Introduction

The Author

Saint Theophan the Recluse was born George Vasilievich Govorov on the tenth of January, 1815, in the village of Chernavsk (Chernavskoye) in the Orel province of central Russia, the son of a parish priest. His childhood unfolded in the settled rhythm of a country presbytery, and that world of quiet fields, family prayer, and the near horizon of a small village left a mark on everything he later wrote; a reader of his letters keeps meeting the meadow, the garden, and the singing bird as the natural images of a soul at peace. He was schooled first at the local church school at Livny, then at the Orel seminary, and in 1837 he was sent to complete his formation at the Kiev Theological Academy, one of the great centers of learning in the Russian Church. There, before he had finished his studies, he received the monastic tonsure and the name Theophan, and there, in the shadow of the ancient Monastery of the Caves, he first drank deeply from the springs of Eastern monastic tradition that would nourish him for the rest of his life.

The decades that followed were crowded with responsibility. He served as rector of church schools and seminaries, taught in the academies, and traveled as a member of the Russian ecclesiastical mission to Jerusalem and as an embassy chaplain in Constantinople—journeys that brought him into living contact with the monasteries of the Christian East and with the Greek manuscripts of its ascetic Fathers. In 1859 he was consecrated bishop and given the see of Tambov, and a few years afterward he was transferred to Vladimir. By every outward measure he was a successful and beloved hierarch. Yet the pull toward stillness never left him, and in 1866 he petitioned to lay down his diocese and withdraw to the Vysha Hermitage in the Tambov province. Poor health was the reason he offered; the deeper reason, as those who knew him understood, was a long-ripening desire for the hidden, prayerful life he had glimpsed among the monks of the East.

At Vysha his withdrawal deepened by degrees until, from about 1872, he entered full reclusion. He ceased to receive visitors and even to attend the common services of the monastery, arranging a small chapel within his own cell where he celebrated the Liturgy alone. This was not a flight from the Church or from the world’s need of him, for the door he closed with one hand he opened wide with the other: from the silence of Vysha flowed an immense correspondence and a stream of books that reached readers of every station, from senior officials to the humblest villager. He gave much of his strength to translation, rendering the great anthology of ascetic wisdom known as the Philokalia from Church Slavonic into a Russian his contemporaries could read, and composing works of spiritual counsel—The Path to Salvation chief among them—that became classics almost at once. He reposed on the sixth of January, 1894, on the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, to which his cell chapel was dedicated. The Russian Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints at its Local Council of 1988, held at the Trinity–Saint Sergius Lavra; he is commemorated in January and again in the summer. Across the twentieth century, when open spiritual guidance had all but vanished from Russian life, believers carried his books from hand to hand, and for many the first primer of the interior life was the very volume introduced here.

The Work: Occasion & Purpose

What the Spiritual Life Is and How to Attune to It belongs entirely to the years of reclusion, and it carries the unmistakable warmth of that late, ripened phase of Theophan’s life, when a lifetime of learning had been distilled into the plain speech of a spiritual father. It is not a treatise but a correspondence: a sequence of eighty letters addressed to a young woman who had written to him for help. As the book has long been received, her story is a small parable of the whole. A gentlewoman of good family, raised in the country and newly launched into the social season of the city, found herself one evening at a ball suddenly seized by the thought that her soul was immortal and that all the whirl around her was empty—and, shaken by the experience, she wrote to ask whether this was a sickness of the nerves or something she should heed. Theophan’s answer opened a correspondence that ran its course through her gradual turning away from the world and toward God, until at the last she inclined toward the monastic life. His own remark about her survives among his letters, unmistakably tender: she lives at home with her father, he wrote, unwilling to marry yet not quite resolved for the convent—may the Lord order her lot; her temperament is very sound and steadfast.

A word of honesty is owed here, and it costs the book nothing. The letters are addressed throughout to a single correspondent and read as one unbroken conversation, and the received tradition treats them so. Scholars who have studied how the book took shape observe that in composing it Theophan drew on the wider body of his spiritual correspondence, gathering and ordering his counsel into a unified work. Whether every letter answers one flesh-and-blood young woman or whether her figure gathers up several such souls, the pastoral situation is real and concrete: a young person of intelligence and feeling, alive to the emptiness of a merely worldly existence, asking in earnest what the spiritual life actually is and how one begins to live it. Everything in the book bends toward answering that question for such a reader.

