Vysha Hermitage (1866–1872): The Retirement and the Reclusion

In 1866 the retired bishop Theophan settled at the Holy Dormition–Vysha Monastery in the Tambov diocese, but he did not vanish into solitude at once: for some six years he lived a semi-ordinary monastic life, attending the common services. Only after the Paschal days of 1872 did he enter the full and strict reclusion that would last twenty-two years until his death — withdrawing into his cell, building there with his own hands a private chapel of the Theophany, and serving the Divine Liturgy alone, at first on feast days and at last every day of his life.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1988)

The Monastery on the Vysha (1866)

When Bishop Theophan resigned the see of Vladimir and asked the Holy Synod for retirement, the place of his retreat was the Holy Dormition–Vysha Monastery — in Russian the Svyato-Uspensky Vyshensky monastery, the Vyshenskaya pustyn, and in the English accounts variously “Vysha Hermitage,” “Vyshensk,” or the “Vyshenskaya Hermitage” (Saint Theophan the Recluse: His Move to the Vysha Hermitage, OrthoChristian.com/175220.html). It stood on the right bank of the Vysha River, near the river’s confluence with the Tsna, some twenty versts from the town of Shatsk, in Shatsk County of the Tambov diocese — the same Vysha district that in later administrative redrawing would fall within the Ryazan region (OrthoChristian.com/175220.html). It was a small and out-of-the-way house, and Theophan had known it before; the choice of so quiet a place was deliberate, for the bishop who came to it had resolved that the rest of his life should be hidden.

Six Years of Ordinary Monastic Life (1866–1872)

It is one of the most commonly misremembered points of his biography that Theophan, on arriving at Vysha, shut himself away at once. He did not. For roughly six years after his retirement in 1866 he lived what the sources call a semi-ordinary monastic life: he kept to the rhythm of the house, went to the common church, and stood the services with the brotherhood (Saint Theophan the Recluse and Bishop of Vladimir and Suzdal, johnsanidopoulos.com/2010/01; Saint Theophan the Recluse, Bishop of Tambov, OCA, Lives of the Saints). This interval matters for understanding what followed. The reclusion was not a sudden flight or a temperamental withdrawal but a measured, tested decision, taken only after years of weighing within the ordinary common life of a monastery (see The Decision to Withdraw).

From the winter of 1866 his quarters were prepared: a cell built over the stone prosphora bakery of the monastery, reasonably spacious, with a north-side balcony screened by a carved wooden grate (OrthoChristian.com/76729.html; Saint Theophan the Recluse and the Vysha Hermitage, johnsanidopoulos.com/2018/01). The room was furnished with extreme simplicity — bare walls, a cheap closet, a cheap chest of drawers, a worn table, and a couch of birch wood (OrthoChristian.com/76729.html). The austerity of the furnishings stood in deliberate contrast to the one form of wealth the cell did contain, of which more below.

The Entry into Strict Reclusion (Pascha 1872)

After the Paschal days of 1872, Theophan entered the full and strict reclusion for which he is remembered. He cut off contact with people, retaining only his confessor and chief priest as a link to the sacramental life of the house, and he ceased to attend the monastery church (OCA, Lives of the Saints; johnsanidopoulos.com/2010/01; Saint Theophan the Recluse, the God-Bearing Teacher of the Christian Life, OrthoChristian.com/76729.html). The arithmetic of his hiddenness is striking and is repeated across the accounts: he lived at Vysha twenty-eight years in all, of which twenty-two were passed in strict reclusion, until his repose in 1894 (OCA; johnsanidopoulos.com/2010/01; OrthoChristian.com/76729.html). From the spring of 1872 onward, the bishop who had governed dioceses and preached to crowds would be seen by almost no one.

