Date: 2026-08-15T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Spiritual instruction; Theophan the Recluse; Orthodox moral theology; virtue and the passions; degrees of the spiritual life; the anatomy of sin; Russian Orthodox spirituality; ascetical guide to the Christian life; Religion & Spirituality; Christianity / Orthodox; Christianity / Christian Living / Spiritual Growth
Description: What is virtue, precisely — and what is sin? Saint Theophan the Recluse answers both with a physician's exactness, setting out the whole moral life of the Christian in two symmetrical parts. The first defines virtue: its three senses, its degrees, the graces that root it in the heart. The second dissects sin — its kinds, the passions that breed it, the ruinous states of soul it hardens into, and the three enemies who drive a man toward it. A working map for anyone in earnest about making progress.

Instruction on Progress in the Christian Life

Theophan the Recluse

Royal Archives

2026

Copyright

The modern English translation and the cover design are © 2026 Royal Archives. All rights reserved.

The underlying source text is in the public domain.

Published by Royal Archives

First published 2026

Translated by Royal Archives

Source: Творения иже во святых отца нашего Феофана Затворника. — М.: Изд. Афонского Русского Пантелеимонова монастыря (дореволюционное издание, переизд.).

Cover: The Harvest — Mowers (Страдная пора. Косцы, 1887) by Grigoriy Myasoedov (Russian, 1834–1911), Wikimedia Commons, which is in the public domain.

Edition identifier: urn:royalarchives:nastavlenie_o_prespejanii:en:1

Introduction

The Author

Saint Theophan the Recluse was born Georgy Vasilievich Govorov on the tenth of January, 1815, in the village of Chernavsk in Oryol province, in the Russian heartland. He was formed from boyhood in the schools of the Russian Church and, taking monastic vows, rose steadily through her teaching and pastoral offices before being consecrated a bishop in 1859. He governed the diocese of Tambov and then, from 1863, the ancient see of Vladimir. By every outward measure he was a churchman of consequence: an administrator, a preacher, a founder of schools.

Yet the office never held him. In 1866, at the height of his influence, he petitioned to be released from the burdens of a ruling bishop and withdrew to the quiet Vysha hermitage in Tambov province, a place he had come to love while shepherding that diocese. There, in 1872, he took the further and decisive step that gave him his name: he sealed himself into reclusion. For the last twenty-two years of his life he did not leave his few small rooms, kept no company but his confessor, and built a private chapel where he served the Liturgy—for a decade on Sundays and feasts, and in his final years every single day, alone. Reclusion did not mean silence. Money sent to him he gave to the poor, keeping only enough for books; his hours went to prayer, to carpentry and icon-painting, and above all to the pen. He answered every one of the twenty to forty letters that reached him daily, and he wrote, steadily and voluminously, until his death at Vysha on the sixth of January, 1894.

That written labor is why he is read today. Theophan set himself to carry the mind of the Fathers into a language his own century could hear, and his gift was exactly this translation of ancient wisdom into terms a modern reader can grasp. He rendered the Philokalia, the great anthology of the Church’s contemplative masters, into Russian, and he composed spiritual manuals—most famously The Path to Salvation — that remain in use across the Orthodox world and well beyond it. Because he stood so near our own time, many find him a more approachable guide than the earlier patristic literature he loved and mediated. The Russian Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints at its Local Council of 1988, the council that marked the millennium of the baptism of Rus, and he is commemorated on the tenth of January. The act of his glorification praised his writings precisely as a faithful unfolding of the Fathers’ teaching.

The Work: Occasion & Purpose

Instruction on Progress in the Christian Life belongs to the shorter pieces of Theophan’s output—one of the “minor works” gathered in the collected editions of his writings—but it is not slight. It is a compact, deliberately systematic treatise on the two things a person striving toward God most needs to understand: what virtue actually is, and what sin actually is. The Russian title turns on the word преспеяние, meaning progress, advancement, growth—the forward motion of a soul that means to get somewhere. The book exists to serve that motion.

Its purpose is diagnostic before it is exhortatory. Theophan noticed, as every experienced confessor does, that earnest people stall in the spiritual life not chiefly for want of desire but for want of a map. They cannot tell a genuine virtue from a respectable habit, or a mortal wound from a scratch; they mistake the passion driving them for the act it produces; they cannot name the state their soul has settled into. This little book answers that need. It takes the whole moral life apart and lays out its members in order, so that a reader can locate exactly where he stands and what stands in his way. Its closing sentence is telling: having mapped the terrain of virtue and sin, Theophan says that how a sinner is to extricate himself, and how the good are to stand firm, is matter for a separate treatment—for what he calls ascetics. The book is thus the survey that his ascetical writing, The Path to Salvation chief among it, presupposes. That work charts the journey; this one charts the ground. The two are companions and should not be confused: one asks what the Christian life is, the other how it is walked.

Theophan did not build his definitions from nothing, and he says so on the page. Behind them stand the moral catechesis of the Russian Church and the Fathers it received—Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, whose On True Christianity he quotes repeatedly; Saint Macarius the Great, whose counsel on how to begin the virtuous life he reproduces at length; and the catechetical Orthodox Confession. The originality of the work lies not in inventing doctrine but in ordering it into a clear, usable whole.

Argument & Structure

The treatise is built in two symmetrical halves, and the symmetry is the argument. Part one treats virtue; part two treats sin; and the two are examined under the very same three aspects, so that the second half reads as the exact negative of the first. Virtue and sin alike are considered as a settled disposition of the heart, as a particular deed, and as an abiding state of the whole person. Twenty-two brief sections carry this scheme through—short enough to read at a sitting, discrete enough to consult like a manual.

The first half opens by unfolding the word virtue into its three senses: diligence in good works generally, a good disposition rooted in the heart, and any single obedient act—the first being the foundation, the second the true character of virtue, the third the means by which the second is planted. That these three are not competing definitions but one living process Theophan shows by way of Saint Macarius the Great, whose counsel he sets out in full: a man begins by believing firmly and giving himself over to God’s commandments; he then compels himself to every good deed even when his heart resists; and at last the Lord, seeing that willing struggle, imprints the virtues in him by the Holy Spirit until they become as if natural to him, so that he does easily what he once had to force. Diligence, deed, and settled disposition are thus successive stages of a single ascent—which is why the book can treat them separately without pulling them apart. Theophan then fixes what genuine virtue requires: constant, zealous keeping of God’s law, grounded in faith, quickened by love, and inseparable from self-denial. Because virtue admits of degree, he asks how one faithful life may stand higher than another, and answers by four measures—the purity of the motive, the willingness that carries one through difficulty, the breadth of the obedience, and the steadiness of zeal under temptation. From here he distinguishes the virtues we possess by nature from those won through struggle and those infused by grace; he defines the truly good work by its object, aim, and circumstances; and he marks off such works from the merely respectable acts that win the praise of men but not of God, who reads the heart. The half closes on the delicate question of grace and freedom, insisting that grace does not override the will but rouses, strengthens, and guides it—with the will’s own consent and cooperation.

