Introduction

The Author

Saint Theophan the Recluse was born Georgy Vasilievich Govorov on 10 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 region and then at the Kiev Theological Academy, where he was tonsured a monk and given the name Theophan. Ordained in 1841, he taught and led in a succession of theological schools, served for a time with the Russian ecclesiastical mission in the Holy Land and at Constantinople, and in 1859 was consecrated bishop, first of Tambov and then, four years later, of Vladimir. He was, by every account, a capable and beloved shepherd. Yet the labor his heart had long inclined toward was another one. In 1866 he petitioned to be released from the administration of a diocese and withdrew to the Vysha Hermitage, a quiet monastery in the Tambov countryside. Some years into that retirement he entered a strict reclusion, seeing almost no one, keeping a small chapel where he served the Liturgy alone, and giving the whole of his remaining strength to prayer, to an immense correspondence with those who sought his counsel, and to writing. He died there on 6 January 1894, the eve of the feast of Theophany whose name he bore. The Russian Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints in 1988.

From the seclusion of Vysha came the body of work for which he is now chiefly remembered. He rendered the Philokalia, the great anthology of the Greek ascetic Fathers, into Russian, opening its treasury of prayer to a wide readership. He wrote guides to the spiritual life that are still read wherever Russian is read—books on the path to salvation and on the shape of the interior life—and thousands of letters of direction. Alongside these he undertook a sustained labor of biblical exposition, and above all a commentary running across nearly the whole of the Apostle Paul’s correspondence: Romans, both letters to the Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, both to the Thessalonians, the letters to Timothy and Titus, and Philemon. Among these the commentary on Romans is the largest, and the fullest single expression of his method as an interpreter of Paul.

The Work: Occasion and Purpose

The Epistle to the Romans is the longest and most closely reasoned of Paul’s letters, and from the earliest Christian centuries it has been read as the fullest written statement of his gospel. Its own occasion is unusual among the letters. Paul was writing to a church he had neither founded nor yet seen. As Theophan reconstructs the situation from the letter itself and from the book of Acts, the Christian community at Rome had grown up without an apostle’s founding hand—carried there, most likely, by Jews of the capital who had come to faith on visits to Jerusalem, and by believers scattered from Rome under the emperor Claudius and later returned. It was a congregation drawn from both Jews and Gentiles, and by the time Paul wrote, the Gentile believers had come to predominate. Theophan gives careful attention to the old tradition that the Apostle Peter founded the Roman church, and concludes, from Paul’s own silence about any such foundation, that Peter cannot have been at Rome when the letter was written; the church, he judges, had been established by others invested with apostolic authority, among them the returned exiles Paul greets by name in his final chapter.

Paul wrote, on Theophan’s reckoning, in the year 58 or 59, from Corinth, during the three-month stay recorded in Acts—a dating that falls within the mid-to-late 50s that later scholarship has generally settled on. He was about to carry to Jerusalem a collection gathered in Macedonia and Achaia for the poor of that church, and he hoped afterward to reach Rome at last and press on to the west. The letter was entrusted to Phoebe, a deaconess of the port town of Cenchreae near Corinth, who was traveling to the capital; her journey supplied the immediate occasion, since Paul commends her to the Roman believers and asks their help. But Theophan is careful to distinguish this occasion from the deeper motive. The commendation of Phoebe could have been said in a sentence. What moved Paul to send instead the longest and weightiest of all his letters was an apostolic burden of his own: a desire, which Theophan reads as prompted by the Spirit, to set before a church he had never visited the whole way of salvation he preached, so that his teaching and theirs might be brought into one accord before he came. The hoped-for visit, unknown to Paul, would be delayed for years and would come at last only in chains; the letter, Theophan suggests, was given to stand in its place.

Argument and Structure

Theophan reads Romans in the shape the ancient commentators gave it, and his own exposition follows that shape closely. After his own set of preliminary chapters—on the origin and composition of the Roman church, the time and place of writing, and the occasion and purpose—he treats the letter in four movements. A brief preface covers the opening address and the announcement of the theme (Romans 1:1–17). A long doctrinal part sets forth salvation in Christ (1:18–11:36). A moral part draws out the life that answers to that salvation (12:1–15:13). A warm conclusion of travel plans, greetings, and doxology closes the whole (15:14–16:24). The reader who keeps this frame in view will not lose the thread through Paul’s most demanding passages.

