The Decision to Withdraw (1866)

In 1866, at the height of his powers and in the full success of his episcopate, Bishop Theophan of Vladimir petitioned to be released from his see and to retire to a remote hermitage. He was neither infirm nor in disgrace; he chose the contemplative life over the active, the pen and the prayer-rule over the crozier — the hinge on which his whole life turned and the precondition of the vast literary harvest that followed.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1988)

The Petition (1866)

Some seven years into a strenuous and fruitful episcopate, Theophan asked to lay it down. In 1866 he petitioned to be released from the see of Vladimir in order to retire, and the request was granted: he was relieved of the Vladimir bishopric in 1866 (Saint Theophan the Recluse, Bishop of Tambov, OCA, Lives of the Saints; Theophan the Recluse, en.wikipedia; Феофан Затворник, ru.wikipedia, citing the Летопись жизни и творений святителя Феофана [Chronicle of the Life and Works of St. Theophan]). [Disputed minor date: the English and Russian Wikipedia articles give the release as 17 June 1866; OrthoChristian gives 17 July 1866; the year 1866 is unanimous across all sources (Theophan the Recluse, en.wikipedia; Феофан Затворник, ru.wikipedia; Saint Theophan the Recluse, OrthoChristian.com/76729.html).]

What makes the act remarkable is its timing and its motive. This was not the resignation of a broken man. The bishop who asked to be released was the same tireless preacher and reformer who had filled his dioceses with sermons, schools, brotherhoods, and the printed word — a respected and capable hierarch in the prime of his life and at the height of his effectiveness. He did not retire because he had failed, nor because he was ill, nor because he had fallen under any shadow. He retired because he judged that he could serve the whole Church better with his pen and his prayer than with his crozier over a single diocese — that the contemplative life to which he had been drawn since his student days at the Kiev Caves had a higher claim on him than the administration of Vladimir.

First Vysha, then the Cell (1866)

He did not pass at a single step from cathedral to hermit’s cell. On his release he was first appointed superior (nastoyatel), the abbot, of the Vyshensky (Vysha) Hermitage — the Holy Dormition Vysha Monastery, a remote house in the Tambov diocese, in the Shatsk district (Saint Theophan the Recluse, OCA; Феофан Затворник, ru.wikipedia). The choice of monastery was itself telling: he returned to the very diocese he had first governed, but now to its quietest corner. Yet even the abbacy proved more than he wanted, for it carried administrative cares of its own, and he had not surrendered a diocese in order to govern a monastery. He soon asked to be released even from the duties of superior so that he might live simply as a monk among the brethren; this further release was granted on 19 September 1866 (Феофан Затворник, ru.wikipedia, citing the Летопись).

The travel itself the sources record in dates that look discrepant but are not: the OCA Life says he set out for Vysha on 24 July 1866, while OrthoChristian gives a departure of 28 July and an arrival of 3 August 1866 — itinerary dates for a long journey across the Russian provinces rather than competing claims about a single event (Saint Theophan the Recluse, OCA; Saint Theophan the Recluse, OrthoChristian.com/76729.html). By the autumn of 1866, then, the former bishop of Vladimir was settled at Vysha as a private monk, free at last of every administrative burden, and the slow movement toward his full reclusion had begun (see Vysha Hermitage).

The Meaning of the Choice

The withdrawal can only be read rightly if it is read as a deliberate vocation rather than a retreat. The whole hagiographic and scholarly tradition frames it so: Theophan chose the contemplative life over the active — prayer and writing for the benefit of the entire Church over the governance of one corner of it. The episcopate had given him a field of immense usefulness, and he had worked it hard; but he had come to see that his deepest gift was not for administration but for the patient labour of spiritual instruction, and that this labour required the silence and the leisure that no diocese could afford its bishop. He judged, in effect, that the Church needed his books and his prayers more than it needed his omophorion — a judgement that the decades after 1866 would vindicate many times over in the great stream of letters, expositions, and translations that flowed from his cell (forward to The Recluse at Work and Translating the Dobrotolyubie).

Behind the act stood the ancient Russian and Eastern monastic ideal of withdrawal — anachoresis, the flight to the desert that had drawn ascetics since the age of the Egyptian fathers and that ran as a deep current through Russian monasticism (see Orthodoxy Guide: Spiritual Direction). What was unusual was not that a monk should seek the desert but that a bishop should. In the ordinary course, hierarchs who left their sees did so because they were aged, ill, or in some way disgraced; a sitting bishop who voluntarily surrendered office while sound in body and unblemished in reputation, simply in order to pray and write, was a rarity that the tradition itself marks as exceptional. Theophan’s contemporaries understood it as the act of a man who took the monastic vow with full seriousness and refused to let the dignity of office stand between him and the one thing needful.

