Introduction

The Author

Unseen Warfare comes to us through three hands, and any honest account of it must name all three. The book we read here is the Russian Nevidimaya bran’ of Saint Theophan the Recluse, one of the great spiritual teachers of nineteenth-century Russia. But Theophan did not invent it. He was the last and boldest of three authors who, over nearly three centuries and across three languages, each took up the same book and remade it for the readers before him. Its first form was Italian and Western; its second was Greek and Athonite; its third—the one in your hands—is Russian and the fruit of a bishop’s long seclusion. The Church has received the finished work as a classic of the ascetic life, and it is fitting to begin with the man who gave it that final shape.

Theophan was born Georgy Vasilievich Govorov on 10 January 1815, in the village of Chernavsk in the Oryol region, the son of a village priest. He was schooled in the seminaries of Livny, Oryol, and Kiev, took monastic vows, and rose through the Church’s teaching offices before being consecrated Bishop of Tambov and Shatsk in 1859. In 1863 he was transferred to the ancient see of Vladimir. Then, in 1866, after some seven years as a ruling bishop, he did an extraordinary thing: he asked to be released from the government of his diocese, and retired to the Vysha Hermitage in the Tambov region. For a few years he lived there quietly as an ordinary monk. In 1872 he withdrew entirely from the world into strict reclusion—the zatvor from which he takes his name—receiving no one but his confessor and the chief priest of the monastery, and building with his own hands a small chapel in his cell where he served the Liturgy, at first weekly and later daily, for the last two decades of his life. He reposed at Vysha on the feast of Theophany, 6 January 1894, having spent twenty-eight years at the monastery, twenty-two of them in reclusion.

It is one of the paradoxes of his life that this deliberate silence made him one of the most widely heard voices of Russian Orthodoxy. Behind the closed door of his cell Theophan wrote and translated ceaselessly. He gave Russia a monumental multi-volume edition of the Dobrotolyubie, the Russian Philokalia, rendering the Greek fathers of prayer into his own tongue; he composed pastoral classics such as The Path to Salvation and a large correspondence of spiritual counsel; and among these labors he produced the Unseen Warfare offered here. His writings are marked by a rare combination of psychological exactness and warmth—an unflinching anatomy of the passions joined to a tenderness toward the struggling soul. The Russian Orthodox Church glorified him as a saint in 1988, at the Local Council convened for the millennium of the baptism of Rus, honoring his writings as a faithful continuation of the teaching of the holy fathers. He is commemorated on 10 January.

The book’s second author stands directly behind Theophan. Saint Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain—Nicodemus the Hagiorite—was born on the island of Naxos in 1749 and died on Mount Athos in 1809. A monk of prodigious learning, he is best known as the co-compiler, with Saint Macarius of Corinth, of the Philokalia, the great anthology of hesychast and ascetic texts that would reshape Orthodox spirituality across the Greek and Slavic worlds. Nicodemus edited canon law, wrote lives and liturgical works, and labored to feed his fellow Christians with the accumulated wisdom of the Eastern fathers. It was he who took a Western devotional manual and, recognizing its worth, naturalized it into the Greek ascetic tradition. He was glorified as a saint by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1955.

The book’s first author was neither Greek nor Russian nor Orthodox. He was Lorenzo Scupoli, an Italian priest of the Theatine order, born at Otranto around 1530 and dying at Naples in 1610. His manual of the interior life, Il combattimento spirituale — The Spiritual Combat — was first printed at Venice in 1589, at first anonymously. It became one of the most influential devotional books of the Catholic Reformation, running through scores of editions in its author’s own lifetime and translated within a decade into Latin, French, German, and English; Francis de Sales is said to have carried it in his pocket and prized it above every book but the Scriptures. That a Western spiritual classic should be received, reworked, and gratefully absorbed into the Orthodox monastic tradition is a striking fact of Christian history, and one this edition presents as exactly that: a common inheritance of the undivided ascetic wisdom of the Church, purified and set in an Eastern key, not a trophy of controversy. The house convention followed here credits each man in his true office—Scupoli as the original author, Nicodemus as the Greek editor who enlarged the work, and Theophan as the reviser and translator who gave us this text—and honors the saints as the Church honors them, without turning the book’s Western origin into a matter of dispute.

The Work: Occasion & Purpose

The purpose of Unseen Warfare is announced in its title. It is a manual of spiritual combat—a practical, chapter-by-chapter instruction in the one war that every Christian is enlisted to fight, “the warfare that is mental and unseen,” as the old preface has it, “the warfare that every Christian takes up from the hour of his baptism.” Its enemies are not flesh and blood but “the various passions and desires of the flesh, and the evil and man-hating demons”; its battlefield “is our own heart and the whole inner man”; and “the time of battle is our entire life.” The book exists to arm the reader for that lifelong campaign—to hand him, one by one, the weapons of self-distrust, hope in God, disciplined attention, and prayer, and to teach him the tactics by which the passions are subdued and the wiles of the enemy exposed.