The theme is announced at the very start: the gospel is “the power of God to salvation to every one that believes,” for in it “the righteousness of God” is revealed “from faith to faith” (Romans 1:16–17). The long doctrinal part unfolds that announcement. Paul first shows that the whole race lies under sin—the Gentiles who suppressed the truth they might have known, and the Jews who possessed the law yet broke it—so that no one, on his own account, stands acquitted before God, and the law can only bring sin to knowledge (1:18–3:20). Against this darkness Paul sets God’s own remedy: a righteousness given through faith in Jesus Christ, “set forth as a propitiation” in his blood, offered alike to Jew and Gentile without distinction (3:21–31). This is confirmed from the Scriptures in the example of Abraham, justified by faith before the law and circumcision were given (chapter 4), and its fruits are then unfolded—peace with God, and the sweep of salvation history in which the one man Adam, through whom sin and death entered, is answered by the one man Christ, through whom grace superabounds to life (chapter 5).

From here the argument turns to the new life itself. Baptism unites the believer to the death and resurrection of Christ, that he may walk in newness of life and no longer serve sin (chapter 6). The law, holy in itself, could name sin but not master it, and the divided self of the seventh chapter—willing the good it cannot do—waits for a deliverance the law could not give. That deliverance is the theme of the eighth chapter, the summit of the doctrinal part: life in the Spirit, in which there is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus, the Spirit bears witness that believers are children and heirs of God, the whole creation groans toward its own redemption, and the chain of God’s purpose runs unbroken from foreknowledge to glory, so that nothing in all creation can separate the believer from the love of Christ. There follows the searching treatment of Israel in chapters nine through eleven, where Paul, in grief over the unbelief of his own people, wrestles with the freedom of God’s election, the remnant preserved by grace, the grafting of the Gentiles into the ancient olive, and the mystery by which God’s mercy is at last shown to all. Theophan places these three chapters, with the tradition, inside the doctrinal part rather than apart from it: they belong to the one account of how God saves.

The moral part turns all of this doctrine into life. It opens with the call to present the body “a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God” (12:1), and moves through the gifts that build up the one body of Christ, the marks of unfeigned love, the duties owed to civil authority, the debt of love that fulfills the law, and—at length—the patient bearing of one another between the “strong” and the “weak” in matters of food and observance, that the community might be of one mind to the glory of God. The concluding chapters return to Paul himself: his account of his ministry among the Gentiles, his plans and his request for the Romans’ prayers, a long roll of personal greetings, a final warning against those who cause division, and the closing doxology to the God who is able to establish them.

Theophan’s Method: Reading Romans with the Fathers

Theophan’s exposition is, before anything else, a work of tradition. He does not read Romans alone but in the company of the Church’s great interpreters of Paul, and on nearly every page he gathers, weighs, and weaves together their comments. The presiding voice throughout is that of Saint John Chrysostom, whose homilies on Romans he quotes more than any other source and whose grasp of Paul’s pastoral logic sets the tone of the whole. With Chrysostom he reads, most often and at length, the terse dogmatic commentary of Blessed Theodoret of Cyrus; the exposition of Theophylact, the eleventh-century archbishop of Ohrid, whose gloss of the Greek Fathers Theophan draws on constantly; the catena-commentator Oecumenius; the Latin expositor known as Ambrosiaster; and, more occasionally, Photius of Constantinople, with briefer recourse to Augustine, Origen, and others. The pattern is that of a patristic catena, a “chain” of excerpts from earlier authorities: Theophan lets each witness speak in his own words, sets them side by side, adjudicates where they diverge, and draws their common mind into one continuous reading of the text before him. His originality lies less in novel interpretation than in the sureness with which he binds these voices to the movement of Paul’s argument and makes the whole intelligible.

To this patristic foundation he joins the register of Russian spiritual direction that marks all his work. He is never content to leave a doctrine in the abstract. Having established what a passage means, he presses it upon the conscience, into prayer, into the daily struggle against sin—for he wrote not for scholars but for believers who wished to understand the Apostle and to live by him. Justification, grace, and faith are for him truths to be defended and also powers to be lived. This union of exact, tradition-anchored exegesis with an ascetical warmth turned toward the reader’s own soul is what gives the commentary its particular character, and it is why Theophan’s Romans has nourished readers far beyond the study.

