Introduction

The Author

Ignatius Brianchaninov was born in 1807 into the old landed nobility of the Russian province of Vologda, on the family estate of Pokrovskoe. In baptism he was named Demetrius, and by the reckoning of his family the child was itself an answer to prayer, born to a devout mother after years of childlessness. He grew up quiet and inward, drawn early to church services and to spiritual reading, and marked from boyhood by the seriousness of temperament that would shape the whole of his life.

At fifteen he was sent to the capital and enrolled in the Imperial School of Military Engineers in Saint Petersburg, then among the most demanding institutions in the empire. He excelled there, graduating at the head of his class and standing at the threshold of a brilliant career in the service of the state. But the studies that most engaged him lay outside the curriculum. In these years the young officer read widely in the Scriptures and the writings of the ascetic Fathers, kept company with monks and pilgrims, and came under the influence of the elders of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. The interior conviction grew in him that the engineering and military future laid out before him was not the one to which he was called. Against the wishes of his family and to the disappointment of his patrons at court, he resigned his commission to seek the monastic life.

The path was not smooth. He spent several difficult years moving among monasteries and under the direction of various elders, in poor health and often in poverty, before he was clothed as a monk in 1831 and given the name Ignatius. Ordination to the diaconate and the priesthood followed. His gifts were quickly recognized. In 1833, while still a young man, he was raised to the dignity of archimandrite and set over the Saint Sergius Hermitage near Saint Petersburg, a monastery that had fallen into decline and that he was charged with restoring. He governed it for nearly a quarter of a century. It was here, in the demanding double labor of administering a community close to the capital and directing the souls who sought him out, that the writings gathered in the present volume were composed.

In 1857 he was consecrated bishop of the Caucasus and the Black Sea coast—a vast, newly organized, and unsettled diocese on the empire’s southern frontier—and set about the ordinary and unglamorous work of a reforming pastor: ordering the divine services, raising the education and the common life of the clergy, and attending to the schools. The labor told on a constitution already worn by years of ascetic effort and by serious illness. After only about four years he asked to be released, and in 1861 he withdrew to the Nikolo-Babaevsky Monastery in the Kostroma region, on the Volga. There he spent his last years in seclusion, reviewing and completing his written work and preparing his collected writings for the press. He died on the thirtieth of April, 1867.

More than a century later, in 1988—the year the Russian Church kept the millennium of the baptism of Rus—he was formally numbered among the saints, and he is now commemorated on the thirtieth of April, the day of his repose. He belongs, in the Church’s memory, among that remarkable company of nineteenth-century Russian spiritual teachers, alongside the elders of Optina and figures such as Theophan the Recluse, through whom the ancient monastic and Philokalic tradition of the Christian East was recovered, translated, and pressed home to the conscience of a modern age. That he was a Russian Orthodox bishop and is a canonized saint of that Church is a plain fact of his biography. What has carried his name far beyond the boundaries of his own communion is something wider: he is one of the surest guides the modern world possesses to the interior life of prayer, repentance, and self-knowledge that stands at the heart of the whole Christian ascetic inheritance.

The Work: Occasion & Purpose

Ascetic Experiences (Аскетические опыты) is Ignatius Brianchaninov’s central work, and the book offered here is its first volume. Its Russian title — opyty, “experiences” or “trials,” in the sense of things tested and proved—is deliberate and worth pausing over. This is not a systematic treatise on the spiritual life, laid out from first principles. It is a gathering of separate pieces, more than fifty in this volume alone, written at different times and for different occasions across the author’s long years as an archimandrite. Most of them arose, as he tells us himself in the preface, in answer to questions of the inner life put to him by the monks and devout laypeople who were under his spiritual direction. They are, in the most exact sense, the record of things learned and confirmed in the actual practice of the ascetic struggle, set down by one who had passed through them.

Toward the end of his life, conscious that his earthly course was nearing its close, Ignatius gathered these scattered writings into one. He gives two reasons for doing so. The first was practical and pastoral: many of the pieces had already spread in manuscript copies, and in the copying they had accumulated errors that he wished to correct at the source. The second reason he states in the language of stewardship. He regarded himself as bound to render to Christian society an account of what he had seen—an account of the monastic and interior life “as it appears in the holy tradition” of the Church, and as he had been permitted to behold it in certain living representatives of that tradition in his own day. So he reviewed, corrected, supplemented, and arranged the whole, and saw it into print at Saint Petersburg in 1865, as the opening volume of the collected works published during his own lifetime.

