A word with no comfortable English equivalent
The Greek is plani, wandering or going astray. The Slavonic and Russian word is prelest, and it is the more telling of the two, because in ordinary modern Russian prelest simply means charm or loveliness. You would use it of a child or a summer evening. The same word, in the language of the ascetic Fathers, means being taken in — the state of a person who has mistaken something in himself for the presence of God.
English translators reach for "spiritual delusion", "spiritual deception", or "self-deception", and none of them quite carries the double sense. The condition is not merely an error. It is an error that feels beautiful from the inside. That is what makes it dangerous, and that is why the tradition has so much to say about it.
Where the teaching comes from
This is not a recent anxiety, nor a Russian one. It comes out of the Egyptian and Palestinian deserts of the fourth century onward, where people who prayed for a living discovered what happens to a mind left alone with itself for twenty years. Saint John Climacus devotes a long step of The Ladder of Divine Ascent to discernment. Saint Gregory of Sinai warns against admitting images into prayer at all. The whole collection assembled by Saint Macarius of Corinth and Saint Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain and printed at Venice in 1782 is called, in full, the Philokalia of the Neptic Fathers — the fathers of watchfulness.
The teaching reached Russian readers largely through Saint Paisius Velichkovsky, who translated the Philokalia into Slavonic at the end of the eighteenth century, and then through Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov (1807–1867), a bishop of the Caucasus and Black Sea whom the Russian Church canonised in 1988. His book The Arena and his writings on the Prayer of Jesus are the most systematic modern treatment of the subject in any language, and they are the books Fr. Seraphim Rose leaned on hardest.
The two shapes it takes
Saint Ignatius describes the condition in two broad forms. The first arises from praying wrongly: from deliberately working up images, warmth in the chest, sensations of sweetness, and then taking these self-produced effects for grace. The body is obliging. It will supply almost any sensation asked of it often enough, and the person who has taught himself to expect consolation will reliably receive some.
The second form he calls opinion, and it is the worse of the two because it needs no visions at all. It is the settled conviction of having arrived — of standing further along than others, of having understood, of being someone whose spiritual judgements can be trusted. A person in this condition may pray very little and still be thoroughly deceived. It is available to bishops, to converts of six months, and to people who write articles for parish websites.
Why visions and warm feelings are not treated as evidence
An outsider often finds this the strangest feature of Orthodox practice. A tradition drenched in icons, incense, chant and the language of mystical union turns out to be cold-eyed about religious experience to a degree that startles people. Told that someone has seen a light in prayer, an experienced Orthodox priest is far more likely to ask what the person has eaten and how much they have slept than to rejoice.
The reason is a piece of reasoning, not a temperament. If the criterion of a genuine experience were its intensity, then whatever can produce intensity can produce the criterion — fatigue, grief, longing, suggestion, music, a crowd, and, the Fathers add without embarrassment, spirits that are not God. Intensity is therefore useless as a test, because it is available from too many sources. Something that cannot be counterfeited is needed instead.
What the tradition puts in its place is not another experience but a direction of movement. Does this leave the person humbler, quieter, less interesting to himself, more patient with the tedious, more willing to be wrong? Grace, on this account, is recognised by its fruit in ordinary conduct over months, not by its taste in the moment. The old counsel about visions follows from that: do not accept and do not reject, but carry on with what you were told to do, and tell your confessor.
Anything outward … can become a counterfeit.
Fr. Seraphim Rose, quoted in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 86 (St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood)
The discipline is aimed at ourselves first
It matters a great deal how this teaching is used, because it can be picked up by the wrong end and turned into a weapon. Used as a diagnostic instrument for other people's prayer, it becomes a permission slip for contempt, and it then produces, with some reliability, the second form of the condition in the person holding it. There is a grim symmetry here that the Fathers saw clearly.
Orthodox practice is itself the first thing under suspicion. The Jesus Prayer taken up as a technique, fasting kept as a performance, a taste for old chant and correct icons, the pleasure of belonging to something ancient and unusual in a city like Singapore, the quiet satisfaction of knowing more than the people in the pew behind you: every one of these is flagged in the literature by name. Fr. Seraphim said he was suspicious of a church with nothing but good icons, because the people there might be following a fashion.
