Symeon the New Theologian

Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022), writing in the late tenth to early eleventh centuries, warns against the method of prayer later used by Ignatius of Loyola and other Western saints as potentially leading to mental problems…

The specific features of this… type of prayer are such: when one, standing at prayer and lifting up his hands, and eyes, and mind to heaven, imagines in his mind divine councils, the heavenly goodness, the ranks of angels, and the dwellings of the saints; in other words, all that he has heard from the Divine Scriptures, he collects into his mind… But during this type of prayer, little-by-little, [he] starts to puff-up in his heart, not understanding this himself; it seems to him that what he is doing is from God’s grace [given] for his comfort, and he asks God to let him always be in this state. But this is a sign of great deception… Such a person, [if he practices this type of prayer in seclusion] will hardly be able to stay sane. But, even if it so happens that he does not go insane, he, nonetheless, will not be able to acquire virtues…

Commenting on this passage, Ignatii Bryanchaninov calls imaginative prayer “most dangerous”…

The most dangerous of the incorrect types of prayer consists of the person creating imaginary pictures, seemingly borrowing them from the Holy Scripture, but in reality—from his own state of fall and self-pride; and with these pictures he flatters his own self-opinion, his fall, his sinfulness, deceives himself. Obviously, everything which is created by the imagination of our fallen nature, does not exist in reality, is make-belief and false… The one who imagines, with the first step on the path of prayer leaves the area of truth and enters the area of deceit, passions, sin, Satan.

The teaching of Bishop Ignatii continues the tradition of prayer carried by the Fathers of the Eastern Church. Much of this tradition was compiled into a large work titled Philokalia (Greek “love of the good”), which contains the writings of the Eastern Fathers from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries. This work, a staple of Orthodox spirituality and an unquestionable Orthodox authority on prayer, forbids the use of mental imagery in no uncertain terms.