Against Delusion (Prelest)

The negative half of St. Ignatius’s teaching on prayer — and the part for which he is most distinctive — is his long, urgent warning against prelest, spiritual delusion: the state in which a person mistakes the workings of his own imagination, feeling, or the demons for the action of grace. He identified delusion as the characteristic danger of his age, fed by imaginative and Western-mystical methods of prayer, and he set against it the sober, repentance-grounded, attention-centered path of the Fathers.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1988)

What Prelest Means

Prelest (Russian prelest’, Greek plani) — usually translated “spiritual delusion,” “beguilement,” or “deception” — is the patristic term for the condition of a soul that has been led astray in the spiritual life and does not know it: that takes its own fantasies, emotional states, or demonic suggestions for the genuine action of God, and so builds its whole spiritual self on a false foundation. It is, in the Fathers and in Brianchaninov, the most dangerous of spiritual conditions precisely because it is hidden from its victim; the deluded person typically believes himself to be advancing, even to be receiving high gifts, while he is in fact being ruined (Brianchaninov, On the Prayer of Jesus and The Ascetical Experiences; cf. The Treatise on the Jesus Prayer).

Brianchaninov made the discernment and avoidance of prelest a central, recurring theme of his whole corpus. No modern Orthodox writer is more associated with the warning against spiritual delusion, and his treatment has become a standard reference point for the topic in Russian and ROCOR spirituality.

The Two Forms of Delusion

Following the patristic analysis, Brianchaninov distinguishes principally two forms or roots of prelest:

Delusion through wrong-doing of the mind (imagination). The first and more obvious form arises when the person, in prayer, imagines — forms mental pictures of Christ, of angels, of heavenly things, of lights and sweetnesses — and treats these imaginings as spiritual realities. The mind, working up its own images and emotional responses, mistakes its self-generated experiences for grace. This is the delusion to which the imaginative, picture-making, feeling-seeking approach to prayer leads (Brianchaninov, On the Prayer of Jesus).
Delusion through a high opinion of oneself (mnenie). The deeper and more dangerous form is the delusion of self-opinion — the settled, often unconscious conviction that one is spiritually advanced, worthy, gifted, righteous. This delusion needs no visions; it is the prideful self-estimate that secretly underlies and produces the imaginative kind, and it can possess even those who have no dramatic experiences at all. It is the harder to detect and the harder to cure, because it is woven into the person’s basic sense of himself (Brianchaninov, The Ascetical Experiences and On the Prayer of Jesus; cf. Osipov, The Basics of Spiritual Life, orthochristian.com/53476.html, on the destructiveness of “good deeds” done from self-opinion).

Both forms have the same antidote, which is also the foundation of the whole spiritual life: humility grounded in self-knowledge — the recognition of one’s own sinfulness and weakness, which makes the soul incapable of the self-flattery on which delusion feeds.

The Critique of Imaginative and Western-Mystical Methods

Brianchaninov’s most pointed and most controversial polemic is directed against methods of prayer that cultivate the imagination — and here he names, in effect, the difference between the Orthodox hesychast tradition and certain currents of Western mysticism. He warns sharply against any practice of deliberately picturing sacred scenes, the sufferings of Christ, the presence of heavenly beings, or of seeking after emotional warmth, raptures, and felt sweetness in prayer. Such methods, he holds, do not lead to God; they lead the practitioner into his own imagination and feeling, and so directly into prelest — and, at their worst, open the soul to demonic deception that clothes itself in the imagined holy images (Brianchaninov, On the Prayer of Jesus; The Ascetical Experiences).

In this critique Brianchaninov draws, as Orthodox writers after him have noted, a sharp contrast between the Orthodox way of the Jesus Prayer — imageless, attentive, repentant, refusing all self-generated images and consolations — and the imaginative meditation characteristic of certain post-medieval Western devotional schools, which deliberately employ the visualization of sacred scenes and cultivate affective fervor. He regarded the latter as a path that, however sincere, was constructed precisely on the faculty (the imagination) that the Orthodox ascetic tradition teaches one to quiet in prayer, and therefore as a generator of delusion. This contrast is one of the most-cited features of his teaching, though readers should note that he writes as an Orthodox ascetical theologian making a spiritual-diagnostic argument, not as a historian of Western spirituality, and his characterization of “Western” methods is a polemical type rather than a survey.

