Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future

by Seraphim Rose

“Christian” ecumenism at its best may be seen to represent a sincere and understandable error on the part of Protestants and Roman Catholics — the error of failing to recognize that the visible Church of Christ already exists, and that they are outside it. The “dialogue with non-Christian religions,” however, is something quite different, representing rather a conscience departure from even that part of genuine Christian belief and awareness which some Catholics and Protestants retain. It is the product, not of simple human “good intentions,” but rather of a diabolical “suggestion” that can capture only those who have already departed so far from Christianity as to be virtual pagans: worshippers of the god of this world, satan (II Cor. 4:4), and followers of whatever intellectual fashion this powerful god is capable of inspiring.

The only possible common denominator among all religions is the totally vague concept of the “spiritual,” which indeed offers religious “liberals” almost unbounded opportunity for nebulous theologizing.

This brings me to the last blandishment that I’ll mention, which is “spiritual experiences.” These are psychic and/or diabolic in origin. But who among the practitioners has any way of distinguishing delusion from true spiritual experience? They have no measuring stick. But don’t think that what they see, hear, smell and touch in these experiences are the result of simple mental aberration. They aren’t. They are what our Orthodox tradition calls prelest. It’s an important word, because it refers to the exact condition of a person having Hindu “spiritual experiences.” There is no precise equivalent to the term prelest in the English lexicon. It covers the whole range of false spiritual experiences: from simple illusion and beguilement to actual possession. In every case the counterfeit is taken as genuine and the overall effect is an accelerated growth of pride. A warm, comfortable sense of special importance settles over the person in prelest, and this compensates for all his austerities and pain.

“What is a man to do when the demon takes the form of an angel of light?” The Saint replied: “In this case a man needs great power of discernment to discriminate rightly between good and evil. So in your heedlessness, do not be carried away too quickly by what you see, but be weighty (not easy to move) and, carefully testing everything, accept the good and reject the evil. Always you must test and examine, and only afterwards believe. Know that the actions of grace are manifest, and the demon, in spite of his transformations, cannot produce them: namely, meekness, friendliness, humility, hatred of the world, cutting off passions and lusts — which are the effects of grace.Works of the demons are: arrogance, conceit, intimidation and all evil. By such actions you will be able to discern whether the light shining in your heart is of God or of satan. Lettuce looks like mustard, and vinegar in color like wine; but when you taste them the palate discerns and defines the difference between each. In the same way the soul, if it has discernment, can discriminate by mental taste the gifts of the Holy Spirit from the fantasies and illusions of satan.”

The misguided or proud spiritual aspirant is most vulnerable to prelest. And the success and durability of Hinduism depends very largely on this false mysticism.

The student may get powers or “siddhis.” These are things like reading minds, power to heal or destroy, to produce objects, to tell the future and so on — the whole gamut of deadly psychic parlor tricks. But far worse than this, he invariably falls into a state of prelest, where he takes delusion for reality. He has “spiritual experiences” of unbounded sweetness and peace. He has visions of deities and of light. (One might recall that Lucifer himself can appear as an angel of light.) By “delusion” I don’t mean that he doesn’t really experience these things; I mean rather that they are not from God.

Actually, Hinduism is not so much an intellectual pursuit as a system of practices, and these are quite literally — black magic. That is, if you do x, you get y: a simple contract. But the terms are not spelled out and rarely does a student ask where the experiences originate or who is extending him credit — in the form of powers and “beautiful” experiences. It’s the classical Faustian situation, but what the practitioner doesn’t know is that the price may well be his immortal soul.

Thomas Merton, of course, constitutes a special threat to Christians, because he presents himself as a contemplative Christian monk, and his work has already affected the vitals of Roman Catholicism, its monasticism. Shortly before his death, Father Merton wrote an appreciative introduction to a new translation of the Bhagavad Gita, which is the spiritual manual or “Bible” of all Hindus, and one of the foundation blocks of monism or Advaita Vedanta. The Gita, it must be remembered, opposes almost every important teaching of Christianity. His book on the Zen Masters, published posthumously, is also noteworthy, because the entire work is based on a treacherous mistake: the assumption that all the so-called “mystical experiences” in every religion are true.

