The Ascetical Experiences

The Ascetical Experiences (Asketicheskie opyty) is the heart of St. Ignatius’s corpus: a great gathering of essays, meditations, and counsels — on prayer, repentance, the passions, the reading of the Fathers, the discernment of spirits, weeping, and death — distilled from a lifetime of patristic reading and ascetical practice. It forms the first two volumes of his Complete Collected Works and supplies the matter from which his treatises on the Jesus Prayer and on the soul after death are drawn. Its governing tone is sober, unillusioned, and centered on repentance.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1988)

What the Work Is

Asketicheskie opyty — rendered in English as The Ascetical Experiences, or in some editions The Refuge, The Field, and similar selections — is not a single continuous treatise but a curated collection of pieces of varying length and genre: essays, reflections, prose-poems, and direct counsels (Brianchaninov, Asketicheskie opyty, in Polnoe sobranie tvorenii, vols. 1–2; “Saint Ignatius (Brianchaninov),” Holy Trinity Publications, holytrinitypublications.com). The Russian title is deliberately modest: opyty means “experiences” or “essays” in the older sense of attempts or trials — the fruits of lived ascetical experience rather than systematic theology. The very title announces the book’s method: this is the testimony of one who has undergone the spiritual life, not a speculative system about it.

The collection forms the first two volumes of the standard Complete Collected Works (Polnoe sobranie tvorenii), and it is the reservoir from which several of his most famous individual works are drawn: his treatise On the Prayer of Jesus (see The Treatise on the Jesus Prayer) is a portion of The Ascetical Experiences, and the essays on the discernment of spirits and on death anticipate the fuller treatment in A Word on Death (see The State of the Soul).

The Major Themes

Across its many pieces, The Ascetical Experiences returns to a consistent set of themes that together constitute Brianchaninov’s ascetical theology:

Repentance as the foundation. The ground of the whole spiritual life is repentance — the recognition of one’s own sinfulness and the turning of the whole soul to Christ the Physician. Brianchaninov insists, with the Fathers, that no spiritual progress is possible except on this foundation, and that any “virtue” or “prayer” not rooted in self-knowledge and contrition is hollow or dangerous (Brianchaninov, Asketicheskie opyty; cf. Osipov, The Basics of Spiritual Life, Based on the Writings of St. Ignatius (Brianchaninov), orthochristian.com/53476.html).
The passions and the warfare of the thoughts. Following Climacus, the Philokalia, and the desert tradition, he treats the inner life as a warfare against the passions, conducted at the level of the thoughts (pomysly) — the suggestions that, unresisted, grow into consent, habit, and bondage (see Reading the Fathers).
The Jesus Prayer. The invocation of the name of Jesus, joined to repentance and attention, is the central instrument of the inner life — treated at length in the portion that became On the Prayer of Jesus.
Weeping and compunction. The gift of tears (plach), the godly sorrow that purifies, is a recurring theme, drawn especially from Isaac the Syrian and the desert Fathers.
The discernment of spirits and the danger of delusion. The careful distinguishing of grace from its counterfeits, and the warning against prelest (spiritual delusion), runs throughout (see Against Delusion).
Death and the remembrance of death. The keeping of death before the eyes as the great sobering discipline — the seed of A Word on Death.

The Sober Tone

What unifies the collection, beyond its themes, is its tone. Brianchaninov writes as a man under no illusions about himself, his readers, or his age. He distrusts spiritual highs, visions, and felt consolations; he counsels patience, humility, attention, and the steady labor of repentance over any reaching for exalted states. This sobriety is partly temperamental, partly the fruit of his lifelong ill health (see Tonsure and Early Years), and partly a deliberate corrective to what he saw as the besetting spiritual error of his educated contemporaries — a Romantic, feeling-driven, imaginative religiosity that mistook its own movements for grace (see Against Rationalism and Romanticism). His famous maxim concentrates the whole outlook: “He who is careless about prayer is careless about his salvation; he who quits prayer renounces his salvation” (Brianchaninov, as cited in Ignatius Brianchaninov, en.wikipedia.org, from the ascetical writings).

The Genre of the “Experience”

The form of The Ascetical Experiences deserves attention, because the genre is itself an argument. Brianchaninov did not write a Summa, a systematic dogmatics of the spiritual life ordered by topic and deduced from principles. He wrote opyty — experiences, essays, attempts: discrete pieces, each addressing a particular question or movement of the soul, each grounded in lived ascetical practice and in the Fathers, and each making its point not by abstract argument but by the testimony of experience tested against the patristic norm. This is a deliberate choice and a patristic one. The Fathers themselves wrote in this mode — homilies, letters, centuries of short chapters, discourses on particular passions — rather than in system, because the spiritual life is not a deductive science but a practice, learned in the doing and described from within. Brianchaninov’s form follows his content: a book about the experiential knowledge of God takes the form of recorded experience, not of system.

