The necessity of strict observance of the law of consistency in the spiritual life is evidenced by the following words of the most experienced instructor in the spiritual life, St. Isaac the Syrian, quoted by St. Ignatius: "The All-Wise Lord has blessed us that we should eat spiritual bread in the sweat of our brow. He established this not out of malice, but so that indigestion would not occur and we would not die. Each virtue is the mother of the one that follows it. If you leave the mother who gives birth to virtues and strive to seek daughters before acquiring a mother, then these virtues become vipers for the soul. If you do not reject them from you, you will soon die" (II, 57-58). In this regard, St. Ignatius sternly warns: "Premature impassibility is dangerous! It is dangerous to receive the pleasure of Divine grace prematurely! Supernatural gifts can destroy an ascetic who has not been taught his weakness" (I, 532). Amazing words! For a spiritually inexperienced person, the very idea that some virtue can turn out to be premature, especially fatal for the soul, snide, will seem simply strange, even blasphemous. But this is precisely the reality of spiritual life, such is one of its strict laws, revealed by the great experience of the saints. In the fifth volume of his works, which the saint called "An Offering to Modern Monasticism," in Chapter Ten, "On Caution in Reading the Patristic Books on Monastic Life," he writes bluntly: "The fallen angel tries to deceive and draw the monks into perdition, offering them not only sin in its various forms, but also offering them uncharacteristic, most sublime virtues" (V, 54).

These thoughts are directly related to the understanding of the most important in the Christian, especially in monastic, podvig of prayerful activity. Bishop Ignatius, in agreement with all the saints, calling prayer the mother and head of all virtues (I, 140), strongly emphasizes the conditions under which it is such only if certain conditions are met. On the contrary, without observing these conditions, prayer either turns out to be fruitless, or becomes a means of the deepest fall of the ascetic. St. Ignatius quotes, for example, the words of the Russian ascetic, the hieromonk Dorotheus, whom he greatly revere: "Whoever prays with his lips, but cares for his soul and does not guard his heart, prays to the air, and not to God, and labors in vain, because God hearkens to the mind and zeal, and not to many words" (II, 266). At the same time, the saint pays special attention to the Jesus Prayer. In view of the great importance of this prayer for every Christian, we will make a brief excerpt from his wonderful article "On the Jesus Prayer. Conversation between the Elder and the Disciple".

"In the exercise of the Jesus Prayer there is its beginning, its gradualness, its endless end.

It is necessary to start the exercise from the beginning, and not from the middle and not from the end...

Those beginners begin in the middle who, after reading the instruction... given by the Fathers to the silent... thoughtlessly accept this instruction as a guide to their activities. Those begin in the middle who, without any preliminary preparation, strive to ascend with their minds to the temple of the heart and from there to send up prayer. Those who seek to immediately discover in themselves the grace-filled sweetness of prayer and its other grace-filled actions begin with the end.

One must begin from the beginning, that is, pray with attention and reverence, with the aim of repentance, taking care only that these three qualities are constantly present in prayer... Special care, the most thorough care, must be taken for the well-being of morality in accordance with the teaching of the Gospel... Only on morality, brought into order by the Gospel commandments... can be erected... an immaterial temple of God-pleasing prayer. In vain is the labor of him who builds on the arctic fox: on light morality, wavering" (I, 225-226).

From this quotation it is evident how attentive and reverently cautious the attitude towards the exercise in the Jesus Prayer should be. It must be done not in any way, but correctly. Otherwise, the exercise in it not only ceases to be a prayer, but can also destroy a Christian. For it is not prayer in itself or any other podvig that makes the life of a believer spiritually lawful (2 Tim. 2:5), but the right disposition of the soul. In one of his letters, St. Ignatius says what this mood should be: "Today I have read that saying of the Great Sisoi, which I have always especially liked, which has always been especially close to my heart. A certain monk said to him: "I am in the unceasing remembrance of God." The Monk Sisoy answered him: "This is not great; great will be when you consider yourself worse than all creation." A lofty occupation is the unceasing remembrance of God! But this height is very dangerous when the ladder to it is not based on the solid stone of humility" (IV, 497).