Because the letter is so densely woven of Old Testament citation—nowhere more than in chapters nine through eleven and again in the appeals of the moral part—the Scripture throughout is quoted in the text the Church received: the Slavonic and Synodal Russian Bible, whose Old Testament follows the Greek of the Septuagint in its wording and numbering. Where Paul’s quotations differ from a reader’s familiar Bible, that received text stands behind them, and Theophan expounds them as they came to him.

Theological and Spiritual Significance

At the doctrinal heart of Romans stands the revelation of the righteousness of God, and it is here that Theophan’s reading is most characteristic. He understands justification not as a bare verdict pronounced over a sinner who remains unchanged, but as at once a forgiveness and a real inward renewal. Faith in Christ, he writes, following the mind of the Fathers, is the door through which the believer “receives forgiveness of sins and the grace of the Holy Spirit, which, having entered the heart, casts out sin from it and dwells righteousness within it.” Pardon and power are given together; the one who is accounted righteous is made, over time, actually to become so. Faith, on this reading, is never idle—it binds the believer to holiness and issues necessarily in a changed life. This is the pattern the wider Christian tradition has called synergy, the working together of divine grace and human freedom, and it runs through the whole of Theophan’s teaching. The great themes of the letter are all read in its light: the fall and raising of the race in Adam and Christ, the death and rising with Christ enacted in baptism, the liberation of the captive will into the life of the Spirit, and the final unsearchable mercy of God toward all.

Presented in this way, the doctrine of Romans is framed not as the property of one confession but as the common inheritance of Christians—the account, held across the traditions, of how a sinner is reconciled to God and brought to new life. Theophan writes as a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the settled Eastern reading of grace and freedom is everywhere present in his pages; yet he writes irenically, expounding Paul’s gospel rather than pressing any polemic. For him the letter is finally the map of a single journey, the soul’s passage out of the wrath and death of sin into peace with God and life in the Spirit—and the commentary exists to help the reader make that journey his own.

The Text and This Edition

This edition presents Theophan’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans in a fresh, complete English translation prepared from his Russian original. The text translated is the commentary as published in the collected works issued by the Russian monastery of St. Panteleimon on Mount Athos in the pre-revolutionary period—the standard edition of Theophan’s expositions of the Pauline epistles, long in the public domain—as digitized in the Russian source used for this translation. The rendering is into modern, readable English throughout, and the many Scripture quotations are given in a faithful modern register consistent with the Slavonic and Synodal text that Theophan himself cited, preserving the Septuagint basis of his Old Testament references.

In keeping with the conventions of this series, the work is attributed as the Church has always received its author—Saint Theophan the Recluse—and those who carried his Russian into English are credited as translators, never as authors. Chapter and verse citations are set in the modern Arabic style familiar to today’s readers, so that a reference such as Romans 6:22 appears in that form rather than in older Roman-numeral notation. The doctrinally weighted passages of the letter—the revelation of God’s righteousness and justification by faith, the parallel of Adam and Christ, baptism into Christ’s death, the seventh chapter’s account of sin and the law, the eighth chapter’s life in the Spirit, and the treatment of Israel’s election in chapters nine through eleven—were collated against the Russian with particular care, so that Theophan’s precise sense in these places is carried over intact. The commentary is presented as an English edition in its own right, complete and self-standing, for readers who wish to follow the Apostle to the Romans in the company of one of the Russian Church’s most trusted guides.

Suggestions for Reading

Romans rewards patience. Its arguments are tightly linked, and a difficulty in one verse is often resolved a few verses on; Theophan’s practice of taking short passages in order is designed to carry the reader through without haste. It helps to keep the Epistle itself close at hand and to turn to Theophan’s comment only after reading the Apostle’s own words for a given passage. The many quotations from Chrysostom, Theodoret, Theophylact, and the rest are not digressions but the substance of the exposition—the Church’s long memory of how these words have been understood. Above all, the commentary asks to be read as it was written: not merely to master Paul’s teaching, but to be changed by it.