The second half turns the same analytic gaze upon sin, and here the treatise reads almost like a physician’s handbook. Sin, too, is taken first as a deed: everything done against God’s law with knowledge and freedom, and thus the gravest of evils, since by it a person sets his own will above God’s and cuts himself off from the source of life. Theophan then classifies sins several ways—inward or committed, our own or shared in another’s guilt, light and venial or grave and mortal—pausing over the most serious of all, the sins against the Holy Spirit and the sins that cry to heaven, and offering rules for weighing how heavy a given fault really is. He descends from acts to their roots, the sinful dispositions or passions, which he gathers under three heads—sensuality, avarice, and pride—and anatomizes into their branches. From the passions he moves to the states they harden into: negligence, hardening and its slide into despair, moral slavery, hypocrisy, and the self-deceiving spiritual delusion of the man who thinks himself already perfect. He closes by naming the three forces that drive a soul toward sin and hold it there—the flesh, the world, and the devil—describing how each works and insisting throughout that these are seducers only, never able to compel, so that the sinner’s own consent remains the hinge of his guilt.

Theological & Spiritual Significance

The value of this small book is that it makes Orthodox moral theology legible. Much spiritual writing moves by exhortation and image; Theophan here moves by definition and division, giving the reader a structure firm enough to think with. Three of its emphases repay attention.

First, its account of virtue by degree resists two opposite errors at once. Against complacency, it insists that fleeting pious feelings and mere outward conformity are not yet virtue, and that even the perfect must go on being perfected—Theophan cites Paul’s own “I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it” to make the point. Against despair, it insists that the highest measure, the full stature of Christ, cannot be reached on earth and need not be, so long as one presses on. Progress, not arrival, is the standard, which is precisely what a book about преспеяние should teach.

Second, its handling of grace and freedom is carefully poised. Theophan holds the divine action and the human effort together without letting either collapse into the other: grace weakens the pull toward evil and awakens the pull toward good, yet requires prayer for it and ready obedience to it, and can be resisted, quenched, or fanned into flame. The good work becomes higher than any natural work—as gold mixed with bronze surpasses bronze—precisely because grace and a free, willing heart meet in it. This is a genuinely pastoral synthesis, guarding both the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of the person. It also has a practical edge: because the same person may hold one virtue by nature, another by hard-won struggle, and the deepest—faith, hope, and love—only as gifts poured in by the Spirit, the reader is taught to expect his growth to be uneven, and to labor where labor tells while praying for what only grace can give.

Third, the treatise is quietly ecumenical in its resources, and a reader from any Christian tradition will find its furniture familiar. The threefold analysis of the passions under sensuality, avarice, and pride; the distinction of venial from mortal sin; the categories of sins against the Holy Spirit and sins crying to heaven; the naming of the flesh, the world, and the devil as the three enemies—these belong to the broad common inheritance of Christian moral reflection, East and West alike. Theophan presents them from within the Russian Orthodox tradition and with its saints as his witnesses, but he presents a moral map that Christians across the confessions will recognize as, in large part, their own. That is part of what makes him so serviceable a guide beyond the boundaries of his own Church.

The Text & This Edition

This is a fresh, standalone English edition, translated for the modern reader from Theophan’s Russian. The Russian text is a public-domain original; it descends from the collected editions of the saint’s works, including the pre-revolutionary edition issued by the Russian Panteleimon Monastery of Athos, and circulates today among his gathered minor writings. The present translation was made directly from that Russian—it is an English edition, not a parallel or bilingual one, and the Russian is not set against it on the page.

The edition follows the conventions of this series. The author is named as the Church has always received him—Saint Theophan the Recluse—and any who carried his words into English are credited as translators, never as authors. The English has been rendered in a dignified but genuinely modern register, so that a nineteenth-century systematic treatise reads clearly for a reader today without losing its precision or its gravity. Scripture, which Theophan quotes on nearly every page, has been translated from his own wording—the Slavonic and Synodal Russian phrasing he actually used—rather than swapped for the text of an existing English Bible, so that his citations continue to say what he meant them to say. Chapter divisions and scriptural references are given in the plain Arabic style used throughout these editions (Rom. 6:22, not Rom. vi. 22). No footnotes or scholarly apparatus intrude on the text; where Theophan himself names a source in the body of his work—Tikhon of Zadonsk, Macarius the Great, the Orthodox Confession — that attribution is his own and has been kept.

Suggestions for Reading

Read this as a manual, not a meditation. It rewards the reader who comes with a question — Is what I am doing actually a virtue? Which passion is really at work in me? What state has my soul settled into? — and looks up the answer. The two halves are best read as a matched pair: the chapters on the degrees of virtue and the rules for weighing sin are mirror images, and each illuminates the other. Newcomers to Theophan may find it useful to read this book first and The Path to Salvation after, since this one names the terrain that the other teaches you to cross. And it is worth remembering the note on which the whole closes: the book diagnoses, but it points beyond itself to the labor of actually getting free. The map is not the journey—but no one walks far without one.

On Virtue

The word virtue has more than one meaning. 1) Sometimes it means “diligence” (2 Pet. 1:5) or “earnest care” in doing good works in general (Tit. 3:8); 2) sometimes—a good disposition of the heart, which underlies a certain kind of good actions, such as, for example, humility or patience; 3) sometimes—any good work or any keeping of the commandment. The first constitutes the essential foundation of all virtuous life; the second imparts the true character of virtue to particular actions; the last serves as an expression of the first two, or more precisely, are for the first a means to establish the second in the heart (thus, for example, one who lacks patience but strives for it through particular acts of patience establishes in the heart a willing and true patience).

Virtue as the Foundation of Virtuous Life

In this regard, virtue is defined thus: it is constant, zealous care in accurately keeping God’s law, grounded in faith and animated by love and reverence for God. From this, the following properties of Christian virtue naturally flow: 1) it consists in constant, zealous care in accurately keeping God’s law. “Stand firm, be immovable, abounding in the Lord’s work always,” says the Apostle (1 Cor. 15:58). Therefore, fleeting feelings of piety, which sometimes even the vicious experience, as well as fruitless desire to live in accordance with God’s law and mere external keeping of it, do not yet constitute Christian virtue; 2) the foundation of this virtue is true faith in Jesus Christ, or firm conviction of mind and heart in the truth of His teaching and the necessity of fulfilling it. Whoever does not believe that he is the greatest sinner and deserves eternal punishment for his sins, that he can obtain salvation only through Jesus Christ, Who “died for our sins” (1 Cor. 15:3), that through the death of the Son of God salvation is truly obtained only by those who, “freed from sin,” live in righteousness (1 Pet. 2:24), “do the will” “of your Father in heaven” (Matt. 7:21)—whoever does not believe this will never be a zealous keeper of God’s law; 3) true virtue grounded in faith is animated by reverent love toward God. Only this love can inspire and sustain in us constant, zealous care in keeping God’s law (Rom. 8:35–39). It is known that we willingly and zealously fulfill the commands of those whom we love and respect. Love alone, as the purest motive, gives our virtue high dignity, or rather, in it consists Christian virtue; for love, according to the Apostle, “is the fulfilling of the law” (Rom. 13:10) and “the bond of perfection” (Col. 3:14); 4) finally, judging by how zeal itself arises and by the nature of love, self-denial must be a necessary attribute of Christian virtue. “If anyone would come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me,” (Lk. 9:23). Self-denial generally means the strong effort of a person to destroy in himself self-love, or false, disordered love of himself, which is incompatible with true love for God and neighbor: “Love does not boast, is not proud, does not act shamefully, does not seek its own” (1 Cor. 13:4–5). In particular, it consists in restraining or mortifying the passions that arise from self-love as branches from a root. The chief of these are: “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.” (1 Jn. 2:16). Since these passions precisely turn a person from virtue toward vice, one who desires to progress in Christian virtue must constantly destroy them in himself, or live amid the struggles of self-denial. And in general, no good work can be performed without self-denial; for as soon as self-love participates in it, the work either becomes impure or loses the goodness proper to it.

