Introduction

The Author

Saint Theophan the Recluse was born Georgy Vasilievich Govorov on the tenth of January, 1815, in the village of Chernavsk in Oryol Governorate, the son of a priest. He was schooled where the sons of clergy were schooled—the theological college at Livny, then the seminary at Oryol—and in 1837 entered the Kiev Theological Academy, one of the great centers of Russian spiritual learning, taking his master’s degree in theology in 1841. A year before graduating he had already set the direction of his life: in October 1840 he received monastic tonsure and the name Theophan, in honor of Saint Theophanes the Confessor.

The decades that followed carried him across the whole surface of the Church’s public work. He taught in the academies and seminaries, served on the Russian ecclesiastical mission in Jerusalem in the years around the Crimean War, held a post at the embassy church in Constantinople, and rose to the rectorship of the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy. In 1859 he was consecrated bishop of Tambov and Shatsk, and in 1863 he was translated to the ancient see of Vladimir. He was, by every account, a diligent and pastoral bishop, forever founding schools and preaching to his people.

Yet the office of a bishop was not, in the end, the life he wanted. In 1866, after twenty-five years of active service, he petitioned to be relieved of his diocese and withdrew to the Vysha Hermitage in the Tambov region, a quiet monastery on the Vysha River. For six years he lived there as an ordinary monk, attending the common services and receiving visitors. Then, after Pascha of 1872, he closed his door. For the remaining twenty-two years of his life he saw almost no one—only his confessor and his cell-attendant—and built a small chapel in his rooms where he served the Liturgy alone. This voluntary enclosure gave him the name by which the Church now knows him: Theophan the Recluse, the recluse of Vysha.

Reclusion did not mean silence. From his cell flowed one of the largest bodies of spiritual writing in the Russian language. He answered, by hand, the twenty to forty letters that arrived each day from souls seeking counsel; he translated the Philokalia into Russian, giving the Slavic world its most influential edition of that anthology of ascetic wisdom; he produced the classics of Russian moral and ascetical theology — The Path to Salvation, What the Spiritual Life Is and How to Be Attuned to It — and the beloved rendering of the treatise known in English as Unseen Warfare. He died in his solitude on the sixth of January, 1894. Nearly a century later, in June 1988, the Russian Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints. His memory is kept in the Church’s calendar, and his letters and treatises remain in constant use wherever Christians take the inner life seriously.

The Work: Occasion and Purpose

On Complete Conversion to God from the Seductions of the World and of Sin — to give the book its full Russian title—belongs to the pastoral, not the reclusive, Theophan. Its substance is a set of seven sermons that he preached to his congregations, in part at Tambov and in part at Vladimir, during his years as a serving bishop between 1859 and 1866. They were gathered and published only after he had retired: they appeared first in the Tambov Diocesan Gazette in 1867 and were then issued as a small separate book. In the chronological catalogue of his printed works, this is the very first title—the earliest of the many volumes that would issue from Vysha, though the preaching behind it reaches back into his active episcopate.

The occasion is therefore the ordinary one of a bishop in his cathedral, addressing the people he serves Sunday after Sunday. But the concern that drives these homilies is anything but routine, and Theophan states it plainly. He is worried about a particular kind of Christian—not the open unbeliever, and not the fervent saint, but the great middle company of the baptized who have made a comfortable peace with God while quietly keeping back a portion of the heart for themselves. He calls this the danger of a conversion left unfinished. A man may keep the outward forms of the faith, attend its services, hold its ideas, perform its charities, and still have a heart that is turned, at its center, toward the world. Against this half-turning Theophan preaches a single insistent word: that the heart must turn to God completely.

He names, too, an intellectual mood of his own century that gives this half-heartedness its excuse—the fashionable opinion that a cultivated, enlightened Christianity ought to be able to blend love of God with love of the world, and that strict detachment is the mark of narrow and gloomy souls. Much of the book is an argument against exactly this reconciliation. Theophan means to take from his hearers the false peace that lets them believe they can serve God and keep the world both. His purpose is not to condemn but to disturb—to awaken a sleeping conscience, hold up a mirror, and press each listener to examine whether his own conversion is entire, and, finding it partial, to complete it.

