The Criteria and the Counterfeits

“Try the spirits, whether they are of God”: the apostolic command assumes both that spiritual experience occurs and that it can deceive. This file sets out the criteria the Church actually applies — the confession of Christ come in the flesh, the fruits, humility rather than exaltation, and submission to the Church’s judgment — and examines the two historical cases in which the Church had to say what she does and does not object to: Montanism and Messalianism.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

What Is Deferred

The ascetic machinery of discernment — the stages by which a thought becomes a passion, the marks of prelest, the safeguards of obedience and confession, the analysis of diakrisis as a virtue — is set out in detail in the collection on the ascetic vocabulary, and this file does not restate it (see The Discernment of Spirits; Discernment and the Measure; The Marks of Delusion and the Safeguards).

What belongs here is the pneumatological question: given that the Holy Spirit is a person who acts, and given that other agents also act and that the human soul generates a good deal on its own, how does the Church identify what is his?

The Apostolic Criteria

Four tests are given in the New Testament, and the Church has never needed a fifth.

The confession of the incarnate Christ. “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: and every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God” (1 John 4:1–3). The test is doctrinal and Christological, and it is the primary one. It is also, on its face, remarkably narrow — the criterion is not general holiness but a specific confession — and it is narrow on purpose, because the counterfeits St. John has in view are precisely those that spiritualize the Incarnation away.

St. Paul gives it in the positive form: “no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:3), the preceding verse having noted that his readers had been “carried away unto these dumb idols” — ecstatic experience is not new to them and is not self-authenticating.

The fruits. “Ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16, 20), in a passage whose subject is false prophets. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance (Galatians 5:22–23) — and these are harder to counterfeit than powers, because delusion feeds on their opposites (see The Gifts and the Fruits).

Order and edification. “God is not the author of confusion, but of peace”; “let all things be done unto edifying”; “let all things be done decently and in order” (1 Corinthians 14:33, 26, 40). Paul applies these directly to spiritual manifestations in the assembly, and they function as tests: a manifestation that produces disorder or serves only the one who has it is, on the apostle’s own criterion, not to be encouraged whatever its source.

And submission to judgment. “Let the prophets speak two or three, and let the other judge” (1 Corinthians 14:29); “the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets” (14:32). The genuine gift does not exempt its bearer from the Church’s assessment, and it does not overwhelm his self-control. The claim that one cannot be judged because one is speaking by the Spirit is, by this test, a mark against.

The Ascetic Criteria

The Fathers add a set of tests drawn from experience, and they converge on one point: the Holy Spirit produces humility, and the counterfeits produce elation.

St. Athanasius, reporting St. Antony, gives the classic formulation: the vision of holy beings is “not with trouble,” and leaves quietness, joy, gladness, courage, and love of God; the demonic apparition comes with tumult, noise, and fear, and leaves “dejection, hatred of ascetics, listlessness, grief, remembrance of kinsfolk, and fear of death” (Athanasius, Life of Antony 35–36; trans. NPNF II/4). The test is not the content of the experience but the state it leaves behind, assessed afterward and soberly.

St. Diadochos of Photike distinguishes the consolation given by grace, which comes with a sense of one’s own unworthiness and quiets the soul, from the deceiver’s counterfeit, which excites and flatters (On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination 30–36, in The Philokalia, vol. 1). St. Gregory of Sinai warns that demonic influence can produce warmth, light, and sweetness closely resembling grace, and gives humility and compunction as the distinguishing marks (On Commandments and Doctrines, in The Philokalia, vol. 4). St. Ignatius Brianchaninov’s nineteenth-century treatment of prelest names its two forms — deception through imagined experiences and deception through an exalted opinion of oneself — and identifies the second as the subtler and more dangerous (Brianchaninov, On the Prayer of Jesus, Part I).

The tradition’s practical counsel follows from this and is uniform: do not seek experiences; neither accept nor reject what comes, but consider oneself unworthy of it; and disclose it to a spiritual father. The safeguard is not a technique of discrimination but the refusal of the isolation in which delusion grows.

The Two Counterfeits

It is worth distinguishing the two things the Church is actually guarding against, because they are not the same and the remedies differ.

The demonic. Scripture is explicit that false signs occur and that they can be impressive: “there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect” (Matthew 24:24); the lawless one comes “with all power and signs and lying wonders” (2 Thessalonians 2:9); Satan is “transformed into an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). The Church’s teaching is not that impressive phenomena prove a divine source, but very nearly the reverse: that the more impressive the phenomenon, the more carefully it must be tested.

The merely psychological. The larger part of what the ascetic tradition treats under prelest is not demonic at all but the soul’s own production — imagination, suggestion, emotional intensity, the effects of fasting and sleeplessness on the body, the pleasure of feeling oneself singled out. The Fathers were shrewd about this long before there was a vocabulary for it, and the neptic tradition’s insistence on imageless prayer is a direct response: prayer that works with visualizations and induced feelings is prayer that has handed itself to the faculty most easily deceived (see Attention, Prayer and the Descent of the Nous).