It is important to read this anachoresis rightly, for the contemplative vocation is not, in the Orthodox understanding, a flight from the Church’s service but a different and equally ancient form of it. The desert fathers who fled the cities did not abandon the Body of Christ; they served it by their prayer, and in time by the word of counsel that drew the world to their cells. Withdrawal in this tradition is a movement deeper into the Church, not out of it — a laying-down of one mode of usefulness in order to take up another, often hidden and often, in the end, wider in its reach. This is precisely how Theophan understood his own act. In the later letters and writings that flowed from Vysha he gave no sign of regret and every sign of settled conviction that the solitary, praying, writing life was the very thing to which God had called him, and the harvest of those years became, for him and for the tradition, the vindication of that conviction (OCA, Lives of the Saints). What looked from outside like a withdrawal from service was, in his own mind and in the event, a withdrawal into a fuller one.

Such a choice could not but provoke surprise, and even disapproval. To many eyes a capable and beloved hierarch in the prime of his strength was simply throwing himself away — wasting on a hermit’s cell gifts that the Church needed at the head of a diocese. The objection was natural, and it measured the cost of the act: Theophan was not disposing of a failed career but of a manifestly successful one, and he had to set against the visible good of an able bishop the less visible, and to many less credible, good of a hidden writer of spiritual books. That he chose the latter, against the grain of expectation and the counsel of worldly prudence, is itself a mark of how deeply the contemplative call had taken hold of him.

A Parallel Choice: St. Ignatius Brianchaninov

He was not, however, entirely alone in it. The same decade saw a closely parallel decision by the other great bishop-ascetic-writer of nineteenth-century Russia, St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, who in 1861 resigned the see of the Caucasus and Black Sea and retired to the Nikolo-Babayevsky Monastery to devote his remaining years to the prayer-rule and the desk (Ignatius Brianchaninov, en.wikipedia). The symmetry is striking: within five years of one another, the two foremost hierarch-writers of the Russian Church each left a working diocese for the seclusion of a monastery and the labour of the pen, and each produced in that seclusion the ascetical writings on which his lasting fame rests. The two were temperamentally and even doctrinally distinct — their later disagreement over the nature of the soul would set them at odds (see Bishop of Tambov and Vladimir) — yet in this fundamental choice of the contemplative over the active they moved as one, and together they stand as the twin witnesses of a nineteenth-century Russian return to the patristic ideal of the writing hermit (on the comparison and its consequences, see Influence and Translations and the parallel build on St. Ignatius).

The parallel runs deeper than the bare coincidence of dates. Both men had been formed in the same Russian Church, shaped by the same monastic and academic world, and both arrived independently at a single diagnosis of their age — that what the modern Church most needed was not two more capable administrators but the ascetical Fathers made available, in living modern language, to a people that had largely lost access to them. Each judged that he could supply this need better with the pen than with the crozier, and each acted on the judgement by exchanging a working see for a monastery and a desk (Ignatius Brianchaninov, en.wikipedia). The lasting fame of both rests on the writings of their seclusion, not on the administration of their dioceses, and in this the two careers form a single argument: that the contemplative withdrawal, far from squandering a hierarch’s gifts, could release them on a scale no diocese could contain.

In Theophan’s case the whole of the later corpus lay folded, as a seed, within this single renunciation. Everything that the reclusion would produce — the systematic ascetical theology, the commentaries, the immense correspondence, and above all the Russian Philokalia — became possible only because in 1866 he surrendered the office that would have consumed the very hours that work required. The decision to withdraw was thus not merely the close of one chapter and the opening of another; it was the act that made the entire literary harvest possible, the renunciation in which the whole later life was already contained.

The Hinge of a Life

The decision of 1866 is rightly called the hinge of Theophan’s whole life. Everything before it — the schools, the East, the seven active years — now appears as preparation; everything after it — the reclusion, the immense correspondence, the Russian Philokalia — flows from it as from a single source. Had he remained in the episcopate, the Church would have had an able and beloved bishop and lost the writer who, more than any other, systematized Orthodox ascetical theology for the modern age. By choosing the cell, he gave the whole Church what no single diocese could have contained.

References

Saint Theophan the Recluse, Bishop of Tambov. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, January 10. (Release from Vladimir in 1866; appointment as superior of Vysha; departure for Vysha on 24 July 1866; the withdrawal as a chosen contemplative vocation.)
Theophan the Recluse. English Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theophan_the_Recluse). (Release from the Vladimir see, 17 June 1866; retirement to the Vysha Hermitage.)
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]. (Release 17 June 1866; appointment as nastoyatel of the Holy Dormition Vysha Monastery; release from the abbacy’s duties granted 19 September 1866.)
Saint Theophan the Recluse. OrthoChristian.com/76729.html. (Release dated 17 July 1866; departure 28 July, arrival at Vysha 3 August 1866.)
Ignatius Brianchaninov. English Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatius_Brianchaninov). (Resignation of the see of the Caucasus and Black Sea in 1861 and retirement to the Nikolo-Babayevsky Monastery to write — the parallel withdrawal.)
Летопись жизни и творений святителя Феофана Затворника [Chronicle of the Life and Works of St. Theophan the Recluse]. The authoritative modern multi-volume chronology underlying the Russian-language accounts.