The Marks of Delusion and the Safeguards

The diagnostic and practical file on prelest. St. Ignatius Brianchaninov’s two classical forms — delusion of the imagination, and mnenie, “opinion” — with the marks by which each is recognized; the safeguards the tradition prescribes; the guardrail that no one may assess his own spiritual attainment; the proportion in which all of this should be held, since the same tradition that issued the warnings also urged the practice; and the modern misuse of the term as a weapon.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (with a distinct Russian development)

The Two Forms

St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, the tradition’s great nineteenth-century diagnostician, orders the phenomena into two forms. This collection follows the same taxonomy as The Jesus Prayer: Prelest and the Need for Guidance, which sets it out for the practice of prayer, and does not depart from it.

1. Delusion of the imagination. The person prays with the imagination — picturing Christ, the saints, heaven, holy scenes — or accepts sensory phenomena in prayer as divine: lights, voices, fragrances, warmth, visions, a felt presence. The origin is often nothing worse than devout eagerness in someone with a visual temperament; the end, in the tradition’s case histories, is exaltation, derangement, and sometimes suicide. Hence the rule, unanimous from the desert to Optina, that prayer in this tradition is imageless: no pictures, no forms, attention held in the words and in the sense of God’s presence, and every appearing form refused regardless of its apparent holiness (Brianchaninov, On the Prayer of Jesus, trans. Father Lazarus [Moore], London: John M. Watkins, 1965; Gregory of Sinai, On Stillness, in The Philokalia, vol. 4, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, London: Faber and Faber, 1995).

2. Opinion — мнение, mnenie. The subtler and, in Brianchaninov’s judgment, far commoner form: no visions at all, only a quietly growing conviction of one’s own spiritual attainment — that one has warmth, gifts, prayer of the heart, discernment, a right to instruct. It is respectable, produces not madmen but experts, and is nearly invisible from inside. Its antidote is the last word of the prayer itself — “a sinner” — taken seriously (Brianchaninov, The Arena, trans. Archimandrite Lazarus, Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1991; see St. Ignatius Brianchaninov: The Arena).

The second form is the one this collection’s readers are far more likely to meet, including in themselves. A vocabulary is exactly the sort of thing that feeds it.

The Marks

The literature’s diagnostic marks are consistent across authors and can be stated as a list. None is decisive alone; the pattern is what matters.

Seeking and valuing experiences. The person prays in order to feel something and measures his prayer by what he felt. The tradition treats the aim as the fault, prior to any phenomenon: the secret decision to have experiences is the beginning of the road.

Accepting phenomena. Lights, voices, scents, visions, a sense of being addressed — accepted rather than refused and reported.

Elation and a sense of election. A settled feeling of being spiritually further on than others, of having been chosen, of having understood what one’s priest and parish have not.

Incorrigibility. Correction is experienced as persecution or as the corrector’s incapacity. The person cannot be told anything.

Secrecy. Reluctance to disclose the matter to a confessor, usually accompanied by a plausible reason why this particular thing need not be mentioned.

Self-appointed escalation. Increasing one’s rule, fasting, vigils, or solitude without a blessing, and treating the increase as evidence of seriousness.

Premature teaching. The impulse to instruct others, to acquire disciples, to correct the Church.

Neglect of the ordinary. The sacraments, the parish, the commandments, work, family, and love of neighbour become secondary to the inner programme. This is the most reliable mark of the set, because it is externally visible.

Contempt or its inverse, despair. The literature notes both poles: the exaltation that despises others, and the collapse into despair when the states are withdrawn. St. Ignatius treats them as phases of one condition.

Alongside these belongs the counterfeit’s signature, given by St. Antony and repeated everywhere: the good visitation leaves peace, quietness, and courage; the counterfeit leaves tumult, excitement, and disturbance (Athanasius, Life of Antony 35–36; trans. NPNF II/4; see The Discernment of Spirits).

The Safeguards

The safeguards are all, without exception, external to the person’s own judgment. This is deliberate and is the structural insight of the whole tradition: a self-confirming condition cannot be broken from inside.

Imageless prayer. No visualization; every form refused. This closes off the first form at its entrance.

Repentance as the only thing sought. The counsel that governs the whole subject is that one should seek in prayer neither visions nor experiences nor gifts, but only repentance and the mercy of God (Brianchaninov, On the Prayer of Jesus, 1965). A person who wants nothing but mercy cannot be deceived by an offer of something else.

Disclosure and confession. Thoughts and experiences are told — to a confessor, to a spiritual father, to someone. The rule is that the one who has an experience neither accepts nor rejects it on his own authority but reports it (Barsanuphius and John, Letters, trans. John Chryssavgis, 2 vols., Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006–07).