The message is essentially this: All religions are true, but Vedanta is the ultimate truth. Differences are only a matter of “levels of truth.” In Vivekananda’s words: “Man is not travelling from error to truth, but climbing up from truth to truth, from truth that is lower to truth that is higher. The matter of today is the spirit of the future. The worm of today — the God of tomorrow.” The Vedanta rests on this: that man is God. So it is for man to work out his own salvation. Vivekananda put it this way: “Who can help the Infinite? Even the hand that comes to you through the darkness will have to be your own.”

Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight!

God is no respecter of persons: but in every nation he that feareth Him and worketh righteousness is acceptable to Him

Let us be warned from this: the religion of the future will not be a mere cult or sect, but a powerful and profound religious orientation which will be absolutely convincing to the mind and heart of modern man.

The future world and humanity are seen by science fiction ostensibly in terms of “projections” from present-day scientific discoveries; in actuality, however, these “projections” correspond quite remarkably to the everyday reality of occult and overtly demonic experience throughout the ages. Among the characteristics of the “highly evolved” creatures of the future are: communication by mental telepathy, ability to fly, materialize and dematerialize, transform the appearances of things or create illusionary scenes and creatures by “pure thought,” travel at speeds far beyond any modern technology, to take possession of the bodies of earthmen; and the expounding of a “spiritual” philosophy which is “beyond all religions” and holds promise of a state where “advanced intelligences” will no longer be dependent on matter. All these are the standard practices and claims of sorcerers and demons. A recent history of science fiction notes that “a persistent aspect of the vision of science fiction is the desire to transcend normal experience ... through the presentation of characters and events that transgress the conditions of space and time as we know them.”

Why, indeed, are so many UFO “landings” precisely in the middle of roads? Why do such fantastically “advanced” craft so often need “repairs”? Why do the occupants so often need to pick up rocks and sticks (over and over again for twenty-five years!), and to “test” so many people — if they are actually reconnaissance vehicles from another planet, as the “humanoids” usually claim? Dr. Vallee well asks whether the “visitors from outer space” idea might not “serve precisely a diversionary role in masking the real, infinitely more complex nature of the technology that gives rise to the sightings?” (The Invisible College, p. 28). He believes “we are not dealing with successive waves of visitations from space. We are dealing with a control system”

“What takes place through close encounters with UFOs is control of human beliefs” (p. 3). “With every new wave of UFOs, the social impact becomes greater. More young people become fascinated with space, with psychic phenomena, with new frontiers in consciousness. More books and articles appear, changing our culture” (pp. 197–98). In another book he notes that “it is possible to make large sections of any population believe in the existence of supernatural races, in the possibility of flying machines, in the plurality of inhabited worlds, by exposing them to a few carefully engineered scenes, the details of which are adapted to the culture and superstitions of a particular time and place.”

One investigator, Brad Steiger, an Iowa college professor who has written several books on the subject, after a recent detailed study of the Air Force “Blue Book” files, concluded: “We are dealing with a multi-dimensional paraphysical phenomenon, which is largely indigenous to planet earth”

John Keel, who began his UFO investigation as a skeptic and is himself an agnostic in religion, writes: “The real UFO story...is one of ghosts and phantoms and strange mental aberrations; of an invisible world which surrounds us and occasionally engulfs us.... It is a world of illusion... where reality itself is distorted by strange forces which can seemingly manipulate space, time, and physical matter — forces which are almost entirely beyond our powers of comprehension.... The UFO manifestations seem to be, by and large, merely minor variations of the age-old demonological phenomenon”

“Many of the UFO reports now being published in the popular press recount alleged incidents that are strikingly similar to demonic possession and psychic phenomena which have long been known to theologians and parapsychologists.”24 Most UFO researchers are now turning to the occult realm and to demonology for insight into the phenomena they are studying. Several recent studies of UFOs, by evangelical Protestants, put all this evidence together and come to the conclusion that UFO phenomena are simply and precisely demonic in origin.

