Notes on The Ladder of Divine Ascent

Icon, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Monastery of St. Catherine
(Sinai, Egypt, 12th c.)

Recently I encountered The Ladder of Divine Ascent by John Climacus—John “of The Ladder” (579–649).  John, who lived in the desert of Sinai, wrote as a monk for monks, drawing on the accumulated wisdom of the Desert Fathers (and Mothers), those earnest Christian men and women who, from the third century of our era, set out into the deserts of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt in pursuit of a life totally dedicated to God.  “The undisputed masterpiece of Byzantine spiritual guidance,”* The Ladder continues to be read yearly during Lent in the Orthodox churches.  Given its importance among the Orthodox—and that reading it led me far afield from myself (to borrow a phrase from Foucault)—I thought it worthwhile to share some reflections on it here.

I won’t attempt a summary of The Ladder—there is an excellent Introduction by Kallistos Ware in the Paulist Press translation—but I will say at least that it is structured around the image of a ladder of thirty steps, which serves as a metaphor for the spiritual life.  The first three steps are concerned with the break with the “world”; the next twenty or so with the “active life” (praxis), with the practice of the virtues and the struggle against the passions; and the last four with the “contemplative life” (theoria), with stillness, prayer, dispassion (apatheia) and love.†

What follows are some idiosyncratic notes on The Ladder.  (A warning: “notes” is a somewhat misleading appellation for 3,000 words!)  I would like them to entice you to allow yourself to be faced with John’s demanding wisdom.

Renunciation & Resemblance to God

“A Christian is an imitator of Christ in thought, word and deed, as far as this is humanly possible, and he believes rightly and blamelessly in the Holy Trinity.” (1, p. 74)  For John, all Christians are called to imitate the Lord Jesus (and to confess the faith of the church), but the monk is the Christian par excellence because his complete and thoroughgoing renunciation of the world frees him for the unhindered pursuit of Christlikeness.  “If you truly love God and long to reach the kingdom that is to come,” John writes, “…then it will not be possible to have an attachment, or anxiety, or concern for money, for possessions, for family relationships, for worldly glory, for love and brotherhood, indeed for anything of earth.  All worry about one’s condition, even for one’s body, will be pushed aside as hateful.  Stripped of all thought of these, caring nothing about them, one will turn freely to Christ” (2, p. 81).  Compared with “the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus,” everything else is “rubbish” (Phil. 3:8).  The monk’s implacable denial of the world makes sense because its objective is love—“a resemblance to God, insofar as this is humanly possible” (30, p. 286).

Not that it is easy to become like Christ; quite the opposite:

“Violence and unending pain are the lot of those who aim to ascend to heaven with the body, and this especially at the early stages of the enterprise, when our pleasure-loving disposition and our unfeeling hearts must travel through overwhelming grief toward the love of God and holiness. It is hard, truly hard. There has to be an abundance of invisible bitterness, especially for the careless, until our mind, that cur sniffing around the meat market and revelling in the uproar, is brought through simplicity, deep freedom from anger and diligence to a love of holiness and guidance.” (1, p. 75)

The journey toward the love of God is intensely difficult precisely because we are not inclined to love God.  Instead, everything about us—body, mind and heart—is deeply attached to the things of this life; this side of Eden, we are profoundly self-centered, buffeted by passions and the promptings of demons, numbly seeking satisfaction apart from God.  Leaving such a state is an agōn, a contest, a painful struggle, a rending.  

Despite the wrenching difficulty, John is confident that we can grow in love, for Christ himself helps us to grow in resemblance to God:

“Yet full of passion and weakness as we are, let us take heart and let us in total confidence carry to Christ in our right hand and confess to Him our helplessness and our fragility. We will carry away more help than we deserve, if only we constantly push ourselves down into the depths of humility.” (1, p. 75)

Remembering this, especially that the end of renunciation is resemblance to God, is essential to a charitable reading of The Ladder.

* Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (Columbia, 1988), p. 237.
† Kallistos Ware, Introduction, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, trans. C. Luibheid and N. Russell (Paulist Press, 1982), pp. 11–12.  All quotations are from this translation.

Obedience & Humility

When John begins to discuss the virtues, those weapons of “the warriors and athletes of Christ,” he writes first and most extensively about obedience.  Two things quickly become clear: first, by “obedience” John means the obedience of a monk to a spiritual director; second, he exalts obedience because he wants to debase pride.  Pride lies at the back of willfulness and is the cause of self-deception, but “obedience is the burial place of the will and the resurrection of lowliness,” it is “self-mistrust up to one’s dying day, in every matter, even the good” (4, p. 92).  “Humility rises out of obedience” (4 p. 109), the obedience learned through submission to a spiritual director.

The role of the spiritual director is hugely important in The Ladder.  To choose a spiritual director, “to entrust [yourself] to another in the Lord,” is to abandon “self-direction” and “to take Christ’s yoke on your neck” (4, p. 92).  To obey one’s spiritual director is to practice obedience to the Lord—an idea I find deeply compelling.  Such obedience brings freedom, because the spiritual director bears the responsibility for his disciple, interceding for him to God, hearing his confession, and caring for his wounded soul like a skilled doctor.  

Fresco, Sucevița Monastery (Romania, 17th c.)

The deepest of our “septic wounds” is pride—“the beginning and the end of all evil” (22, p. 206).  For John, the demonic nature of pride authorizes drastic measures to root it out.  And sometimes these measures seem to involve a sort of “teleological suspension of the ethical.”  For example, John tells of a superior who deliberately censured a monk he knew to be innocent, because, as the superior put it, “Good, fruitful, and fertile land, if left without the water of dishonor, can revert to being forest and can produce the thorns of vanity, cowardice, and arrogance.”  John reports he initially argued with the superior about this “because of human frailty,” but he was convinced by the superior’s argument that nothing will induce a monk to leave his superior from whom “he has received the cure for his wounds” (4, pp. 99–100).  Even more shocking to my sensibilities is John’s description of penitents living in a separate monastery called “The Prison,” a “dark, stinking, filthy, and squalid” place where fallen monks deliberately sought horrific suffering in penitence for their sins (5, pp. 122ff).  For John, the end—“the marvelous humility of these holy men, their contrite love for God, and their penance”—justifies the brutal means.  The most charitable thing I can think to say about such means is that they show up my own indifference to sin.

Tears & Laughter

Insensitivity keeps us from growing in love, for “the insensitive man…talks about healing a wound and does not stop making it worse” (18, p. 191).  The remedy for “our unfeeling hearts” is remembrance of death and mourning, because these practices restore a lively awareness of our mortality and sinfulness.  Mourning is the proper response to the waywardness of our hearts, to the intransigence that runs so deep within us and the world that at our deaths “we will certainly have some explanation to offer to God for not having mourned unceasingly” (7, p. 145).  Those who mourn heal their wounds through repentance.  John would agree with St. Paul that “godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret” (2 Cor. 7:10).  The sign that life is being restored to our deadened souls is the gift of tears.

The tears that spring from true compunction are a precious gift of God.  Tears are a renewal of baptism, for “they purify us, lead us on in love of God, wash away our sins and drain away our passions” (7, p. 140).  God brings consolation through the gift of compunction, through “beautiful,” “joyful” sorrow.  

