What the Spiritual Life Is

St. Theophan the Recluse’s The Spiritual Life and How to Be Attuned to It (Russ. Chto est’ dukhovnaya zhizn’ i kak na neyo nastroit’sya, 1878) is a series of eighty letters of spiritual direction written to a young woman of educated Moscow society. His most accessible work, it presents the same body/soul/spirit anthropology as his systematic manuals, but as a personal summons to a worldly soul to “attune” itself to the spirit — the God-ward power that “knows God, seeks God, and in Him alone finds rest.”

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1988)

A Book of Letters

If The Path to Salvation is St. Theophan’s systematic architecture of the inner life, The Spiritual Life and How to Be Attuned to It is its accessible doorway. The book is not a treatise but a compilation of letters of spiritual direction, written to an anonymous young woman of upper-class Moscow society. The occasion is famous: in the midst of her worldly life, the young woman was seized by a sudden sense of the futility and emptiness of it all — by one well-attested account, at a ball — and turned for guidance to the recluse of Vysha. He answered her in a series of letters that became, in published form, his most beloved introduction to the spiritual life; she herself later became a nun (The Spiritual Life and How to Be Attuned to It, St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood ed.; the Russian original at azbyka.ru). [Disputed: the recipient is sometimes called a “Countess,” but the sources treat her as anonymous; she is best described simply as a young woman of educated Moscow society, with no title asserted.]

The Russian original, Chto est’ dukhovnaya zhizn’ i kak na neyo nastroit’sya, appeared in 1878. The standard English translation, by Alexandra Dockham, was published by the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood (St. Paisius Abbey) in 1995, and a later St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press edition also exists (store.ancientfaith.com; archive.org). The work is organized as eighty numbered letters, and it is by these letter-numbers, rather than by page, that its teaching is most reliably cited — for, as will be seen, the various editions differ in their pagination.

The Three Layers of Life

The whole of the book rests on a single anthropological conviction, stated to the correspondent early on: that man is a being of three levels. As Theophan writes in Letter 5, “A man has three layers of life: that of the spirit, of the soul, and of the body” (The Spiritual Life, Letter 5). The bodily life is the life man shares with all living things; the soul is the seat of his ordinary mental, emotional, and practical life; and the spirit is the highest layer, the dimension by which he is open to God. The spiritual life, properly so called, is the life of this third layer — and the tragedy of the worldly person is that this layer, though present in everyone, lies dormant and unattended while the soul and body absorb all his energy. The aim of the whole correspondence is to awaken the spirit and to “attune” the soul and body to it. This threefold anthropology is identical to that of his systematic works and is developed at length elsewhere in his corpus (see The Heart as Center).

What the Spirit Is

The heart of the book is its account of the spirit, which Theophan unfolds for his correspondent in Letter 9. He defines it first by its origin, as the breath of God in man: it is, he tells her, “that force which God breathed into man when He created him” (The Spiritual Life, Letter 9, cited to the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood edition). Its origin determines its orientation. The spirit, he continues, is that in man which “knows God, seeks God, and in Him alone finds rest” (Letter 9) — a phrase that gathers the whole Augustinian and patristic intuition of the God-ward restlessness of the human person into a single line addressed to a young woman who had just discovered, at a ball, that the world could not give her rest.

From this Theophan draws the measure of man’s dignity and his place in the order of creation. As he tells his correspondent, “The human soul makes us a little above the animals, while the spirit makes us a little below the angels” (Letter 9, cited to the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood edition). The soul, with its reason and will, lifts man above the beasts; but it is the spirit, with its knowledge of and longing for God, that sets him just below the angelic ranks. To live only at the level of the soul — however cultivated, intelligent, or refined — is therefore to live beneath one’s nature; it is to be merely “a little above the animals” when one is made to be “a little below the angels.”

It is worth noting that in this work the three movements of the spirit are given as fear of God, conscience, and thirst (longing) for God. This is a slight but real variation from the triad in The Path to Salvation, where the spirit’s three activities are fear of God, conscience, and prayer (see The Path to Salvation). The two formulations are complementary rather than contradictory: prayer is precisely the movement of the soul’s thirst toward the God it longs for, and the difference of wording reflects the difference between a systematic manual and an intimate letter.

The Heart as the Center of Life

If the spirit is the highest layer of man, the heart is the place where the whole of his inner life is concentrated. In Letter 8 Theophan explains to his correspondent why the spiritual tradition gives the heart such weight: “Everything which enters the soul from the outside … falls into the heart,” he writes, and for that reason, he continues, “That is why it is called the center of life” (The Spiritual Life, Letter 8, cited to the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood edition). The heart is not a metaphor for sentiment but the inner center where every impression, thought, and impulse is registered and where the person’s true disposition is formed. This is also why it is the battleground of the spiritual life, for, as he warns, “The passions more than anything tyrannize the heart” (Letter 8). The work of attuning oneself to the spirit is therefore, concretely, the work of cleansing and ordering the heart — a teaching he develops systematically elsewhere (see The Heart as Center).

