There is another more common, less spectacular form of spiritual deception, which offers to its victims not great visions but just exalted ‘religious feelings.’
This occurs, as Bishop Ignatius has written, ‘when the heart desires and strives for the enjoyment of holy and divine feelings while it is still completely unfit for them. Everyone who does not have a contrite spirit, who recognizes any kind of merit or worth in himself, who does not hold unwaveringly the teaching of the Orthodox Church but on some tradition or other has thought out his own arbitrary judgment or has followed a non-Orthodox teaching — is in this state of deception.’ The Roman Catholic Church has whole spiritual manuals written by people in this state; such is Thomas á Kempis’ Imitation of Christ.
Bishop Ignatius says of it:
‘There reigns in this book and breathes from its pages the unction of the evil spirit, flattering the reader, intoxicating him…. The book conducts the reader directly to communion with God, without previous purification by repentance…. From it carnal people enter into rapture from a delight and intoxication attained without difficulty, without self-renunciation, without repentance, without crucifixion of the flesh with its passions and desires (Gal. 5:24), with flattery of their fallen state.’
And the result, as I.M. Kontzevitch, the great transmitter of Patristic teaching, has written, is that ‘the ascetic, striving to kindle in his heart love for God while neglecting repentance, exerts himself to attain a feeling of delight, of ecstasy, and as a result he attains precisely the opposite: “he enters into communion with satan and becomes infected with hatred for the Holy Spirit” (Bishop Ignatius).’
(Fr Seraphim Rose, Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, pp. 145-146)
