What Plane and Prelest Name

The definitional file on spiritual delusion. Greek πλάνη is wandering and being led astray; Slavonic and Russian прелесть renders it but is built on a different root — flattery and beguilement — and in ordinary modern Russian means charm. The Russian term therefore names a deception that attracts, which is precisely the phenomenon. This file sets out both words, their scriptural background, what delusion is, and the three things it is not.

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

Πλάνη: Wandering

Greek πλάνη comes from πλανάω, “to cause to wander, to lead astray”, and πλανάομαι, “to wander”. The same root gives the ancient name of the planets — οἱ πλάνητες ἀστέρες, the wandering stars, so called because they do not keep the fixed courses of the others. The image built into the word is of straying from a path rather than of falling into a pit: delusion is the condition of someone who is still walking, still moving with purpose, and no longer on the road.

The New Testament uses the word group for error and deceit generally: being “carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive” (Ephesians 4:14); the “strong delusion” (ἐνέργειαν πλάνης) sent upon those who refuse the truth (2 Thessalonians 2:11); “the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error” (πνεῦμα τῆς πλάνης, 1 John 4:6). Christ’s enemies call him a planos, a deceiver (Matthew 27:63).

Greek usage keeps a wide range. Πλάνη in Byzantine texts covers doctrinal error and heresy as readily as it covers the ascetic phenomenon; the Synodikon of Orthodoxy and the conciliar literature use it of false teaching. The narrowing to the specific ascetic sense — a person’s acceptance of false spiritual states as genuine — is a development within the neptic literature and is only ever one of the word’s uses in Greek.

Прелесть: Beguilement

Church Slavonic прельщение and прелесть translate πλάνη but are built on a quite different root. The base is лесть (Old Church Slavonic льсть), meaning guile, flattery, deceit, with the intensifying prefix пре-; the verb прельстити means to seduce, to entice, to lead astray by attraction. The Slavonic word therefore encodes not wandering but being charmed away.

The development in modern Russian makes the point unmistakable. Ordinary Russian прелесть means “charm, loveliness, delight” — какая прелесть! is an expression of admiration, “how lovely!”, and прелестный means charming. The ascetic term and the everyday term are the same word. A Russian reader therefore hears in prelest something an English reader does not hear in “delusion”: that what is being described is not merely a mistake but an enchantment, something that pleases, attracts, and is wanted.

This is not a curiosity of philology. It fits the phenomenon exactly. The person in delusion is not suffering; he is, characteristically, delighted. The states he has entered are pleasant, elevating, and confirming, and this is why he defends them and why argument does not reach him. The Greek term describes the trajectory; the Russian term describes the mechanism.

English has no single word. Translations give “delusion”, “spiritual delusion”, “beguilement”, “illusion”, “self-deception”; the Philokalia glossary uses “delusion” for πλάνη. Much English-language Orthodox writing now simply uses prelest untranslated, a usage that entered through the translations of St. Ignatius Brianchaninov and spread through Russian-diaspora and convert literature in the later twentieth century. It should be noted honestly that the word’s frequency in English-speaking Orthodoxy is considerably greater than the frequency of πλάνη in the Greek sources, and greater than its frequency in ordinary Greek Orthodox pastoral speech; the term has had a career in English that it did not have in Greek.

What Delusion Is

Prelest is the state of a person who has accepted a falsehood about God, about grace, or about himself as spiritual truth, and who is therefore building on it.

Four features distinguish it from ordinary error.

Its object is spiritual. A mistake about a fact, a text, or a person is not prelest. What is misjudged is one’s own relation to God — that one has grace, gifts, prayer of the heart, discernment, a calling, a revelation.

It is self-confirming. The condition supplies its own evidence. The experiences it produces are taken as verification, and the resistance of others is taken as their incapacity. This is the reason the tradition insists that the deluded man is by definition the last to know, and why the safeguards are all external to the person (see The Discernment of Spirits).

It engages the will, not only the mind. Delusion is entered because something in it is wanted. The Fathers locate its root in vainglory and pride: the desire to be someone spiritually, which is why the condition attacks the diligent rather than the negligent.