“As I ponder the true nature of compunction,” John writes, “I find myself amazed by the way in which inward joy and gladness mingle with what we call mourning and grief, like honey in a comb. There must be a lesson here, and it surely is that compunction is properly a gift from God, so that there is a real pleasure in the soul, since God secretly brings consolation to those who in their heart of hearts are repentant.” (7, p. 141)

Tears give way to a deep joy: “The man wearing blessed, God-given mourning like a wedding garment gets to know the spiritual laughter of the soul.” (p. 140)

One of the loveliest passages in The Ladder concerns this “laughter of the soul”:

“God does not demand or desire that someone should mourn out of sorrow of heart, but rather that out of love for Him he should rejoice with the laughter of the soul. Take away sin and then the sorrowful tears that flow from bodily eyes will be superfluous. Why look for a bandage when you are not cut? Adam did not weep before the fall, and there will be no tears after the resurrection when sin will be abolished, when pain, sorrow, and lamentation will have taken flight.” (7, p. 141)

For John, weeping lasts only for the night of sin, but joy comes even now as a foretaste of the morning of the resurrection.

The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Monastery of St. Catherine (Sinai, Egypt, 10th c.)

“Purified and Refined by Clay”: The Body & Fasting

“In the desert tradition, the body was allowed to become the discreet mentor of the proud soul.  No longer was the ascetic formed, as had been the case in pagan circles, by the unceasing vigilance of his mind alone.  The rhythms of the body and, with the body, his concrete social relations determined the life of them monk: his continued economic dependence on the settled world for food, the hard school of day-to-day collaboration with his fellow-ascetics in shared rhythms of labor, and mutual exhortation in the monasteries slowly changed his personality.  The material conditions of the monk’s life were held capable of altering the consciousness itself.”‡

This tradition, so ably described by Peter Brown, flows into John’s teaching that the discipline of the body contributes to the transformation of the whole person into the likeness of Christ, “that the immaterial spirit can be purified and refined by clay” (14, p. 169).  Ascetic practice in general, and fasting in particular, figure so prominently in the desert tradition precisely the doctrine of the resurrection of the body entails that resemblance to the Incarnate Christ can only be attained in and through the body.  One monk described his body as “this body, that God has afforded me, as a field to cultivate, where I might work and become rich.”§

Accordingly, for John, there is a fairly direct line between the ascetic discipline of the body and the transformation of the soul.  “Begrudge the stomach and your heart will be humbled,” he writes, “please the stomach and your mind will turn proud” (14, p. 168).

“Fasting ends lust, roots out bad thoughts, frees one from evil dreams. Fasting makes for purity of prayer, an enlightened soul, a watchful mind, a deliverance from blindness. Fasting is the door of compunction, humble sighing, joyful contrition, and end to chatter, an occasion for silence, a custodian of obedience, a lightening of sleep, health of the body, an agent of dispassion, a remission of sins, the gate, indeed, the delight of Paradise.” (14, p. 169)

The tears that come as Christ’s gift melt the hardened heart, and the capacity for physical love can be transferred to love of the Lord (5, p. 129).  The body is that by which the monk battles the passions and acquires the virtues.

The fallen body is deeply ambiguous, both “friend” and “enemy,” site of the passions and of the hope of the resurrection.  In one of the most poignant passages of The Ladder, John struggles with the enigma of the body:

“By what rule or manner can I bind this body of mine? … How can I break away from him when I am bound to him forever? How can I escape from him when he is going to rise with me? … He is my helper and my enemy, my assistant and my opponent, a protector and a traitor. I am kind to him and he assaults me. If I mortify him I endanger myself. If I strike him down I have nothing left by which to acquire virtues. I embrace him. And I turn away from him.
    “What is this mystery in me? What is the principle of this mixture of body and soul? How can I be my own friend and my own enemy?” (15, pp. 185–6)

Nevertheless, John insists that everyone should seek to make the body holy: “everyone should struggle to raise his clay, so to speak, to a place on the throne of God” (26, p. 248).  He speaks haltingly, however, sometimes doubting whether it is possible to tame “the flesh” in this life (14, p. 166), sometimes speaking of the chaste monk as having “risen to immortality before the general resurrection” (15, p. 179).

In the end, John holds out the high hope that the body can be “sanctified and rendered incorruptible” by the fires of love, even in this life.  In the last step of The Ladder, he describes “a man flooded with the love of God” who “reveals in his body, as if in a mirror, the splendor of his soul, a glory like that of Moses when he came face to face with God” (30, p. 288).  John’s hope is that, by the power of Christ, the body, this clay, will be rendered translucent to the love of God.