Argument and Structure

The seven sermons can be read as one sustained argument, each taking up where the last left off, followed by a short appendix that answers a question the sermons deliberately leave open. The movement runs from the beginning of the Christian life to its most searching self-examination and out to a precise definition of what must be renounced.

The first sermon begins at the font. Baptism, Theophan teaches, is a “bath of regeneration” that reaches inward and re-forms the person. Drawing on Saint Paul’s language of dying and rising with Christ, he describes how the scattered powers of a fallen soul—an enlightened conscience, a recovered fear of God, a freedom strengthened by grace, communion restored through faith—are gathered by grace, as metal is fused in a crucible, into a new inward person. He is careful to insist that grace works nothing mechanically here: it seals a moral change already stirring in the soul, so that nature and grace are mingled together like copper alloyed with silver, outwardly the same and inwardly transformed.

From that renewal springs the theme of the second sermon: the “ardor of zeal” for God that Theophan calls the very pulse of Christian life, so that whoever has it lives and whoever lacks it merely sleeps. Here he sorts his hearers into three companies—the fervent, who need no exhortation; those who have turned wholly away, who cannot be reached; and, in the middle, the outward Christians “without the Spirit of Christ,” to whom, he says, his words are chiefly directed, himself first among them. The bulk of the sermon is a long, tender appeal addressed to the reluctant soul, urging it to remember its first dignity and turn back to the God who seeks it.

The third sermon is the sharpest, and in a sense the heart of the book. Its text is the rich young man of the Gospel who “went away grieving” because one attachment was dearer to him than heaven. Theophan reads this scene as the pattern of every incomplete conversion: a man who genuinely wants salvation but will not surrender the one thing he has reserved. He presses the diagnosis home—a single uncut root lets the whole tree live, a single hidden attachment defiles every pious deed, and whatever a man will not yield to God for its sake has become, in effect, his god. Our peace, he warns, if it rests on such a reservation, is a false peace.

The fourth sermon turns from diagnosis to remedy, and its tone changes to consolation: “Do not be afraid!” If the complete turning of the heart is finally the work of grace, that is cause for hope, not despair, for grace is near. Our part is fervent desire and self-compulsion; God’s part is the deliverance itself, which He gives through the ordinary channels of the Church’s life—her services, her Scriptures, and above all the Mysteries of confession and communion. Theophan illustrates the whole economy with an extended parable of a royal valley whose paths, some pure and some mixed with the roads of a hostile kingdom, lead travelers either to the prince’s house or astray.

The fifth sermon takes up the Lord’s command to “seek first the Kingdom of God” and locates that Kingdom, on the Lord’s own authority, “within you.” Each person is a small realm whose throne is the heart; God reigns there when He becomes king of the mind, the will, and the affections, and the passions that had set up their idols are driven out. Where God so reigns, Theophan says, there is blessedness—the union of the soul with a God who is jealous for it as a bridegroom for his bride.

The sixth sermon, “On Gracious Choice,” sets two kingdoms side by side—the Kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of “the prince of this age”—and contrasts them point by point: their kings, their laws, their promises, and their ends. The one is certain, truthful, and enduring; the other shifting, deceptive, and empty. Theophan declines even to command a choice, since only a person who has lost all sense could hesitate; he simply lays the two before his hearers and prays them out of the enemy’s snare.

The seventh sermon anticipates an objection. Perhaps, a hearer might think, the preacher’s severity toward “the world” is only his private opinion. In answer, Theophan resolves to say nothing of his own and instead gathers into one place what the Lord and His apostles say about the world—a dense chain of testimony from the Gospel of John, the catholic epistles, and Saint Paul, all pointing one way. But this raises the question the sermon ends on: what, exactly, is this “world” a Christian must leave? He promises to answer another time.

The appendix supplies that answer, and it is characteristic of Theophan that he gives it not in his own words but in those of a Father of the desert. Quoting Saint Isaac the Syrian, he defines “the world” as a collective name for the passions themselves—attachment to riches, carnal pleasure, the craving for honor and power and human praise, the fear for the body—so that a person can measure precisely by how many of these “members” he still lives to the world and by how many he has died to it. The book thus closes by handing the congregation a diagnostic instrument rather than a slogan.

