Introduction

The Author

Georgy Vasilievich Govorov, who would become Saint Theophan the Recluse, was born on the tenth of January 1815 in the village of Chernava, in the Oryol province of central Russia. His father was a parish priest, and the household that formed him was one of quiet devotion, ordered by the services of the Church and the rhythm of the countryside. He passed through the customary schooling of a clerical family—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 ecclesiastical learning, from which he graduated in 1841 with a master’s degree in theology.

While still at the Academy he took the decisive step of his life. In 1840 he was tonsured a monk and given the name Theophan, in honor of Saint Theophanes the Confessor; the following year he was ordained to the priesthood. What followed was an unusually varied career for a man whose fame would finally rest on stillness. He taught in the seminaries and academies of the Church; he served with the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem and spent time in Constantinople, absorbing at first hand the living tradition of Eastern monasticism and its texts; and he rose to become rector of the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy. In 1859 he was consecrated Bishop of Tambov, and four years later, in 1863, he was transferred to the ancient see of Vladimir. As a diocesan bishop he was known for his care of the clergy, his founding of schools—including a diocesan school for girls—and above all for his preaching.

Yet the pastoral office, for all its fruitfulness, was not where Theophan believed his own path lay. In 1866 he petitioned to be released from the administration of a diocese and withdrew to the Vysha Hermitage, a small monastery in the Tambov province. For the first six years he lived there as an ordinary monk, sharing the common services and receiving the many visitors who sought his counsel. Then, in 1872, after Pascha, he entered upon the reclusion that would give him his name in the Church’s memory. He ceased to attend the monastery church, closed his door to almost all visitors, and confined himself to a few rooms, in which he built a small chapel dedicated to the Baptism of the Lord and served the Liturgy alone. He remained in this seclusion for some twenty-two years.

The reclusion was not idleness or flight but a change of labor. From his cell Theophan carried on an immense correspondence with people across Russia who wrote to him for spiritual direction, and he produced the body of writing for which he is loved. He translated the Philokalia — the great anthology of the ascetical Fathers on prayer and the inner life—into Russian in five volumes; he rendered into Russian, freely revised and expanded, the manual of spiritual combat known in English as Unseen Warfare; and he wrote his own works on the Christian life, among them The Path to Salvation, The Spiritual Life and How to Be Attuned to It, commentaries on the Epistles and on the longest of the psalms, and thousands of letters that were gathered and printed. Theophan died on the sixth of January 1894, the feast of the Baptism of the Lord to which his cell-chapel was dedicated. Nearly a century later, in 1988, the Russian Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints at the Local Council held to mark the millennium of the Baptism of Rus; he is commemorated as Saint Theophan, Recluse of Vysha. The book before the reader belongs entirely to his hidden years, and bears their character on every page.

The Work: Occasion & Purpose

Thoughts for Each Day of the Year, According to the Daily Church Readings from the Word of God is exactly what its full title announces. The Orthodox Church appoints for every day of the year a passage from the Epistles and a passage from the Gospels, read at the Divine Liturgy, so that in the course of a year the faithful hear the greater part of the New Testament in a fixed and repeating order. Theophan set himself the task of accompanying this daily reading. For each day he wrote a short meditation—most often a single paragraph, sometimes two or three—that takes up a verse or an image from the day’s appointed lesson and draws from it a lesson for the soul. The reader is meant to open the Scriptures to the day’s reading and then to read Theophan’s reflection upon it, so that the hearing of the word and its application to life become a single act, repeated every morning.

The book grew out of the same soil as the rest of Theophan’s late work: the quiet of Vysha, the daily cycle of the services, and the pastoral instinct that never left him even in seclusion. What he could no longer give from a pulpit or a bishop’s chair he gave in print, to readers he would never meet. The collection was first published not under his own imprint but through the Russian monastery of Saint Panteleimon on Mount Athos, which brought it out in 1881; it proved immediately popular and was reprinted many times in Moscow and Saint Petersburg over the following decades, and a companion volume of shorter thoughts arranged by the days of the civil month followed in 1882. From the beginning it was received less as a book to be read through than as a book to be lived with—a daily companion, kept at hand and returned to morning by morning across the years.

Its purpose is frankly practical and pastoral. Theophan is not writing a commentary in the scholarly sense, weighing variant readings or reconstructing the historical setting of a text. He is a physician of souls addressing ordinary Christians in the world, and his aim is always the same: to move the reader from hearing to doing, from the assent of the mind to the transformation of the heart. He assumes a reader who is busy, distracted, and inclined to let the words of Scripture pass without lodging, and he writes to arrest that reader for the space of a few minutes and send him back into his day changed. The brevity of each entry is therefore not a limitation but a design. He gives just enough to be carried in the memory and acted upon before evening.

