Introduction

The Author

Georgy Vasilievich Govorov was born on January 10, 1815, in the village of Chernavsk, in the Oryol province of central Russia, the son of a parish priest. He grew up inside the rhythm of church life, and that formation carried him along the ordinary path of a clergyman’s gifted son: the theological college at Livny, then the seminary at Oryol, and finally, from 1837, the Theological Academy of Kiev, where he completed a master’s degree in 1841. At Kiev he was tonsured a monk in 1840 and took the name Theophan, after Theophanes the Confessor. In the years that followed he taught in the Church’s schools, served with the Russian ecclesiastical mission in Jerusalem, and lived for a time near Constantinople and on Mount Athos. Those years abroad were not incidental: on Athos and in the libraries of the Christian East he copied and collected the writings of the Fathers, and the labor of translating them would occupy the rest of his life.

He was consecrated a bishop in 1859, first over the see of Tambov and Shatsk, and in 1863 was transferred to Vladimir. As a bishop he traveled his dioceses, preached, founded a school for girls, and shared in the joys and troubles of his people. Yet the pastoral office did not answer the deepest desire of his soul, which was for stillness and undistracted prayer. In 1866, after only seven years as a bishop, he asked to be released from the government of his diocese and retired to the Vysha Hermitage in the Tambov country. For six years he lived there quietly, attending the services of the church. Then, in 1872, he withdrew into strict reclusion: he ceased to leave his cell, saw no one but his confessor, arranged a small chapel where he served the Liturgy alone, and gave himself wholly to prayer, to reading, and to writing. He remained in that seclusion for more than twenty years, until his repose on January 6, 1894. He was buried in the Kazan church of the Vysha monastery.

Reclusion did not silence him; it made him one of the most widely read spiritual teachers Russia has produced. From his cell he answered the twenty to forty letters that arrived each day, and he wrote steadily for the whole Church. His major undertaking was a Russian rendering of the Philokalia — the Dobrotolyubie — issued in five volumes between 1877 and 1889, which carried the ascetical and contemplative Fathers to a vast lay readership; he also gave Russia its version of Unseen Warfare, extended commentaries on the epistles of the Apostle Paul, and such enduring guides to the interior life as The Path to Salvation and The Spiritual Life and How to Be Attuned to It. His particular gift, often remarked, was to set the wisdom of the ancient Fathers in language a modern reader could take up without a scholar’s training. Because he lived so near our own time, and wrote for people much like ourselves, many find him more approachable than the older patristic literature he loved. In 1988, at the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church held at the Trinity–Sergius Lavra during the celebration of the millennium of the Baptism of Rus’, he was glorified as a saint; he is commemorated on January 10.

The Work: Occasion & Purpose

Selected Psalms is a small book with a modest history, and the modesty is part of its meaning. It gathers Theophan’s expositions of four psalms—Psalms 1, 2, 33, and 51 in the numbering of the Greek and Slavonic Psalter. The greater part of it is posthumous. After the saint’s repose, those who sorted his papers found among them selections he had copied from the Fathers and teachers of the Church, together with his own beginnings of a commentary on the Psalter—the traces, evidently, of an intention he never lived to complete. The editors judged that not a single line of his labor should be lost, and so they published these fragments. The readings of Psalms 1, 2, and 51 were assembled in this way from his manuscripts and his patristic excerpts. The exposition of Psalm 33 stands apart: this one Theophan wrote out fully and finished, and it forms the heart of the collection. In the Russian editions the four psalms are printed together with his long and complete commentary on Psalm 118, of which they are, as it were, the smaller companions.

The purpose of the book is stated plainly in Theophan’s own preface to Psalm 33, and it governs the whole. He did not set out to write a learned commentary. He wanted to show how the psalms that a Christian hears again and again in church may be turned to the ordering of the inner life—how to draw from them lessons for the disposition of the heart and the conduct of a day, and so of a lifetime. Psalm 33 he chose in part because it is among the most frequently heard: in the Orthodox rite it is chanted toward the close of the Divine Liturgy, as the faithful prepare to return to their scattered occupations, and Theophan reads it as a parting instruction handed to them at the door of the church—a rule of life to carry out into the world. What holds the four together is not a scholarly program but this single pastoral aim, the aim of all his writing: to kindle in the reader the spirit of prayer and a settled zeal to walk according to the will of God.

Argument & Structure

The book moves through its four psalms in the order of the Psalter, and each is read closely, most often a verse or a single phrase at a time. Theophan does not hurry. He will pause over one Slavonic word, open its sense by weighing the Hebrew and the Greek of the Seventy behind it, and only then press that sense home upon the reader’s own heart. Throughout he reads in company—Athanasius the Great, Basil the Great, Theodoret of Cyrus, John Chrysostom, and, in the fourth psalm, Augustine are all summoned as witnesses—letting the Fathers accumulate before he turns their testimony to the work of self-examination.

Psalm 1 opens the collection as it opens the Psalter. Theophan treats it as a foreword to the whole book: it names the goal toward which every soul reaches—blessedness—and marks out the two ways that lead toward it or away from it. He divides the short psalm into three movements. First come the marks of a God-fearing life, described by what such a person refuses (he will not walk in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stand in the way of sinners, nor sit in the seat of the destroyers) and by what he loves (his delight is in the law of the Lord); the opposite traits of the wicked are implied by contrast. Then the condition of each is set out: the righteous man full of life and fruit, like a tree planted by streams of water, and the wicked unsettled and driven, like dust before the wind. Finally comes their standing, among people and before God—the ungodly carrying no weight in the assembly, and the Lord Himself knowing and guarding the way of the righteous while the way of the ungodly perishes. A closing section, “Subjects for Reflection,” turns the whole into material for meditation.