The Various Degrees of Christian Virtue

Just as bodily life has stages of growth, so too spiritual or virtuous life must have its degrees. Scripture testifies to this, not only through experience but by calling some infants in Christ and others perfect: “Everyone who partakes of milk is unacquainted with the word of righteousness, for he is a babe; but solid food is for the mature, for those who have their faculties trained by practice to discern good and evil.” (Heb. 5:13–14). And even among the perfect there should be degrees, as is evident from the fact that the Apostle not only exhorts others to be perfected: “Brothers, rejoice, be made perfect,” (2 Cor. 13:11) but also speaks of himself: “Brothers, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” (Phil. 3:13–14). The highest degree of spiritual perfection, according to Scripture, is “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ,” (Eph. 4:13) which consists in “walking” (living) “in the same manner… as He walked” (1 Jn. 2:6) Jesus Christ did and taking on those good moral qualities whose example He showed us for ourselves (Phil. 2:5), or in short, being “holy in all your conduct.” (1 Pet. 1:15). But this cannot be fully attained on earth; for “if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us,” says the Apostle (1 Jn. 1:8). Yet this must not weaken in us the zeal to cleanse ourselves with all our strength “from every defilement of flesh and spirit” (2 Cor. 7:1) and thereby gradually perfect ourselves in holiness.

Rules for Determining Degrees of Christian Virtue

To determine the various degrees of virtue in our present condition, when we must still “struggle against sin,” (Heb. 12:4) the following rules can be established: our virtue is the more perfect: 1) the purer our motives by which we strive to keep God’s law. Those who act from fear of punishment are below those who act from hope of eternal bliss. The most perfect virtue is found in those who do all things to the glory of God in faith in our Lord Jesus Christ; 2) the greater willingness with which we keep God’s law and the more difficult this is for us either inwardly in the state of our spirit or outwardly in our circumstances. One is accompanied by approval and attention from others, another is not spared mockery and oppression; one’s passions greatly trouble him, another experiences them as light movements, and so forth. The widow who brought her last two coins into the temple brought, according to the Lord’s words, the richest gift compared to those who gave “from their abundance.” (Lk. 21:1–4); 3) the wider the circle of our good activity, that is, when we strive in all things to act in accordance with God’s law, rather than limiting ourselves to keeping only certain commandments, remembering the Apostle’s words: “Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it,” (Jas. 2:10). Finally: 4) the more steadfast our zeal in keeping God’s law, the more courageously we overcome all temptations that draw toward sin. Those are very weak in faith who “believe for a while and in time of temptation fall away” from faith (Lk. 8:13).

Virtues as Good Dispositions of Heart and Will

Underlying a certain kind of good works must be a kindred good disposition of spirit; otherwise good works will lack true value and virtue without this is altogether unreliable. Thus, acts of almsgiving are good works, but underlying them should be love and compassion for the poor, or mercy. When Christians are commanded to advance in virtues, it is precisely these good dispositions that are meant. Thus the Apostle Peter exhorts: “To sum up, let all be harmonious, sympathetic, brotherly, kindhearted, and humble in spirit; not returning evil for evil or insult for insult, but giving a blessing instead.” (1 Pet. 3:8–9). And the Apostle Paul: “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.” (Col. 3:12–14). The more one succeeds in implanting such dispositions in the heart, the more reliable and firm he becomes. One entering upon the path of virtue may have them in seed form; but to bring them to where they become as if natural to him cannot be done except through long labor and struggle.

Saint Macarius the Great teaches thus about this, and at the same time about the entire order of virtuous life: “One who sets the intention to please God should act as follows: First, believe firmly in the Lord, surrender yourself entirely to His commandments, and, having turned away from the world so that the mind does not cling to visible things, always remain in prayer, waiting for the Lord’s visitation. (This is virtue in the first sense.) Then he should compel himself constantly to every good deed and to every commandment of the Lord. (This is virtue in the last sense as a good work.) Even if the heart does not yet desire this because of sin remaining in us, one should not pay attention to that, but, having only the Lord before one’s eyes and His commandments, strive to please Him alone. Compel yourself to gentleness, even if the heart opposes it; also strive to be merciful, kind, compassionate, good. Then the Lord, seeing such good zeal—how he compels himself to every good work, to gentleness, humility, and the rest, against his heart’s desire—imprints these virtues in him by the power of the Holy Spirit, so that they become as if natural to him; whereupon he easily and willingly does what he previously compelled himself to do against his will. (This is virtue in the sense of a good disposition).” (Brief Teachings on the Chief Saving Dogmas of the Faith, Nov. 26. How to Prepare Oneself for Virtuous Life. Of Saint Macarius).

Types

Some good dispositions a person may have by nature. Thus, one may be naturally humble, compassionate. These do not have the merit of true virtue and receive it only when a Christian, having resolved to advance in all virtues, acquires them through free choice. Most of them must be acquired through labor and struggle, as Saint Macarius the Great teaches. Such are especially those opposed to the chief passions, for example gentleness, humility, disinterestedness, chastity, and so forth. Some, finally, the most essential to Christian life, are established in the heart together with the awakening of the decision to repent, through the Divine action of the All-Holy Spirit. These are: faith, hope, and love, which are therefore called divinely infused, or Divine virtues. Thus Scripture says that faith is a “gift of God” (Eph. 2:8) and that “love… is poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 5:5), that “we are born to hope” (1 Pet. 1:3).

Virtue as Good Work

“Good works consist in keeping God’s commandments, which a person observes willingly with God’s help and through the operation of his own reason and will, from love of God and neighbor.” (Orthodox Confession… Part 3, Question 3).