The occasion, then, is a lifetime’s spiritual direction distilled and set in order at its end; the purpose is unmistakably practical. Ignatius writes for people who actually intend to pray, to repent, and to struggle against their passions, and he writes to tell them the truth about what that undertaking involves. The governing concern of the volume, announced in its very first pages, is stated with great clarity. The distinguishing mark of monastic life in more recent times, he observes—following Saint Nilus of Sora and the later Fathers—is that the seeker can no longer count on being guided by living, God-inspired teachers, for such vessels of grace have become extremely rare. The one who would advance in the spiritual life must therefore be guided above all by Holy Scripture and by the writings of the Fathers, read rightly and applied to present conditions. To explain this necessity, and to serve as exactly such a guide, is the aim that runs through the whole book. It is a work written out of a keen and sober sense of its own historical moment: a manual of the ancient interior tradition, deliberately framed for readers who no longer have easy access to the living masters who once transmitted it face to face.

Argument & Structure

The volume opens with the author’s own brief preface, which sets out the governing thought just described, and it closes, in the manner of the Fathers, with a personal lament over the writer’s own poverty of soul. Between these two frames it moves, without rigid system, across the whole territory of the interior life. The reader should not look for a single continuous argument advancing chapter by chapter. What holds the pieces together is a shared center of gravity, and, moving between them, an unmistakable unity of voice and vision.

The book proceeds in two registers, and the way they answer one another is one of its distinctive features. In the first register stand the sustained doctrinal essays. These are the load-bearing pillars of the volume: extended meditations on following Christ and on the renunciation the following requires; on repentance, which for Ignatius names the abiding disposition of the Christian soul rather than a single act; on the reading of the Gospel and on the reading of the Fathers, together with a companion warning against books that carry false teaching; on the love of neighbor and the love of God; on fasting; on the eight principal passions and the virtues set against them; and, at length and with great care, on prayer and above all on the Jesus Prayer. To these are joined more discursive treatments of humility, patience, purity, the Gospel commandments and Beatitudes, the Christian’s proper relation to his own passions, and the nature and calling of monasticism itself.

In the second register are the short lyrical meditations, and they give the book much of its unexpected beauty. Ignatius had the eye of a contemplative for the ordinary things before him, and again and again he reads the visible world for what it can teach the soul. A garden in winter, a bare tree against the window of his cell, a cemetery, the sea, the setting sun, dew on the grass, the changing of a season—each becomes an occasion for reflection on mortality, providence, and the life to come. These pieces are brief, unguarded, and often deeply moving, and they stand among the doctrinal essays as another way of saying the same thing, never as ornament. What the essays argue, the meditations see.

Running beneath both registers are a small number of convictions that surface everywhere and bind the volume into a whole. First is the reality of the fall and its reach: for Ignatius, sin reaches past isolated wrong acts into the very faculties of the soul, a corruption soaked into what he calls “carnal reasoning,” so that the whole of the natural mind and will must be renounced and remade. Second is the primacy of repentance and self-knowledge; the ascetic path begins in the honest sight of one’s own condition, never in exalted states. Third is the centrality of prayer, and specifically of the Jesus Prayer—the constant, attentive invocation of the name of the Lord Jesus—as the ordinary means by which the mind is gathered, guarded, and united to the heart. And fourth is the insistence, everywhere present, that this whole way must be walked under the guidance of Scripture and the Fathers rather than by private inspiration or the untested promptings of the heart. The long essays on prayer are especially insistent that the beginner must proceed with humility and caution, seeking repentance and attention rather than visions or consolations, lest the ardor of the untutored soul be turned by self-deception into spiritual harm.

Theological & Spiritual Significance

The lasting importance of Ascetic Experiences lies in what it accomplishes for the reader living long after the age of the great desert masters. Ignatius Brianchaninov stands within an unbroken tradition—the ascetic and contemplative inheritance of the Christian East, running from the fathers of the Egyptian and Palestinian deserts through John Cassian, John of the Ladder, the Sinai and Athonite teachers of watchfulness, and the Philokalic writers, down to Saint Nilus of Sora and the elders of his own century. His achievement is to have transmitted that tradition whole, tested against his own experience and made intelligible and practicable for readers of the modern world, adding no new doctrine of his own. He is, in effect, a bridge: he read the Fathers with the closest attention, absorbed their teaching in his own long struggle, and then set it down in a language his contemporaries—and ours—could understand and use.

Two features give his teaching its particular value. The first is its unusual candor about the conditions of the spiritual life in a later age. Ignatius does not pretend that the reader stands where the early monks stood. He is frank that living spirit-bearing guides have grown scarce, that the surrounding culture is distracted and unbelieving, and that the seeker must therefore lean the more heavily on the written tradition and proceed with corresponding humility and care. This realism keeps his counsel free of both nostalgia and presumption. He never counsels the reader to imitate outwardly the extraordinary feats of the ancients; he counsels instead the patient, hidden work of repentance, attention, and obedience to the Gospel that is possible in any age and any circumstance.

