The Eastern Orthodox have a word,
prelest, a transliteration from Russian, where in common use means something like charm. In the Orthodox Church, however, prelest has a darker denotation. It’s a kind of spiritual delusion, the “wounding of human nature by falsehood,” using the phrase of the 19th-century Russian monk and theologian Ignatius Brianchaninov.
“All of us are subject to spiritual deception” in a general sense, Brianchaninov taught, when we do not have the truth of Christ (John 14:6). But prelest as spiritual delusion can have a narrower meaning, too: a more specific delusion in which we actively embrace falsehoods, including ones about our own spiritual state.
on One Word That Explains the Current Delusions
We seem to have exhausted our vocabulary to describe the constellation of crises of radical left-wing provenance besetting America of late: extreme, unprecedented, extraordinary, unbelievable, outrageous, horrendous, despicable, frightening, ungodly, Orwellian, and so on. There is one word, however, that may capture our centrifugal culture of hypocrisy, lying, deception, vulgarity, hostility, rage, viciousness, malice, burning, looting, mayhem, destruction, statue-toppling, history-denial, economic class envy, race obsession, madness, and derangement. That word comes from my own Orthodox Christian spiritual tradition. That word is
Prelest is how the medieval Slavonic language rendered the older Greek word