Since morality of action is generally determined by its object, aim, and circumstances, for our work to be truly good it is necessary: 1) that it be by its object in accord with God’s law. An act contrary to God’s commandments can in no way be good. Yet not only the object commanded by the law is good, but also that proposed in the form of counsel, such as celibacy or voluntary poverty; and even that which remains undefined in the law—in itself neither good nor evil—can receive goodness from the aim for which it serves as a means. Commandments form the foundation, as it were the heart of the moral life, counsels are above the law, and indifferent matters are below it; 2) that it be performed with a good aim. An evil aim turns even a good work in itself into an evil one; for example, one who comes into church to please the eyes and ears. The chief aim of all works is, as has been said, God’s glory in faith in our Lord Jesus Christ; but toward this aim one can ascend through various intermediate aims, which does not prevent the work from being truly good. Bishop Tikhon generally lists the following aims with which we should perform good works: a) to show obedience and submission to our God; b) to glorify God’s name; c) to testify to God, our Benefactor, our heartfelt gratitude; d) to show by our deeds our faith in God and His Son Jesus Christ; e) to not disgrace the high Christian calling and name; f) for the sake of love for the brothers; g) so as not to scandalize anyone; h) to silence the mouths of opponents and enemies of Christianity; i) so that, seeing our good life, those who do not know the name of Christ may turn to Christ and be one with us (Saint Tikhon of Voronezh. On True Christianity, 3, Conclusion to this book. First conclusion, 271 and following); 3) finally, the circumstances in which the deed is performed must be lawful. Circumstances are not something external but in some way enter into the composition of the deed itself. Wherefore they either increase or decrease its goodness, or often nullify it entirely. Thus the moral merit of actions depends greatly on: a) who performs them; for not everything is permitted to everyone and not everyone is equally obligated to everything; for example, a sacred action, holy in itself, becomes quite sinful if an uncalled and unordained person willfully performs it: “No one takes this honor upon himself, but he who is called by God,” (Heb. 5:4); b) how it is performed; a deed good in its object and aim becomes evil, or at least loses much of its merit, if performed by impermissible means or not as it should be. The Apostle forbids “doing evil so that good may result” (Rom. 3:8); and the prophet Jeremiah says: “Cursed is he who does the Lord’s work with negligence.” (Jer. 48:10); c) when and where; for certain actions, though lawful in themselves, cannot without guilt be performed at a certain place or at a certain time. Thus the Savior drove out of the temple those who were buying and selling in it (Jn. 2:15–16); and the Wise Man calls foolish one who speaks when he ought to be silent: “The wise man is silent until the proper time; but the babbler and the fool prattle at all times.” (Sir. 20:7).

Seemingly Good Works

From truly good works we must distinguish those which, though outwardly in accord with God’s law, are performed not out of respect for it but only from natural inclination, propriety, necessity, or even with evil intent. Such lawful actions (actions legales) can be called seemingly good. They may have praise, but only from men, not from God, Who sees our heart and values our actions by its disposition (2 Cor. 9:7). Whoever honors God with lips only and not with heart honors Him in vain (Matt. 15:8–9). “What is not in the heart,” says Tikhon of Voronezh, “is not in the thing itself. Faith is not faith, love is not love, when not in the heart, but is hypocrisy. Humility is not humility but pretense when not in the heart. Friendship is not friendship but bitter enmity when it appears only outwardly and does not dwell in the heart.”

Divine Grace in Performing Good Works

Here grace is understood not in the sense of how it meets a person at his very entry into the Church of Christ, regenerates, justifies, and makes him a son of God and heir to Christ’s eternal Kingdom, but in the sense of how, abiding in the Christian, it aids him and helps him in many ways to advance in virtue. In this regard it is the saving power of God acting in a person, through which, on the one hand, inclination to evil is weakened, and on the other, inclination to good is awakened, strengthened, and preserved, so that he is “prepared for every good work.” (2 Tim. 3:17). The Apostle speaks of this grace thus: “For it is God Who is at work in” us “both to will and to work for His good pleasure.” (Phil. 2:13). More specifically, this saving action is expressed: 1) in enlightenment of the mind, in which it imprints saving truths and places inspirations toward good works, as the Apostle John teaches: “You have an anointing from the Holy One, and you know all things… that anointing teaches you about all things… and as it has taught you, abide in it.” (1 Jn. 2:20, 27); 2) in inclining the human will toward good, communicating to it the strength necessary to gain victory over the flesh, which draws toward evil, as the Apostle Paul says: “The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin.” (Rom. 8:2). Such cooperation of grace imparts a higher, Divine character to the Christian’s actions, whereby they become incomparably superior to natural works, just as, for example, bronze mixed with gold is superior to plain bronze.

The Harmony of God’s Grace With Human Freedom

God’s grace, in regenerating a person and acting in him, through this does not destroy or restrict his freedom, but only prompts, strengthens, and guides it toward good, moreover with its consent and with some measure of its cooperation. This is evident: 1) from the fact that the merciful God, although He “wants all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth,” (1 Tim. 2:4) nevertheless requires them to themselves repent and “with fear and trembling work out your own salvation,” (Phil. 2:12). Wherefore the Apostle Peter, having said that “His Divine power has given us all things that pertain to life and godliness,” adds: “and for this very reason, applying all diligence, supply… in virtue” your “knowledge” and the rest (2 Pet. 1:3, 5), thereby obliging us to diligence in virtue; 2) from the fact that people, by the testimony of Scripture, can resist the saving grace of God: “You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears!”, says Stephen to the Jews, “you always resist the Holy Spirit; as your fathers did, so also do you.” (Acts. 7:51) Finally: 3) from the fact that those regenerated can increase in themselves the workings of grace through good deeds, and deprive themselves of it through willful sins, as is evident from the following words of the Apostle: “I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God that is in you,” (2 Tim. 1:6); “Do not quench the Spirit” (1 Thes. 5:19); “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Pet. 3:18); “For it is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, and have tasted the heavenly gift, and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit… to renew them again to repentance” (Heb. 6:4, 6).

From this, the conditions on man’s part for God’s grace to be efficacious must be the following: 1) prayer for it: “Ask and it will be given to you.” (Matt. 7:7); “if you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!” (Lk. 11:13); and 2) ready willingness to obey its inspirations, so as not to grieve or quench God’s Spirit, according to the Apostle (1 Thes. 5:19). Thus the Lord says in the Psalm of grace: “I will instruct you and teach you…” and commands people: “Do not be like a horse or a mule, without understanding; their mouths must be held firm with bit and bridle, else they will not come near you.” (Ps. 31:8–9).

On Sin

Properties of Sin. Sin can be regarded in three ways, just as virtue was regarded: either 1) as sinful work, or 2) as sinful disposition, passion, or vice, or 3) as sinful state.

Sin as Sinful Work

Everything done against the holy and eternal law of God is sin: “Everyone who commits sin also commits lawlessness,” teaches the Apostle, “and sin is lawlessness.” (1 Jn. 3:4) However, for such violation of the law to be sin properly speaking, it is necessary that both consciousness and freedom participate in it. Wherefore sin is conscious and voluntary violation of a known Divine law, disobedience and resistance to God’s holy will (Saint Tikhon of Voronezh. On True Christianity, 2, Article 3, 1, 40–45). From this it is evident that sin consists not in the limitation of our powers but in their perverse use; not in errors of reason, as though all sin were merely foolishness, but in a corrupted will, by which, even seeing what is good, we do evil. “Whoever knows to do good and does not do it, for him it is sin.” (Jas. 4:17)

Sin is the greatest and most terrible evil: 1) by it God’s Majesty is offended, His eternal and unchangeable law is perverted; a sinning person sets his own will in place of God and willingly submits to it, unwilling to obey God; wherefore by sin he separates himself from God, as the Prophet says: “your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God” (Is. 59:2); and having separated himself from God—the Source of life—he enters the realm of death and under the power of the devil—the chief of sins. “You are of your father the devil,” says the Lord to the wicked Jews (Jn. 8:44); and in general: “everyone who commits sin is of the devil” (1 Jn. 3:8). Wherefore no one could destroy this evil except the Only-begotten Son of God, Who for us humans and for our salvation came down from heaven and became flesh. In this respect, sin is infinite evil; 2) sin promises light but plunges man into darkness: “They did not know”, says the Prophet of sinners, “nor did they understand; they walk about in darkness” (Ps. 81:5); “they shall grope like the blind along the wall, groping as those without eyes would grope; they shall stumble at noon as in the twilight” (Is. 59:10); it promises freedom but casts into slavery, for “everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin” (Jn. 8:34); it promises pleasures but subjects to intolerable torment of conscience, by which “the wicked flee when no one pursues” (Prov. 28:1), “groaning and trembling” like Cain (Gen. 4:12) or Judas the traitor (Matt. 27:5); 3) from sin even the most innocent creature suffers and sighs, and from it come all temporal disasters: bloody wars, plague, sickness, famine, fire, and so forth; for it are prepared Gehenna, Hades, and eternal torment.

