All this fundamentally contradicts the foundations of spiritual podvig, as it is given in the experience of the lives of the saints of the Universal Church, and is considered by the Orthodox Church as a most serious spiritual illness due to its incurability.

Here are a few sayings of those ancient Fathers whose experience has been completely forgotten in the Catholic Church.

St. Nilus of Sinai (5th century) warns: "Do not desire to see the Angels, or the Powers, or Christ sensually, lest you go mad, mistaking the wolf for a shepherd and bowing down to your enemies, the demons."

St. Symeon the New Theologian (eleventh century), speaking of those who, in prayer, "imagine heavenly blessings, the ranks of angels and the abodes of the saints," directly says that "this is a sign of delusion." "Standing on this path, they are also deceived who see the light with their bodily eyes, smell incense with their sense of smell, hear voices with their ears, and the like."

St. Gregory of Sinai (XIV century) writes: "Prelest, they say, appears in two forms, or, better, finds it – in the form of dreams and influences, although in pride alone it has its beginning and cause... The first image of prelest is from dreams. The second image... has its beginning... in voluptuousness, born of natural lust. In this state, the deceived one undertakes to prophesy, gives false predictions... The demon of lewdness, darkening their minds with voluptuous fire, drives them mad, dreamily presenting to them some of the saints, allowing them to hear their words and see their faces."

There are many such statements by the Fathers of the Universal Church. All of them are united in what the Apostle John the Theologian already warns: "Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God, for many false prophets have appeared in the world" (1 John 4:1).

However, the most serious thing, as evidenced by the experience of the Catholic saints, is not even the obvious error of these ascetics, but the deeply sad fact that all of them were canonized by the Catholic Church. Here, therefore, we are no longer confronted with the error of individuals, which is possible both in Orthodoxy and elsewhere, but with the error of the entire Roman Church in the most important question for the Church – the salvation and spiritual perfection of man. It is no accident that our ascetic hierarchs Ignatius (Brianchaninov) and Theophan (Govorov), St. Ambrose of Optina and many others so decisively declared the falsity of the Roman Catholic Church in general, the delusion of its saints.

St. Ignatius wrote, for example: "The majority of the ascetics of the Western Church, proclaimed by her as the greatest saints, after her falling away from the Eastern Church and after the apostasy of the Holy Spirit from her, prayed and attained visions, of course, false ones, in the manner I have mentioned... Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, was in such a state. His imagination was so heated and refined that, as he himself asserted, he had only to desire and use a certain tension, as hell or heaven appeared before his eyes, at his will... It is known that visions are given to true saints of God solely by God's grace and by the action of God, and not by the will of man and not by his own effort – they are given unexpectedly, very rarely... The intensified podvig of those who are in delusion usually stands side by side with deep depravity. Depravity serves as an assessment of the flame with which the deceived are kindled" (I, 244).

The saint also points to other reasons for the charming states of the Western ascetics, hidden from the external eye. Thus, he writes: "Blood and nerves are set in motion by many passions: anger, love of money, voluptuousness, and vanity. The last two extremely inflame the blood of ascetics who struggle illegally, making them ecstatic fanatics. Vanity prematurely strives for spiritual states to which man is not yet capable because of his impurity; because of the failure to achieve the truth, he invents dreams for himself. And voluptuousness, combining its action with the action of vanity, produces in the heart seductive false consolations, delights, and raptures. Such a state is a state of self-deception.

All those who labor illegally are in this state. It develops in them more or less, depending on how much they intensify their feats. From this state of affairs many books have been written by Western writers" (IV, 499).

It is interesting that St. Ignatius, who studied Catholic ascetic literature not from translations, but in Latin originals, also indicates the specific temporal coordinates of the retreat of the new Catholic ascetics from the common experience of the saints of the one Universal Church. He writes: "St. Benedict and the holy Pope Gregory the Dialogist still agree with the ascetic teachers of the East, but Bernard differs from them by a sharp line; the later ones deviated even more. They are immediately drawn and draw their readers to heights inaccessible to the novice, they are carried in and carried away. Hot... daydreaming replaces in them everything spiritual, of which they have no idea. This dreaming is recognized by them as grace" (IV, 498).

Prelest, as we see, arises in those who live not according to patristic principles, but according to their own ideas, desires and understanding, and who seek from God not salvation from sin, but grace-filled pleasures, revelations, and gifts. They are usually "received" in abundance by the unfortunate ascetic in his heated imagination and by the action of dark forces. Delusion, therefore, is not one of the possible and equivalent variants of spirituality, not a special one's own path to God, but a serious illness. Not properly understood and appreciated, it corrupts religions from within. And this terrible illness, as we see, threatens to destroy not only natural religions, but also Christianity. It turns out that the departure from the Church—schism, heresy, self-willed gathering—inevitably leads to the fact that the new "Church" ceases to take into account the principles of spiritual life as they are given in the Holy Tradition of the Church, as a result of which it as a whole loses the idea of true holiness, accepting as such and glorifying its blatant distortions, thereby leading its members to the path of direct destruction. The same disastrous consequences lead to each individual believer when he deviates from the "royal path" of spiritual life, paved by the ascetic footsteps of the saints.

Especially frequent are the impulses to the heights of young ascetics, who have not yet come to know their old man, who have not freed themselves from passions, but who are already seeking the states of a new, perfect man. No wonder the Fathers have an expression: "If you see a young man flying to heaven, pull him by the heel to the ground." The reason for such mistakes is still the same: ignorance of the laws of spiritual life, ignorance of oneself. St. Ignatius quotes the following remarkable words of St. Isaac the Syrian: "If some of the Fathers wrote about what is purity of the soul, what is its building, what is impassibility, what is vision, then they did not write so that we would seek them prematurely and with expectation. It is said in the Scriptures: "The Kingdom of God shall not come in a visible manner" (Luke 17:20). Those in whom expectation lives have acquired pride and fall. The search with the expectation of God's lofty gifts is rejected by the Church of God. This is not a sign of love for God; this is an illness of the soul." St. Ignatius concludes this thought with the following words:

"The Holy Fathers of the Eastern Church, especially the desert dwellers, when they reached the height of spiritual exercises, then all these exercises merged into one repentance. Repentance embraced their whole life, all their activity: it was the consequence of seeing their sin" (II, 125-126).