Try the spirits
The apostolic instruction is blunt, and it is addressed to believers. Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world (1 John 4:1, KJV). St John is not writing to sceptics who doubt that anything spiritual exists. He is writing to Christians who were having experiences, and telling them that having the experience settles nothing by itself.
Most of us instinctively do the opposite. Something happens in prayer — warmth, tears, a sudden certainty, a sense of being addressed — and the sheer intensity of it seems to be its own credential. The stronger it felt, the truer it must have been. Orthodox tradition does not accept that inference, and it has a large, unglamorous body of teaching about how sincere people go wrong here. It assumes from the outset that going wrong is ordinary.
The word the Fathers use
Greek and Russian ascetic writers have a term for the condition: prelest, usually rendered as spiritual deception or delusion. English has no exact equivalent, which is part of the difficulty. Prelest is not lying and it is not insanity. It is the state of a person who has mistaken something else — his own imagination, his nerves, his vanity, or an intelligence that is not his own — for the grace of God, and who is often the last to suspect it.
Fr. Seraphim Rose set out the teaching chiefly from Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, the nineteenth-century Russian hierarch whose collected works gather the older Fathers on this subject. Bishop Ignatius distinguishes two forms. The first and rarer is spectacular: a person reaches for high spiritual states or visions before he has been purified, relying on his own judgment, and receives visions accordingly. The second is commoner and much quieter: a heart that wants the enjoyment of holy feelings while it is not yet fit for them.
Note where that leaves the reader. The dangerous case in this teaching is not the obvious fraud; it is the devout person with good intentions. Bishop Ignatius, quoted by Fr. Seraphim, says that we are all in some measure deceived, that knowing this is the best protection there is, and that the worst deception of all is to believe oneself free of deception. The criteria that follow exist because of that sentence, not in spite of it.
First: humility, which in practice means distrust of oneself
The older texts are startlingly unsentimental. St Anthony the Great counselled that when any vision presents itself one should not take fright but ask it, firmly, who it is and where it has come from; a manifestation from God will calm the fear, while a deception wavers when it meets a steady soul. Bishop Ignatius adds that if great saints were sometimes nearly deceived by spirits appearing in the form of angels, we are in no position to assume we would do better.
His practical counsel, drawn from the same Fathers, is therefore to decline such perceptions altogether: not to enter into conversation with an apparition, not to dwell on it, to make the sign of the Cross and acknowledge oneself unfit for that kind of communion. St Gregory of Sinai is quoted to the same effect — the mind readily forms whatever images it desires, and those who do not watch themselves closely are the ones it forms them for.
There is a consoling corollary that gets quoted far less often. On this teaching, God is not offended by the cautious person who refuses something out of fear of being deceived, even if what was refused had in fact been sent by Him. Caution is treated as good sense, not as ingratitude. That is worth holding on to if you are the sort of person who worries about having failed a test you did not know you were sitting.
Second: peace, and the kind of peace it has to be
Grace, in the patristic accounts, is recognised less by its intensity than by its quietness. It leaves a person sober, collected, aware of his own sins and not especially interested in describing what happened to him. The counterfeit tends to leave excitement, a warm sense of having been singled out, and a strong wish to tell somebody. That is a criterion about aftermath rather than about the moment itself, which is precisely why it takes patience to apply.
The same caution extends to the physical phenomena that often accompany religious feeling. Fr. Seraphim, following St John of the Ladder, notes that tears have many different causes, some of them good and some not, and that a person should not trust his own tears until his soul has been purified; the Ladder is similarly wary of religious laughter. None of this means the body is irrelevant to prayer. It means the body is not evidence.
Third: the fruits, measured in years
By their fruits ye shall know them (Matthew 7:16, KJV) is the criterion everyone remembers and almost nobody applies properly, because fruit takes seasons. The question is not what a person felt on the night, or even in the month afterwards. It is what he is like five years later: whether he is gentler or harder, whether he forgives faster, whether he has become more patient with dull people, whether he still thinks the experience was mainly about him.
Fr. Seraphim applied this test in public, and it is instructive that he applied it favourably to Protestants. Speaking in 1980 about a non-Orthodox Christian community in Eureka, California, from which several of his own spiritual children had come, he noted approvingly that they believed in spiritual struggle and the training of the soul, that they made themselves forgive one another and hold no grudges, and that they took people in off the streets. He said plainly that this was not the fullness of Christianity as the Orthodox have it, and equally plainly that it was good as far as it went.
In the Protestant world, we have many examples of people with soft hearts, who, for the love of Christ, are kind to other people.