Argument & Structure

Because the book follows the Church’s calendar of readings rather than the numbers of the civil months, its architecture is that of the liturgical year, and understanding this is the key to using it well. The entries are not dated to fixed days like the first or the fifteenth; they are keyed to the movable cycle that turns around Pascha, together with the great fixed feasts of the Lord and the Mother of God that fall at set points within it. The reader who wishes to follow Theophan day by day must therefore know where he stands in the Church’s year, not merely on the ordinary calendar.

The cycle as Theophan lays it out opens with the New Year—the first of January, the feast of the Circumcision of the Lord and the commemoration of Saint Basil the Great—and moves at once into the season of Theophany, the Baptism of the Lord in the Jordan. From there the reader is carried through the weeks whose readings are counted from the previous Pentecost (which is why entries in January are headed by the thirty-first, thirty-second, and thirty-third weeks after Pentecost), and then into the pre-Lenten Sundays that the Church uses to prepare her people for the fast: the Publican and the Pharisee, the Prodigal Son, the Sunday of the Last Judgment, and Forgiveness Sunday. Great Lent follows, its five Sundays and their weekdays; then Palm Sunday and Holy Week; then the radiant center of the whole year, the Bright Resurrection of Christ, and the weeks of Pascha with their appointed Gospels of the Myrrh-Bearing Women, the Paralytic, the Samaritan Woman, and the Man Born Blind. The Ascension and Pentecost bring the paschal season to its close; the Sunday of All Saints opens the long stretch of numbered Sundays after Pentecost that carries the reader through summer and autumn; and the year comes to rest, at its far end, in the Nativity of Christ. Interwoven throughout are the fixed feasts that keep their own dates—the Meeting of the Lord in the Temple, the Entry of the Mother of God, and others—set in their proper place in the flow of readings. In all, the book comprises some three hundred and fifty-three entries, one for nearly every day the Church gathers to hear the word.

Within this frame the individual meditations are anything but random. Read in sequence they reveal themselves as a continuous course of instruction, each building on the one before. Theophan will often begin an entry by recalling the previous day’s lesson—“Yesterday the Apostle armed the Christian with the full spiritual armor, and today he points out the guides on this battle-march”—so that a week’s readings become a single sustained argument carried forward step by step. In this way the daily form conceals a deliberate program of the spiritual life. Certain themes recur and deepen as the year turns. He teaches, again and again, that repentance is the door to faith and that faith without works is stillborn; that the Christian’s true task is the forming of what Scripture calls “the hidden person of the heart,” built up from the virtues and quickened by the sanctifying presence of God within; that the fear of God is the beginning and the guardian of the spiritual life; that prayer must be persistent and humble, offered by one who claims no right to be heard. Around these convictions he gathers the whole of the daily Scripture, so that the movable feasts and the ordinary weekdays alike are made to serve one end: the inward renewal of the person who reads.

This gives the book a double character that is worth naming. Taken one day at a time, it is a series of brief, self-contained exhortations, each complete and each capable of standing alone. Taken as a whole, it is a single ascetical catechesis—a patient, year-long leading of the soul from the first stirrings of repentance to the “measure of the full stature of Christ.” The reader receives both at once: a word for the day, and, imperceptibly, an education of the heart.

Theological & Spiritual Significance

Theophan belongs to a great renewal of Orthodox spiritual life in nineteenth-century Russia, a movement that recovered the ascetical and contemplative inheritance of the Christian East and made it available, in the vernacular, to a wide reading public. His translation of the Philokalia was central to that recovery; Thoughts for Each Day of the Year is, in a sense, its popular fruit—the same teaching on the inner life, distilled from the Fathers and from his own experience, brought down to the scale of a single day and addressed to Christians who would never enter a monastery. Its significance lies precisely in this act of translation, not from one language to another but from the cell to the world.

The theology that runs through the book is the theology of the heart. For Theophan the center of the person is not the reasoning mind or the outward conduct but the heart, and the whole aim of the Christian life is that the heart should be cleansed, warmed, and given over to God. He is unfailingly severe on a religion that stops at the surface—the correct deed done without love, the prayer said before others but abandoned in solitude, the faith professed with the lips but never carried into action. The fig tree rich in leaves and barren of fruit, the widow whose two small coins outweighed the offerings of the rich, the Pharisee who left the temple with nothing because he counted his own righteousness: these are the images Theophan returns to, and their common lesson is that God sees and weighs the inner disposition, not the external form. This is not a lax or comfortable teaching. Theophan calls the reader to a real and costly conversion, to the “circumcision of the heart,” to a warfare against the passions that lasts a lifetime. But it is never anxious or merely moralizing, because it rests throughout on grace: the transformation he asks for is one that God works in the one who consents and labors, and the daily reading of Scripture is itself a means by which that grace is given.