Theological and Spiritual Significance

The lasting value of these sermons lies in the way they hold together two things that are often pulled apart: the objective work of grace and the moral responsibility of the person. Theophan is emphatic that salvation is God’s doing—baptism regenerates, grace alone can loose the soul’s bonds, and no one tears himself from the world by his own strength. Yet he is equally emphatic that grace will not act without us, that it waits for a disposition it will not force, and that the “chief obstacle” is our own insincerity toward a truth we already know. The whole book lives in the space between these claims, and its pastoral genius is to make the reader feel both the sufficiency of grace and the urgency of his own consent.

Its central and most searching contribution is the theme announced in its title: the difference between a partial and a complete conversion. Theophan gives unusually precise attention to the spiritual pathology of the reserved attachment—the single kept thing that quietly poisons an otherwise devout life, the piety that becomes “an instrument of sin.” In naming the “neither hot nor cold” Christian and refusing him the comfort of his half-measures, the book takes its place in the long ascetic tradition, from the Fathers of the desert forward, that treats the divided heart as the fundamental spiritual problem. That the sermons close by borrowing Saint Isaac the Syrian’s definition of the world signals Theophan’s own self-understanding: he preaches not a private rigor but the common mind of the Church’s ascetic teachers, rendered into the language of nineteenth-century parishioners.

The book also engages a live controversy of its day, and one that has hardly aged—the claim that mature, cultured Christianity can be reconciled with a whole-hearted love of the world. Theophan’s answer, that faith and the world are as incompatible as light and darkness, is uncompromising, but he takes pains to ground it in the plain words of Scripture rather than in temperament, and to distinguish a right renunciation of “the world” (the passions) from any contempt for creation or for the ordinary duties of life. The Christian, in his account, may be fully occupied with the affairs the conditions of life require, provided the inward turning of the heart is given to God alone. This is a teaching for people living in the middle of the world, not for monks only, and that is precisely why a retired bishop thought it worth publishing first among all his books.

Suggestions for Reading

These are sermons, and they read best as sermons—heard rather than studied, taken one at a time. A reader coming to Theophan for the first time might begin with the third discourse, on the rich young man, where the book’s whole argument comes to a point, and then read outward from there. The repetitions are deliberate: Theophan circles his single theme on purpose, approaching “complete conversion” from the font, from zeal, from self-examination, from grace, from the indwelling Kingdom, and from the nature of the world in turn, trusting that a truth so easily forgotten needs to be met from many sides. The images—the crucible, the alloyed copper, the freed bird, the royal valley, the two kingdoms—are the hinges of his thought, and it rewards a reader to pause on them. The closing appendix from Saint Isaac the Syrian is best kept for last, as Theophan intended, as the sober definition toward which everything before it has been moving.

The Text and This Edition

This edition presents On Complete Conversion to God in a fresh, readable modern English translation made directly from Saint Theophan’s Russian. The Russian text follows the pre-revolutionary edition of his collected works issued by the Russian Monastery of Saint Panteleimon on Mount Athos, as preserved in the public-domain text now available through the digital library azbyka.ru. It is an English-only edition, intended for continuous reading.

A word on the Scripture quotations, which are woven through every page. Theophan preached and wrote from the Church Slavonic and Russian Synodal Bibles, and often adapted their wording to his argument. In this edition the scriptural passages have been rendered from Theophan’s own wording as he gives it, rather than replaced with the phrasing of any existing English Bible, so that the reader hears the text as he shaped it for his hearers. Scripture references are cited in the modern Arabic style familiar to English readers—book, chapter, and verse—for ease of use.

In keeping with the conventions of this series, the work is attributed as the Church has always received it, to Saint Theophan the Recluse; those who have carried it into English are credited as translators, never as authors. The aim throughout has been a dignified, contemporary English that lets a nineteenth-century Russian bishop speak plainly to a reader today, without the stiffness of older translation and without smoothing away the directness—at times the bluntness—with which he addressed the people he loved and worried over.