The second is his sober, cautionary teaching on prayer, and here his contribution is most distinctive. The essays on the Jesus Prayer are among the fullest and most balanced treatments of the subject in modern spiritual literature. Ignatius sets the invocation of the name of Jesus at the very heart of the interior life, yet he surrounds it with careful warnings. He is wary of every technique or ambition that would seek exalted experiences ahead of repentance; he insists that the foundation is humility and the honest acknowledgment of one’s own sinfulness; and he teaches, with the whole tradition of watchfulness behind him, that the mind must descend into the heart and be united to it, but only in God’s time and by God’s grace, never by the soul’s own forcing. This guarding of the beginner against spiritual delusion—the counterfeit of true prayer—is one of the enduring gifts of the book.

Beyond these particulars, the volume engages the perennial questions of the interior life in a way that reaches well past the bounds of any one confession. What does it cost to follow Christ in earnest? What is the relation of the will to grace, of ascetic labor to divine gift? How is the fallen mind to be healed, and by what means is the heart to be gathered from its dispersion and turned toward God? How is the ordinary Christian, living in the world and not the desert, to take up genuinely the life of prayer and repentance? On all of these, Ignatius speaks with an authority born of experience rather than speculation, and with a directness that any reader seeking the interior life—of whatever Christian tradition—will recognize as addressed to the real conditions of the soul.

Reception & Influence

Within a generation of his death, Ignatius Brianchaninov was recognized as one of the foremost spiritual writers of the Russian Church, and his collected works became a standard of ascetic reading. His glorification in 1988 set the seal of the Church on a reputation that his readers had long since accorded him. In the century that followed, and with the wider dissemination of his writings in translation, that reputation has spread far beyond his own communion. The Arena, his counsel to those beginning the monastic life, and On Death, drawn from the later volumes of the same collected works, have found readers across the Christian world; but it is Ascetic Experiences that remains the fullest expression of his mind. Together with the writings of Theophan the Recluse and the recorded counsels of the Optina elders, his work is now widely regarded as a principal channel by which the classic ascetic and Philokalic tradition of the Christian East has reached modern readers—a body of teaching valued as living instruction in prayer and repentance rather than as a historical curiosity.

The Text & This Edition

This edition presents Ascetic Experiences, Volume One, in a fresh modern English translation rendered from the Russian. The author himself prepared and published the work in Russian at Saint Petersburg in 1865, arranging the collected pieces and correcting the text with his own hand near the end of his life; the present translation is made from that public-domain Russian text as preserved in the collected works. It is an English-only edition, complete in itself, and is not laid out as a parallel or bilingual text against the Russian.

A few conventions of this edition may be noted. In keeping with the practice observed throughout this series, the author is named as the Church has always received him—Ignatius Brianchaninov, with his title of sanctity recorded in its proper place—and those who have carried his words into English are credited as translators, never as authors. The English aims at a dignified but genuinely contemporary register, readable without being slack, so that the force and gravity of the original come through to a reader today. The many passages of Scripture that Ignatius quotes, which in his own text stand in Church Slavonic, are given here in a faithful modern rendering consonant with the Slavonic he cites, rather than being conformed to any one familiar English version; his citations follow the Greek Septuagint numbering of the Psalms that he himself used. The author’s own titles for the several pieces are kept, and his own arrangement of them is preserved, so that the reader meets the volume in the order and under the headings that Ignatius gave it. Where the length of the longer essays required it, they have been divided into parts for ease of reading, without alteration to the text itself.

Suggestions for Reading

The newcomer need not read this volume straight through from front to back, and may find it more rewarding not to. The book was assembled from separate pieces, and it can be entered at many points. A reader wishing to take the measure of Ignatius might begin with the opening essay, “On Following Our Lord Jesus Christ,” and with “On Repentance,” which together lay the foundation on which everything else rests. From there the essays “On Reading the Gospel” and “On Reading the Holy Fathers” open the door to his understanding of how the spiritual life is to be learned and guided. Those drawn to the prayer of the heart should come to the long treatments of prayer and the Jesus Prayer only after this groundwork, and should read them in the cautionary spirit in which they were written—as counsel for a patient and humble beginning, not as a set of techniques for rapid attainment. Throughout, the short lyrical meditations—the winter garden, the seashore, the cemetery, the tree before the cell window—may be read as places of rest between the weightier essays; brief as they are, they often carry the book’s teaching most memorably. Above all, this is a book to be read slowly and in small portions, and returned to. It was written for practice rather than survey, and it gives most to the reader who is willing to sit with a single page until it has done its work.