Case histories of people who have been drawn into contact with UFOs reveal the standard characteristics which go with involvement with demons in the occult realm. A police officer in southern California, for example, began to see UFOs in June 1966, and thereafter saw them frequently, almost always at night. After one “landing” he and his wife saw distinct traces of the UFO on the ground. “During these weeks of tantalizing sightings, I became totally obsessed with the UFOs, convinced that something great was about to happen. I abandoned my daily Bible reading and turned my back on God as I began reading every UFO book I could lay my hands on.... Many nights I watched in vain, trying to mentally communicate with what I then thought were extraterrestrial beings, almost praying to them to appear and establish some sort of contact with me.” Finally he had a “Close Encounter” with a “craft” some eighty feet in diameter, with rotating white, red, and green lights. It sped off and left him still expecting something “great” to happen — but nothing ever did happen; the UFOs ceased appearing, and in his frustration he turned to alcohol, depression, thoughts of suicide, until his conversion to Christ ended this period of his life. People who have actually contacted the UFO beings have much worse experiences; the beings sometimes literally “possess” them and try to kill them when they resist (UFOs: A Better Explanation, pp. 298–305).

conceal their nature when they were to be submitted to Martin’s eyes.” “It was so fully within his power to see the devil that he recognized him under any form, whether he kept to his own character or changed himself into any of the various shapes of ‘spiritual wickedness’” — including the forms of pagan gods and the appearance of Christ Himself, with royal robes and crown and enveloped in a bright red light.

The physical world is morally neutral and may be known relatively well by an objective observer; but the invisible spiritual realm comprises beings both good and evil, and the “objective” observer has no means of distinguishing one from the other unless he accepts the revelation which the invisible God has made of them to man. Thus, today’s UFO researchers place the Divine inspiration of the Bible on the same level as the satanically inspired automatic writing of spiritism, and they do not distinguish between the actions of angels and those of demons.

Dr. Vallee, in The Invisible College, expresses the secular appreciation of this fact: “Observations of unusual events suddenly loom into our environment by the thousands” (p. 87), causing “a general shifting of man’s belief patterns, his entire relationship to the concept of the invisible” (p. 114). “Something is happening to human consciousness” (p. 34); the same “powerful force [that] has influenced the human race in the past is again influencing it now” (p. 14). In Christian language this means: a new demonic outpouring is being loosed upon mankind. In the Christian apocalyptic view (see the end of this book), we can see that the power which until now has restrained the final and most terrible manifestation of demonic activity on earth has been taken away

Orthodox Christian government and public order (whose chief representative on earth was the Orthodox emperor) and the Orthodox Christian worldview no longer exist as a whole, and satan has been “loosed out of his prison,” where he was kept by the grace of the Church of Christ, in order to “deceive the nations” (Apoc. 20:7–8) and prepare them to worship antichrist at the end of the age. Perhaps never since the beginning of the Christian era have demons appeared so openly and extensively as today. The “visitors from outer space” theory is but one of the many pretexts they are using to gain acceptance for the idea that “higher beings” are now to take charge of the destiny of mankind.32 Second, UFOs are but the newest of the mediumistic techniques by which the devil gains initiates into his occult realm. They are a terrible sign that man has become susceptible to demonic influence as never before in the Christian era. In the 19th century it was usually necessary to seek out dark séance rooms in order to enter into contact with demons, but now one need only look into the sky (usually at night, it is true). Mankind has lost what remained of basic Christian understanding up to now, and now passively places itself at the disposal of whatever “powers” may descend from the sky. The new film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is a shocking revelation of how superstitious “post-Christian” man has become — ready in an instant and unquestioningly to believe and follow hardly-disguised...

