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| 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.