Montanism

The New Prophecy arose in Phrygia in the second half of the second century around Montanus and the prophetesses Prisca and Maximilla. It is the first case in which the Church had to state what she objects to in a claim to the Spirit, and the statement is instructive because of what it does not include.

She did not object to prophecy. Prophets appear in Paul’s lists, the Didache legislates for them, and the Church has never taught that the prophetic charism ceased.

What the sources record as the objections are three. The manner of the prophesying: the anti-Montanist writers preserved by Eusebius complain that Montanus spoke “in a frenzy,” out of a displaced consciousness, whereas the true prophet retains his own mind — the criterion Paul had already given in “the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets” (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History V.16–17; trans. NPNF II/1). The claim to supersede: the new utterances were presented as a further stage of revelation beyond the apostolic. And the rigorism that followed: prohibition of second marriage, refusal of reconciliation after grave sin, additional fasts imposed as of obligation.

Tertullian’s adherence in his later years is part of the record and is not to be suppressed; a rigorist movement claiming the Spirit attracted one of the ablest minds of the early Church, which is a fact about how such claims work.

Messalianism, and the Complication

The Messalians — the “praying people,” also called Euchites — were condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431. What they were charged with was, in substance, an account of the Christian life in which prayer alone produces a sensible, conscious experience of the Spirit that expels the indwelling demon, and in which the sacraments and the Church’s order are consequently unnecessary.

This case is the more difficult of the two, and it must be handled honestly, because a great deal of authentic Orthodox spirituality lies close to it.

The Macarian Homilies, which teach the conscious perception of grace, were suspected of Messalian affiliation and are still discussed in those terms by scholars; they are nonetheless among the most influential ascetic texts in Orthodox tradition. St. Symeon the New Theologian was accused by his contemporaries of something very like Messalianism for insisting that a Christian ought to be aware of grace, and was driven into exile (see Against Formalism; Stephen of Nicomedia). The hesychasts of the fourteenth century were charged with Messalianism by Barlaam, and the councils of 1341–1351 found for them (see The Barlaam Dispute).

[Disputed: the relation of the Macarian corpus to Messalianism. (a) A line of scholarship since Villecourt (1920) and Dörries has identified substantial contact between the Macarian Homilies and the Messalian propositions condemned at Ephesus, some holding the corpus to be of Messalian provenance or edited out of it. (b) Others — including Columba Stewart, *Working the Earth of the Heart*, Oxford, 1991 — argue that the shared vocabulary reflects a common Syrian ascetic idiom rather than doctrinal identity, and that the corpus is orthodox in its own terms. The Orthodox Church has received the Homilies and has condemned the Messalian propositions; both facts stand, and the historical question is genuinely open.]

The line the Church actually drew is therefore not between claiming conscious experience of the Spirit and denying it. Symeon and Palamas claim it emphatically and are saints. The line is at the point where the claimed experience is made to replace the mysteries, the Church’s order, and the confession — which is exactly what the Messalian propositions did. Grace consciously perceived within the sacramental life of the Church is the hesychast tradition; grace consciously perceived as an alternative to it is what Ephesus condemned. The distinction is fine and it is the whole of the matter.

The Corporate Criterion

The last test is the one that gathers the rest. A claimed working of the Spirit is judged by whether it agrees with the faith the Church has received — because the Spirit does not contradict himself, and because he is the one who gave the Church her faith in the first place.

This is not an appeal to institutional authority against the freedom of the Spirit; it is the recognition that the same Spirit is the author of both. St. Irenaeus’ formula holds in both directions: where the Church is, there is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church (Against Heresies III.24.1). A claimed illumination that leads away from the confession, the mysteries, and the obedience of the Church has failed the test that the whole tradition, from 1 John to Brianchaninov, applies first.

References

Athanasius of Alexandria. Life of Antony 35–36. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 4.
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History V.16–17. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 1.
Diadochos of Photike. On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination 30–40. In The Philokalia, vol. 1. London: Faber and Faber, 1979.
Gregory of Sinai. “On Commandments and Doctrines.” In The Philokalia, vol. 4. London: Faber and Faber, 1995.
Ignatius Brianchaninov. On the Prayer of Jesus. Trans. Father Lazarus. London: John M. Watkins, 1965.
Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies III.24.1. Trans. ANF, vol. 1.
Stewart, Columba. “Working the Earth of the Heart”: The Messalian Controversy in History, Texts, and Language to AD 431. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
Council of Ephesus (431). Canons and the condemnation of the Messalians. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 14.
Scripture: Matthew 7:16, 20; 24:24; 1 Corinthians 12:2–3; 14:26, 29, 32–33, 40; 2 Corinthians 11:14; Galatians 5:22–23; 2 Thessalonians 2:9; 1 John 4:1–3.