Each of the three authors wrote for a real and present need. Scupoli composed his Combattimento for the devout of Counter-Reformation Italy, in an age hungry for interior, method-driven practice of the Christian life; his genius was to locate holiness not in outward austerities but in the will’s steady warfare against itself. Nicodemus, working on Mount Athos in the late eighteenth century, found in Scupoli’s book a treatment of the inner struggle that answered exactly to the concerns of the Athonite revival of prayer of which he and Macarius were the leaders. He translated it into Greek, gave it the title Aoratos Polemos — Unseen Warfare — and, as an early note preserved in this edition candidly explains, “reviewed it, corrected it, supplemented it, and enriched it with notes and extracts from the holy Fathers and ascetics,” so that “the book belongs to Elder Nicodemus more in spirit than in letter.”

Theophan’s occasion was the spiritual formation of nineteenth-century Russia. Already deep in his translation of the Philokalia, he knew Nicodemus’s writings intimately and admired them, and he undertook to bring Unseen Warfare into Russian for the same audience he served in all his work: the ordinary believer, monastic or lay, seeking a sure path through the interior life. But he did far more than translate. As the editorial note frankly warns, “the present book should therefore be regarded not so much as a translation as a free rendering.” Theophan folded Nicodemus’s patristic notes into the body of the text, rewrote freely where he judged the style or the teaching could be bettered, and—most significantly—reworked the book’s treatment of prayer to bring it fully into line with the hesychast tradition of the heart, giving it, among other things, its rich chapters on inner prayer and the Jesus Prayer. What began as a Western manual of the will thus became, in his hands, an Orthodox manual of the praying heart. This is why the book stands in our corpus under his name as its reviser and translator: the Russian Unseen Warfare is a genuinely new thing, resting on Nicodemus, who rests on Scupoli.

Argument & Structure

The work is built in two parts. Part One, by far the longer, is the spiritual combat proper: fifty-three chapters, preceded by the publishers’ note and Nicodemus’s preface, that lay out the whole art of interior warfare. Part Two, in thirty chapters, turns from the battle to its sustenance and its goal—the sacramental life, surrender to God, and the peace of soul that crowns the struggle. Together they move the reader from the first taking-up of arms to the final serenity of a heart established in God, and to the hour of death, where the last and fiercest assaults are met.

Part One opens by defining its terms. Christian perfection, the first chapter insists, does not consist in fasts, vigils, long prayers, or any outward austerity, however useful these are as means; it consists in “nearness to God and abiding in union with him,” in the love of God and the hatred of self, in the total surrender of one’s own will to his. From this the book derives the “four things supremely necessary” for the warfare, which then organize its opening movement: never to trust or rely on oneself; to place all hope and confidence in God alone; to strive unceasingly; and to abide in prayer. The chapters on the first two weapons are the spiritual heart of the book. Distrust of self—the frank recognition of one’s own nothingness and inconstancy, learned even through one’s falls—is set as the foundation of humility; and it is at once balanced by “hope in God alone,” lest the soul, despairing of itself and finding no other support, “immediately flee from the field of battle.” The two together, self-emptiness and God-reliance, form the double disposition on which everything else is built.

The middle of Part One is a detailed schooling of the inner faculties and the senses. Theophan’s book teaches the reader to exercise the mind so that it neither errs through ignorance nor swells with idle curiosity; to train the will to seek in every act, inward and outward, nothing but the pleasing of God; and to wage war on the “irrational sensory will” and its sudden stirrings until virtue becomes habit. From there it moves outward to the government of the five senses, the tongue, the imagination, and the memory—turning even sense-impressions into occasions for meditation on the Incarnation and the mysteries of Christ’s life and passion. A cluster of chapters then maps the strategy of the adversary: the order the devil follows in tempting each kind of person, how he keeps sinners in slavery, how he entangles even those who have set out on the good path, and how he corrupts good deeds and turns the very virtues against those who practice them. The remedy in every case is the same watchful humility and unshaken peace. Part One closes with a sustained treatment of prayer—the summit of the four weapons—ascending from what inner prayer is, through personal and brief “arrow” prayers, to a full teaching on the Jesus Prayer and the role of prayer in the whole warfare.

Part Two carries the reader from combat to communion. It opens with the Eucharist—“the most holy Mystery” and the chief food of the spiritual warrior—with chapters on how to receive it sacramentally and how to kindle love for God by meditating on it, followed by teaching on spiritual (non-sacramental) communion, thanksgiving, and surrender to the will of God. It treats with great psychological delicacy the alternation of spiritual warmth and dryness in the heart, and the guarding and examination of conscience. Then comes the book’s most sober section: the preparation for the battle at the hour of death, and the four temptations the enemy launches in that final hour—against faith, by despair, by vainglory, and by phantoms—each with the means of overcoming it. The remaining chapters unfold the theme that gives Part Two its unity: the spiritual peace of the heart—how it is established little by little, how it is preserved through humility, solitude, prudence in love of neighbor, and detachment from consolations, and how the soul stripped of its own will surrenders itself wholly to God. The work ends where it has been tending all along, in a heart at peace under God’s overshadowing, and closes with an afterword and words of the holy hierarchs.

