Govorov and Formation (1815–1841)

The early life of Georgy Vasilievich Govorov: born in 1815 a priest’s son in the village of Chernavsk (Chernava) in Oryol province; schooled at Livny and at the Oryol seminary; sent to the Kiev Theological Academy (1837–1841), where the brilliant student was tonsured a monk with the name Theophan and ordained — the formation that turned a country deacon’s grandson into the future systematizer of Orthodox ascetical theology for the modern age.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1988)

Birth and Family (1815)

The future bishop was born Georgy (George) Vasilievich Govorov on 10 January 1815 (Old Style; 22 January New Style), the son of a rural parish priest, in the village of Chernavsk in the Oryol (Orel) governorate of central Russia (Saint Theophan the Recluse, Bishop of Tambov, Orthodox Church in America [OCA], Lives of the Saints; Theophan the Recluse, en.wikipedia, locating the chronicle sources). His father, Fr. Vasily Timofeyevich Govorov, served a country parish and was remembered as hospitable and kind-hearted; his mother, Tatiana Ivanovna, herself a priest’s daughter, was of a meek and quiet character and died in 1838 while her son was still a student at Kiev (Saint Theophan: His Childhood and Youth, OrthoChristian.com/113998.html; Феофан Затворник, ru.wikipedia, citing the Летопись жизни и творений святителя Феофана [Chronicle of the Life and Works of St. Theophan]).

The exact spelling of the birthplace is not uniform in the sources. [Disputed: the OCA Life and the English chronicle give “Chernavsk” in Oryol/Orlov province; the Russian sources give “Chernava” (Чернава), in the Yelets district (Yeletsky uyezd) of Oryol governorate (Saint Theophan the Recluse, OCA; Феофан Затворник, ru.wikipedia).] The discrepancy is a transliteration-and-rendering one rather than a substantive disagreement: all sources place the birth in the same priestly household in the same district of Oryol province in January 1815.

That household was the ordinary world of the Russian белое духовенство — the married “white” parish clergy, a near-hereditary estate from which generation after generation of priests, deacons, and church-singers came. It was from precisely this stratum that the great churchmen of nineteenth-century Russia were largely drawn, and Govorov’s near-contemporary and lifelong counterpart, the future St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, was the conspicuous exception that proved the rule — a nobleman who entered the clerical world rather than being born into it (see Influence and Translations).

The Schools (1820s–1837)

The son of a priest was, by the structure of the Russian Church, destined for the clerical schools, and Georgy passed through them as a leading student. He was sent first to the Livny (Livensk) theological school, and from there, in 1829, as one of the best pupils, to the Oryol (Orel) Theological Seminary (Saint Theophan the Recluse, OCA; Theophan the Recluse, en.wikipedia). The seminary curriculum of the period — Church Slavonic and Russian, Latin and Greek, the catechism, rhetoric, and the rudiments of philosophy and theology — laid down the philological foundation on which his later translation of the Greek and Slavonic Fathers would rest. He completed the seminary course among its strongest graduates and was selected, in 1837, to continue to one of the four imperial theological academies.

Kiev Theological Academy (1837–1841)

In 1837 Govorov entered the Kiev Theological Academy, the academy attached to the great Kiev Caves Lavra and the most venerable of the Russian higher schools of divinity; he graduated in 1841 with the academy’s master’s degree in theology (Saint Theophan the Recluse, OCA; Theophan the Recluse, en.wikipedia; Феофан Затворник, ru.wikipedia). Kiev shaped him in two ways that proved permanent. First, it set him in the orbit of a living monastic-ascetical tradition: as a student he frequented the Caves Lavra, with its cave-dwelling ascetics and the relics of the founders of Russian monasticism, and the years there fixed in him the conviction that academic theology must serve, and be tested by, the practical life of prayer and repentance. His spiritual father and the rector of the academy in these years was Archimandrite Jeremiah (Solovyov), who would tonsure him (Saint Theophan: His Childhood and Youth, OrthoChristian.com; OCA).

Second, the academy gave him the languages and the patristic library that the rest of his life would draw upon. The systematic reading of the Fathers in the original, begun at Kiev and deepened in the East, is what made possible the Dobrotolyubie — the Russian Philokalia — of his old age (see Translating the Dobrotolyubie).

