Introduction

The Author

Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov was born Dmitry Alexandrovich Brianchaninov on the fifteenth of February, 1807, on the family estate of Pokrovskoye in the province of Vologda, into one of the oldest and wealthiest landowning families of that northern Russian region. He was a gifted and unusually serious child, drawn from early years to prayer and to the solitude of the countryside, and his talents were such that his father set him on the path expected of a young nobleman with imperial prospects. At fifteen he entered the Main Military Engineering School in Saint Petersburg, the capital’s most demanding technical academy, where he graduated at the head of his class. He came under the notice of the court and of the emperor himself, and a brilliant career in the service of the state lay open before him.

He turned away from it. Even during his years at the engineering school, the inner life had claimed him more deeply than mathematics and fortification; he sought out spiritual guidance among the monks of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra and read the ascetic Fathers with a hunger that his examinations could not satisfy. A grave illness in 1827 gave him the occasion to leave the army on medical grounds, and against the strong opposition of his family and of the authorities who had marked him for advancement, he laid down his commission to take up the monastic life. He was professed a monk in 1831, receiving the name Ignatius, and was ordained to the priesthood soon after. His natural gifts and evident holiness carried him quickly to responsibility: in 1833, still in his mid-twenties, he was appointed superior of the Trinity–Saint Sergius Hermitage near Saint Petersburg—the Sergiev Pustyn, a monastery on the Gulf of Finland close to the capital—and raised to the rank of archimandrite. He governed that community for roughly a quarter of a century, and it was there, as confessor and director to monks and to the devout laity of the capital, that the greater part of his writing took shape.

In 1857 he was consecrated a bishop and sent to the far south of the empire as Bishop of the Caucasus and the Black Sea, with his see at Stavropol. The episcopate proved brief. His health, never robust, could not bear the burdens of a vast and difficult diocese, and after four years he asked to be released. In 1861 he withdrew to the Nikolo-Babaevsky Monastery on the Volga, where he spent his last six years in prayer, correspondence with his spiritual children, and the final ordering of his writings for the press. He died there on the thirtieth of April, 1867. More than a century later, in 1988, he was numbered among the saints by the Russian Orthodox Church at the council held for the millennium of the baptism of Rus; he is commemorated on the day of his repose, and his relics rest at the Tolga Monastery near Yaroslavl. Across the Christian world he is now read, well beyond the Russian Church, as one of the surest modern guides to the tradition of interior prayer.

Two things distinguished his teaching in his own age and account for its authority since. The first is that he wrote from the Fathers rather than from himself—his pages are woven through with the desert masters, with Isaac the Syrian, Barsanuphius, Macarius, the compilers of the Philokalia—so that his voice is the tradition’s voice, made intelligible to a modern reader. The second is his honesty about his own times. He believed that the age of great living elders was passing, that direct, unbroken spiritual fatherhood was becoming rare, and that the Christian of the coming century would have to learn the inner life chiefly from the written counsel of the Fathers, guarded by humility and the sacramental life of the Church. Much of the peculiar sobriety of his work—its insistence on caution, on self-knowledge, on the danger of spiritual self-deception—comes from that conviction.

The Work: Occasion and Purpose

Ascetic Experiences (Аскетические опыты) is the central work of Saint Ignatius’s life, and the present book is its second volume, the companion to the first. The Russian title is difficult to render exactly: opyty carries both the sense of “essays,” attempts at a subject, and the sense of “experiences,” things tried and proven—and both meanings are meant. These pieces were written over many years, most of them out of the actual work of guiding souls, and afterward gathered, corrected, and arranged by their author himself—occasional writings, never systematic treatises composed to a plan. In his last years at the Nikolo-Babaevsky Monastery he reviewed the whole body of his ascetic writing, set it in order, and saw it into print at Saint Petersburg in the mid-1860s, the first volume appearing in 1865 as the opening of the collected works published in his own lifetime. The second volume followed as its natural sequel.

Where the first volume ranges widely across the whole of the ascetic path—following Christ, repentance, the reading of the Gospel and of the Fathers, fasting, the passions, the shape of monastic life, interleaved with brief lyrical meditations drawn from a garden, a cell window, a cemetery, the sea—the second volume settles its weight upon one theme above all others: prayer, and in particular the interior prayer of the mind and heart. If the first volume lays the foundations of the Christian struggle, the second builds toward its summit. It is here, and not in the first volume, that Brianchaninov sets down his fullest and most ordered teaching on how a Christian is actually to pray, moving stage by stage from the beginner’s rule to the prayer of the heart and to the Jesus Prayer itself. The reader who comes to this book after the first will find its concerns deepened and drawn to a point; the reader who comes to it first will find a self-standing course in prayer, framed by the great doctrinal essays of the author’s maturity.