The Danger of the Unguided and the Self-Willed

The risk of delusion is multiplied, in Brianchaninov’s analysis, by the conditions of his age — the scarcity of experienced elders who could detect and correct it (see The Search for an Elder). A monk or layman who undertakes intense prayer, or the physical techniques of the Jesus Prayer, or reaches for high states, without a guide and without the foundation of repentance, is in his view almost certain to fall into some degree of delusion (Brianchaninov, The Arena and On the Prayer of Jesus; cf. Discernment for a Weakened Age). This is why his counsel is so insistently restraining: do not reach for what is beyond you; do not seek experiences; distrust your own spiritual feelings; cling to repentance, humility, the Scriptures, the Fathers, and the counsel of the prudent. Osipov, expounding him, puts the principle starkly: supernatural gifts and “dispassion” sought prematurely, by a soul not prepared through humility, do not bless but harm the ascetic — “untimely dispassion is dangerous” (Osipov, The Basics of Spiritual Life, orthochristian.com/53476.html).

The Signs of Delusion

Because prelest is, by definition, hidden from its victim, Brianchaninov gives the discernment of its signs particular care — for one cannot guard against a danger one cannot recognize. Drawing on the Fathers, he teaches the marks by which the deluded condition may be detected, in oneself or in another. The deluded person typically displays an unwarranted confidence in his own spiritual state; he is drawn to and trusts in experiences — visions, lights, warmth, sweetness, voices, raptures — and treasures them as signs of grace; he is reluctant to submit his experiences to examination and resists correction; he tends toward a subtle (or not so subtle) elevation of himself above others; and beneath all of this lies the mnenie, the high opinion of himself, that is the engine of the whole condition (Brianchaninov, On the Prayer of Jesus and The Ascetical Experiences).

By contrast, the soul on the safe path bears the opposite marks: it distrusts its own spiritual states; it does not seek or treasure experiences but seeks mercy; it submits readily to examination by the Scriptures, the Fathers, and prudent counsel; it sees itself as the least and the worst; and it is established not in any felt consolation but in repentance and the sense of its own sinfulness. The presence of humility and self-reproach is the great positive sign of the genuine; the presence of self-satisfaction and the love of experiences is the great warning sign of the false. This diagnostic teaching is one of the most practically useful parts of Brianchaninov’s whole legacy, and it is constantly cited in modern Orthodox discussions of discernment.

Why the Demons Prefer the “Right Hand”

Brianchaninov, with the desert tradition, observes that the demons attack the serious ascetic less often through obvious gross sin — the temptations of the “left hand,” which the watchful soul recognizes and resists — than through counterfeit virtue and counterfeit grace, the temptations of the “right hand,” which the soul welcomes precisely because they wear the appearance of holiness. A monk who would never be deceived into open sin may be readily deceived into believing that his imaginative consolations are divine visitations, that his emotional fervor is the action of the Holy Spirit, that his ascetic achievements have made him pleasing to God. This is why prelest is so dangerous and so characteristic a peril of the advanced and the zealous rather than the careless: it is the deception fitted to those who are genuinely seeking God, and it ruins them through the very thing they seek. The remedy is therefore not less zeal but more humility — the refusal to trust even one’s apparent virtues and graces, and the constant referring of everything to repentance and to the patristic measure (Brianchaninov, The Ascetical Experiences and On the Prayer of Jesus; cf. Osipov, The Basics of Spiritual Life, orthochristian.com/53476.html, on virtues without humility as separation from Christ).

The Antidote: Sober Repentance

Against the whole danger of delusion Brianchaninov sets one remedy, which is also the foundation of all he teaches: sober, attentive repentance, grounded in the knowledge of one’s own sinfulness. The soul that genuinely knows itself a sinner, that seeks mercy and not experience, that distrusts its own movements and clings to the patristic norm, is protected from prelest at the root — because delusion can only take hold where there is self-flattery, and self-flattery cannot survive true contrition. The negative teaching against delusion and the positive teaching of the Jesus Prayer (see The Treatise on the Jesus Prayer) are thus one teaching: the same repentance that grounds right prayer is the same repentance that guards against false prayer. This sober path, set against both imaginative excess and prideful self-estimate, is developed further in The Sober Path.

References

Brianchaninov, Ignatius. On the Prayer of Jesus. Trans. Father Lazarus (Moore); foreword by Kallistos Ware. (The two forms of delusion; the critique of imaginative prayer; the refusal of self-generated images and consolations.)
Brianchaninov, Ignatius. The Ascetical Experiences (Asketicheskie opyty), in Polnoe sobranie tvorenii, vols. 1–2. (On prelest, self-opinion [mnenie], and the discernment of spirits.)
Brianchaninov, Ignatius. The Arena: An Offering to Contemporary Monasticism. Trans. Lazarus Moore. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Publications. (The danger of the unguided ascetic and the necessity of humility.)
Osipov, Alexei Ilyich. The Basics of Spiritual Life, Based on the Writings of St. Ignatius (Brianchaninov). OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/53476.html). (Self-opinion as spiritually destructive; “untimely dispassion is dangerous”; premature gifts as harm.)