The Kiev of these years was the great clearing-house of Russian spirituality, where the academic and the monastic met. The Caves Lavra, the cradle of Russian monasticism since the eleventh century, lay at the academy’s door; the Paisian revival of contemplative monasticism — the movement descending from St. Paisius Velichkovsky that was at the same time reviving Optina and the other great centres — had its own deep roots in the Kievan lands. A theological student of Govorov’s seriousness could not pass through Kiev without being marked by this confluence, and the marks are visible throughout his later life: the refusal to let theology float free of prayer, the conviction that the goal of the whole Christian enterprise is the actual transformation of the person, and the lifelong magnetic pull of the monastic ideal. The death of his gentle mother in 1838, during his second year at the academy, fell within these formative years and may be felt behind the seriousness with which the bright young man turned, in his final year, from the prospect of a brilliant academic and ecclesiastical career toward the monastic renunciation (Saint Theophan: His Childhood and Youth, OrthoChristian.com).

Tonsure and Ordination (1841)

In the last year of his academy course, having resolved on the monastic path, Govorov was tonsured a monk on 15 February 1841 (Old Style) at the Kiev Theological Academy by Archimandrite Jeremiah, and given the name Theophan — Greek Θεοφάνης, “manifestation of God,” “God-made-manifest,” the same root as the feast of the Theophany on which, fifty-three years later, he would die (Феофан Затворник, ru.wikipedia, citing the Летопись; on the name and feast, see Repose and Canonization). The providential symmetry of the name was not lost on the tradition: the recluse who would build a private chapel of the Theophany in his cell, and serve the Liturgy there alone, and die on that feast, had borne its name from his tonsure.

He was ordained hierodeacon on 6 April 1841 and hieromonk on 1 July 1841 (Феофан Затворник, ru.wikipedia). [Disputed: the English Wikipedia article gives “1840” for these ordinations and dates a petition for tonsure to 1 October 1840; this is an internal error — an ordination cannot precede the tonsure it itself dates to a later petition. The Russian chronicle’s sequence (tonsure 15 February 1841, hierodeacon 6 April 1841, hieromonk 1 July 1841) is internally consistent and is followed here.] With his graduation, his tonsure, and his ordination all falling in 1841, the twenty-six-year-old hieromonk Theophan stepped out of the schools and into the service of the Church — first as a teacher, then as a missionary to the Christian East.

See Also

• Early Service and the East — the teaching posts and the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission to Jerusalem that completed his formation
• Bishop of Tambov and Vladimir — the episcopate to which this formation led
• Translating the Dobrotolyubie — the patristic and linguistic foundation laid at Kiev and in the East
• Repose and Canonization — the name “Theophan” and the feast of his death
• Orthodoxy Guide: Russian Monasticism — the monastic world Govorov entered

References

• Saint Theophan the Recluse, Bishop of Tambov. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, January 10. (Birth 1815, Chernavsk, Oryol province, a priest’s son; Livny and Oryol schooling; Kiev Academy; tonsure and name Theophan.)
• Theophan the Recluse. English Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theophan_the_Recluse). (Chronology of schooling 1829 Oryol seminary, 1837–1841 Kiev Academy; used to locate the underlying chronicle.)
• Феофан Затворник [Theophan the Recluse]. Russian Wikipedia (ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Феофан_Затворник), citing Летопись жизни и творений святителя Феофана Затворника [Chronicle of the Life and Works of St. Theophan the Recluse]. (Father Vasily Timofeyevich Govorov; mother Tatiana Ivanovna; birthplace Chernava, Yelets district; tonsure 15 February 1841 under Archimandrite Jeremiah; hierodeacon 6 April 1841; hieromonk 1 July 1841.)
• Saint Theophan the Recluse: His Childhood and Youth. OrthoChristian.com/113998.html. (The father’s hospitality; the mother’s character and 1838 death; the fifth child in the family.)
• Летопись жизни и творений святителя Феофана Затворника [Chronicle of the Life and Works of St. Theophan the Recluse]. The authoritative modern multi-volume chronology of his life, underlying the Russian-language accounts.