Introduction

The Author

Georgy Vasilievich Govorov was born on the tenth of January, 1815, in the village of Chernavskoye in Orel province, the son of a priest. He was formed in the seminary world of his day and completed his studies at the Kiev Theological Academy, where in 1841 he received monastic tonsure and the name Theophan, and was ordained to the priesthood. The years that followed carried him through a wide range of service—teaching and rectorship in the theological schools, a period with the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem, and eventually the rectorship of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy—so that by middle life he had seen the Church’s work from the classroom, the mission field, and the administrative center alike.

In 1859 he was consecrated bishop and given charge of the Tambov diocese, and in 1863 he was transferred to Vladimir. As a ruling bishop he traveled his dioceses, preached, restored churches, and founded schools; it was in these episcopal years that he preached and published much of his early spiritual teaching. Yet the labor that history remembers him for lay ahead. In 1866, after twenty-five years of active service, he asked to be released from the government of his diocese and withdrew to the Vysha Hermitage in the Tambov region. There, after several years, he took a further and decisive step: he entered strict reclusion, closing himself off from ordinary company, serving the Liturgy alone in a small cell-church, and giving himself over almost entirely to prayer, study, and writing. This seclusion lasted some twenty-two years, until his death.

The paradox of Theophan’s reclusion is that it made him one of the most accessible teachers of his age. The more his tongue fell silent, the more his pen spoke. From his cell flowed translations, scriptural commentaries, and books on the Christian life—and an enormous correspondence, for people from across Russia wrote to him with their troubles and their questions, and he answered. He reposed on the sixth of January, 1894, at the age of seventy-nine. The Russian Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints in 1988; he is commemorated as St. Theophan, Recluse of Vysha. Among his enduring monuments is his Russian rendering of the Philokalia, the great anthology of the Church’s teachers on prayer and the inner life—a labor whose fruit is quietly present throughout the present book.

The Work: Occasion & Purpose

How to Learn to Pray belongs to that correspondence, and to the reclusion that produced it. For more than twenty years the letters came—from monastics and married people, the educated and the simple, those just beginning and those far advanced—and Theophan replied to each in turn, resolving a particular difficulty, steadying a particular soul. The counsel in this book is drawn from those replies, later collected and issued in Russia in several editions, and it carries throughout the marks of its origin: nearly every passage closes with a reference to the letter it came from, cited by number and by volume of his collected correspondence. What the reader holds, in other words, is not an abstract essay on prayer but the distilled pastoral advice of a spiritual father, given to real people over real difficulties, and then sorted by subject so that its cumulative wisdom can be read as a whole.

This origin explains both the book’s character and its scope. Because the counsel was given case by case, it is unfailingly concrete: it descends to how long to stand at prayer, what to do when prayer will not come, how to read Scripture, how to keep attention from wandering, how to hold to a rule without letting the rule become a dead form. And because the same questions recurred across many correspondents, the same themes are approached again and again from slightly different angles, so that a truth stated briefly in one place is unfolded more fully in another.

It is worth placing this book beside Theophan’s other, better-known treatments of prayer, for the corpus can seem to repeat itself. His four homilies on prayer set out, in the compact and shapely form of the pulpit, the ascent through the degrees of prayer—from prayer recited with the lips, to prayer attended to by the mind, to prayer that becomes unceasing in the heart. That ascent is present here too, and the book’s closing chapters state it plainly. But where the homilies teach the pattern from above, as a preacher laying out a map, this collection approaches it from below, as a director walking beside the traveler over the actual ground—telling him where to put his foot next. The homilies are the architecture; these letters are the daily construction. Readers who know the shorter works will find the doctrine familiar; what is distinctive here is its retail application, the sheer range of practical situations it addresses, and the intimacy of a teacher speaking not to a congregation but to one person at a time.

Argument & Structure

The material is organized as a graded course, moving outward from foundations to fine detail. It opens by asking what prayer is, and answers with the images that recur throughout Theophan’s teaching: prayer is the breathing of the spirit, the center of the Christian life, the barometer and thermometer by which the soul’s true condition is read. Set prayer right, he insists, and everything else will fall into order.

From this foundation the book turns to the ordinary supports of a praying life. Sections on the reading of Scripture and the holy books, and on the church services, treat prayer not as a private technique but as something nourished by the word of God and the common worship of the Church—with characteristically practical advice on how to read, what to read, and how to stand in church so that the services become prayer rather than mere attendance. A section on what hinders progress turns to the moral ground of prayer: idle talk, the neglect of the virtues, the subtle self-satisfaction that undoes everything, the need to keep one’s inner labor hidden.

The heart of the book concerns what is chief in prayer. Here Theophan presses his central conviction: that the essence of prayer is not the form of words but the turning of mind and heart toward God—attention, reverence, feeling, the warming of the heart into a steady flame. He returns repeatedly to the discipline of “walking before God,” the habitual awareness of God’s nearness that supports prayer at every hour. Around this center are gathered sections on the labor of prayer (the forcing of oneself, the long patience, the refusal to command God or to demand quick results), on attention (the unhurried recitation of words, the descent of the mind into the heart), and on praying amid many tasks, where prayer must be maintained in the midst of work.