Its purpose, then, is formation rather than argument. Theophan is not defending the faith against its cultured despisers; he is teaching a beginner how to be attuned—the metaphor is his own and it governs the whole work. He wants his correspondent not merely to learn the principles of the spiritual life but to catch its living tone, as an instrument is brought into tune, so that the strings of her heart will sound in harmony with the will of God. He proceeds, as he says more than once, by refusing abstractions and plans: he will speak only of what her present circumstances actually raise, answering her real questions as thirsty ground drinks water, so that each truth is fixed in the soul at the moment it is needed. This is the book’s occasion and its method at once, and it accounts for the freshness that has kept it in readers’ hands for more than a century.

Argument & Structure

Beneath the easy epistolary surface runs a firm and deliberate architecture, and it is worth seeing the whole before entering the parts. The letters move through three great movements: a diagnosis of the emptiness of worldly life; an anatomy of human nature that locates the source of that emptiness; and a long, patient course of instruction in how the neglected part of us may be awakened and brought to full life in God.

The first letters (roughly the opening four) set the scene. Writing to a young woman freshly dazzled by the theaters, parties, and ceaseless motion of society, Theophan takes up her own sharp observations—the crush and the noise, the universal play-acting, the strange coldness that breathes from people who seem all warmth—and shows her what they mean. Society life, he argues, “is not life”; it stirs endless movement while touching only the outermost edge of the human being. Here he first sounds the note that will organize everything: a person truly lives only when all his powers are engaged and all his needs met, and the world’s amusements engage only the lowest, animal layer while starving the rest. Into this diagnosis he weaves the Fathers—Saint Macarius the Great’s image of souls sifted like wheat in the devil’s sieve—so that the young woman’s fresh eye and the ancient tradition confirm one another.

The heart of the book’s teaching, and its true spine, is the threefold anatomy of the human person set out in the central letters. Theophan takes his reader on a guided tour inward. First comes the bodily life, with its organs and its simple natural needs for food, movement, and sensation—good in their place, but ruinous when a person makes the body’s comfort his chief end. Then comes the soul, which he examines through its three faculties: the thinking power, whose proper work is real reflection but which, left to itself, dissolves into idle reverie and the endless wandering of thoughts; the desiring or active power, governed by the will, whose task is to order life wisely but which, unmoored, is tossed about by inconstant desires and the invading passions; and the feeling power, the heart, the true center where everything that enters and leaves the soul is registered, and which the passions above all tyrannize. Only then, at the summit, does he name the third and highest dimension, the spirit—that God-facing depth of the person which shows itself in three unmistakable signs: the fear of God, the voice of conscience, and an unquenchable thirst for God that no earthly thing can satisfy. This ascending anatomy is not offered as science for its own sake; it is the ground of the entire practical teaching, for, as Theophan insists, we must live as God made us to live, and only by seeing how we are built can we see how we ought to live. Worldly life is empty precisely because it feeds body and a sliver of soul while the spirit—the part made for God—goes hungry.

From this diagnosis the book turns, in its long second half, to the cure, and here the letters become a genuine manual of the interior life. Theophan traces how the disorder entered—through the sin of the first parents, which severed the spirit’s communion with God and let body, soul, and passions usurp the throne—and how it is healed: not by human effort alone but by the grace of God, given in the redemption wrought by the Son and applied by the Holy Spirit. He dwells on the awakening of zeal, the whole-hearted resolve to belong to God, as the first and decisive step, and shows how the seed of grace planted in Baptism must be freely confirmed and fanned into flame. There follows a remarkably concrete course of counsel: on fasting, self-examination, confession, and Communion; on the practice of prayer, and above all on the labor of learning to pray without distraction, with the remembrance of God kept warm in the heart; on the long struggle against the passions, examined stage by stage—from the first passionate thought, through feeling and desire, to the deed—and on the weapons of that struggle, from guarding the eyes and ears to the short prayer repeated on the prayer rope. The letters take up the ordinary fabric of the young woman’s days—household duties, music, reading, solitude, a pilgrimage, the talk of others, the fear of growing cold—and show how each may be turned to spiritual profit. The book closes as her life does: with her drawn toward a life wholly given to God, steadied against the enemy’s final storms of anxiety and doubt, and sent home to the country with a father’s blessing and a last, almost playful picture of the anchoress’s cell she dreams of, singing the Creator’s praise with the birds.

