from the back cover of The Heart of Salvation, "First a schoolteacher, then a bishop, then a hermit, Theophan the Recluse was one of the Russian holy men canonized in 1988 and one of the greatest of the "startzi" - teachers of spirituality and of Prayer of the Heart - who have played such an important role in keeping the spiritual doctrines of the early Fathers alive in the Russian Orthodox Church."