Thus sin is, as Saint John Chrysostom says, the foulest, most unclean, and gravest evil; it is “worse than the very spirit of wickedness—the devil—for even the devil from a bright Angel became the devil through sin” (Saint Tikhon of Voronezh. On True Christianity, 2, Article 3, 1, 44).

The Classification of Sins

Sins, as evil acts of humans, are classified in various ways according to how they are committed. Namely, they are called: 1) mental or inward, if we only think to transgress the law or mentally take pleasure in sin, and outward or committed, when we manifest such evil thought through some action. Whoever takes pleasure in the thought of sin and desires to commit it is already guilty before the Heart-Knower, so, for example: “Everyone who looks at a woman to lust for her”, says the Savior, “has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Matt. 5:28). However, from this one should not conclude that there is no difference between mental and committed sin; the latter is guiltier because it shows greater shamelessness and corruption in a person. Moreover, as long as sin is hidden in the heart of a person, it is harmful only to him alone, but when it is revealed in action, it harms many other people; 2) sins are called our own, if we ourselves commit them, and others’, but imputed to us, if in some way we participate in the deeds of other people. We shall one day give God an account not only for our own sins but also for others’, because, taking part in them in some way, we claim them as our own; wherefore the Apostle exhorts to “not share in the sins of others.” (1 Tim. 5:22) When we command, advise, help, or do not prevent others from doing what is evil, when by our example we give them cause for sin, when we praise their evil deeds—in all these and similar cases we share in others’ sins, wherefore we must answer for them according to our share in them; 3) finally, sins are called involuntary, light, and venial, if we violate the law through ignorance or carelessness, and voluntary, grave, and mortal, when we do this with full consciousness and by free will. Concerning involuntary, light, and venial sins, the following should be noted: a) sins of ignorance and carelessness are called involuntary not because they wholly do not depend on our will (in that case they could not be called sins), but because they arise not so much from our desire to sin as from ignorance of their unlawfulness, from carelessness; b) these sins are only light when the ignorance of their unlawfulness, through which they were committed, depended more on circumstances than on our fault or on chance inattention to the law rather than on constant neglect of it; c) they are called light only in comparison to other more serious ones (Lk. 12:47–48), but taken in themselves every sin is grave because by it God the Lawgiver is offended, wherefore every sin must be carefully avoided; finally: d) they are called venial not because they do not deserve punishment or are forgiven us without repentance, but because they are lighter than others, and a person committing them can more easily repent than one who sins willfully.

We sin willfully when we know that a certain action is contrary to God’s law, yet still commit it, and moreover by special desire. In this case our sin is grave and mortal because, committing it, we show disrespect for the law, cooling of love toward God, which constitutes the life of our spirit; and therefore we not only deserve mortal punishment but actually exist in a state of spiritual death. The most serious of grave sins are: a) sins against the Holy Spirit, such as: contradiction of obvious and proven truth and stubborn rejection of Orthodox Christian faith, joined with bold blasphemy against it and hostility toward those who profess it; excessive and foolish presumption on God’s mercy; and despair, that is, when one has no hope in God’s compassion (Matt. 12:27, 31, 34; Mark 3:29–30). The Savior says that such sins “will not be forgiven in this age or in the age to come” (Matt. 12:32) not because the merits of our Redeemer and Lord are insufficient for it, for “The Blood” His “cleanses us from all sin” (1 Jn. 1:7), but because those infected by them, by their hardening, are incapable of repentance; b) sins that cry out to heaven for God’s vengeance, such as: deliberate murder (Gen. 4:10), the sin of Sodom (Gen. 18:20), oppression of the poor, widows, and orphans, and withholding wages from workers (Mal. 3:5), and also disrespect and ingratitude toward parents (Ex. 21:15, 17). Finally: c) the chief sins, which serve as sources for many others, such as: pride, avarice, lust, envy, gluttony, rancor, negligence (these are sinful dispositions).

Rules for Determining the Gravity of Sins

To determine, as far as possible, the degree of gravity of sins, one must pay attention to who is sinning, against whom, under what circumstances, and especially with what disposition. Namely, sin becomes more grave the more the one committing it: 1) is obligated to lead a virtuous life and is able to influence others. For this reason, for example, the sins of a pastor, who ought to be an example to others, deserve more serious punishment than similar sins of a layperson; 2) the more worthy of love, respect, or compassion is the one against whom he sins. Obviously one offends a benefactor more grievously than one who offends another neighbor; 3) the more evil results to himself or to other people from his evil deed; 4) the more by circumstances he should have refrained from sin and the less cause he had for it. Thus, for example, to commit sin in the temple of God is far more sinful than to commit it elsewhere. Finally: 5) the more clearly he understands the gravity of sin and the more willingly he surrenders to it; for example, for the same sin an enlightened person should be guiltier before God than an uneducated one. However, one must remember that to determine which sins are grave and which are light is beyond human power. This knowledge belongs to God alone, Who examines the heart and the inmost being and sees all the consequences of our actions. To avoid grave sins, one must avoid even light ones: “whoever despises small things will gradually fall away.” (Sir. 19:1)

Sin as Sinful Disposition

Sinful dispositions lying at the basis of a certain kind of sinful acts, otherwise sinful habits, inclinations, and passions, are constant desires to sin in a particular way, thus, for example, frivolity is a constant desire for distractions. Some of these sinful dispositions are acquired through frequent repetition of the same sins, while some naturally develop from self-love, which constitutes our hereditary corruption. The chief of them are “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (1 Jn. 2:16), or sensuality, avarice, and pride.

The Chief Passions: 1) Sensuality. By sensuality is meant a strong inclination to excessive indulgence in sensual pleasures. The chief forms of this vice are: a) gluttony and drunkenness, or the habit of excessive consumption of food and strong drink; b) delicacy or a taste for exotic and costly foods; c) lust and all sexual sins; d) luxury or excessive wastefulness in food, clothing, home decoration, and so forth. How reprehensible the vice of sensuality is and what harmful consequences it can produce not only for our body and well-being, which it gradually ruins, but especially for the soul, can be seen, among other things, from the Gospel parable of the rich man (Lk. 12:16–21). The sensual cannot be lovers of God (2 Tim. 3:1–4); “their god is their stomach” (Phil. 3:19); 2) Avarice. Avarice is called excessive concern with acquiring and preserving wealth or riches. Its forms are: a) money-love or passion for acquiring money. The person possessed by it sometimes reaches such childish absurdity as to collect money merely to gaze upon it; b) stinginess—such a passion by which a person, out of attachment to wealth, reluctantly and far too little uses his possessions even for necessary needs. The sins accompanying avarice are: falsehood, deceit, theft, robbery, and even murder. Moreover, love of money disposes one toward envy, hatred, hardheartedness, and other vices; “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil; it is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs” (1 Tim. 6:10); 3) Pride is an excessively high opinion of one’s worth joined with the contempt of others. This vice appears in various forms and serves as the source of many others; for “pride is the beginning of all sin” (Sir. 10:15). The chief branches of it are: a) vanity—the passion to make oneself known in society and gain great reputation; b) love of power—the striving to subject others to one’s authority and make them follow one’s way of thinking; c) ambition—the excessive desire to surpass others through external advantages and receive external marks of honor; d) conceit—such a vice by which a person highly values his own deeds and advantages, displays them in order that others might respect him.

