10. Spiritual Delusion (Prelest).

Weak faith and carelessness are expressions of people’s irreligion, but even a pious

person is not protected from spiritual sickness if he does not have a wise guide, either a

living person or a spiritual writer. This sickness is called prelest, or spiritual delusion,

imagining oneself to be near to God and to the realm of the divine and supernatural. Even

zealous ascetics in monasteries are sometimes subject to this delusion, but of course, lay

people who are zealous in outward ascetic struggles undergo it much more frequently.

Surpassing their acquaintainces in feats of prayer and fasting, they imagine that they are

seers of divine visions, or at least of dreams inspired by grace. In all events in their lives

they see special, intentional directions from God or their Guardian Angel, and then they

start imagining that they are God’s elect, and not infrequently try to foretell the future.

The Holy Fathers armed themselves against nothing so fiercely as against this sickness —

spiritual delusion.

Prelest endangers a man’s soul if it lurks in him alone; but it is dangerous and

imperilling also for the whole of local church life, if a whole society is seized in its grasp,

if it makes its appearance anywhere as a spiritual epidemic and the life of a whole parish

or diocese is oriented entirely towards it. This is exactly what has happened in the

Russian Church, both in Great Russia and in the Ukraine, both among the simple people

and in the so-called “enlightened society.” This plague, under various names, began to

develop in strength throughout the local Russian Church some thirty years ago, and by

the time of the last war it had seized almost all parts of the former Russian Empire in its

grasp. In St. Petersburg, in Moscow and on the lower reaches of the Volga appeared the

Johannites, who declared the late Fr. John of Kronstadt4 to be a reincarnation of Christ

and a certain Matrona Kisileva to be the Mother of God. To replace one Christ,5 others

appeared — Chursikov in Petrograd, Koloskov in Moscow and Samara, and so on. The

Ukraine created Stephan Podgorny, a wanderer who later became a monk and claimed to

be God. Podolia and Bessarabia declared a semi-literate and drunken Moldavian

hieromonk, Innokenty, to be Christ. In Kiev another uneducated monk called Spiridon,

who had attained to the rank of archimandrite during the war, started to preach a new

faith. In Siberia Johannism took on an especially fanatical character, and, alas, even on

Mt. Athos an extremely harmful movement of delusion, called imenobozhnichestvo,6 has

started spreading.

In high society Rasputin gave himself out as Christ, and the teaching of

reincarnation, or neobuddhism, with its extremely easy methods of imaginary

communication with the supernatural world, can almost be called the ruling trend of

thought in contemporary society. The way was prepared for this by the writings of L.

Tolstoy and Vladimir Soloviev. A certain female writer, Schmidt, all but imagined the

latter a reincarnation of the Saviour. For a long time now the majority of our writers have

been decadents,7 and although they are themselves atheists or pantheists, they also give

themselves out, with considerable success, as intermediaries with the Godhead or even

with the gods.

The war, and especially the revolution, have significantly cooled the ardour both

of these self-deluded people and also of those who were consciously and slyly deluding

others. But such a spiritual epidemic goes too deep to be completely destroyed even by

the most radical political upheavals. This disease will continue, especially because not

one people provides such fertile soil for the activity of self-styled seers and prophets as

4 Fr. John of Kronstadt: canonized by the Russian Church Outside Russia in 1964, St.

John was a man of truly holy life, but the “Johannites” carried their devotion for him to

an excess which even caused some to doubt his sanctity.

5

i.e., after St. John reposed.

6 Imenobozhnichestvo: Deification of the name of God — the belief that the Divine

essence is present in the name of Jesus uttered in the Jesus Prayer, and that the Jesus

Prayer is the only genuine form of monastic activity.

7 Decadents: Representatives of a literary movement that appeared at the end of the

nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. They rejected the nineteenth

century ideal of realism, preached “art for art’s sake”; “deliberately and consciously they

were creating precious poems full of neologisms, sensuous alliterations, and cryptic

meanings, while their ethereal prose sketched dreams and exotic or perverse emotions.