St. Symeon the New Theologian for this reason remarks that “the struggler of prayer should quite rarely look into the sky out of fear of the evil spirits in the air who cause many and various deceptions in the air” (Philokalia, “The Three Forms of Heedfulness”). “Men will not understand that the miracles of antichrist have no good, rational purpose, no definite meaning, that they are foreign to truth, filled with lies, that they are a monstrous, malicious, meaningless play-acting, which increases in order to astonish, to reduce to perplexity and oblivion, to deceive, to seduce, to attract by the fascination of a pompous, empty, stupid effect” (p. 11). “All demonic manifestations have the characteristic that even the slightest heed paid to them is dangerous; from such heedfulness alone, allowed even without any sympathy for the manifestation, one may be sealed with a most harmful impression and subjected to a serious temptation”

“Dabbling with UFOs can be as dangerous as dabbling with black magic. The phenomenon preys upon the neurotic, the gullible, and the immature. Paranoid schizophrenia, demonomania, and even suicide can result — and has resulted in a number of cases. A mild curiosity about UFOs can turn into a destructive obsession. For this reason, I strongly recommend that parents forbid their children from becoming involved. School teachers and other adults should not encourage teenagers to take an interest in this subject” (UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse, p. 220).

In a different place Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov recorded with awe and foreboding the vision of a simple Russian blacksmith in a village near Petersburg at the dawn of our present age of unbelief and revolution (1817). In the middle of the day he suddenly saw a multitude of demons in human form, sitting in the branches of the forest trees, in strange garments and pointed caps, and singing, to the accompaniment of unbelievably weird musical instruments, an eerie and frightful song: “Our years have come, our will be done!”

For if one conclusion emerges from this description, it must certainly be that the spectacular present-day “charismatic revival” is not merely a phenomenon of hyper-emotionalism and Protestant revivalism — although these elements are also strongly present — but is actually the work of a “spirit” who can be invoked and who works “miracles.” The question we shall attempt to answer in these pages is: what or who is this spirit? As Orthodox Christians we know that it is not only God Who works miracles; the devil has his own “miracles,” and in fact he can and does imitate virtually every genuine miracle of God. We shall therefore attempt in these pages to be careful to try the spirits, whether they are of God

What can be the reason for such a spectacular success of a “Christian” revival in a seemingly “post-Christian” world? Doubtless the answer lies in two factors: first, the receptive ground which consists of those millions of “Christians” who feel that their religion is dry, over-rational, merely external, without fervency or power; and second, the evidently powerful “spirit” that lies behind the phenomena, which is capable, under the proper conditions, of producing a multitude and variety of “charismatic” phenomena, including healing, speaking in tongues, interpretation, prophecy — and, underlying all of these, an overwhelming experience which is called the “Baptism of (or in, or with) the Holy Spirit.”

But what precisely is this “spirit”? Significantly, this question is seldom if ever even raised by followers of the “charismatic revival”; their own “baptismal” experience is so powerful and has been preceded by such an effective psychological preparation in the form of concentrated prayer and expectation, that there is never any doubt in their minds but that they have received the Holy Spirit and that the phenomena they have experienced and seen are exactly those described in the Acts of the Apostles. Too, the psychological atmosphere of the movement is often so one-sided and tense that it is regarded as the very blasphemy against the Holy Spirit to entertain any doubts in this regard. Of the hundreds of books that have already appeared on the movement, only a very few express any even slight doubts as to its spiritual validity.

Before quoting the “charismatic” testimonies, we should take note of a chief characteristic of the original Pentecostal Movement which is seldom mentioned by “charismatic” writers, and that is that the number and variety of Pentecostal sects is astonishing, each with its own doctrinal emphasis, and many of them having no fellowship with the others. There are “Assemblies of God,” “Churches of God,” “Pentecostal” and “Holiness” bodies, “Full Gospel” groups, etc., many of them divided into smaller sects. The first thing that one would have to say about the “spirit” that inspires such anarchy is that it certainly is not a spirit of unity, in sharp contrast to the Apostolic church of the first century to which the movement professes to be returning. Nevertheless, there is much talk, especially in the “charismatic revival” within the denominations in the past decade, of the “unity” which it inspires. But what kind of unity is this? — the true unity of the Church which Orthodox Christians of the first and twentieth centuries alike know, or the pseudo-unity of the Ecumenical Movement, which denies that the Church of Christ exists?