The pieces belong to the whole span of his monastic life. Some were written in the cell of the young archimandrite at the Sergiev Hermitage; the earliest bears the date 1847 and the name of the Babaevsky monastery, and several of the longest and most considered—including the homilies on prayer that form the core of the book—belong to the years of retirement, when he wrote deliberately for those who would have to seek God without the living elders he feared were vanishing from the earth. The occasion of the volume, then, is no single event: it is a life’s accumulated counsel on the one thing needful, gathered by a dying bishop for the generations who would read him after him.

Argument and Structure

The volume opens and closes with meditation on Scripture, and between these it carries the reader through the doctrine of the spiritual life and up into prayer. It is best read as a series of movements.

It begins with Blessed Is the Man, a sustained lyrical meditation on the first Psalm, written in the voice of a solitary who has withdrawn from the noise of the world and begun, in stillness, to hear the “divine bard” David sing. Here Brianchaninov sets out a theme that governs the whole book: that Scripture is to be entered as well as read, its words transferred from the page into the living mind and heart, until the man who meditates on the law of God day and night becomes himself “a tree planted by streams of water.” The retelling of Joseph, drawn from the Book of Genesis, follows as an extended sacred narrative—the story of the youth in the coat of many colors read as both a figure of Christ and a pattern for the soul that keeps faith through undeserved affliction and is at last exalted.

From narrative the book turns to doctrine. A cluster of great essays lays the theological ground on which any prayer must stand: A Homily on the Fear of God and the Love of God, which orders the two as beginning and end of one road; The Judgments of God, on the unsearchable providence that governs every life; A Conference of the Soul with the Mind and The Sight of One’s Own Sin, on the self-knowledge and compunction without which prayer becomes fantasy; and On the Image and Likeness of God in Man, Brianchaninov’s anthropology, his account of what the human person is and of what is restored in redemption. These essays are the necessary foundation of the subject of prayer, never digressions from it: the author’s constant teaching is that the state of the one who prays determines everything, and that true prayer grows only from a right understanding of God, of providence, and of oneself.

The book then narrows toward the monastic life proper — A Meditation on the First Epistle to Timothy and On the Essential Work of the Monk — before entering its central and most celebrated movement, a connected cycle of homilies on prayer. This cycle is the architectural heart of the volume. It opens with The Spirit of Prayer in the Beginner and proceeds in careful stages: A Homily on the Cell Rule of Prayer, on the fixed personal discipline kept in solitude; A Homily on Prayer in Church, on common and liturgical prayer; A Homily on Oral and Vocal Prayer, on prayer spoken with the lips; A Homily on Meditation, or the Remembrance of God, on the unceasing turning of the mind toward God through the day; and A Homily on Prayer of the Mind, the Heart, and the Soul, on the descent of prayer from words into the depths of the person. The ascent culminates in A Homily on the Jesus Prayer, by far the longest single work in the volume—extended over many parts—and the fullest treatment of that prayer Brianchaninov ever wrote. It is a landmark of the Russian tradition of watchfulness: an ordered, sober, deeply cautious account of the invocation of the name of Jesus, of the way it is learned, of the conditions and dangers that attend it, and of the fruit it bears in those who practice it in obedience and humility.

After this summit the book descends by way of two shorter pieces — The Pilgrim, and A Mystical Explanation of Psalm 99 (Psalm 100 in the Hebrew numbering), a return to the reading of Scripture with which the volume began—and then closes with two large doctrinal homilies that set the whole ascetic enterprise in its final perspective: A Homily on Salvation and on Christian Perfection, on what a Christian may and may not attain in this life, and A Homily on the Various States of Human Nature in Relation to Good and Evil, a searching analysis of human nature before the fall, after it, and under grace. The volume thus forms an arch: from the reading of Scripture, through the doctrine of God and man, up to the prayer of the heart, and out again into the doctrine of salvation and the last things.

