866, at his own request, he laid down his diocese and withdrew to the Vysha Hermitage in the Tambov region.

The withdrawal deepened by stages. For the first years at Vysha he still attended the services and often celebrated the Liturgy himself; but in 1872 he closed his door, ceasing ordinary contact with all but his confessor and one or two attendants. The remaining decades of his life were spent in this strict seclusion—praying, celebrating the Liturgy alone in a small cell chapel, and, above all, writing. It was from behind that closed door that the bulk of his enormous literary output flowed: works of ascetical and spiritual guidance, biblical exposition, and a vast pastoral correspondence with people he never met. He rendered the Greek Philokalia into Russian as the Dobrotolyubie, produced the widely loved handbooks of the interior life for which he is best remembered, and turned again and again to Scripture as a teacher of souls. He reposed on 6 January 1894 (Old Style), the feast of the Theophany, having lived at Vysha for twenty-eight years, twenty-two of them in reclusion. He is commemorated as a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church, which numbered him among the glorified at its council of 1988, held in the year that marked a thousand years since the baptism of the Rus. His writings have long since passed beyond the boundaries of his own communion and are read wherever Christians seek a practical theology of prayer.

The Work: Occasion & Purpose

This is a short, self-contained essay rather than a treatise or a running commentary—the kind of focused piece Theophan wrote when a single stretch of Scripture had become a genuine stumbling-block for thoughtful readers. Its Russian title announces its subject plainly: a resolution of perplexities met with in reading the parable of the unjust steward and the promise made to those who forsake all for the Kingdom of Heaven. He tells us the occasion himself in the opening lines. Certain lovers of Scripture, he writes, had come to him troubled in heart by two passages that seemed very difficult, and after offering them a few remarks to clear the difficulty, he judged it useful to set the whole explanation down at greater length, supposing that the same perplexities trouble others too, in other places.

The two difficulties are precise. The first is the parable of the steward in the sixteenth chapter of Luke (Luke 16:1–13): a manager, accused of squandering his master’s goods and about to be dismissed, quietly reduces what his master’s debtors owe so that they will take him in when he is put out—and his master commends him for acting shrewdly. To the ordinary reader this is scandalous. How can a plainly dishonest man be held up as a pattern for those seeking salvation, and what can the Lord mean by telling His hearers to “make friends by means of unrighteous mammon”? The second difficulty is the Lord’s sweeping promise, given after the rich young man went away sorrowful and Peter asked what those who had left everything would receive: that whoever forsakes house and kindred for His sake shall receive “a hundredfold now in this time,” and in the age to come eternal life (Mark 10:29–30, with the parallels in Matthew 19 and Luke 18). How can that be true? No one who abandons a family receives a hundred families back. In what sense is the promise kept, and kept now?

The essay belongs to the exegetical side of Theophan’s work—the same pastoral reading of Scripture that runs through his commentaries and his letters—and its purpose is thoroughly practical. He is not writing to display learning or to settle a scholarly dispute but to remove an obstacle from between the believer and the text, so that a passage which had unsettled the conscience can instead instruct it.

Argument & Structure

The piece falls into two unequal movements, answering the two perplexities in turn, and its method is as instructive as its conclusions. Theophan’s governing rule, stated early and returned to often, is that a parable should be interpreted only as far as its author interprets it. The Lord Himself draws out the lesson of the steward, and beyond the features the Lord singles out, the details of the story are simply narrative furniture—the two debtors, the measures of oil and wheat, the exact sums—meant to carry the tale forward, not to be decoded one by one. Much of the confusion around this parable, he argues, comes from readers who allegorize every particular and so bury the plain lesson under their own inventions.

He opens the first movement by recovering the setting. The parable was spoken to a mixed crowd—tax-collectors and sinners drawn to Jesus, Pharisees murmuring at the company He kept, disciples and apostles among them—and it follows directly on the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the prodigal. Read in that light, the steward becomes a word to the entangled: to people caught in a way of life they cannot see their way out of, the Lord holds up a man who, in an extremity, found a shrewd way to secure his future, and says in effect, do likewise for the life to come. Theophan then retells the story verse by verse, clearing away the small puzzles—why the steward fears only dismissal and not punishment, what “accused” implies, why the master’s commendation is a businessman’s admiration of cleverness and not an approval of fraud. On the decisive point he is emphatic: it is the master in the story, the rich man, who praises the steward, not the Lord who tells it, so the whole scandal of “the Lord commended a cheat” rests on a misreading of who is speaking.

The interpretive heart of the essay is his handling of the Lord’s own application in verse 9. Here he unfolds three questions: who the “sons of this age” and “sons of light” are and how the former can be called wiser; what the “unrighteous mammon” is; and who the “friends” are that we are to make by it. On the first he surveys a whole spectrum of readings—that the worldly are simply more diligent about their aims than believers are about theirs, that they are craftier in the traffic of daily life, that they scheme against one another as the sons of light in their simplicity do not—and weighs them without forcing a single verdict, preferring the most direct sense while allowing that the Lord’s words hold more than one lesson for more than one kind of hearer. On the “unrighteous mammon” he explains why wealth bears that name even when it is honestly gained: it is called untrue because it is unreliable, deceptive, and passing. His most striking move is on the “friends.” Against the common view that these are simply the poor who will one day pray us into heaven, he argues that the friends who actually receive us into the eternal dwellings are God Himself and His angels and saints—with the poor as the indispensable intermediaries, since it is by mercy to them that their heavenly friendship is won.