The Alphabet of the Heart

One of the most remarkable features of The Ladder is John’s sensitivity to particularities of personality and his subtlety in diagnosing vices.  John is a master of what Peter Brown describes as the cultura Dei, the “art of thought” discovered by the desert fathers and mothers, in which “the monk’s own heart was the new book.”  He is a skilled exegete, trained from long experience to interpret “the ‘movements of the heart,’ and the strategies and the snares the Devil laid within it.”  John was fluent in the “alphabet of the heart.”**  

Indeed, John twice spells out a literal alphabet.  Here is the second:

“Α—an unfettered heart, Β—perfect love, Γ—a well of humility, Δ —a detached mind, Ε—an indwelling of Christ, Ζ—an assurance of light and of prayer, Η—an outpouring of divine illumination, Θ—a wish for death, Ι—hatred of life, Κ—flight from the body, Λ—an ambassador for the world, Μ— an importuner of God, Ν—fellow worshiper with the angels, Ξ—a depth of knowledge, Ο—a dwelling place of mysteries, Π—a custodian of holy secrets, Ρ—a savior of men, Σ—lord over the demons, Τ— master of the passions, Υ—lord of the body, Φ—controller of nature, Χ—a stranger to sin, Ψ—home of dispassion, Ω—with God’s help an imitator of the Lord.” (26, p. 232)

A Concluding Postscript: Human Effort and Divine Gift

Miniature, The Heavenly Ladder of St. John Climacus
(Russia, 15th c.)

In some icons and illuminated manuscripts of The Ladder, the figure of Christ is depicted at the top of the ladder, reaching out his hand to help the monk ascend the last few steps.  Such depictions might tempt us to think that John envisions progress in the spiritual life to be primarily a matter of human effort with God helping out at the end or when things get particularly difficult.  But to think this would be to misread The Ladder.  For, while John undoubtably stresses human efforts in the battle against the passions, he unequivocally asserts that progress in virtue is wholly the gift of God:

“Anyone trained in chastity should give himself no credit for any achievements. … When nature is overcome it should be admitted that this is due to Him Who is above nature. … The man who decides to struggle against his flesh and to overcome it by his own efforts is fighting in vain. … Admit your incapacity. … ‘What have you got that you did not receive as a gift either from God or as a result of the help and prayers of others?’” (15, pp. 172, 173, 184)

And again, in a passage rich with irony and quiet humor:

“…it is sheer lunacy to imagine that one has deserved the gifts of God.  You may be proud only of the achievements you had before the time of your birth. But anything after that, indeed the birth itself, is a gift from God. You may claim only those virtues in you that are there independently of your mind, for your mind was bestowed on you by God. And you may claim only those victories you achieved independently of the body, for the body too is not yours but a work of God.” (23, pp. 208–9)

John wants his readers to utterly reject “the notion that by their own efforts and enthusiasm they made great advances in purity,” because such a notion comes from demonic pride lying hidden “deep down in their hearts, like a snake in dung” (15, p. 183).  Against pride he counsels the humility that comes from recognizing that everything we have comes as a gift.

The Ladder ends in both exhortation and praise to God, fittingly displaying how divine gift enables human effort.  John urges his brother monks to “ascend eagerly”—and praises the Lord “Who makes our feet to be like the feet of the deer, ‘Who sets us on the high places, that we may be triumphant on His road’ [Hab. 3:19].”  He begs his readers to run, to hurry until we arrive “‘at the measure of the stature of Christ’s fullness’ [Eph. 4:13]”—and praises God, who is love and in whom “is the cause, past, present, and future, of all that is good forever and ever.  Amen.”

‡ Brown, The Body and Society, p. 237.  I am indebted to Brown for much of the following discussion.

§ Quoted in Brown, p. 236.

** Brown, p. 229.