Theological & Spiritual Significance

The abiding importance of Unseen Warfare lies in its relentless interiorization of the Christian life. Against every temptation to measure holiness by outward performance, it drives the reader inward, to the hidden warfare of the will and the heart where salvation is really won or lost. Its opening insistence that the ascetic disciplines are means and not ends—that a man may fast beyond the desert fathers and ransom slaves and still be lost if his passions rule him—is a permanent corrective to spiritual pride, and one of the book’s most quoted teachings. In its place it sets the paradoxical foundation of all the fathers of prayer: that strength begins in the confession of weakness, that the first weapon is distrust of self, and that this self-distrust is not despair but the necessary underside of an unbounded hope in God.

What makes the book theologically remarkable is the transmission that produced it. Scupoli’s original is a masterpiece of the Western spiritual renewal, method-driven and centered on the discipline of the will. Nicodemus and then, more thoroughly, Theophan received that teaching and rewove it on the loom of the Christian East—supplementing it from the Greek fathers, anchoring it in the sacramental and hesychast life, and above all reorienting its doctrine of prayer toward the prayer of the heart and the invocation of the Name of Jesus. The result is a rare witness to the deep unity of Christian ascetic wisdom beneath its confessional divisions: the same warfare, the same passions, the same weapons, recognized and refined across the boundary between West and East. Read alongside the Philokalia — with which both Nicodemus and Theophan were saturated — Unseen Warfare is a practical introduction to hesychast spirituality for those not yet ready for the fathers themselves, translating the tradition’s hardest lessons into plain, ordered, chapter-length counsel.

The book’s psychology is its other enduring gift. Few manuals so patiently describe the actual motions of the fallen soul—the subtle survival of self-esteem even in those sure they have renounced it; the difference between a fall met with peace and a fall met with the “dark and comfortless grief” that betrays wounded pride; the way the enemy disguises evil counsel “under the guise of good” and turns a man’s own virtues into snares. This attention to inner discernment, and its steady prescription of humility and unbroken interior peace as the remedy for every disturbance, is what has kept the book alive as a companion for real spiritual struggle rather than a museum piece.

Reception & Influence

Each stage of the book’s life left a mark. Scupoli’s Spiritual Combat became one of the most widely read devotional works of early modern Catholicism, valued across the Western church for generations. Nicodemus’s Greek Aoratos Polemos, published in the same era as the Philokalia, quickly became “an accepted and important influence in the Eastern Churches,” carrying Scupoli’s teaching—now clothed in patristic dress—into the Greek-speaking Orthodox world. Theophan’s Russian revision then made it a staple of Russian spiritual reading in the nineteenth century and after, standing among the works through which he shaped the piety of a whole church; it remains in continuous devotional use.

In the twentieth century the book reached the English-speaking world chiefly through the translation made from Theophan’s Russian text by E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer—the same pair who translated the Philokalia selections—published under the title Unseen Warfare: Being the “Spiritual Combat” and “Path to Paradise” of Lorenzo Scupoli, as Edited by Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain and Revised by Theophan the Recluse, with an introduction by H. A. Hodges that remains the standard English account of the book’s threefold history. Through that edition Unseen Warfare has become, for many Western readers, one of the first doors into Orthodox ascetic spirituality, frequently recommended alongside The Way of a Pilgrim and the Philokalia as an accessible entry to the tradition of inner prayer.

The Text & This Edition

This edition presents Unseen Warfare as a fresh, modern English translation made from Saint Theophan the Recluse’s Russian text—the public-domain Nevidimaya bran’ — the form in which the work has been read in Russia and, through it, across the Orthodox world. It is an English-only edition, prepared for continuous reading rather than for study against the original, though it faithfully preserves the two-part structure, the chapter divisions and headings, and the internal notes of Theophan’s book, including the publishers’ note and Nicodemus’s preface that stand at its head.

The layered making of the work governs how it is presented here. The original author is Lorenzo Scupoli, whose Spiritual Combat (Venice, 1589) is the seed of the whole; Saint Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain is credited as the Greek editor who translated and enlarged it into Unseen Warfare in the 1790s, adding the patristic material that made it an Eastern book; and Saint Theophan the Recluse is credited as the reviser and translator who produced the Russian text on which this edition rests. In keeping with house convention, translators and revisers are named in their true office and are not presented as the original author; the work therefore stands under Theophan as the maker of this version, with Scupoli’s authorship and Nicodemus’s editorship stated plainly. As Theophan’s own book acknowledges, his Russian is “not so much a translation as a free rendering,” and this English edition renders that free rendering—Theophan’s Unseen Warfare, not Scupoli’s or Nicodemus’s—into clear contemporary prose.

The aim throughout has been readable, dignified English that keeps faith with the plain, exhortatory voice of the original: direct address to “my brother,” short numbered counsels, and the steady interweaving of Scripture. Scriptural quotations are set in their familiar form and cited in a modern style, with chapter-and-verse references given in ordinary numerals for ease of use. Chapter titles follow the Russian text. Where the tradition preserves editorial notes explaining the book’s own history—the note from the publishers, the preface written by Nicodemus for the manuscript he used—these are retained as part of the work, so that the reader meets the book’s remarkable pedigree in its own words as well as in this introduction.