Pride, while being in itself a grave sin, entirely incompatible with the spirit of Christian humility, leads to many other sins, such as: hypocrisy, flattery, envy, obstinacy, disobedience, presumptuousness, forgetfulness of God, murmuring against His Providence, despair, and so forth. Wherefore “pride is hated before God and men.” (Sir. 10:7)

Sinful attachment is deeply rooted in the heart of man and becomes as it were his second nature. It holds a person in its power as a slave, so that he unwillingly obeys it even after seeing his own ruin. Sometimes he comes to his senses, grieves, and is sorrowful; but when the occasion arises, drawn by habit, he returns to the passion (an example is drunkenness). Therefore it is slavery to sin and corruption. Love of passions is an inward and spiritual idolatry; for those who serve their passions honor them, like idols, with swift and ready obedience. Thus for some “the belly” is “their God” (Phil. 3:19); for others “greed… is idolatry” (Col. 3:5). Wherefore one possessed by passion is inevitably in a sinful state, in separation from God and His grace.

Sinful States

The root of virtuous life is zeal to please God, by which a person directs all things to God’s glory and submits to none but His law. By contrast, the source of sinful life is turning away from God, in which a person does not keep in mind whether God and His holy law exist, and acts according to entirely different rules and principles. This general character of sinful life is expressed in its various states. By these states people can be divided into two kinds; to the first belong those who have never thought and do not think of leaving sin; to the second belong those in whom we observe some concern for a good life, but it has not matured properly and has taken a perverted direction. The first are in either a) a state of negligence; or b) hardening with despair, while the second are in a state of either c) slavery; or d) hypocrisy; or e) spiritual delusion.

The State of Moral Negligence

Moral negligence is a state in which a person does not strive to learn how God’s law commands one to live and whether his deeds accord with it; and therefore does not feel the need for reform and calmly continues to live a vicious life. He is indifferent to eternal rewards for virtue and does not fear endless torment for sin, because if he ever remembers them or hears of them from others, he pays no proper attention. Many people are in such a state, especially those who enjoy worldly happiness; for “the cares” (anxieties) “of this age, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the other lusts… choke” in them “the word” of God, so it becomes completely unfruitful (Mark 4:19).

The State of Hardening

Hardening is that state of a person when he sins not out of ignorance and weakness but with consciousness and obstinacy, surrendering to depravity and heeding no good counsel and even deliberately acting against it and mocking the admonitions (2 Chron. 36:16). From the state of hardening there is a swift transition to a state of despair, when a person, contemplating on one hand all the weight of his sins, and on the other all the strictness of God’s justice, ordinarily conducts himself as though completely convinced that his ruin is inevitable, and therefore either fulfills the measure of his wickedness by surrendering to all desires of his corrupt heart, or hastens to end his life by suicide (Matt. 27:5).

Moral Slavery

Moral slavery is a state in which a person strives to keep God’s law and refrains from violating it not from love of God or from heartfelt aversion to evil, but from fear of punishment for breaking the law; and, little concerned with reforming his heart, strives to keep the law only outwardly. This state is especially characteristic of those people who, poorly understanding or wholly ignorant of the nature of Christian religion, regard God as a strict Judge and Master, forgetting that He is also a merciful Father; and therefore do not love Him but only tremble, thinking to escape His wrath through observance of religious ceremonies, in which they place the essence of their faith, become attached to them excessively, but neglect true virtues.

The State of Hypocrisy

Being in the state of moral hypocrisy, a person knows what God requires of him and sees the inconsistency of his life with God’s law, but does not strive to reform his heart; rather he strives only to appear pious. The goal for which he strives to display his piety is to turn the attention of others upon himself, to gain their praise and respect or better to conceal and more successfully accomplish certain selfish or unclean intentions. The clearest example of hypocrisy with its chief characteristics can be seen in the Pharisees. They loved to pray in open places and in crowded gatherings “so that they may be seen by people” (Matt. 6:5). They performed long prayers to deceive pious women with their piety and dispose them toward generous almsgiving; they gave alms publicly “so that they will be honored by men” (Matt. 6:2); they showed great zeal for their religion, crossing sea and land to convert others to it, but at the same time made those converted “twice as much a child of hell” (Matt. 23:15), because they did not strive to reform them and teach them true knowledge of God, but only instilled their hypocrisy and great respect for the traditions of the elders, joined with neglect of God’s commandments.

The State of Spiritual Delusion

In the state of spiritual delusion, a person knows that it is necessary to live virtuously, yet nevertheless neglects his reform because he considers himself morally perfect. The cause of such delusion is an erroneous understanding of Christian perfection and self-love. Precisely performing the external deeds of piety, withdrawing from worldly vanities insofar as possible, noticing in himself some good dispositions, he compares himself with others, and finding his life superior, one can easily think that he is truly very perfect and dares before the face of God Himself to say: “God, I thank You that I am not like other people—extortioners, unjust, adulterers…” (Lk. 18:11). “I have become wealthy, have been enriched, and need nothing…” What then does the Lord answer to him: “…you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked.” (Rev. 3:17)

Note. Concerning both vices and sinful states, it should be remarked that: 1) all at once cannot be in one and the same person, because some of them are opposed to each other; 2) a person does not always have the same vice but may combine many and pass from one state to another; 3) some vices are easier to correct than others; 4) however, no person, however vicious he might be, should be considered wholly incorrigible, “for things impossible for humans are possible with God.” (Lk. 18:27)

Causes That Impel Toward Sin and Keep One in It

The Christian sinner suffers from sin, yet does not abandon it; and not infrequently does one who has tasted the sweetness of virtue leave it and turn to sin. There must be mighty causes that hold the first fast and draw the latter away, and there are! They are the flesh, the world, and the devil.