Psalm 2 lifts the gaze from the single soul to the nations. Why do the peoples rage against the Lord and against His Anointed? Theophan reads it, as the Church has always read it, of Christ the King enthroned on Zion, the Son to whom the Father says, You are my Son, this day have I begotten you; and he hears in its close the summons that the psalm addresses to the rulers of the earth—to serve the Lord with fear and to take counsel while there is time. This psalm he treats in a single sustained reading rather than by strophes.

Psalm 33 is the longest and most finished of the four, and the center of the book. Its superscription recalls how David, a fugitive from Saul, feigned madness before the Philistine king and was released—the psalm names the king Abimelech, while the narrative of 1 Kingdoms (1 Samuel) 21 calls him Achish of Gath, and Theophan handles the two names without strain. Out of that deliverance David composed a psalm of thanksgiving and instruction, arranged in Hebrew as an alphabetic acrostic. Theophan follows its structure carefully, dividing the psalm into two “decades” of verses, and each decade again into parts, so that the reader is led through it in orderly stages: the thanksgiving and the summons to magnify the Lord together; then the great turn to the teaching of the fear of God—what it is, how it is practiced, and what its fruits are, down to the special favor God shows, the swift hearing of prayer, His nearness in sorrow, and the recompense of the righteous and the wicked at the last. It is here that Theophan’s scholar’s care is most visible: he weighs the Hebrew against the Septuagint, and both against the readings of Symmachus and the Chaldean paraphrase, so that the plain devotional lesson rests on firm ground in the text. The governing theme—the fear of God as the beginning and the school of the whole spiritual life—is the one he most wanted his readers to carry away.

Psalm 51 closes the collection and answers Psalm 33 across the space between them, a pairing that Chrysostom already noticed. It was occasioned, its heading says, by the treachery of Doeg the Edomite, who betrayed to Saul the priests of Nob who had sheltered David, and so brought about their slaughter. Against this “mighty one” who boasts in mischief, whose tongue is a whetted razor and who loves evil more than good, Theophan sets the divine judgment that uproots such a man from the land of the living, and against him the righteous who trust not in wealth or power but in the mercy of God, and who flourish, in the psalm’s own image, like a green olive tree in the house of the Lord. The reading becomes an extended meditation on the destructiveness of the slanderous and flattering tongue and on the security of the soul that has once and for all placed its hope in God.

Theological & Spiritual Significance

These are not lectures on ancient poems but readings meant for the soul, and their significance lies in what they show about a whole way of reading Scripture. Theophan stands in the old catholic tradition of the Fathers, for whom the psalms are not merely records of David’s history but a living text addressed to every believer. He treats the historical occasions seriously—David before the Philistine king, the treason of Doeg—but he never rests in them; the deliverance of David becomes the pattern of every soul’s deliverance, the fear of God taught in Psalm 33 becomes the reader’s own schooling, and the two ways of Psalm 1 become the two ways that lie open before anyone who takes up the book. This is the ancient conviction that Scripture is for the building up of the inner life, held without strain and applied with unusual directness.

The unifying theme is the fear of God, understood not as dread but as the reverent, watchful love that is the beginning of wisdom and the foundation of prayer. In Theophan’s hands it is intensely practical. He is interested in the disposition of the heart, the ordering of thoughts, the temper a Christian should carry through an ordinary day; he wants the psalm to become “a program of conduct.” In this he is recognizably the same teacher who gave Russia the Philokalia, translating the contemplative tradition of the Christian East into terms a layman could live by. The four psalms make that tradition audible in miniature: the same attention to watchfulness and the guarding of the heart that fills his larger works is here trained on the words a worshiper sings in church.

Their significance is also liturgical, and here they touch the common life of the whole Church. Psalm 33, in the Orthodox usage Theophan knew, is chanted near the end of the Divine Liturgy, and his exposition is in effect a meditation on a text the faithful hear every week—an attempt to keep familiar words from going stale, to make what is often repeated sink in and be engrafted upon the heart. That instinct, to press home the meaning of what the Church prays continually, is one every Christian tradition can recognize. The book asks nothing of the reader but attention and a willingness to be examined; its whole force is to turn the psalms from beautiful language into a mirror for self-knowledge and a school of prayer.

The Text & This Edition

Theophan wrote in Russian, drawing on the Church-Slavonic Psalter that he had prayed all his life. This edition presents his four expositions in a fresh, readable modern English, translated from the public-domain Russian text as it circulates in the standard collected editions of the saint’s works. It is an English edition, not a parallel or bilingual one: the reader meets Theophan’s commentary in continuous English prose, without the Russian set against it.

Two conventions of this edition deserve a word. First, the numbering of the psalms. Theophan uses the numbering of the Greek Septuagint and the Slavonic Psalter, which differs from the Hebrew reckoning familiar to many English readers: the four psalms treated here as 1, 2, 33, and 51 correspond to Psalms 1, 2, 34, and 52 in a Hebrew-numbered Bible. We have kept his numbering throughout, because it is the numbering he expounds and the one heard in the services he had in view. Second, the verses of the psalms themselves. Theophan quotes and interprets the Slavonic text, often turning on a particular Slavonic word; wherever he cites a verse, it has been rendered into plain English directly from his own wording, and not borrowed from any established English Psalter, so that what the reader encounters is the text exactly as he read and explained it. Scripture references are given in the modern style familiar to English readers—book, chapter, and verse in Arabic numerals.

The book is presented under the name by which the Church receives its author, Saint Theophan the Recluse; the traditional attribution stands without qualification. Those who prepared this English text are credited as translators, never as authors. The aim throughout has been fidelity—to carry over Theophan’s meaning together with the warmth and plainness of his voice, so that this small posthumous gathering may do for the English reader what he intended it to do: turn a few well-known psalms into a school of the fear of God and a way toward salvation.