Introduction

1. The Author

Saint Theophan the Recluse was born Georgy Vasilyevich Govorov in 1815, in the village of Chernavsk in the Oryol province of central Russia, the son of a village priest. He was schooled at the Oryol seminary and then at the Kiev Theological Academy, where in 1840 he was tonsured a monk and took the name Theophan, in honor of the confessor Theophanes. The decades that followed carried him through the ordinary stations of a gifted churchman: teacher and rector in the seminaries, service on the Russian ecclesiastical mission in Jerusalem, a term at the embassy church in Constantinople, and the rectorship of the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy. In 1859 he was consecrated bishop, first of Tambov and Shatsk and then, from 1863, of Vladimir.

He might have finished his life a respected diocesan bishop. Instead, in 1866, at the height of his powers, he asked to be released from the government of a diocese altogether, and withdrew to the Vysha Hermitage in the Tambov province. For six years he still shared the common worship of the monastery. Then, after Pascha of 1872, he entered strict seclusion, closing himself into two small rooms with a chapel of his own, seeing almost no one but his confessor and the abbot, and giving the remaining twenty-two years of his life to prayer and to the pen. From that silence came the writing for which the Russian Church remembers him best: his rendering of the Philokalia into Russian, his letters of spiritual counsel, works such as The Path to Salvation, and—the labor of his last two decades—a continuous commentary on nearly the whole of the Pauline corpus. He reposed on the sixth of January 1894, the feast of the Theophany, in the chapel-quarters where he had served daily. The Russian Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints in 1988; he is commemorated on the tenth of January (the twenty-third by the civil calendar), his birthday, among other days.

The commentary on Titus belongs to this final, hidden period, and bears its stamp throughout. It is not the work of a professor arguing before colleagues but of a bishop who had laid down his office to seek God, writing so that others might do the same. His life is given more fully in the back matter; what matters for the pages that follow is that they were composed in seclusion, out of a lifetime of reading the Fathers, and for the practical salvation of the reader.

2. The Work: Occasion and Purpose

The Epistle to Titus is one of the three letters—with the two to Timothy—that tradition has long grouped as the Pastoral Epistles, because they are addressed not to a congregation but to a single overseer charged with the care of a church. Titus is the shortest and, in a sense, the most concentrated of them. In it the Apostle Paul writes to a trusted fellow-worker whom he has left behind on the island of Crete to bring order to a young and scattered Christian community.

Theophan opens his commentary, as the older commentators did, by setting the letter in its history. Titus, he relates on the authority of tradition, was a Cretan of noble family, drawn to the God of Israel through the prophet Isaiah before he ever heard of Christ, and sent from Crete to Judea to learn the truth of the reports arriving from there. He came to faith, attached himself to Paul, and became one of the Apostle’s most capable and trusted companions—the man Paul could send into a difficult situation at Corinth and rely on to set it right. When Paul, released from his first Roman imprisonment, passed through Crete, he found much among the believers there still wanting, and left Titus behind to finish what he himself had had no time to complete. Following Saint John Chrysostom, Theophan places the letter in the interval between Paul’s two Roman imprisonments, about the years 64 to 65, a little before the Second Epistle to Timothy.

The state of the Cretan church, as Theophan reconstructs it, is the key to the letter’s purpose. Christianity had spread widely across the island—brought first by Cretans who had heard the Apostles at Pentecost, watered by the labors of Titus, Zenas, and Apollos—but it had put down its roots faster than it had grown a structure. There was as yet no settled hierarchy, no authoritative voice. And in that vacuum, Theophan observes, “idle talkers” had multiplied: men who had not yet submitted their old opinions to the pattern of sound teaching, and who argued over doctrine and morals each as he saw fit, so that wrangling and quarreling had become habitual. He is careful here not to overstate the case. There is no sign, he notes, of formal heresies among the Cretans—only the unsteadiness of a faith without order.

Part of what was lacking was a check on the disorder itself. The letter does not shrink from naming the fault: Paul rebukes the “unruly and vain talkers and deceivers,” and reinforces the charge with a hard word from one of the Cretans’ own—the ancient poet whose line “the Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, slow bellies” the Apostle turns against the island’s besetting vices. Theophan reads this severity as medicine rather than contempt: the overseer must “rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith,” precisely so that a wandering flock may be brought back to soundness. The remedy Paul prescribes is not censure alone but the settled authority that censure serves.

The letter, then, is written to supply exactly what was lacking. Its purpose, in Theophan’s phrase, is to set down “rules for the guidance of Saint Titus and, in his person, for all who order the life of Churches.” And Paul writes rather than merely instructing Titus in person, Theophan suggests, partly because he had left in haste, and partly to lend his own apostolic authority to a native son—for “a prophet is not without honor, save in his own country.” With the letter in hand, Titus could act not on his own word but on the word of the Apostle of the Gentiles.

3. Argument and Structure

For all that it addresses questions of church government, the letter is short, and its plan is simple. Theophan divides it into three parts framed by the customary opening and close.

After the salutation and greeting (Titus 1:1–4)—itself unusually weighty, opening upon the eternal purpose of God and the hope of life everlasting—come the rules that form the body of the letter (Titus 1:5 through 3:11). These fall naturally into stages. First stands the charge that gives the letter its occasion: to “set in order the things that are wanting, and ordain elders in every city,” followed by the list of qualities required in the elder and overseer, who must be blameless in life and must “hold fast the faithful word” so as to be “able by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers.” Against such a settled teacher Paul sets the “unruly and vain talkers” who must be silenced—the occasion for his sharp citation of the Cretans’ own poet and the vices of the island. From the ministry the letter turns to the flock: the conduct proper to the older men and women, the younger, and to servants, each state of life shaped into soberness and good works. This ethical instruction then opens, twice, onto its deepest ground—the grace of God that has appeared to train and to save—before the letter closes with a few personal directions and greetings (Titus 3:12–15).