1) By flesh is understood that corruption of human nature by which man is drawn toward sensual pleasures, earthly goods, and proud opinion of himself. This is how this enemy works: a) when in the mind there arise passionate thoughts about carnal and sinful objects; b) when in the will desires opposed to God’s law and the inspirations of grace are awakened (2 Sam. 11–11); c) when in sensual desires there is revealed a striving toward entertainments, pleasures, and carnal indulgences, generally toward such a life as Solomon describes: “…all that my eyes desired I did not keep from them, and I did not withhold my heart from any of my joy, for my heart rejoiced in all my labor: and this was my portion… from” all “my labor.” (Eccl. 2:10). Temptations of the flesh are the more dangerous because we ourselves carry within us the corrupted human nature. Only he who never fulfills carnal desires (Gal. 5:16) but always strives to crucify the flesh with its passions and desires is delivered from the bondage of this enemy (Gal. 5:24); 2) by world must be understood those people who by their way of life and customs oppose the spirit of faith and the teaching of truth. The world, understood in this sense, acts toward the sinful and against good Christians in two ways: sometimes with a spirit of craftiness it flatters either their sensuality through objects of carnal lust, or their love of money through earthly treasures, or their ambition through honors, distinctions, and other objects of worldly pride; sometimes with hardening and malice it persecutes all who desire to “live godly in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:12), whereby sometimes it does not allow one to come to his senses, and other times it entraps others in the nets of sin. One will not be overcome by this enemy if he always remembers that everything in the world is “vanity of vanities” (Eccl. 1:2), if he is sincerely convinced that without God’s will not even a hair of his head will perish (Lk. 21:18); 3) the last and at the same time first enemy of good is the “Devil… a murderer from the beginning” (Jn. 8:44). He is the more terrible the more powerful, the more dangerous the more crafty in his schemes, because he uses circumstances, properties of man, and everything that can help accomplish his ruinous intentions, and, like a “roaring lion he seeks someone to devour” (1 Pet. 5:8). However hidden this enemy acts, those experienced in spiritual life nevertheless “are not ignorant of his designs.” (2 Cor. 2:11) Sometimes he beguiles through outward objects, pleasant ones, as with the first parents (Gen. 3; 1 Cor. 7:5); sometimes he terrifies through disasters and sorrows, as the Lord said: “Behold, the devil is about to cast some of you into prison, that you may be tested” (Rev. 2:10); sometimes he acts on soul and heart, as seen in the example of Judas (Jn. 13:2) and Ananias (Acts 5:3), striving to either produce unclean thoughts in the mind, or fill the imagination with vain fantasies, or awaken in the will sinful desires. In general, he always notices in a person the weak point and customarily acts more strongly upon that, as the Satan’s device was revealed in Judas, who grieved over the precious ointment: “Not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief, and having charge of the money box, he used to help himself to what was put into it.” (Jn. 12:6, Jn. 13:2, Lk. 22:3–5). However, the devil does not act arbitrarily but only by God’s permission, as is evident from the example of Job (Job 2:6), and he has success in his actions against us only when we ourselves cease to guard ourselves and surrender to negligence (Matt. 13:25).

These opponents of good are so mighty that no one can escape their bondage unless the Lord delivers him; and those already free from it preserve this freedom only by “being strong in the Lord” Jesus Christ and “putting on all” the grace-given “armor” (Eph. 6:10–11) However, this power is not unconditional. They rule over a person only with his consent; for they only propose sin and draw him toward it; but that this sin is then chosen as the goal—in this no one but the sinner himself is guilty. Compel to choose, no power can. Therefore these enemies of good are only seducers, not the active causes of our sins. Neither their dominion over sinners nor their perversion of good should be regarded as violence to our freedom. From this it is evident that only the obligation on one side to seek help, and on the other to be watchful and vigilant.

Note. How a sinner might extricate himself from the nets of sin, and how the good might stand firm in goodness—on these matters the teachings should be offered in ascetics.

Scripture Index

Every Scripture reference identified in this book, sorted in canonical Bible order. Tap a reference to jump to the verse where it appears.

Genesis
Genesis 4:1013. The Classification of Sins
Genesis 4:1212. Sin as Sinful Work
Genesis 18:2013. The Classification of Sins
2 Chronicles
2 Chronicles 36:1618. The State of Hardening
Job

Job 2:622. Causes That Impel Toward Sin and Keep One in It

Psalms

Psalms 31:8–910. The Harmony of God’s Grace With Human Freedom

Psalms 81:512. Sin as Sinful Work
Proverbs
Proverbs 28:112. Sin as Sinful Work
Ecclesiastes

Ecclesiastes 1:222. Causes That Impel Toward Sin and Keep One in It

Ecclesiastes 2:1022. Causes That Impel Toward Sin and Keep One in It

Isaiah
Isaiah 59:212. Sin as Sinful Work
Isaiah 59:1012. Sin as Sinful Work
Jeremiah
Jeremiah 48:107. Virtue as Good Work
Malachi
Malachi 3:513. The Classification of Sins
Sirach
Sirach 10:715. Sin as Sinful Disposition
Sirach 10:1515. Sin as Sinful Disposition

Sirach 19:114. Rules for Determining the Gravity of Sins

Sirach 20:77. Virtue as Good Work
Matthew
Matthew 5:2813. The Classification of Sins
Matthew 6:220. The State of Hypocrisy
Matthew 6:520. The State of Hypocrisy

Matthew 7:710. The Harmony of God’s Grace With Human Freedom

Matthew 7:212. Virtue as the Foundation of Virtuous Life

Matthew 12:3213. The Classification of Sins

Matthew 13:2522. Causes That Impel Toward Sin and Keep One in It

Matthew 15:8–98. Seemingly Good Works

Matthew 23:1520. The State of Hypocrisy

Matthew 27:512. Sin as Sinful Work; 18. The State of Hardening

Mark
Mark 3:29–3013. The Classification of Sins
Mark 4:1917. The State of Moral Negligence
Luke

Luke 8:134. Rules for Determining Degrees of Christian Virtue

Luke 9:232. Virtue as the Foundation of Virtuous Life

Luke 11:1310. The Harmony of God’s Grace With Human Freedom

Luke 12:16–2115. Sin as Sinful Disposition
Luke 12:47–4813. The Classification of Sins
Luke 18:1121. The State of Spiritual Delusion
Luke 18:2721. The State of Spiritual Delusion

Luke 21:1–44. Rules for Determining Degrees of Christian Virtue

Luke 21:1822. Causes That Impel Toward Sin and Keep One in It

Luke 22:3–522. Causes That Impel Toward Sin and Keep One in It

John
John 2:15–167. Virtue as Good Work
John 8:3412. Sin as Sinful Work

John 8:4412. Sin as Sinful Work; 22. Causes That Impel Toward Sin and Keep One in It

John 12:622. Causes That Impel Toward Sin and Keep One in It

John 13:222. Causes That Impel Toward Sin and Keep One in It

Acts

Acts 5:322. Causes That Impel Toward Sin and Keep One in It

Acts 7:5110. The Harmony of God’s Grace With Human Freedom

Romans
Romans 3:87. Virtue as Good Work
Romans 5:56. Types

Romans 8:29. Divine Grace in Performing Good Works

Romans 8:35–392. Virtue as the Foundation of Virtuous Life

Romans 13:102. Virtue as the Foundation of Virtuous Life

1 Corinthians

1 Corinthians 7:522. Causes That Impel Toward Sin and Keep One in It

1 Corinthians 13:4–52. Virtue as the Foundation of Virtuous Life

1 Corinthians 15:32. Virtue as the Foundation of Virtuous Life

1 Corinthians 15:582. Virtue as the Foundation of Virtuous Life

2 Corinthians

2 Corinthians 2:1122. Causes That Impel Toward Sin and Keep One in It

2 Corinthians 7:13. The Various Degrees of Christian Virtue

2 Corinthians 9:78. Seemingly Good Works

2 Corinthians 13:113. The Various Degrees of Christian Virtue

Galatians

Galatians 5:1622. Causes That Impel Toward Sin and Keep One in It

Galatians 5:2422. Causes That Impel Toward Sin and Keep One in It

Ephesians

Ephesians 2:86. Types

Ephesians 4:133. The Various Degrees of Christian Virtue

Ephesians 6:10–1122. Causes That Impel Toward Sin and Keep One in It

Philippians

Philippians 2:53. The Various Degrees of Christian Virtue

Philippians 2:1210. The Harmony of God’s Grace With Human Freedom

Philippians 2:139. Divine Grace in Performing Good Works

Philippians 3:13–143. The Various Degrees of Christian Virtue

Philippians 3:1915. Sin as Sinful Disposition
Colossians
Colossians 3:515. Sin as Sinful Disposition

