St. Theophan the Recluse

He was born in 1815 in the Oryol province of Russia, the son of a priest, and baptized George. He was educated in the seminaries and at the Kiev Theological Academy, and was tonsured a monk with the name Theophan. He taught and governed in the schools of the Church, served on a mission to the Holy Land and at Constantinople, and was in time consecrated bishop, governing the sees of Tambov and then of Vladimir with zeal and gentleness.

Yet his heart was set on a deeper stillness. In 1866, at the height of his powers, he asked to be released from the governance of his diocese, and withdrew to the Vysha Hermitage. After some years among the brethren he entered upon a strict reclusion, shutting himself in his cells, where he set up a small chapel and served the Liturgy alone, and saw almost no one for the last twenty-eight years of his life.

But his seclusion was not idleness. He labored at the great rendering of the Philokalia into Russian, that the teaching of the Fathers on prayer might reach his own people; he wrote books that have become classics of the spiritual life, on the path to salvation and the ordering of the inner man; and he answered, in his own hand, the thousands of letters that came to him from every kind of person seeking counsel, so that his cell became a fountain of guidance for the whole land.

He taught the prayer of the mind in the heart and the unseen warfare against the passions in a plain and practical way, suited to laypeople in the world as much as to monks, and warned against both coldness and delusion. He reposed quietly on the feast of Theophany, the sixth of January, 1894.

The Russian Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints in 1988, and the Church keeps his memory on the tenth of January, honoring Theophan the Recluse, the bishop who hid himself away and so taught his whole people to pray.