The first movement closes with the Lord’s further application—faithfulness in what is least as the measure of faithfulness in much, and the impossibility of serving two masters—which Theophan reads as a summons to hold the goods of this life as a steward holds another’s property, with a heart detached and free.

The second, shorter movement takes up the hundredfold promise. Comparing the accounts in Mark, Matthew, and Luke, Theophan first shows that the promise cannot be quietly pushed off into the next world alone: all three evangelists set the recompense “in this time,” and the Lord’s own manner of speaking rules out a wooden, literal reading. He then distinguishes voluntary renunciation, such as the apostles’, from the involuntary loss suffered by those whom persecution or hostile kin drove from their homes—the far larger number in the early Church, and probably foremost in the Lord’s mind. The hundredfold, he proposes, is fulfilled in two ways: outwardly, in that the whole body of believers, bound by a love the essay describes with real warmth, became a single family in which the one who lost a father found a hundred fathers and every house stood open to him; and inwardly, in the surpassing consolation of grace that made the martyrs count all things loss for Christ. He gathers the Fathers behind both readings and ends by bringing the promise home to his own century—to the missionaries leaving family to preach in the Altai, in Kamchatka, in Abkhazia; to those who enter monastic communities; and to believers pushed out of nominally Christian households for taking the faith in earnest—showing that the same word is still being kept.

Theological & Spiritual Significance

The lasting value of this essay lies less in any single conclusion than in the disciplined way it reads. Theophan models a restraint that much popular interpretation lacks: he lets the Lord fix the boundaries of His own parable and refuses to press the allegory past them, and he is candid that this text has produced more divergence of opinion than almost any other, cataloguing the ancient and modern readings and declining to pretend that a hard passage is simple. That combination of reverence and sobriety—taking the difficulty seriously rather than explaining it away—is itself a lesson in how to handle Scripture.

Behind the exegesis stands the spiritual theology for which Theophan is loved. The parable becomes an occasion to teach detachment: to own without being owned, to handle earthly goods as a trust to be spent on others and returned to God through the hands of the poor, to keep the heart whole for God because a divided heart makes an unsteady soul. The reading of the “friends” as God, the angels, and the saints draws the ordinary duty of almsgiving up into the communion of heaven, so that a coin given to a beggar is a debt discharged on behalf of the angels who bear the prayers of the needy. And the meditation on the hundredfold offers one of the essay’s most attractive passages—its picture of the Church as a family in which every believer’s love and every believer’s house belong to each, and its insistence that the deepest recompense for what is given up for Christ is a sense of well-being in Him that no earthly comfort can rival.

The essay also quietly displays the breadth of the tradition Theophan draws upon. He weighs Chrysostom, Theophylact, and Euthymius Zigabenus from the Greek East alongside Basil the Great, and reaches westward to Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory the Great, Augustine, and John Cassian—reading the Latin and Greek Fathers together as a single company of interpreters. For a modern reader the piece is a compact introduction both to two genuinely hard Gospel texts and to the way a seasoned pastor of prayer brought the whole received tradition to bear on the everyday questions of a troubled conscience.

The Text & This Edition

This edition presents a fresh modern English translation of Theophan’s essay, made from the public-domain Russian text as preserved in the digital collection of his works at azbyka.ru, under its full Russian title, Разрешение недоумений при чтении притчи о неправедном приставнике и обетования тем, кои все оставляют ради Царствия Небесного. It is an English-only reading edition; the Russian is not printed alongside.

A few conventions of the edition are worth noting. The saint is named by the attribution the Church has always given him—Theophan the Recluse—with his sanctity recorded plainly and without controversy; where others contributed to bringing this text into English, they are credited as translators and never as its author. The English aims at a dignified but readable modern register, faithful to Theophan’s own movement of thought. Because Theophan quotes Scripture in his own Slavonic and Synodal Russian wording, and often bends the phrasing to the point he is making, the biblical passages here are rendered from his text rather than lifted from any existing English Bible, so that the reader hears the verses as he read them. Scriptural citations are given in the ordinary modern style—book, chapter, and verse in Arabic numerals (Luke 16:9, Mark 10:30)—in place of the older Roman and Slavonic forms. The result is meant to let a reader with no Russian and no specialist training follow, clearly and in full, an argument that St Theophan first set down to steady the faith of a few perplexed readers of the Gospel.

Suggestions for Reading

Readers new to this kind of writing may find it helpful to read the parable of the unjust steward (Luke 16:1–13) straight through first, and to notice their own reaction to it—the discomfort the essay sets out to address. Theophan’s single most clarifying point comes early and is easy to miss: it is the rich man within the story, not Christ, who praises the steward, and once that is seen the chief scandal dissolves. From there the essay can be read as it is built—the setting, the retelling, the interpretation, the application, and finally the hundredfold promise—without hunting for hidden meanings in every detail, which is precisely the habit Theophan is at pains to discourage. The closing pages, where he brings the ancient promise into his own day, need no scholarly apparatus to reward a first reading.