The later sections descend to the concrete framework of a rule of prayer: how to keep a prayer rule, how to make prostrations, how to move from set prayers to praying in one’s own words, and how to compose a rule suited to one’s own life and strength. A section on spiritual sloth and coldness meets the discouragement that every praying person knows. The book closes with an extended body of counsel on the Jesus Prayer—its place and its power, and equally its dangers, for Theophan is emphatic that the prayer is safe and salutary in itself, while the artificial physical techniques sometimes attached to it are perilous. The final chapters draw the whole course together in his account of the degrees of prayer and the union of mind with heart.

Theological & Spiritual Significance

The lasting contribution of this book is its wholly practical, sober, and unromantic vision of the life of prayer. Theophan holds together two things that are easily set against one another: unremitting human labor and the free gift of grace. On the one hand he never tires of urging effort—force yourself, constrain yourself, pray for a long time, do not be lazy—and he compares learning to pray to learning to write: it comes only through disciplined practice against a model. On the other hand he insists just as firmly that the higher reaches of prayer cannot be manufactured. Deepened, unceasing, heartfelt prayer is grace, given in God’s own time to the one who has labored and waited with a pure conscience. Our part is the labor; the prayer itself is a gift. This balance guards the reader at once from despair and from presumption.

Equally significant is where Theophan locates the essence of prayer. It is not in the quantity of words, the length of the rule, or any bodily technique, but in the disposition of the heart—attention, contrition, reverent feeling, and above all the steady remembrance of God. From this flows his sharp and repeated warning against every “artificial” or mechanical method, and his careful teaching on spiritual delusion. He is a firm advocate of the Jesus Prayer as the great means of gathering the scattered mind toward God, yet he is at pains to define it soberly: in itself it is simply spoken prayer, a means and not a magic, and its fruit is God’s to give. This measured account has made him a trusted guide precisely on the terrain where enthusiasm most often goes astray. Because his counsel insists throughout that attentive, heartfelt prayer is the calling of every Christian and not of monastics alone, the book has served generations of ordinary readers as a safe and searching manual of the inner life.

Reception & Influence

Theophan’s authority on prayer did not rest on these letters alone. During his reclusion he gave the Russian Church one of its foundational gifts: a Russian rendering of the Philokalia, the great multi-volume anthology of the Fathers on the inner life, whose voices—Macarius, Isaac the Syrian, John Climacus, and others—stand behind the counsel in this book and are quoted in its notes. His own spiritual writings circulated widely in his lifetime and have never gone out of print, and this collection of his epistolary counsel on prayer has been reissued in numerous modern Russian editions, furnished with notes and an index for ordinary use. His canonization in 1988 confirmed a stature already long acknowledged: that of a trusted teacher of the interior life, valued especially for the balance and sobriety with which he handled the Jesus Prayer and the ascent to unceasing prayer—the very matters this book takes up. Through these letters he continues to serve as a spiritual director to readers he never met.

The Text & This Edition

This edition presents a fresh, modern English translation made from the Russian, prepared for today’s reader in clear contemporary prose. The base text is the public-domain Russian collection published on azbyka.ru under the title Kak nauchit’sya molit’sya (“How to Learn to Pray”)—the thematic anthology assembled from St. Theophan’s collected letters, the same body of counsel issued in modern Russian editions with explanatory notes and an index. (The work is filed under the source repository’s slug kak-nadobno-molitsja, which follows the online source’s address; the title given here follows the collection’s own.) The passages retain the editorial citations that identify the letter behind each entry, so the reader can always see that the counsel rests on a particular, concrete reply.

In keeping with the conventions of this series, the author is named as the Church has long received him—St. Theophan the Recluse—and those who rendered the text into English are credited as translators, never as authors. The translation aims to carry Theophan’s own register into English: direct, warm, occasionally blunt, and always practical. Chapter numbering and scriptural references are given in the modern Arabic style familiar to contemporary readers. Explanatory notes that stood in the source—identifying, for instance, a Church Slavonic term or a patristic quotation—have been preserved where they aid understanding. This is an English edition, meant to stand on its own; it does not set the Russian alongside the English, and it makes no claim to be a critical or scholarly recension of the original. Its purpose is the same as the letters’ own: to put St. Theophan’s counsel to work in the reader’s life of prayer.

Suggestions for Reading

Because the book grew from answers to particular questions, it does not need to be read straight through to be useful. A reader may follow the graded course from beginning to end, or may turn directly to the section that meets a present need—on keeping a rule, on distraction, on coldness and discouragement, on the Jesus Prayer. Either way it rewards slow reading. The passages are short by design, and many are best taken one at a time, held in mind through the day, and returned to. Theophan would ask of this book exactly what he asks throughout it of prayer: not that it be gotten through quickly, but that it be labored at, patiently and from the heart.