This also means the work can be entered at almost any point. A reader does not need to begin at the first page and proceed to the last; he can find the essay that speaks to his present condition — on prayer when he is learning to pray, on weeping when he is given compunction, on the discernment of spirits when he is troubled by his own experiences — and read it as a self-contained counsel. This is part of why the work has functioned so well as a kind of elder-in-print: like an elder, it gives the particular word for the particular need, rather than requiring the reader to master a system before he can be helped.

The Christ-Centeredness Beneath the Asceticism

It would be a serious misreading to take Brianchaninov’s asceticism as an end in itself, a program of self-improvement or spiritual achievement. Beneath every essay of The Ascetical Experiences lies a single Christocentric conviction: that the whole purpose of the spiritual life is union with Christ, and that asceticism, repentance, prayer, and the struggle against the passions are not achievements that earn this union but the removal of the obstacles — the passions, the self-opinion, the delusion — that prevent the soul from receiving what Christ freely gives. Osipov, expounding this strand of Brianchaninov, stresses that “good deeds” and virtues pursued as accomplishments, apart from humility and from Christ, are not merely useless but destructive, creating separation from Christ rather than union with Him, because they feed the very self-opinion that is the soul’s deepest disease (Osipov, The Basics of Spiritual Life, orthochristian.com/53476.html). The point of all the asceticism is to bring the soul to the place where it knows it can do nothing of itself and casts itself wholly on the mercy of Christ. The ascetical literature is, at its root, a literature of grace: it labors to empty the soul of self so that it may be filled by God.

For Whom It Was Written

Though much of The Ascetical Experiences speaks in the idiom of monastic struggle, its readership has always been wider. Brianchaninov wrote for serious Christians in a serious age of doubt, and the work has been recommended for laypeople by major modern figures — Fr. Thomas Hopko among them (Ignatius Brianchaninov, en.wikipedia.org). In Russia, Professor Alexei Osipov has built a substantial part of his popular exposition of the spiritual life directly on The Ascetical Experiences, presenting Brianchaninov as the reliable interpreter of the Fathers for modern, spiritually inexperienced Christians (Osipov, The Basics of Spiritual Life, orthochristian.com/53476.html; see Influence and Reception). The work’s enduring usefulness lies exactly in its claim to translate the desert and the Philokalia into terms a modern person can actually live by — neither watering them down nor pretending the modern reader is a desert father.

The English Selections

Because The Ascetical Experiences is a large and miscellaneous collection rather than a single treatise, its passage into English has taken the form of multiple selections and gradually a complete translation, chiefly through Holy Trinity Publications of Jordanville. English-speaking readers encounter portions of the work under titles such as The Refuge: Anchoring the Soul in Christ, The Field: Cultivating Salvation, and On the Prayer of Jesus (the last being the prayer-treatise drawn from the larger collection), as well as in the multi-volume English Complete Works that makes the whole corpus available (“Saint Ignatius (Brianchaninov),” Holy Trinity Publications, holytrinitypublications.com; see Influence and Reception). This pattern of selection is faithful to the work’s own nature: a book composed of self-contained essays naturally reaches readers in gatherings organized around a theme, and each gathering can stand on its own as a coherent guide. The reader new to Brianchaninov is well served by beginning with one such selection rather than attempting the whole corpus at once — which is, in effect, how the work was always meant to be read: a word at a time, for the need at hand.

References

Brianchaninov, Ignatius. Asketicheskie opyty [The Ascetical Experiences], Parts I–II, in Polnoe sobranie tvorenii [Complete Collected Works], vols. 1–2. (The collection of essays; repentance, the passions, the Jesus Prayer, weeping, discernment, death.)
“Saint Ignatius (Brianchaninov).” Holy Trinity Publications (holytrinitypublications.com). (English selections and editions: The Refuge, The Field, and the multi-volume English Complete Works.)
Osipov, Alexei Ilyich. The Basics of Spiritual Life, Based on the Writings of St. Ignatius (Brianchaninov). OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/53476.html). (Repentance and self-knowledge as foundation; virtues without humility as destructive; Brianchaninov as interpreter of the Fathers for the modern Christian.)
“Ignatius Brianchaninov.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org (used for the maxim on prayer and salvation, and for the note of recommendation for laypeople by Thomas Hopko; quotation cross-checked against the ascetical writings).