The “charismatic” movement, however, claims to be in contact with God, to have found a means for receiving the Holy Spirit, the outpouring of God’s grace. And yet it is precisely the Church, and nothing else, that our Lord Jesus Christ established as the means of communicating grace to men. Are we to believe that the Church is now to be superseded by some “new revelation” capable of transmitting grace outside the Church, among any group of people who may happen to believe in Christ but who have no knowledge or experience of the Mysteries (Sacraments) which Christ instituted and no contact with the Apostles and their successors whom He appointed to administer the Mysteries? No: it is as certain today as it was in the first century that the gifts of the Holy Spirit are not revealed in those outside the Church.

The great Orthodox Father of the 19th century, Bishop Theophan the Recluse, writes that the gift of the Holy Spirit is given “precisely through the Sacrament of Chrismation, which was introduced by the Apostles in place of the laying on of hands” (which is the form the Sacrament takes in the Acts of the Apostles). “We all — who have been baptized and chrismated — have the gift of the Holy Spirit...even though it is not active in everyone.” The Orthodox Church provides the means for making this gift active, and “there is no other path.... Without the Sacrament of Chrismation, just as earlier without the laying on of hands of the Apostles, the Holy Spirit has never descended and never will descend.

Many testify, as does one Protestant, that tongues “have now become an essential accompaniment of my devotional life” (Lillie, p. 50). And a Roman Catholic book on the subject, more cautiously, says that of the “gifts of the Holy Spirit” tongues “is often but not always the first received. For many it is thus a threshold through which one passes into the realm of the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit” (Ranaghan, p. 19). Here already one may note an overemphasis that is certainly not present in the New Testament, where speaking in tongues has a decidedly minor significance, serving as a sign of the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2) and on two other occasions (Acts 10 and 19). After the first or perhaps the second century there is no record of it in any Orthodox source, and it is not recorded as occurring even among the great Fathers of the Egyptian desert, who were so filled with the Spirit of God that they performed numerous astonishing miracles, including raising the dead.

The Orthodox attitude to genuine speaking in tongues, then, may be summed up in the words of Blessed Augustine (Homilies on John, VI:10): “In the earliest times the Holy Spirit fell upon them that believed, and they spake with tongues which they had not learned, as the Spirit gave them utterance. These were signs adapted to the time. For it was fitting that there be this sign of the Holy Spirit in all tongues to show that the Gospel of God was to run through all tongues over the whole earth. That was done for a sign, and it passed away.” And as if to answer contemporary Pentecostals with their strange emphasis on this point, Augustine continues: “Is it now expected that they upon whom hands are laid, should speak with tongues? Or when we imposed our hand upon these children, did each of you wait to see whether they would speak with tongues? And when he saw that they did not speak with tongues, was any of you so perverse of heart as to say, ‘These have not received the Holy Spirit’?”

“A person’s religious life is not harmed by occultism or spiritism. Indeed spiritism is to a large extent a ‘religious’ movement. The devil does not take away our ‘religiousness’.... [But] there is a great difference between being religious and being born again by the Spirit of God. It is sad to say that our Christian denominations have more ‘religious’ people in them than true Christians.”7

At a Catholic Pentecostal prayer meeting, “upon entering a room one was practically struck dead by the strong visible presence of God” (Ranaghan, p. 79). (Compare the “vibrant” atmosphere at some pagan and Hindu rites; see above, p. 17.) Another man describes his “Baptismal” experience: “I became aware that the Lord was in the room and that He was approaching me. I couldn’t see Him, but I felt myself being pushed over on my back. I seemed to float to the floor ...” (Logos Journal, Nov.–Dec. 1971, p. 47). Other similar examples will be given below in the discussion of the physical accompaniments of “charismatic” experience. This “pulsing,” “visible,” “pushing” spirit that “approaches” and “flows” would seem to confirm the mediumistic character of the “charismatic” movement. Certainly the Holy Spirit could never be described in these ways!