The book also carries, quietly, a whole doctrine of the Church and the sacraments, drawn out from the readings as they come. On the feast of Theophany Theophan expounds the manifestation of the Holy Trinity at the Jordan; from the epistles of Peter and Paul he teaches the work of Father, Son, and Spirit in the salvation of each soul; from the daily Gospels he draws out the necessity of the sacraments, of the guidance of pastors, of prayer and repentance and love. He writes from within the Orthodox tradition and with its full confidence, and he makes no secret of the conviction, characteristic of his time and place, that this tradition is the faithful keeper of the apostolic faith. A reader of another Christian communion will hear that confidence and recognize where the book stands; but he will also find, beneath the particular idiom, a teaching on repentance, faith, prayer, humility, and the transformation of the heart that belongs to the common inheritance of Christians and that has nourished readers far beyond the tradition in which it was written.

Reception & Influence

Few of Theophan’s works have been more widely read than this one. From its first appearance under the imprint of the Athonite monks it was taken up as a household book, kept beside the icon corner and read at the start of the day, and it has never since gone out of use. It passed through edition after edition before the Revolution, survived the long Soviet decades in memory and in guarded copies, and returned to wide circulation in Russia at the end of the twentieth century, when it was reprinted in large numbers and adapted into forms—including devotional applications for readers who carry their books on a screen—that Theophan could not have imagined but whose purpose he would have recognized at once. Its endurance is of a particular kind: it is the endurance not of a monument admired from a distance but of a tool worn smooth by daily use. That so simple a book, made of nothing but short reflections on the appointed readings, should have held its place for well over a century is itself a testimony to the soundness of Theophan’s instinct—that what Christians most need is not novelty but a faithful daily return to the word of God, guided by a wise and unhurried teacher.

The Text & This Edition

This is a fresh English edition of Thoughts for Each Day of the Year, rendered from Saint Theophan’s Russian. It was prepared from the public-domain Russian text of the work as established and made available by the digital library of Azbyka.ru, which reproduces the traditional printed collection first issued by the Russian monastery of Saint Panteleimon on Mount Athos. That underlying Russian text is arranged according to the liturgical calendar of a single year—traditionally identified as 1887, an identification the text itself supports, since several entries carry composition dates in January of that year and the whole sequence of movable feasts falls where it would in that year’s reckoning. The present edition preserves that arrangement faithfully: each entry keeps its heading, naming the day in the Church’s year and giving the appointed Epistle and Gospel (and, in the Lenten and festal readings, the Old Testament lesson) that the meditation unfolds.

The aim throughout has been a translation that reads as natural, dignified English while keeping faith with Theophan’s voice—direct, warm, and unadorned, moving easily between exhortation and tenderness. Scripture is quoted as Theophan quotes it, following the Slavonic and Russian biblical tradition in which he wrote; where he cites the Psalms or other books of the Old Testament, the numbering and wording reflect that tradition, which rests on the ancient Greek text of the Septuagint, and the many phrases he draws from the Church’s hymnography—troparia, stichera, and the canons of the feasts—are given in a form faithful to their liturgical sense. A small number of editorial notes present in the Russian source, identifying the liturgical sources of such phrases, have been carried over where they aid the reader; these are the source’s notes, not commentary added here.

Two conventions of this edition follow the practice of the series. Scripture is cited in the modern Arabic-numeral style familiar to English readers—Romans 6:22 rather than the older Roman-numeral forms—so that a reader who wishes to open the Bible to the day’s reading can do so at a glance. And attribution follows the principle of naming each author as the Church has received him: the book is Saint Theophan’s own, the fruit of his years at Vysha, and those who have carried it into English are credited as its translators and never as its authors. What this edition offers, in sum, is Theophan’s daily book made ready for the English-speaking reader who would use it as it was meant to be used—one page, one reading, one morning at a time.

Suggestions for Reading

The book asks to be read slowly and in order, but the order is the Church’s, not the calendar’s. A reader who wishes to keep pace with Theophan day by day will do best to follow him alongside a table of the Orthodox daily readings, so that the meditation and the lesson it expounds are held together; read this way, over a full year, the separate entries knit themselves into the single course of instruction that Theophan intended. A reader who simply wishes to begin may open at the New Year, where the book itself begins, and let the seasons carry him forward. But the entries reward another use as well. Any one of them, taken by itself in a spare few minutes, gives a complete and finished word—on prayer, on repentance, on the hidden work of the heart—that can be carried through the day. However it is approached, the book is best met not as something to be finished but as something to be lived with: a teacher who says a little each morning, and expects to be heard the next.