Theological and Spiritual Significance

The lasting importance of this second volume lies in its account of interior prayer, and above all in its teaching on the Jesus Prayer. Brianchaninov stands within the tradition of the Philokalia and of the great fourteenth-century hesychast masters, and behind them the desert Fathers, for whom the short, repeated invocation of the name of Jesus—“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me”—is the appointed means by which the mind is gathered into the heart and the whole person turned toward God. What Brianchaninov contributes is a clarifying sobriety rather than novelty. Writing for an age he judged to be spiritually impoverished, he strips the teaching of any suggestion of technique-for-its-own-sake and of any promise of quick or extraordinary experience. He insists, with unusual firmness, on the peril of spiritual delusion — prelest, the self-deception in which the ascetic mistakes the movements of his own imagination, or of the enemy, for the action of grace—and he sets against it the safeguards of humility, obedience, the reading of one’s own sin, and the ordinary sacramental life of the Church. His counsel on prayer is therefore inseparable from his teaching on self-knowledge: the same volume that teaches the prayer of the heart teaches, at length, The Sight of One’s Own Sin, because for Brianchaninov the two cannot be parted.

Around this practical core stand the doctrinal essays, and these too have weight beyond their occasion. On the Image and Likeness of God in Man is one of the fullest statements of his Christian anthropology; the homilies on the fear and the love of God, on providence, and on salvation and Christian perfection together amount to a compact ascetical theology, in which the disciplines of prayer are grounded in a coherent account of God, of the human person, and of the economy of redemption. His treatment of Scripture—framing the volume in Blessed Is the Man and the reading of Psalm 99—advances a distinctive claim that runs through all his work: that the words of God are to be assimilated until they live in the reader, so that spiritual reading is itself a form of prayer and a means of union with the Spirit who dwells in the Scriptures.

There is also a pastoral significance particular to this book. Brianchaninov wrote consciously for Christians who would lack what he himself had sought and found—experienced spiritual fathers, a living chain of transmitted counsel. His answer was to commit the tradition to writing with such care, order, and honesty that it might guide the attentive reader safely in the absence of a living guide, provided that reader kept humility and remained within the common life of the Church. That purpose gives the volume its enduring usefulness. It is at once a summit of the Russian ascetic tradition and a manual written for ordinary seekers in a diminished age, and it has been received in that double character ever since.

The Text and This Edition

Ascetic Experiences is the original Russian composition of Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov; there is no earlier text behind it in another tongue. This edition presents the second volume in a fresh modern English translation made directly from the public-domain Russian—the text of the pre-revolutionary collected works (Полное собрание творений, Saint Petersburg, from 1865 onward), as preserved in the standard digital editions of that source. The translation renders the whole of the second volume: the twenty-one pieces described above, in the author’s own order, under his own titles.

A word on the aims of the translation. Brianchaninov’s Russian is dignified and deliberately archaizing, close to the language of the Church, and this English seeks a matching register—grave, unhurried, plain—without either flattening his cadences into modern journalese or affecting a false antiquity. Where he quotes Scripture, he quotes it in Church Slavonic, often in wordings shaped by the Fathers’ use rather than by any modern printed Bible; these citations are carried into a faithful contemporary English that keeps to the sense he draws from them, and biblical references are supplied in the usual chapter-and-verse form for the reader’s convenience. His many quotations from the Fathers and from the desert literature are preserved as he gives them.

This is an English-only reading edition, prepared for study and devotion; it is not a bilingual or parallel-text edition, and no knowledge of Russian is presumed of the reader. Because several of the pieces—most of all the Homily on the Jesus Prayer — are very long, the longer works have been divided into sequential parts for comfortable reading, with the author’s own title standing over each; these divisions serve the reader and do not alter the text. In keeping with the conventions of this series, the work is attributed to the author as the Church has always received him, Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov, and those who prepared the English are credited as translators, never as authors. Nothing has been added to his argument and nothing abridged; the editorial hand appears only in this introduction, in the modernized English, and in the arrangement into readable sections.

Readers should note that Brianchaninov’s celebrated Homily on Death, sometimes associated with these ascetic writings, is a separate and self-standing work and is not contained in this volume; what the second volume of Ascetic Experiences offers on the remembrance of the last things belongs to its homilies on prayer and on salvation, not to that distinct treatise.

Suggestions for Reading

The volume rewards being read in its own order, for it is built as an ascent, and its later homilies on prayer assume the self-knowledge and doctrine laid down in the earlier essays. A reader impatient to reach the Homily on the Jesus Prayer would do well to pause first over The Sight of One’s Own Sin and A Homily on the Fear of God and the Love of God, since Brianchaninov himself would not let the one be sought without the other. Those new to this tradition should read slowly and without anxiety: the author’s whole counsel is that interior prayer is learned over a lifetime, in humility and within the ordinary life of the Church, and that it begins in attention, patience, and the honest sight of oneself before God, never in rapture. Read in that spirit, this second volume is among the clearest and most trustworthy guides the modern age has received to the ancient prayer of the heart.