Fr. Seraphim made the same point more sharply in a letter written in 1981, during an argument about whether a Western Father had erred in his theology. His correspondent wanted the errors catalogued. The reply refused to treat that as the urgent question, and it is the sentence to keep if only one is kept:
I myself fear the cold hearts of the 'intellectually correct' much more than any errors you might find in Augustine.
Fr. Seraphim Rose, letter to Fr. Michael, 26 June 1981, in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 86 (St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood)
The safeguards
None of the protections the Church offers is dramatic, and that is deliberate. They work by keeping a person's interior life from becoming a private matter, and by keeping the ordinary duties in front of the exalted ones. Fr. Seraphim, asked repeatedly by young Americans how to find a God-bearing elder, answered that such guidance is not given to our times and pointed instead to what Saint Ignatius calls life by counsel: a counsellor gives advice which is then tested in experience, rather than commands.
- Confession — spiritual experience described out loud, to a priest who knows you, loses most of its power to flatter.
- Counsel — a settled relationship in which someone else's judgement about your prayer outweighs your own.
- Watchfulness, nepsis — attention to what is actually arriving in the mind, without arguing with it or entertaining it.
- The appointed prayers — words given by the Church rather than composed in the moment, which do not bend to your mood.
- Ordinary duties first — giving alms, visiting the sick, helping those in need, which are hard to perform while admiring yourself.
- A working distrust of your own spiritual states, held without anxiety, as a pilot distrusts his inner ear in cloud.
What this teaching does not say
It does not say that feeling is bad, or that consolation is suspect in itself. God does console, often at the point where a person can bear no more, and the Church's own hymns are not exactly restrained. Pascha night in a packed church at two in the morning is not a sober occasion, and no one asks it to be. The Fathers are not describing a religion of grey suspicion.
Nor does it say that God gives no visions. The Lives of the Saints are full of them. What the tradition says is narrower and more practical: that you are not the right judge of your own, that seeking them is the surest way to be given something false, and that a person who is not looking for them is in far less danger than a person who is. Saint Nicetas, who shut himself away to pursue exactly such gifts, is the standing example of how that ends.
A writer who applied it to himself
Fr. Seraphim's best-known use of this material is in The Soul After Death, published in 1980, and in Chapter VII of Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, where section 5 is headed simply "Spiritual Deception". What is worth noticing is how he wrote when the criterion was turned on his own work. In the preface to The Soul After Death he separates what the Church teaches about life after death, which he presents as settled, from his own readings of particular modern cases, which he does not.
That sentence was tested almost immediately. His presentation of the aerial toll-houses was publicly attacked, chiefly by Deacon Lev Puhalo, and the dispute went to the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Church Abroad. The Synod found that the teaching contains nothing contrary to piety, acknowledged that the vivid form given to it in one saint's Life has no direct scriptural basis, and then forbade further public controversy in periodicals. The teaching itself is old and widely attested in Orthodox liturgical and dogmatic sources; the manner of its presentation has genuinely been disputed among Orthodox writers, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
Concerning these interpretations, of course, there is room for a legitimate difference of opinion among Orthodox Christians.
Fr. Seraphim Rose, The Soul After Death, Preface (St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1980; 2009 printing)
Why a stranger might find this useful
If you have arrived here from a tradition where a strong experience of God is welcomed and given thanks for, the Orthodox habit of interrogating such experiences can look ungrateful, even faithless. It is worth saying plainly that Orthodoxy does make large claims for itself, and that this article has not tried to soften them. But the discipline described here is not a claim about you. It is a house rule, applied indoors, and applied first to the people who wrote it down.
Anyone is welcome to see how it works in practice. Come to a service at the Dormition parish in Kovan and watch what happens after: the queue for confession, the ordinary business of asking forgiveness of people you will see again next week. That is where the tradition thinks the real test of anyone's prayer is administered, and it is a test most of us fail quietly and often.