A word of honesty is owed about these particular quotations. The page-level citations for the Letter 8 and Letter 9 passages reach us through reputable secondary Orthodox sources citing the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood (1995) edition, rather than from a character-checked primary copy, and the editions differ in their pagination (the older Jordanville 1962 printing and the St. Herman 1995 edition do not agree). For that reason the passages are attributed here to the letter and to the St. Herman edition, without over-precise page references; the letter-numbers are the secure anchor.

The Pastoral Genius of the Book

The lasting importance of The Spiritual Life is that it is the most accessible doorway into Theophan’s entire system. It carries the same body/soul/spirit anthropology, the same doctrine of the heart, and the same call to live by the spirit that fill his ascetical manuals — but it carries them not to monks in a monastery but to a young woman of educated Moscow society, in the language of personal letters. This is the mark of his pastoral genius: he meets the educated modern reader exactly where she is, in the disenchantment of a worldly life that has lost its savor, and from that very point of emptiness he leads her by stages toward the spirit and toward God. The book is thus both an introduction to his thought and a model of his method as a director of souls — a method exercised on an enormous scale through his correspondence (see Spiritual Direction by Mail), and continuous with the broader Orthodox practice of spiritual fatherhood (see Spiritual Direction). For the modern reader seeking a single point of entry into Theophan, no better one exists.

Meeting the Soul Where It Is

What makes the book a masterpiece of direction is the exactness with which Theophan begins from his correspondent’s actual condition. He does not open with doctrine but with her experience: the sudden disenchantment of a young woman of educated Moscow society who had felt, in the midst of her pleasures — by one well-attested account, at a ball — the futility and emptiness of the whole worldly round (The Spiritual Life, St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood ed.). That sense of emptiness is not scolded as worldliness to be repented of; it is treated as the first stirring of the dormant spirit, the proof that the soul was made for something the world cannot give. From this single foothold he leads her step by step: first to the recognition that worldly life, however refined, cannot satisfy a being made “a little below the angels” (Letter 9); then to the discovery that within her lies a third and higher layer, the spirit, “that force which God breathed into man” (Letter 9); and only then to the disciplines by which the heart, the “center of life,” may be cleansed and the soul attuned to the spirit (Letter 8). The order is pedagogical rather than systematic — he begins where she stands and moves only as far as she can follow.

The epistolary form is not incidental to this method but is itself the method. A letter is addressed to one soul in one condition, and it may be gradual, personal, and adapted in a way no treatise can be; Theophan can press a point or let it rest, return to an earlier theme, and meet his correspondent’s resistances as they arise, because he is writing to a person and not to an audience (The Spiritual Life, St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood ed.; the Russian original at azbyka.ru). The eighty letters thus enact, in their very form, the patient art of spiritual fatherhood — a director of souls leading one soul, at her own pace, from emptiness toward God. This is also why the book stands so far from a dry catechism. A catechism instructs the understanding with settled answers; Theophan addresses the heart and the lived condition of a modern person, beginning from a felt dissatisfaction rather than from a proposition to be assented to.

For exactly these reasons the work is the best entry point into Theophan’s whole system for the modern lay reader. It carries the same threefold anthropology as The Path to Salvation — the doctrine that man lives on three layers, spirit, soul, and body (Letter 5) — and the same teaching on the heart, but it carries them without the apparatus of a manual, in the idiom of a personal correspondence aimed at someone whose life looks much like the reader’s own. The continuity of its anthropology with the systematic works means that nothing learned here must be unlearned later; the lay reader who begins with these letters and proceeds to The Path to Salvation finds the same architecture, now drawn out in full (see The Path to Salvation). The disenchanted modern reader, in other words, is met by Theophan precisely as his Moscow correspondent was met — at the point of emptiness, and led from there toward the spirit.

References

St. Theophan the Recluse. The Spiritual Life and How to Be Attuned to It. Trans. Alexandra Dockham. St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood / St. Paisius Abbey, 1995 (a later St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press edition also exists). Russian original Chto est’ dukhovnaya zhizn’ i kak na neyo nastroit’sya (1878); original text at azbyka.ru. Structure: eighty numbered letters. (store.ancientfaith.com; archive.org.) (Letter 5: the three layers of life — spirit, soul, body. Letter 8: the heart as the center of life; the passions tyrannize the heart. Letter 9: the spirit as the force God breathed into man, which knows, seeks, and rests in God; the soul a little above the animals, the spirit a little below the angels. The Letter 8 and Letter 9 passages are cited via reputable secondary sources referencing the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood 1995 edition; editions differ in pagination.)