The Spiritual Logic of Reclusion

To modern eyes the choice of zatvor — strict reclusion — can look like a retreat from love into self-regard, a withdrawal from the Church into oneself. In the Russian and broader Orthodox tradition it is understood as very nearly the opposite. The recluse withdraws not from a fondness for solitude as such, still less from any distaste for his brethren, but in order to give himself wholly and without remainder to unceasing prayer and to God. Reclusion is reckoned among the most intense forms of the monastic vocation precisely because it is the most undivided: the recluse has stripped from his life every occupation, however good, that might compete with the one work of standing before God, so that the whole of his waking strength may flow into prayer. The Vysha sources present Theophan’s withdrawal in exactly these terms — a man who had governed dioceses and could have ended his days in honored activity instead chose hiddenness, that he might serve God alone and pray for the world he no longer saw (OCA, Lives of the Saints; johnsanidopoulos.com/2010/01).

The two stages of his life at Vysha must therefore be kept distinct, for they answer to two distinct measures of this self-giving. The semi-eremitic first years (1866–1872) were already a withdrawal from the public office of a bishop, but they preserved the common life: he still went out to the monastery church and stood the services with the brotherhood (OCA; johnsanidopoulos.com/2010/01). The strict zatvor entered after Pascha 1872 was a further and decisive deepening. Concretely, “strict reclusion” meant that he received no one but his confessor and chief priest, took the food that was passed to him without himself going out for it, never left his cell-suite, and no longer attended the common church at all (OrthoChristian.com/76729.html; OCA, Lives of the Saints; johnsanidopoulos.com/2010/01). Every thread that still bound him to the visible society of the monastery, save the single sacramental thread of his confessor, was cut — not from coldness, but so that nothing should stand between the recluse and the unceasing prayer that was now to be the substance of his days.

The center of gravity of this whole regime was the daily solitary Liturgy. Once he had begun, in the second decade of his reclusion, to serve every day (roca.org, Orthodox America), the Liturgy became the fixed sun around which the prayer, reading, writing, and handicraft of the cell all turned. The recluse who saw no congregation nonetheless offered, alone, the Church’s central act of communion with God, and from that daily offering the rest of his ordered labor took its meaning and its measure.

The Cell and Its Library

The poverty of the furnishings was real, but the cell was not bare of all things. It held a vast multilingual library — books in Russian, Slavonic, Greek, French, German, and English — that made the recluse’s chamber a place of immense learning (johnsanidopoulos.com/2018/01). Among its holdings the Sanidopoulos account records a complete collection of the Holy Fathers, a 150-volume French theological encyclopedia, and works of philosophy and natural history, the philosophers including Hegel and Fichte (johnsanidopoulos.com/2018/01). The combination is characteristic of the man: a monk who had renounced the company of human beings surrounded himself with the company of the Fathers and of the best of human learning, the better to transpose it into the spiritual writing that would be his life’s labor (see The Recluse at Work).

The Chapel of the Theophany and the Solitary Liturgy

Within his chambers Theophan built, with his own hands, a small private church dedicated to the Baptism of the Lord — the Holy Theophany (johnsanidopoulos.com/2010/01; OCA, Lives of the Saints). In this chapel he served the Divine Liturgy entirely alone. The pattern of his serving is recorded with unusual precision in the Orthodox America account: “For the first ten years he served the Liturgy in this church every Sunday and feast day, and for the next eleven years everyday” (Bishop Theophan the Recluse of Vysha, roca.org, Orthodox America). He served wholly by himself, sometimes in silence and sometimes singing (johnsanidopoulos.com/2010/01; roca.org). That singing is the only confirmed music in his solitude, and it should not be enlarged upon: the violin class and the physics laboratory with its microscope that the sources mention belonged to the Vysha monastery school, not to Theophan, and there is no reliable warrant for saying that he himself played an instrument or studied medicine. What the record affirms is the lone bishop, singing the Liturgy to God in a chapel no one else entered.