Theophan’s own method of exposition governs the reading throughout. He takes the text in short steps—a verse, or a few verses together—states the Apostle’s meaning plainly, clears away the difficulties, and then turns the sense toward the conscience of the reader. He does not construct his own argument in place of Paul’s; he follows the letter as it lies. And he never lets a point of order or doctrine rest as mere information: a rule for the appointment of clergy becomes a meditation on what the Church needs in order to stand, and a doctrinal verse becomes at once a call to repentance. The result reads as both a close exposition of a short letter and a manual of the Christian life.

4. Theological and Spiritual Significance

Beneath the letter’s practical surface lie two passages that carry its whole weight, and Theophan gives them the fullest attention.

The first is the great sentence on grace as teacher: “the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world” (Titus 2:11–12). Here Theophan, with Chrysostom, presses hard against any notion that grace is a bare pardon leaving the sinner where it found him. Grace, he insists, “does not slacken but rather strains the moral powers of believers”; its very work is to make them upright. “All is from goodness,” he writes, “but God’s goodness does not indulge.” In that balance lies the theme that runs through the whole of his teaching—that salvation is neither earned by human effort nor bestowed on a passive soul, but worked out in the meeting of divine grace and the free striving of the person it renews. The Christian awaits “that blessed hope,” the appearing of the glory of the great God and Savior; and the grace that has appeared already is the training that fits him for the appearing still to come.

The second passage is the mystery of the new birth: God “saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost; which he shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Saviour” (Titus 3:5–6). Not by works of righteousness that we had done, but according to His mercy, God has not merely mended the fallen man but, as Theophan says with Chrysostom, re-created him entirely in the font of baptism through the Holy Spirit. And in this brief verse, he observes with Jerome and Theodoret, the Most Holy Trinity is most clearly named: the salvation of the believer is a single work of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit together. Baptism, for Theophan, is therefore no symbol but a true regeneration—the point at which the grace that trains us first takes hold.

Around these two centers the letter’s other concerns arrange themselves. The insistence on an ordered ministry and on overseers of proven character is not, for Theophan, a matter of administration only; the settled overseer is the one who guards both “the form of the doctrine of faith and the form of life according to faith,” and so keeps the idle talk from unsettling the flock. And the repeated demand that believers “be careful to maintain good works” flows directly from the doctrine of grace: sound teaching is meant to bear fruit in sound living, or it has not been received at all. The letter’s charter of church order and its theology of salvation are, in the end, a single thing—the securing of a life that grace both begins and sustains.

5. Reception and Place in Theophan’s Work

The commentary on Titus does not stand alone. It is the third panel of Theophan’s exposition of the Pastoral Epistles, and he comments on all three letters as a set, so that the reader meets Titus already having seen the charge to Timothy. It belongs, in turn, to the larger enterprise of his last two decades: a running commentary on the letters of Paul that was among the chief fruits of his seclusion and remains one of the most widely used works of Russian Orthodox biblical exposition.

Its authority rests on the tradition it gathers. Theophan does not offer private opinions; he reads Titus in the company of the Fathers who read it before him—above all Chrysostom, and with him Theodoret of Cyrus, Theophylact of Ohrid, Oecumenius, and the Latin commentators Ambrosiaster and Jerome, whom he follows with particular care on the Trinity in this letter. He weighs one witness against another and against Paul’s own reasoning, and renders their agreement in the plain, searching idiom of Russian spiritual writing. What the reader receives, in a few brief chapters, is the long memory of the Church on how these words of the Apostle have been understood.

6. The Text and This Edition

This edition presents a fresh, modern English translation of Saint Theophan’s commentary, made from his Russian text. The commentary was composed in his seclusion at Vysha and published in the collected exposition of the Pauline epistles issued by the Russian Monastery of Saint Panteleimon on Mount Athos; the translation follows the public-domain Russian edition of that text. It is an English-only edition, prepared for study and for continuous reading, not a parallel or bilingual one.

In preparing it, the house conventions have been observed throughout. Saint Titus and Saint Theophan are named as the Church has always received them, without critical qualifications intruding on the text. The scriptural citations that fill the commentary are given in a readable form, with book, chapter, and verse in the ordinary modern style rather than in Roman numerals, so that the reader can turn quickly to the passage under discussion; and the Apostle’s words are rendered in a Scripture register faithful to the tradition Theophan himself read. The translator’s work is credited as translation; the author remains Saint Theophan alone. The aim throughout has been to let this small classic of Orthodox biblical commentary speak clearly to an English reader, in prose as direct as the Russian from which it comes.

7. Suggestions for Reading

The commentary is best read with the Apostle’s own text open beside it. Theophan wrote to be read slowly, a few verses at a time, and it repays that pace: read Paul’s words first, then Theophan’s comment, and let the one illuminate the other. The many quotations from Chrysostom, Theodoret, Jerome, and the rest are not digressions to be skimmed but the substance of the exposition—the voices of the Fathers brought to bear on a single verse. Though the letter is a charter for pastors, its heart is a teaching for every believer: that grace both saves and trains, that baptism is a true new birth, and that sound doctrine is meant to be lived. It asks, in the end, to be read as Theophan wrote it in his silence—to learn how a Church is ordered and to be renewed by the grace it proclaims.