St. Theophan the Recluse

St. Theophan the Recluse was born Georgy Govorov on 10 January 1815 in the Russian province of Oryol, the son of a priest. He became a monk, a scholar, and eventually a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church, serving the dioceses of Tambov and Vladimir with pastoral zeal before, in 1872, he withdrew entirely from public life into strict reclusion at the Vysha hermitage, whence comes his name, the Recluse.

For the remaining twenty-eight years of his life he lived in solitude, celebrating the liturgy daily and devoting himself to prayer and to a vast correspondence and literary labor. He is honored in the Orthodox Church as one of its foremost spiritual teachers, above all for his Russian rendering of the Philokalia, the great anthology of ascetic and mystical writings, and for his own works on prayer of the heart and the interior life, which guided countless souls. He died on 6 January 1894 and was glorified as a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1988.