This serious warning points to yet another extremely important moment in the spiritual life, to the terrible danger that threatens the ascetic who is inexperienced and has neither a true guide nor correct theoretical spiritual knowledge ("thoughts," according to St. Ignatius) – the possibility of falling into daydreaming, or the so-called prelest. The latter term, often used by the Fathers, is remarkable for the fact that it accurately reveals the very essence of this phenomenon: flattery to oneself, self-deception, opinion of one's own dignity and perfection, pride. St. Ignatius warns: "He who thinks of himself as impassible will never be cleansed of passions; he who thinks that he is full of grace will never receive grace; he who thinks of himself as holy will never attain holiness. It is simple to say: he who ascribes to himself spiritual deeds, virtues, virtues, grace-filled gifts, flatters himself and amuses himself with opinions, blocks the entrance to spiritual deeds, Christian virtues, and Divine grace with this opinion, opens wide the entrance to sinful infection and demons. There is no longer any capacity for spiritual progress in those infected with opinion" (I, 243). Quoting the words of St. Gregory the Sinaite and naming the main source of this deadly disease: "In general, the only cause of delusion is pride..." – the saint also offers an antidote: "As pride is the cause of delusion in general, so humility... serves as a true warning and protection against delusion... Let our prayer be imbued with a feeling of repentance, let it be combined with weeping, and delusion never affects us" (I, 228).

In this feeling of repentance and humility, the Fathers saw the main criterion in distinguishing between holiness and delusion. St. Ignatius writes: "All the saints recognized themselves as unworthy of God: by this they showed their dignity, which consists in humility. All the self-deceived considered themselves worthy of God: by this they revealed the pride and demonic delusion that enveloped their souls. Some of them received demons that appeared to them in the form of angels, and followed them... others stirred up their imagination, heated their blood, produced nervous movements in themselves, took this for grace-filled pleasure and fell into self-deception, complete delusion, and were numbered in their spirit among the rejected spirits" (II, 126).

Unfortunately, any believer can find himself in this miserable state if he lives "on his own," without a spiritual mentor, without the guidance of the writings of the Holy Fathers. But if understanding the fathers is not always an easy task, then it is many times more difficult to find a true leader. And in this regard, St. Ignatius gives especially valuable advice to the modern believer. He warns about the need for great caution in choosing a spiritual father and the right attitude towards him, about the indispensability of separation from someone who turns out to be in delusion. Finally, and this can be especially important for a modern person. St. Ignatius says that at the present time there are no teachers who see the souls of people, but there are still, by the mercy of God, the elder "successful brethren" who have knowledge of the Holy Fathers and a certain spiritual experience, whose advice must be used without fail, checking, however, their patristic writings. Let us cite a few small excerpts from the works of the saint on this issue.

"According to the teaching of the Fathers, the residence... the only thing befitting our time is to live under the guidance of the writings of the fathers with the advice of successful modern brethren; This advice must again be checked according to the Scriptures of the Fathers... The Fathers, who are thousands of years removed from the times of Christ, repeating the advice of their predecessors, are already complaining about the rarity of divinely inspired teachers, about the multitude of false teachers that have appeared, and offer Holy Scripture and patristic writings for guidance. The Fathers, who are close to our time, call the divinely inspired leaders the heritage of antiquity and already resolutely bequeath the Holy Scriptures as a guide, verified by these Scriptures, and the advice of contemporary ones, which is accepted with the greatest circumspection and caution... brethren" (I, 563). "The Holy Fathers bequeath to choose a teacher who is not charming... They warn against unskilled teachers, lest they be infected by their false teaching" (I, 219).

"It will be objected: the faith of a novice can replace the lack of an elder. It is not true: faith in the truth saves, faith in falsehood and in demonic delusion destroys, according to the teaching of the Apostle" (2 Thessalonians 2:10-12) (V, 73).

"The Monk Pimen the Great commanded to immediately separate from the elder, living together with whom turns out to be harmful to the soul: obviously, because of the violation by this elder of the moral tradition of the Church" (V, 74).

St. John of the Ladder wrote that "in his time the vessels of Divine grace were greatly diminished... the saint sees the reason for this in the change of spirit in human society, which has lost its simplicity and has become infected with deceit" (verse 26, ch. 52). St. Gregory of Sinaite (XIV century) "I ventured to say that in his time there were no grace-filled men at all, so rare they had become... All the more so in our time it is necessary for the worker of prayer to observe the greatest caution. We have no divinely inspired teachers!" (I, 274)