Against Rationalism and Romanticism

St. Ignatius set his whole teaching against the two great temptations of nineteenth-century educated religion: a cold rationalism that dissolved the spiritual world into metaphor and reduced created spirits and the soul itself to figures of speech, and a warm Romanticism that mistook the movements of feeling and imagination for the action of grace. His Supplement to “A Word on Death”, on the nature of created spirits, is his most direct engagement with the rationalizing science of his day; his ascetical writing as a whole is his answer to the Romantic religiosity of his class.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1988)

The Two Temptations of the Educated Soul

Brianchaninov spent his most formative decades — the twenty-three years at the Trinity–St. Sergius Hermitage near St. Petersburg (see Archimandrite Near the Capital) — among educated Russians, and he diagnosed in them two opposite but equally corrosive distortions of the spiritual life. On one side stood rationalism: the temper of the Enlightenment and of the new science, which treated the spiritual world as superstition, dissolved angels, demons, and the soul into metaphors or psychological projections, and reduced religion to ethics and feeling. On the other stood Romanticism: the temper of the new sensibility, which prized intense feeling, imaginative vision, and inward rapture, and which, transposed into religion, mistook the soul’s own emotional and imaginative movements for the presence and action of God.

These are opposite errors — one too cold, one too warm — but Brianchaninov saw them as twin products of the same modern severance from the patristic, ascetical knowledge of God. The rationalist denies the spiritual world; the Romantic counterfeits it. Against both, Brianchaninov set the sober, experiential, patristic realism of the Fathers, who neither dissolve the spiritual world into metaphor nor confuse it with the soul’s own feelings (Brianchaninov, The Ascetical Experiences and Slovo o smerti; cf. The Sober Path).

The Supplement on the Nature of Spirits

Brianchaninov’s most direct confrontation with rationalism is the Supplement to “A Word on Death” (Pribavlenie k “Slovu o smerti”) — also circulated as a treatise on the sensual and spiritual vision of spirits — which forms part of the third volume of his collected works alongside A Word on Death (Brianchaninov, Pribavlenie k “Slovu o smerti”, in Polnoe sobranie tvorenii, vol. 3). Here he addresses, at length and with evident concern for the rationalizing science of his age, the question of the nature of created spirits — angels, demons, and the human soul.

His central contention is that created spirits are not purely immaterial in the way that God alone is immaterial. Against the rationalist tendency to treat spirits, if they exist at all, as pure abstractions with no relation to the created order — and so as something the modern mind can safely ignore or allegorize away — Brianchaninov argued that created spirits possess a certain refined, subtle materiality or embodiment proper to creatures, distinct from the gross materiality of bodies but real, and that this is why they can act in and be perceived within the created world. Only the uncreated God is absolute Spirit, wholly beyond all materiality (Brianchaninov, Pribavlenie k “Slovu o smerti”, vol. 3).

It should be recorded plainly that this particular thesis — the “subtle materiality” of created spirits — was itself contested within Orthodox theology, and is the point on which Brianchaninov and his great contemporary St. Theophan the Recluse are known to have differed: Theophan defended the more usual teaching of the simple immateriality of created spirits against Brianchaninov’s account (see St. Theophan the Recluse). [Disputed: Brianchaninov, in the Supplement to “A Word on Death,” argued that created spirits (angels, demons, the soul) possess a refined or subtle materiality proper to creatures; St. Theophan the Recluse, while a fellow defender of the toll-houses, opposed this and upheld the simple immateriality of created spirits — the two nineteenth-century masters thus disagreed on the metaphysics of spirit even as they agreed on the eschatology.] What the two agreed on, against the rationalists, was the reality of the spiritual world; they disagreed on its precise metaphysical character.

Against Romantic Religiosity

If the Supplement answers the rationalist, the whole of Brianchaninov’s ascetical teaching answers the Romantic. The Romantic religiosity of his educated contemporaries — the cultivation of religious feeling, the seeking of inward sweetness and rapture, the imaginative dwelling on sacred scenes, the trust in vivid spiritual experiences — Brianchaninov regarded as a direct road to prelest, spiritual delusion (see Against Delusion). The Romantic mistakes the faculty of imagination and the movements of feeling for the organ of communion with God; but in the patristic understanding these are precisely the faculties that must be stilled in prayer, not indulged, because they are the very ground on which the soul deceives itself and on which the demons most easily counterfeit grace.

This is why his teaching on prayer is so relentlessly imageless and unsentimental: no pictured scenes, no sought-after sweetness, no trust in felt consolations, but bare attention and repentance, the mind enclosed in the words of the Jesus Prayer, seeking mercy and not experience (see The Treatise on the Jesus Prayer). His sharp critique of imaginative, Western-mystical methods of meditation belongs here too: he saw in them the same Romantic error baptized — the systematic cultivation of exactly the imaginative and affective faculties that the Orthodox ascetic tradition teaches one to quiet.