Theological & Spiritual Significance

The lasting importance of this small book lies in what it does with a very old idea. The division of the human person into body, soul, and spirit is not Theophan’s invention; it reaches back through the Fathers to the Apostle Paul’s prayer that spirit and soul and body be kept whole, and it belongs to the common inheritance of Christian anthropology East and West. Theophan’s achievement is to make this scheme livable—to take what could be a dry classification and turn it into a working map of the inner life by which an ordinary person can locate herself, name what ails her, and know what to do next. When he tells his correspondent that her sense of the world’s emptiness is not a morbid symptom to be cured but the spirit stirring in her and refusing to be fed on husks, he is performing the essential move of the whole book: reading the raw data of experience by the light of a Christian understanding of what a human being is for.

This is why the work reads less like theology and more like the diagnostics of a physician of souls, and why it has been so useful to beginners. Theophan grounds every counsel in nature as God created it, so that the rules of the spiritual life never appear as arbitrary impositions from outside but as the very conditions of health for a being made in a certain way. His treatment of the heart as the center of the person, of the passions as the true source of our unrest, and of the wandering of thoughts as the chronic sickness of the mind, distills the accumulated psychological wisdom of the Eastern ascetic tradition—the tradition of the Philokalia he had labored to translate—into terms a thoughtful layperson can grasp and apply. He shows, too, that this interior path is not the preserve of monks: his correspondent is a young woman living in the world, and his whole effort is to teach her how to keep her heart free while her body moves through drawing rooms and household cares.

The counsel is offered from within a particular tradition, and Theophan does not disguise it. He writes as a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the specific furniture of that Church’s devotion is present—the sacraments of confession and Communion, the discipline of fasting, the short prayer and the prayer rope, even the vivid account of the soul’s passage through the toll-houses after death. A reader from another Christian communion will meet some of this as unfamiliar. Yet the book’s central vision belongs to no single confession: that the human person is made for God, that the deepest self is the God-facing spirit, that our restlessness is the spirit’s hunger, and that the whole art of living is to bring body and soul into the service of that spirit and so into tune with the will of God. In that vision the letters speak, and have long spoken, far beyond the boundaries of the Church that produced them.

Reception & Influence

Few of Theophan’s works have been read as widely or as tenderly as this one. Gathered from his letters and published in the collections issued by the Russian Monastery of Saint Panteleimon on Mount Athos around the turn of the twentieth century, it passed quickly into the devotional life of ordinary Russian Christians. Its influence proved most remarkable in the hardest years. Through the long Soviet decades, when monasteries were shuttered and living spiritual guides had all but disappeared, believers copied and circulated Theophan’s letters from hand to hand, and for a great many people this book was the first teacher of the inner life they ever had—a portable spiritual father when no other could be found. That history is itself a testimony to what the book is: not a monument to be admired but an instrument to be used. In the English-speaking world it has become, since its translation in the later twentieth century, one of the standard introductions to Orthodox spirituality, valued precisely for the plainness and warmth that made it beloved in Russia.

The Text & This Edition

This edition presents What the Spiritual Life Is and How to Attune to It in a fresh, complete English translation made directly from the Russian. The base text is the public-domain Russian edition of Theophan’s letters as preserved in the standard collections of his correspondence, and the translation renders all eighty letters in full, following the arc of the whole from the first note of gentle reproach for the young woman’s silence to the closing blessing on her journey home.

The aim throughout has been a clear, natural, contemporary English that carries Theophan’s voice without the stiffness of an older idiom—his directness, his humor, his fondness for homely images drawn from the sewing machine, the tobacco workshop, and the country garden. Where he quotes Scripture or the Fathers—Macarius the Great, Hesychios, Poemen, and others whose words he braids into his own—those quotations are given in an English of the same register, and scriptural and other references are cited in the modern style, with ordinary Arabic numerals for chapters and verses.

In keeping with the conventions of this series, the work is attributed as the Church has always received it, to Saint Theophan the Recluse, bishop and recluse of Vysha; those who have prepared the English text are credited as translators and never in the author’s place. This is an English-only reading edition, shaped for continuous reading rather than for study against the original, and it is offered in the hope that the young woman’s questions—so plainly the questions of any awakening soul—may find in Theophan’s patient answers the same help that has drawn readers to these letters for well over a century.

Suggestions for Reading

A reader new to Theophan need not begin as a student of ascetic theology; the book was written for exactly such a reader and teaches as it goes. It rewards being read slowly and in order, a letter or two at a time, since Theophan builds one idea upon another and often returns to complete later what he has only sketched before. Those who feel the pull of the practical counsel in the second half will find it stands on the anatomy of body, soul, and spirit laid out in the central letters, and a reader who grasps that map first will follow everything after it with ease. Above all the book asks to be read as it was written—not as information to be finished but as a conversation to be joined, with the same candor Theophan asks of his correspondent, letting each counsel be taken up where one’s own life actually stands.