Their strong anti-social tendency was bolstered by haughty individualism, which often

degenerated into narcissism. They had recourse to demonism, drugs and sexual excess in

order to enter the ‘artificial paradise’ of hallucinations, mystical flights and

hypersensitivity” (From Chekhov to the Revolution, by Marc Slonim, p. 84). They

included Merezhkovsky, Sologub, Rozhanov, Bely and others.

does the Russian people. The hero of one of Ostrovsky’s plays (“There Is Enough

Simplicity to Deal with Every Wise Man”) said quite correctly that in Russia anyone can

give himself out as a prophet, provided that he is not lazy, nor ashamed to do so. No

matter how much people are let down by his predictions, they will not stop believing in

his special knowledge, but will explain the failure of the prophecy by their own lack of

understanding. But the false prophet or christ will have honour, glory and every possible

kind of gift heaped upon him as before. Everyone knows how destructive are the

consequences of being carried away by this “Khlystism”;8 it begins with feats of prayer

and fasting and ends with shameless depravity, or fornication.

Of course, a spiritual father cannot struggle with this sin or with Khlystism in

general in its entirety. He can only advise individual Christians and warn them against

falling over this spiritual precipice, as soon as he notices even the slightest inclination

towards visions, predictions and things of this sort. Apart from confession itself, he must

explain in sermons what delusion and Khlystism are (my circular letter about this was

printed in the periodical “Light of Petchersk” in the summer of 1918). If a priest notices

that the person confessing to him a Khlyst or a Johannite or, in general, someone inclined

towards delusion, then he should briefly explain to him how the devil deludes Christians

and even monks by suggesting the thought that they have been granted visions. Then he

constantly blinds their conscience, convincing them of their apparent sanctity and

promising them the power of working miracles. (These can be illustrated by referring to

the life of “Svyatogorets”9 about the Holy Mountain Athos, Abba Dorotheus, St. John of

the Ladder, or the Synaxarion). He leads such ascetics to the summit of a mountain or

roof of a church and shows them a fiery chariot on which they will be taken at once to

Heaven. The deluded ascetic then steps on to it and falls headlong into the abyss, and is

dashed to death without repentance. If the person confessing tells of visions he has seen,

then ask him if the person who appeared had a cross with him or blessed him with the

sign of the Cross; if not, the visions were all from the devil; this is explained by the

fathers and spiritual writers we have just mentioned. The Apostle Paul also wrote that

Satan takes the form of an angel of light (I Cor. 11:14). You must also bear in mind that,

when the Khlysti find out about this sign for distinguishing true visions from false ones,

then, in their future accounts they will be careful to mention that the person who appeared

had a cross with him and even blessed them with the cross. However, if you continue

raising objections they will not be able to restrain themselves from anger. At this point

immediately explain that, according to the teaching of the Fathers, anger or irritation

when telling about a vision is a sure sign that the person who saw it is in delusion and

8 Khlysti: a sect of flagellants. Ordinary services were held with readings from the Bible,

etc., but the secret meetings held at night, for the initiated, progressed from readings and

hymns to dances inducing hysteria and trances, and ended in a general sexual orgy, at

which both natural and unnatural sexual acts were committed. The word “khlyst,” which

literally means “whip,” was also understood to be a corruption of “Christ” for the

members of the sect considered themselves to be “Christs,” and their leader, “God.”

9 Svyatogorets, or “Hagiorite” means “an inhabitant of Mount Athos.” This was the

pseudonym of a Russian spiritual writer of the Holy Mountain.

that the visions themselves are false. “Angels and demons appear to the saints, but we

sinners can only deceive ourselves and others if we recount our ‘visions’.”

In order to open the eyes of a person who has fallen or is falling into delusion, you

must show him examples of this fatal sickness taken from the above-mentioned books,

and also of its invariable sign — disturbance and even irritability in the face of

accusations. Should they be admitted to Communion? If they directly affirm some absurd

belief, such as in the divinity of Stephan Podgorny or Matrona Kiseleva, then of course

they should not be admitted. But if they offer repentance for all their sins and promise to

test their visions or dreams with the sign of the Cross and to conceal nothing from the

priest, then they can be admitted.

Twenty years ago, the Russian Holy Synod gave orders for priests to demand that

all Khlysts known to them solemnly curse the Khlyst errors, in front of the Cross and

Gospels. This was the only means of diagnosing the Khlyst heresy, as its followers are

told not to reveal their secrets “either to father or mother or spiritual father.” Only before

an actual cursing of the Khlyst heresy will a secret Khlyst hesitate, and then the priest

will understand with whom he is dealing and, of course, will not give him absolution of

sins or Holy Communion unless he condemns the heresy. However, even an admission of

this sort can be obtained from a Khlyst, although not in its entirety. He will swear that he

does not belong to any Khlyst society and does not share their errors, but not one word of

this can be believed until he has anathematized the main points of the Khlyst heresy.

These are set forth in the circular published by the Holy Synod and printed in the

“Church Bulletin” (“Tserkovniya Vedomosti”).