Obedience, and the refusal of spiritual autonomy. Not obedience as submission for its own sake, but the refusal of the position in which one is one’s own only authority. Where an elder is not available, the substitute is living by counsel — Scripture, the Fathers, the mind of the Church, and the advice of sober contemporaries — which St. Ignatius set out precisely for an age in which guides had become rare (Brianchaninov, The Arena, 1991; see Discernment and the Measure; St. Ignatius Brianchaninov: Discernment for a Weakened Age).

The sacramental and liturgical life. Regular confession and communion, the services, the fasts of the Church rather than fasts of one’s own devising. Delusion characteristically grows in private; the Church’s common life is not a private place (see The Jesus Prayer (hub article)).

The measure. No escalation of ascetic practice without a blessing (see Discernment and the Measure).

The ordinary duties as the test. Whether a person has become more patient, more useful, less irritable, easier to live with. The tradition’s most exacting version of this test is St. Silouan’s: the presence of the Holy Spirit is known by love of enemies (see St. Silouan the Athonite: The Criterion).

The Guardrail: No One Assesses His Own Attainment

Behind the individual safeguards stands a single principle, and it is dogmatic rather than merely prudential: no person may assess his own spiritual state.

The tradition’s uniform testimony is that the saints regarded themselves as sinners and that the announcement of one’s own attainments is diagnostic of the opposite. This is not conventional modesty. It follows from the doctrine: what is given is God’s, given freely, and the person who is measuring is by that act occupied with himself rather than with God. The collection on deification states the same guardrail and this one agrees with it exactly (see Theosis: The Dogmatic Guardrails, “Not Something a Person Can Claim”; Theosis: Counterfeits and Confusions).

The corollary is that the machinery of the Church — confession, obedience, a spiritual father, the common life — exists partly to protect a person from his own judgment about himself.

When It Is Illness

The ascetic tradition’s descriptions of derangement are descriptions of what its authors saw, in the categories available to them. A modern reader must add what they could not: some of what is described here is illness, and some of what presents today as prelest is illness.

The practical rule is simple and should be stated without hedging. Hallucinations, sustained sleeplessness, grandiosity, self-starvation, suicidal thoughts, and the belief that one has a special mission are matters for a physician, and the fact that they occur in a religious context does not change this. Ascetic counsel is not treatment, a confessor is not a psychiatrist, and reducing a rule of prayer is not a substitute for medical care. Nothing in the Orthodox tradition requires a person to choose between them (see Cautions for the Modern Reader).

The Proportion

The warnings must be held in the proportion the tradition itself held them, or they become their own kind of error.

The same St. Ignatius who anatomized prelest wrote volumes urging the Jesus Prayer on his readers; the same Athos that produced the case histories produced the saints. The warnings are the practice’s fence, not its refutation, and they are evidence of how seriously the tradition takes the reality of what prayer touches. A reader who comes away from this file frightened of prayer has misread it; the counsel is not to pray less but to pray for mercy, imagelessly, in the Church, and to tell someone what happens (see The Jesus Prayer: Prelest and the Need for Guidance, which states this proportion in the same terms; The Jesus Prayer: The Prayer for Everyone).

A Word on the Misuse of the Term

Prelest has become, in English-speaking Orthodox argument, a term of dismissal — applied to converts, to other jurisdictions, to charismatic Christians, to anyone whose spiritual life is reported with warmth. This use is a straightforward inversion of the term.

Three points settle it. The literature developed the category for self-examination and for the use of a spiritual father with an actual disciple in front of him. The confident diagnosis of another’s inner state from outside is, by the tradition’s own marks, characteristic of mnenie — the person who is certain he can see what others cannot. And judging the neighbour is itself named among the passions in the Eastern catalogue, with particular severity in the Russian sources this term comes from (see The Catalogue and the Chief Passions; Matthew 7:1–5).

The tradition’s own instrument is available and is the opposite of a label: tell your own thoughts to someone who can weigh them.

References

Athanasius of Alexandria. The Life of Antony, 35–36. Trans. NPNF II/4.
Barsanuphius and John. Letters. Trans. John Chryssavgis. 2 vols. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006–07.
Brianchaninov, Ignatius. On the Prayer of Jesus. Trans. Father Lazarus [Moore]. London: John M. Watkins, 1965.
Brianchaninov, Ignatius. The Arena: An Offering to Contemporary Monasticism. Trans. Archimandrite Lazarus. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1991.
The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 4. Trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1995. (Gregory of Sinai, On Stillness; Pseudo-Symeon, The Three Methods of Prayer.)
Ware, Kallistos. The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality. Oxford: SLG Press, 1974.
Scripture: Matthew 7:1–5; 2 Corinthians 11:14.