There is a providence in the chapel’s dedication that the tradition has long noted. The name Theophan means “manifestation of God,” and the chapel of the Theophany — the feast of the manifestation of the Holy Trinity at the Lord’s Baptism — prefigured the day of his death: Theophan reposed on the feast of the Theophany in 1894, having borne its name since his tonsure and served its mystery alone for two decades (see Repose and Canonization).

The Daily Regime

The hours of the recluse were filled, not emptied. Prayer, reading, writing, and the answering of correspondence consumed his days; only in rare free moments did he turn to manual labor (roca.org). He ate sparingly — only enough so as not to ruin his health — and gave away to the poor what he received (roca.org). His hands were not idle. He painted icons, of which the accounts speak warmly (“He painted excellent icons”), and he worked at a range of crafts: carpentry, wood-turning at the lathe, woodcarving, bookbinding, and locksmithing, his cell holding the tools for all of these (OCA; roca.org; OrthoChristian.com/76729.html). It even held photographic equipment, a notable detail for a hermit of the period (OrthoChristian.com/76729.html). The labor of his hands, however, was always the secondary thing; the primary labor of the cell was the pen, and it is to that workshop of the reclusion that the larger part of his ministry belongs (see The Recluse at Work).

Taken together, these details disclose the cell as a kind of microcosm — a whole world of prayer and work compressed into a few rooms. Within that small compass lay a chapel for the Liturgy and the hours, a library to rival a seminary’s for the reading of the Fathers, and a workshop fitted for icon-painting, carpentry, wood-turning, bookbinding, and the rest (johnsanidopoulos.com/2018/01; OCA; roca.org). The recluse had not so much abandoned the world as folded a complete Christian life into the space of his suite: worship, study, manual labor, and almsgiving all carried on without his ever crossing the threshold. The narrowing of his outward range was thus matched by an inward concentration; the fewer the rooms, the more wholly each hour within them belonged to God.

See Also

• The Decision to Withdraw — how the resignation of the episcopate led to Vysha and the choice of reclusion
• The Recluse at Work — the writing, translating, and correspondence that filled the daily regime of the cell
• Repose and Canonization — the name “Theophan,” the chapel of the Theophany, and his death on that feast
• Spiritual Direction by Mail — the correspondence by which the recluse kept contact with the world he had left
• Orthodoxy Guide: Russian Monasticism — the monastic and eremitic tradition within which the Vysha reclusion stands

References

• Saint Theophan the Recluse: His Move to the Vysha Hermitage. OrthoChristian.com/175220.html. (The Holy Dormition–Vysha Monastery; its names; location on the Vysha near the Tsna, twenty versts from Shatsk, Shatsk County, Tambov diocese; later Ryazan administration.)
• Saint Theophan the Recluse and Bishop of Vladimir and Suzdal. johnsanidopoulos.com/2010/01. (The six years of semi-ordinary life before reclusion; the chapel of the Baptism of the Lord built by his own hands; the solitary Liturgy on Sundays and feasts, then daily; twenty-eight years at Vysha, twenty-two in reclusion.)
• Saint Theophan the Recluse and the Vysha Hermitage. johnsanidopoulos.com/2018/01. (The cell over the stone prosphora bakery; the balcony with carved grate; the multilingual library, the complete Fathers, the 150-volume French theological encyclopedia, Hegel and Fichte, natural history.)
• Saint Theophan the Recluse, the God-Bearing Teacher of the Christian Life. OrthoChristian.com/76729.html. (The simplicity of the furnishings; the entry into strict reclusion after Pascha 1872; the confessor retained; the handicraft tools and photographic equipment.)
• Saint Theophan the Recluse, Bishop of Tambov. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, January 10. (The retirement to Vysha; the semi-ordinary life; the chapel of the Theophany; icon-painting and carpentry; the solitary Liturgy.)
• Bishop Theophan the Recluse of Vysha. roca.org, Orthodox America. (The frequency of the solitary Liturgy — ten years on Sundays and feasts, eleven years daily; the daily regime of prayer, reading, writing, and rare manual labor; sparing food; almsgiving; the crafts.)