It is a real spiritual danger, not merely an embarrassment. The literature’s case histories end badly — in derangement, in the abandonment of the Church, and, in the accounts St. Ignatius reports, in suicide. The tradition’s severity on this subject is proportioned to what it has observed.

Three Things Delusion Is Not

It is not heresy. The two are related and can accompany one another, and Greek πλάνη covers both, but they are distinct: heresy is a false teaching held about the faith, and prelest is a false state accepted about oneself. A person can be perfectly orthodox in doctrine and thoroughly deluded about his own condition, and this is in fact the commonest case.

It is not mental illness. The tradition’s own case histories certainly include people whom a modern physician would diagnose and treat, and honesty requires saying so; the descriptions of derangement in the ascetic literature are descriptions of what its authors saw, offered with the categories they had. Prelest names a spiritual condition and is not a psychiatric category, has no diagnostic criteria in any clinical sense, and should never be used to explain away symptoms that require medical attention. A person who is hearing voices needs a physician as well as a confessor, and the two are not in competition (see Cautions for the Modern Reader).

It is not other people’s problem. The term is diagnostic in the first person. Its use as a label for another Christian’s spiritual life — common in online Orthodox argument — inverts it, since the confident diagnosis of another’s delusion is itself a textbook mark of the second form of the thing (see The Marks of Delusion and the Safeguards).

The General and the Particular Sense

The literature uses the term in two registers, and both belong.

In the particular sense, prelest is a definite state that a definite person has entered, with identifiable marks — the subject of the next file.

In the general sense, the whole fallen condition is a delusion, since every person is to some degree deceived about himself by the passions. St. Ignatius Brianchaninov’s much-quoted teaching runs in this direction: all men are in prelest in some measure, and the recognition of the fact is the chief protection against it, since the person who knows he is liable to deception submits his judgment to another, while the person who believes himself exempt does not (Brianchaninov, On the Prayer of Jesus, trans. Father Lazarus [Moore], London: John M. Watkins, 1965; The Arena, trans. Archimandrite Lazarus, Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1991; see St. Ignatius Brianchaninov: Against Delusion).

The general sense is what keeps the particular sense from becoming a way of sorting people into the deluded and the sound. It is also the ground of the tradition’s practice: confession, disclosure of thoughts, and obedience are not remedies applied to the sick but the ordinary regimen of everyone.

The Greek Sources

Although the term is most developed in Russian, the phenomenon is described throughout the Greek literature.

St. John Climacus treats the phenomena of false visions and false consolations and warns against accepting appearances, however holy they seem (The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 3, on dreams, and Step 26; trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell, New York: Paulist Press, 1982). Gregory of Sinai instructs the hesychast to reject lights and forms, lest he accept something else in place of grace (On Stillness, in The Philokalia, vol. 4, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, London: Faber and Faber, 1995). The treatise transmitted as St. Symeon’s Three Methods of Prayer condemns the imaginative method outright and records what it produces (The Philokalia, vol. 4, 1995; on the attribution, see Attention, Prayer, and the Descent of the Nous). And the desert had the whole phenomenon already, in its stories of ascetics deceived by apparitions of angels and of Christ (The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, trans. Benedicta Ward, rev. ed., Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1984).

What St. Ignatius Brianchaninov added in the nineteenth century was not the observation but the systematization — a taxonomy, a set of marks, and a pastoral policy for an age in which experienced guides had become rare (see The Marks of Delusion and the Safeguards).

References

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.
John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Steps 3 and 26. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. New York: Paulist Press, 1982.
The Philokalia: The Complete Text. Trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware. Vol. 1 (1979): glossary, s.v. “Delusion”. Vol. 4 (1995): Gregory of Sinai, On Stillness; Pseudo-Symeon, The Three Methods of Prayer. London: Faber and Faber.
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1984.
Scripture: Matthew 27:63; Ephesians 4:14; 2 Thessalonians 2:11; 1 John 4:6.