Two Protestant ministers went to a “charismatic” prayer meeting at a Presbyterian church in Hollywood. “Both of us agreed beforehand that when the first person started to speak in tongues, we would pray roughly the following, ‘Lord, if this gift is from you, bless this brother, but if it is not of you, then stop it and let there be no other praying in tongues in our presence.’...A young man began the meeting with a short devotion after which it was open for prayer. A woman started to pray fluently in a foreign language without any stammering or hesitation. An interpretation was not given. The Rev. B. and I started to pray quietly as we had agreed earlier. What happened? No one else spoke in tongues, although usually in these meetings all of them, except for an architect, pray in unknown tongues” (Koch, p. 15). Note here that in the absence of the mediumistic solidarity of faith, the phenomena do not appear.

To identify this “spirit” more precisely, and to understand the “charismatic” movement more fully, not only in its phenomena but also in its “spirituality,” we shall have to draw more deeply from the sources of Orthodox tradition. And first of all we shall have to return to a teaching of the Orthodox ascetic tradition that has already been discussed in this series of articles, in explanation of the power which Hinduism holds over its devotees: prelest, or spiritual deception.

There are two basic forms of prelest or spiritual deception. The first and more spectacular form occurs when a person strives for a high spiritual state or spiritual visions without having been purified of passions and relying on his own judgment.

But there is another more common, less spectacular form of spiritual deception, which offers to its victims not great visions but just exalted “religious feelings.” This occurs, as Bishop Ignatius has written, “when the heart desires and strives for the enjoyment of holy and divine feelings while it is still completely unfit for them. Everyone who does not have a contrite spirit, who recognizes any kind of merit or worth in himself, who does not hold unwaveringly the teaching of the Orthodox Church but on some tradition or other has thought out his own arbitrary judgment or has followed a non-Orthodox teaching — is in this state of deception.”

The Roman Catholic Church has whole spiritual manuals written by people in this state; such is Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ. Bishop Ignatius says of it: “There reigns in this book and breathes from its pages the unction of the evil spirit, flattering the reader, intoxicating him.... The book conducts the reader directly to communion with God, without previous purification by repentance.... From it carnal people enter into rapture from a delight and intoxication attained without difficulty, without self-renunciation, without repentance, without crucifixion of the flesh with its passions and desires (Gal. 5:24), with flattery of their fallen state.” And the result, as I. M. Kontzevitch, the great transmitter of Patristic teaching, has written,11 is that “the ascetic, striving to kindle in his heart love for God while neglecting repentance, exerts himself to attain a feeling of delight, of ecstasy, and as a result he attains precisely the opposite: ‘he enters into communion with satan and becomes infected with hatred for the Holy Spirit’ (Bishop Ignatius).”

Having little or no foundation in the genuine sources of Christian spiritual experience — the Holy Mysteries of the Church, and the spiritual teaching handed down by the Holy Fathers from Christ and His Apostles — the followers of the “charismatic” movement have no means of distinguishing the grace of God from its counterfeit.

Any reader of the Orthodox Lives of Saints and other spiritual literature knows that all of these spirits — both “good” and “evil,” the “lower” with the “higher” — are equally demons, and that the discernment between true good spirits (angels) and these evil spirits cannot be made on the basis of one’s own feelings or impressions. The widespread practice of “exorcism” in “charismatic” circles offers no guarantee whatever that evil spirits are actually being driven out; exorcisms are also very common (and seemingly successful) among primitive shamans,14 who also recognize that there are different kinds of spirits — which are all, however, equally demons, whether they seem to flee when exorcised or come when invoked to give shamanistic powers.