Experience Against Both

There is a single weapon Brianchaninov wields against both the rationalist and the Romantic, and it is the same weapon in each case: experience — but experience rightly understood, the purified ascetical experience of the Fathers rather than the rationalist’s empirical observation or the Romantic’s emotional intensity. Against the rationalist, who would confine knowledge to what the senses and discursive reason can establish and so dissolve the spiritual world, Brianchaninov appeals to the experiential knowledge of God that the ascetic tradition transmits: the spiritual world is known, not speculated about, by those who have been purified to perceive it, and the Fathers are the reliable witnesses of that perception. Against the Romantic, who would also appeal to inner experience but means by it the soul’s own feelings and imaginings, Brianchaninov insists that genuine spiritual experience is not the soul’s self-generated affect but the perception, by a purified soul, of a reality outside and above itself — and that the test of the genuine is humility, repentance, and conformity to the patristic norm, not intensity of feeling.

This is a subtle and important position. Brianchaninov is not an anti-experiential dogmatist who would reduce the spiritual life to the mere assent to propositions; he is, on the contrary, deeply experiential — his whole corpus is Asketicheskie opyty, ascetical experiences. But he distinguishes sharply between the false “experience” of feeling and imagination, which deceives, and the true experience of the purified soul, which knows. The rationalist has too little experience; the Romantic has the wrong kind; the Father, and the one who follows him, has the right kind. The whole of Brianchaninov’s epistemology of the spiritual life turns on this distinction (Brianchaninov, The Ascetical Experiences and On the Prayer of Jesus).

The Modern Relevance of the Polemic

It is worth observing how durable this double polemic has proved, and why Brianchaninov is read as a contemporary rather than a period figure. The two temptations he named have not passed; they have, if anything, intensified. The rationalist reduction of religion to ethics, psychology, and metaphor — the dissolution of the spiritual world into a projection of the human — is the standard form of modern unbelief and of much liberal religion. And the Romantic cultivation of religious experience for its own sake — the seeking of states, feelings, and consciousness-events, whether in charismatic enthusiasm, in the spiritual-but-not-religious marketplace, or in the technique-driven pursuit of mystical experience — is the standard form of modern religiosity. Brianchaninov’s critique cuts against both with undiminished force, which is a large part of why he became so important to the twentieth-century convert world (see Influence and Reception): the convert arriving from a secular or a Romantic-religious background finds in Brianchaninov a guide who has already mapped, and warned against, the exact errors he is most likely to bring with him. The polemic written for nineteenth-century St. Petersburg turns out to be a polemic for the modern soul as such.

The Patristic Realism Between the Two

Brianchaninov’s positive position is best understood as a patristic realism set deliberately between the two modern errors. Against the rationalist, he insists that the spiritual world — God, angels, demons, the soul, the life after death — is real, more real than the material world, and is known not by speculation but by the purified, ascetical experience that the Fathers transmit. Against the Romantic, he insists that this real spiritual world is not to be grasped through feeling and imagination, which deceive, but only through repentance, humility, attention, and the disciplined following of the patristic norm. The rationalist has lost the spiritual world; the Romantic has mistaken his own soul for it; the Father, and the one who follows the Fathers, knows it truly because he approaches it in the only way it can be safely known.

This double polemic is what makes Brianchaninov so distinctively a writer for the modern mind. He did not write, as the desert Fathers did, for a world that took the spiritual realm for granted; he wrote for a world that had learned to doubt it on one side and to counterfeit it on the other, and he offered that world the patristic path as the narrow way between. The constructive form of that path — the sober, attentive, repentant realism he set against both dreamy feeling and cold reason — is the subject of The Sober Path.

References

Brianchaninov, Ignatius. Pribavlenie k “Slovu o smerti” [Supplement to “A Word on Death”] / on the sensual and spiritual vision of spirits, in Polnoe sobranie tvorenii [Complete Collected Works], vol. 3. (The nature of created spirits; the “subtle materiality” thesis; the answer to rationalism.)
Brianchaninov, Ignatius. The Ascetical Experiences (Asketicheskie opyty), in Polnoe sobranie tvorenii, vols. 1–2. (The imageless, unsentimental teaching on prayer set against Romantic religiosity.)
Brianchaninov, Ignatius. On the Prayer of Jesus. Trans. Father Lazarus (Moore); foreword by Kallistos Ware. (The critique of imaginative and Western-mystical methods.)
Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology. (For the broader nineteenth-century Russian theological context of rationalism, Romanticism, and the patristic revival; and for the Brianchaninov–Theophan difference on the nature of spirits.)
St. Theophan the Recluse collection, this repository — on Theophan’s defense of the simple immateriality of created spirits against Brianchaninov’s account.