Colossians 3:12–145. Virtues as Good Dispositions of Heart and Will

Colossians 3:142. Virtue as the Foundation of Virtuous Life

1 Thessalonians

1 Thessalonians 5:1910. The Harmony of God’s Grace With Human Freedom

1 Timothy

1 Timothy 2:410. The Harmony of God’s Grace With Human Freedom

1 Timothy 5:2213. The Classification of Sins
1 Timothy 6:1015. Sin as Sinful Disposition
2 Timothy

2 Timothy 1:610. The Harmony of God’s Grace With Human Freedom

2 Timothy 3:1–415. Sin as Sinful Disposition

2 Timothy 3:1222. Causes That Impel Toward Sin and Keep One in It

2 Timothy 3:179. Divine Grace in Performing Good Works

Titus
Titus 3:81. On Virtue
Hebrews
Hebrews 5:47. Virtue as Good Work

Hebrews 5:13–143. The Various Degrees of Christian Virtue

Hebrews 12:44. Rules for Determining Degrees of Christian Virtue

James

James 2:104. Rules for Determining Degrees of Christian Virtue

James 4:1712. Sin as Sinful Work
1 Peter
1 Peter 1:36. Types

1 Peter 1:153. The Various Degrees of Christian Virtue

1 Peter 2:242. Virtue as the Foundation of Virtuous Life

1 Peter 3:8–95. Virtues as Good Dispositions of Heart and Will

1 Peter 5:822. Causes That Impel Toward Sin and Keep One in It

2 Peter

2 Peter 1:51. On Virtue

2 Peter 3:1810. The Harmony of God’s Grace With Human Freedom

1 John

1 John 1:713. The Classification of Sins

1 John 1:83. The Various Degrees of Christian Virtue

1 John 2:63. The Various Degrees of Christian Virtue

1 John 2:162. Virtue as the Foundation of Virtuous Life; 15. Sin as Sinful Disposition

1 John 3:412. Sin as Sinful Work
1 John 3:812. Sin as Sinful Work
Revelation

Revelation 2:1022. Causes That Impel Toward Sin and Keep One in It

Revelation 3:1721. The State of Spiritual Delusion

The Author: Saint Theophan the Recluse

Saint Theophan the Recluse (1815–1894) is among the most beloved teachers of the spiritual life in the Russian Orthodox Church. He was born on 10 January 1815 in the village of Chernavsk, in the Oryol province of central Russia, and given the name Georgy Vasilyevich Govorov. His father was a parish priest, and the boy was raised in the ordered piety of a country rectory. He studied first at the theological school in Livny, then at the Oryol Seminary, and finally at the Kiev Theological Academy, from which he graduated in 1841. The ancient monasteries of Kiev, and above all the Monastery of the Caves, left a deep mark on him during those years.

In his last year as a student, in 1841, Georgy Govorov was tonsured a monk and given the name Theophan, after Saint Theophan the Confessor, a defender of the holy icons. He was soon ordained hieromonk and set on the path of teaching and administration in the Church’s schools: he served in the theological schools of Kiev, as inspector at Novgorod, and as an instructor in moral and pastoral theology at the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy. For several years he lived in the Christian East, attached to the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission, where in Jerusalem, Constantinople, and on Mount Athos he studied, copied, and gathered the writings of the Fathers that he would later render into Russian. In 1857 he was appointed rector of the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy.

In 1859 he was consecrated Bishop of Tambov and Shatsk, and in 1863 he was transferred to the ancient see of Vladimir. As a bishop he was known for gentleness, tireless preaching, and care for the education of his people, founding diocesan schools for girls in both dioceses. Yet the labours of administration drew him away from the inner life he most desired. In 1866, at his own request, he was released from the government of his diocese and withdrew to the Vyshensky Hermitage, a quiet monastery he had come to love while at Tambov.

At Vysha, Saint Theophan gradually gave himself wholly to prayer and writing. Beginning in 1872 he entered strict reclusion: he no longer left his cell for the monastery church, received almost no visitors, and lived for the remaining years in two small rooms, celebrating the Divine Liturgy alone in a chapel he had arranged. This seclusion, far from being idleness, became the most fruitful period of his life. From it flowed the works for which he is remembered: The Path to Salvation and What the Spiritual Life Is; his translation and great expansion of the Philokalia (the Russian Dobrotolyubie) and of other monastic writings; Unseen Warfare; his commentaries on almost all the Epistles of the Apostle Paul, together with expositions of several Psalms; and an immense correspondence, in which he answered, often at the rate of dozens of letters a day, the spiritual questions of people throughout Russia. In 1890 the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy conferred on him a doctorate in theology.

Saint Theophan reposed on 6 January 1894, the Feast of the Theophany whose name he bore, at the age of seventy-nine, and was buried at the Vysha monastery. In 1988, during the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church that celebrated the millennium of the Baptism of Rus’, he was numbered among the saints. His feast is kept on 10 January.

His significance for the Church lies in the way he gathered the whole ascetical and patristic inheritance of Orthodoxy and made it speak to ordinary Christians. He wrote not for specialists but for anyone seeking God, tracing with unusual clarity the movements of the heart, the discipline of unceasing prayer, and the long work by which grace and human freedom together bring a soul to salvation. In his Scripture commentaries this same pastoral aim is at work: he reads the sacred text through the eyes of the ancient Fathers and turns every doctrine toward the reader’s own inner life. For this the Russian Church honours him as a Father in her own age and a sure guide on the path of salvation.

Colophon

Instruction on Progress in the Christian Life
by Theophan the Recluse.

This edition was produced by
Royal Archives.

The cover features
The Harvest — Mowers (Страдная пора. Косцы, 1887)
by Grigoriy Myasoedov (Russian, 1834–1911), Wikimedia Commons, which is in the public domain.

The text is set in Palatino and Georgia.

The first edition of this ebook was released on
August 16, 2026.

Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Copyright
- Introduction
- On Virtue
- Virtue as the Foundation of Virtuous Life
- The Various Degrees of Christian Virtue

- Rules for Determining Degrees of Christian Virtue

- Virtues as Good Dispositions of Heart and Will

- Types
- Virtue as Good Work
- Seemingly Good Works
- Divine Grace in Performing Good Works

- The Harmony of God’s Grace With Human Freedom

- On Sin
- Sin as Sinful Work
- The Classification of Sins
- Rules for Determining the Gravity of Sins
- Sin as Sinful Disposition
- Sinful States
- The State of Moral Negligence
- The State of Hardening
- Moral Slavery
- The State of Hypocrisy
- The State of Spiritual Delusion

- Causes That Impel Toward Sin and Keep One in It

- Scripture Index
- The Author: Saint Theophan the Recluse
- Colophon