Early Service and the East (1841–1859)

The years between ordination and the episcopate: the rapid round of teaching and rectorship posts at Kiev, Novgorod, and St. Petersburg; the formative six years with the first Russian Ecclesiastical Mission to Jerusalem (1847–1854) under Archimandrite Porphyrius (Uspensky), where the young hieromonk steeped himself in the ascetical manuscripts of the Christian East and Mount Athos; the recall at the outbreak of the Crimean War; and the further rectorships at Olonets, Constantinople, and finally the St. Petersburg Academy that brought him to the threshold of consecration.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1988)

The Teaching Years (1841–1847)

Hieromonk Theophan’s gifts were recognized at once. On graduating from the Kiev Academy in 1841 he was appointed rector of the Kiev-Sophia (Kiev-Sofia) theological school, teaching Latin; on 7 December 1842 he was transferred to the Novgorod Theological Seminary as inspector and teacher of psychology and logic, receiving the degree of Master of Divinity later that month; and on 16 October 1844 he was appointed to the St. Petersburg Theological Academy in the department of moral and pastoral theology, becoming assistant inspector there in March 1845 (Theophan the Recluse, en.wikipedia, from the chronicle; Saint Theophan the Recluse, Bishop of Tambov, OCA). The subject he taught in the capital — moral and pastoral theology — is precisely the field he would later remake in his own books. The young professor was already, in effect, lecturing on the material of The Path to Salvation a quarter-century before he wrote it (see The Path to Salvation).

The Russian Ecclesiastical Mission to Jerusalem (1847–1854)

In August 1847 the course of his life turned eastward. Hieromonk Theophan was appointed a member of the newly established first Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem, headed by the learned Archimandrite Porphyrius (Porfiry) Uspensky — the orientalist and manuscript-hunter whose journeys through the libraries of Sinai, Athos, and the Levant did much to open the Christian East to Russian scholarship (Saint Theophan the Recluse, OCA; Russian Orthodox Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem, en.wikipedia). Theophan went still in the rank of hieromonk and remained in the East for some six years.

The Jerusalem years were the second great formation of his life, after Kiev. Living in the Holy Land and travelling in the lands of early monasticism, he learned Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and French; he immersed himself in the patristic and ascetical manuscripts of the Eastern monasteries; and he took up the iconography and handicrafts of the monks, skills he would carry into his cell at Vysha (Saint Theophan the Recluse, OCA; on the Philokalic harvest of these years, see Translating the Dobrotolyubie). It was here, among the originals, that the project of his old age was conceived in embryo: a Russian Dobrotolyubie drawn from the same wells the Athonite Fathers had drawn from, mediated through his own reading of the manuscripts. The future translator of the Philokalia learned the East not from books about it but from the East itself.

The character of this formation is worth dwelling on, because it set Theophan apart from the purely academic theologian. The Russian theological academies of the period produced able systematicians trained largely on Latin scholastic models and German manuals; Theophan had passed through that training at Kiev and excelled in it. But the Jerusalem mission gave him something the academies could not: a direct, lived encounter with the living East — the desert monasteries of Palestine and Sinai with their unbroken ascetical practice, the Greek-speaking hierarchy of the ancient patriarchates, and above all the manuscripts in which the Fathers spoke for themselves rather than through the filter of a textbook. The mission under Porphyrius (Uspensky) was as much a scholarly expedition as a diplomatic one, and Theophan shared in its labors of copying, cataloguing, and studying. The fruit was a mind furnished not with propositions about the ascetical Fathers but with the Fathers themselves, read in Greek in the lands where they had written — a furnishing that would make his later books read as transcriptions of a living tradition rather than as compilations from a shelf.

The mission was recalled at the outbreak of the Crimean War (1853–1856), when the Holy Land became hostile territory and the Russian presence in the Ottoman domains untenable; Theophan’s return to Russia is dated 3 May 1854 (Theophan the Recluse, en.wikipedia; OCA). After his return he was elevated to archimandrite on 14 April 1855 while teaching canon law at the St. Petersburg Academy (OCA). The years in the East had been the quiet seed-time of everything that followed; the man who came back was outwardly an able churchman on the rise, but inwardly a contemplative who had tasted the ascetical East and would, in the end, give the rest of his life to making its treasures available to his own people.

Olonets, Constantinople, and St. Petersburg (1855–1859)

The four years between his return and his consecration were a rapid ascent through the senior administrative posts of the Church. In September 1855 he was made rector of the Olonets Theological Seminary at Petrozavodsk; on 21 May 1856 he was appointed rector of the Russian embassy church in Constantinople (Tsargrad), where he was also charged with observing the gathering Greek–Bulgarian ecclesiastical dispute; and in 1857 he was recalled to be rector of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy, the senior such post in the Russian Church, which he held until his consecration in 1859 (Saint Theophan the Recluse, OCA; Theophan the Recluse, en.wikipedia).

The Constantinople posting deserves a note of its own, for it returned him to the Greek East at a moment of ferment. The dispute he was sent to observe — the rising Bulgarian demand for an ecclesiastical hierarchy independent of the Greek Phanar, which would culminate in the schism of 1872 and the charge of phyletism — gave him a close view of the perils of mixing national feeling with the Church’s order, and of the practical strains within Orthodoxy beyond Russia’s borders. It also kept his Greek fluent and his contacts with the Athonite and Constantinopolitan world alive, both of which would matter when he came to edit the Dobrotolyubie. He was, by the late 1850s, one of the small number of Russian churchmen equally at home in the Slavonic and the Greek ascetical traditions — and equally at home in the lecture hall, the chancery, and the cell.

These were not the posts of a recluse-in-waiting. Theophan in the 1850s was a rising churchman of the capital — professor, rector, diplomat-observer, an editor and writer for the church press — moving in exactly the world of educated, Westernized, official Orthodoxy whose spiritual shallowness he would later diagnose so sharply (see Grace, Freedom, and the Modern World). He knew that world from the inside, which is part of why his later critique of it carries weight: the man who withdrew from St. Petersburg society had first succeeded in it.

By 1859 the path that began in a country parish in Oryol had led to the rectorship of the empire’s premier theological academy. The next step was the episcopate.

See Also

References

  • Saint Theophan the Recluse, Bishop of Tambov. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, January 10. (Teaching posts; the Jerusalem mission under Porphyrius; languages and iconography learned in the East; archimandrite 1855; Olonets, Constantinople, and St. Petersburg rectorships.)
  • Theophan the Recluse. English Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theophan_the_Recluse), from the Летопись chronicle. (Dated chronology: Kiev-Sophia 1841; Novgorod 7 December 1842; St. Petersburg Academy 16 October 1844; Jerusalem mission appointed August 1847; return 3 May 1854; archimandrite 14 April 1855; Constantinople 21 May 1856.)
  • Russian Orthodox Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem. English Wikipedia. (The first mission, 1847; Archimandrite Porphyrius (Uspensky) as head; the Crimean War recall.)
  • Феофан Затворник [Theophan the Recluse]. Russian Wikipedia, citing the Летопись жизни и творений святителя Феофана Затворника. (Cross-check of the post-by-post chronology.)