No one will deny that the “charismatic” movement on the whole is firmly oriented against contemporary occultism and satanism. But the more subtle of the evil spirits appear as “angels of light” (II Cor. 11:14), and a great gift of discernment, together with a deep distrust of all one’s extraordinary “spiritual” experiences, is required if a person is not to be deceived. In the face of the subtle, invisible enemies who wage unseen warfare against the human race, the naively trusting attitude towards their experiences of most people involved in the “charismatic” movement is an open invitation to spiritual deception.

One pastor, for example, counsels meditation on Scriptural passages and then writing down any thought “triggered” by the reading: “This is the Holy Spirit’s personal message to you” (Christenson, p. 139). But any serious student of Christian spirituality knows that, for example, “at the beginning of the monastic life some of the unclean demons instruct [novices] in the interpretation of the Divine Scriptures ... gradu...

But even before consulting the Fathers on specific questions, the Orthodox Christian is protected against deception by the very knowledge that such deception not only exists, but is everywhere, including within himself. Bishop Ignatius writes: “We are all in deception. The knowledge of this is the greatest preventative against deception. It is the greatest deception to acknowledge oneself to be free of deception.”

Thus, totally unprepared for spiritual warfare, unaware that there is such a thing as spiritual deception of the most subtle sort (as opposed to obvious forms of occultism), the Catholic or Protestant or uninformed Orthodox Christian goes to a prayer meeting to be “baptized (or filled) with the Holy Spirit.” The atmosphere of the meeting is extremely loose, being intentionally left “open” to the activity of some “spirit.” Thus do Catholics (who profess to be more cautious than Protestants) describe some of their Pentecostal gatherings: “There seemed to be no barriers, no inhibitions.... They sat cross-legged on the floor. Ladies in slacks. White-robed monk. Cigarette smokers. Coffee drinkers. Praying in free-form.... It occurred to me that these people were having a good time praying! Is that what they meant by the Holy Spirit dwelling amongst them?” And at another Catholic Pentecostal meeting, “except for the fact that no one was drinking, it seemed like a cocktail party” (Ranaghan, pp. 157, 209). At interdenominational “charismatic” meetings the atmosphere is likewise sufficiently informal that no one is surprised when the “spirit” inspires an elderly woman, in the midst of a fit of general weeping, to stand up and “dance a little jig”

To the sober Orthodox Christian, the first thing noticeable about such an atmosphere is its total lack of what he knows in his own Divine services as genuine piety and awe, proceeding from the fear of God. And this first impression is only strikingly confirmed by observation of the truly strange effects which the Pentecostal “spirit” produces when it descends into this loose atmosphere.

Many, many examples could be collected of this truly strange reaction to a “spiritual” experience, and some “charismatic” apologists have a whole philosophy of “spiritual joy” and “God’s foolishness” to explain it. But this philosophy is not in the least Christian; such a concept as the “laughter of the Holy Spirit” is unheard of in the whole history of Christian thought and experience. Here perhaps more clearly than anywhere else the “charismatic revival” reveals itself as not at all Christian in religious orientation; this experience is purely worldly and pagan, and where it cannot be explained in terms of emotional hysteria (for Fr. Eusebius, indeed, laughter provided “relief “ and “release” from “an intense feeling of self-consciousness and embarrassment” and “emotional devastation”), it can only be due to some degree of “possession” by one or more of the pagan gods, which the Orthodox church calls demons.

Here, for example, is a comparable “initiation” experience of a pagan Eskimo shaman: Not finding initiation, “I would sometimes fall to weeping and feel unhappy without knowing why. Then for no reason all would suddenly be changed, and I felt a great, inexplicable joy, a joy so powerful that I could not restrain it, but had to break into song, a mighty song, with room for only one word: joy, joy! And I had to use the full strength of my voice. And then in the midst of such a fit of mysterious and overwhelming delight I became a shaman.... I could see and hear in a totally different way. I had gained my enlightenment...and it was not only I who could see through the darkness of life, but the same bright light also shone out of me...and all the spirits of earth and sky and sea now came to me and became my helping spirits” (Lewis, Ecstatic Religion, p. 37).