Fr. Seraphim Rose, talk on simplicity, 1979, in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 87 (St. Herman Press, 2003)
Fourth: somebody other than you has to look at it
This is the criterion that modern readers like least, and it is the one the tradition insists on most. A person cannot reliably assess his own spiritual state, because the faculty doing the assessing is the one under suspicion. The remedy is not a guru. Asked about finding a God-bearing elder, Fr. Seraphim answered that such guidance is not given to our times, and pointed instead to what Bishop Ignatius calls life by counsel: a counsellor gives advice, which you then test in your own experience, rather than commands.
In ordinary parish life this means a confessor — a priest who knows you over years, to whom you can say what happened and who is permitted to be unimpressed. It is a slow, unglamorous arrangement, and it works mainly by removing the private echo chamber in which spiritual self-assessment goes wrong. Fr. Seraphim wrote to one convert who was busy grading his own progress with a frankness that has aged well.
You are too young in Orthodoxy to be evaluating your spiritual growth—that is actually a sign of your pride.
Fr. Seraphim Rose, letter of 22 June 1976, in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 84 (St. Herman Press, 2003)
Fifth: Scripture and the Fathers, together and not selectively
The final criterion is the longest memory. Scripture itself warns that Satan is transformed into an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14, KJV), which is a warning about attractive experiences rather than repulsive ones. St John Cassian, writing in the fifth century on the gifts of the Spirit, observed that wonders are sometimes worked precisely in order to inflate the man who believes he possesses a gift, and so prepare him for a heavier fall. The Ladder of St John warns that even the interpretation of Scripture can be suggested to a beginner by something that does not wish him well.
Reading the Fathers as a whole, rather than mining them for a sentence that endorses what you already experienced, is what makes this a criterion at all. Nobody does that alone or quickly. It is the ordinary work of a lifetime in the Church, which is why the tradition ties discernment to the sacraments, to confession and to time, rather than to a technique anyone could learn in a weekend.
The charismatic movement, and how to read what he wrote about it
The longest chapter of Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future — Chapter VII, in the Fifth Edition (St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2004) — is about the charismatic revival then spreading through Roman Catholic and Protestant congregations. Before summarising his argument, the parish wants to say what Fr. Seraphim also said: that the people in those meetings were in the main sincere and well-meaning Christians who loved Christ and wanted more of God. Nobody reading this should be left with the impression that their sincerity is in question here.
His argument runs as follows. The criterion for judging a spiritual experience is not the experience but the attitude taken towards it; the category of prelest was largely absent from the Western spiritual manuals of the period, so the movement had no inherited tool for the job; and when he laid the published testimonies of participants alongside Bishop Ignatius, he found the pattern of the second, quieter form of deception. His conclusion was severe, and we will not disguise it: he judged the movement a counterfeit of the Church's own spiritual life, and he wrote about it sharply.
Two honest qualifications follow. His tone in that chapter is harder than almost anywhere else in his writing, and many Orthodox readers who accept his criteria still find the tone difficult. He knew the danger himself and named it in print in 1980, writing about converts who had grown too free with the words heresy and heretic, and about the smugness that can hide inside a technically accurate position.
Even when it is worded in a theologically correct manner, this attitude is spiritually wrong
Fr. Seraphim Rose, “In Defense of Fr. Dimitri Dudko”, The Orthodox Word no. 2 (1980), p. 131, quoted in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 84 (St. Herman Press, 2003)
Criteria, not verdicts
Which brings us to the reader. Everything above is a set of criteria. It is not a ruling on your prayer meeting, your conversion, or the night something happened that you have never been able to explain to anyone. This parish does not know what happened to you, has no way of knowing, and is not going to tell you. Anyone who offers you a confident diagnosis of an experience he was not present for is doing something the Fathers did not do.
What the tradition offers instead is a way of testing, worked out over centuries by people who took the risk of self-deception seriously and who applied it to themselves before anyone else. The right use of these criteria is slow and inward: wait; do not build your life on a single hour; tell somebody older in the faith than you are; and watch what you are like in five years. That is unexciting counsel. It was also given to the best disciples the Fathers had.
One last thing should be said, because the testing can sound like suspicion of God. It is not. Fr. Seraphim's own account of the Christian life was that it is formed in the hard struggle to acquire the Kingdom of Heaven (Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, ch. VIII §2, Fifth Edition, 2004), which is a very different thing from nervousness. Caution about our own impressions exists to protect something, not to shrink it. If you have had an experience you cannot account for, you are welcome to bring it to a priest in Kovan, who will not be shocked and will be glad you asked.