John Climacus: The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Archimandrite Lazarus Moore translation. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959.
At Genesis 28: 10-19, we learn of Jacob’s dream at Haran, northeast of Beersheba, from which he was fleeing from his malicious brother, Esau. He sees angels ascending and descending on a ladder between Heaven and earth, and finds the LORD Himself beside him, assuring him that his people someday will prosper, throughout the world. The Christian Fathers Gregory of Nyssa and John Chrysostem interpreted this passage as a figure of the ascetic’s struggle toward God. In the seventh century, John Climacus, abbot of the Monastery at Mount Sinai, followed this line of thought, writing The Ladder of Divine Ascent (titled simply, Climax Paradisi in Latin), in response to a request from John, Abbot of Raitha. Although Jacob’s Ladder has more than seventy rungs, this version has thirty, which commentators have associated with the age of Jesus when baptized by John the Baptist.
Writing to “the servants of God,” and invoking the supreme goodness of God at the outset, Climacus immediately presents a classification of human beings in Christian terms. All angels and human beings are “rational beings created by Him and honored with the dignity of free-will.” But there the resemblances end. The angels and saints in Heaven are the “intellectual and incorporeal beings which surround God.” The “true servants of God” are “those who tirelessly and unremittingly do and have done His will.” But there are also “worthless servants” who “think of themselves as having been granted baptism but have not faithfully kept the vows they made to God.” There are those “estranged from God and alienated from Him—the unbelievers or heretics.” And there are outright “enemies of God,” who “have not only evaded and rejected the Lord’s commandment themselves, but who also wage bitter war on those who are fulfilling it.” Preeminent among them are the fallen angels, the demons. “God belongs to all free beings”; among humans, “the monk is he who within his earthly and soiled body toils towards the rank and state of incorporeal beings.” He is the true servant of God, “a mourning soul”—recall that Jesus, the Man of Sorrows, weeps but never laughs—who, “both asleep and awake is unceasingly occupied with the remembrance of death.” He has withdrawn from the world in “voluntary hatred of vaunted material things,” denying “nature for the attainment of what is above nature.” Renunciation of the world is the first step on the Ladder. Taking that step is reasonable if done “either for the sake of the future Kingdom, or because of the multitude of [one’s] sins, or for love of God”—God, Who out of respect for human free-will, “sets our contests” and “waits to see what the end of our course will be.”
If motivated by a desire to overcome sin, the monk “should not discontinue his hot and fiery streams of tears and voiceless heartfelt groaning until he, too, sees that Jesus has come to him an rolled away the stone of hardness from his heart,” freeing “Lazarus, that is to say, our mind, from the bands of sin,” commanding the angels to free the penitent’s mind from his passion and “let[ting] him go to blessed dispassion.” Those motivated by the desire to enter the Kingdom of God, “to go out of Egypt and to fly from Pharaoh,” will need “some Moses as a mediator with God and from God,” a man standing “between action and contemplation,” praying “for us to God” to allow us to “cross the sea of sin and rout the Amalek of the passions.” This person may be what Orthodox Christians call a spiritual father. And those animated simply by the love of God will need to battle (“violence indeed and constant suffering”) “until our pleasure-loving dispositions,” our erotic longings, our natural and worldly loves, “attain the love of God and chastity” by means of “visible sorrow” in imitation of Christ. Eventually, this spiritual warfare, undertaken with “great toil” and “much unseen suffering” by means of “simplicity, deep angerlessness and diligence,” will make our mind, that “greedy kitchen dog addicted to barking,” into “a lover of chastity and watchfulness.” We can achieve this, “if only we unceasingly go right down to the depth of humility.” “He who withdraws from the world out of love for God has obtained fire at the very outset; and, like fire set to fuel, it soon kindles a larger fire.” The right foundation or first step of renunciation consists of innocence, fasting (because physical food feeds the passions), and temperance. “A firm beginning will certainly be useful for us when we later grow slack. A soul that is strong at first but then relaxes”—few indeed will not experience backsliding—is “spurred on by the memory of its former zeal,” often growing “new wings” as a result.
This first step comes with “labor and grief.” But as we progress, “we no longer feel sorrow, or we feel little sorrow,” as “our mortal mind is consumed” and we practice the Christian virtues “with all joy and eagerness, with love and with divine fire.” But what of those who cannot undertake a life in solitude, or life in a monastery, Christians who have families and are “beset with social cares”? “Do all the good you can,” Climacus replies. “Do not speak evil of anyone; do not steal from anyone; do not lie to anyone; do not be arrogant towards anyone; do not hate anyone; be sure you go to church; be compassionate to the needy; do not offend anyone; do not wreck another man’s domestic happiness; and be content with what your own wives can give you. If you behave in this way you will not be far from the Kingdom of Heaven.” (He leaves it open, as to whether you will get there.) But “those who have really [emphasis added] determined to serve Christ, with the help of spiritual fathers and their own self-knowledge will strive before all else to choose a place, and a way of life, and a habitation, and exercises suitable for them,” inasmuch as “community life is not for all, on account of greed; and not for all are places of solitude, on account of anger,” which festers when a man is alone with his bitter memories of past injuries. The “monastic state” comes in three forms: “the retirement and solitude of a spiritual athlete”; “living in silene with one or two others”; or “settling patiently in a community.” Climacus prefers the social settings for most monks, as they will have other men to lift them up if they fall into despondency, despair, lethargy or laziness. He quotes Jesus: “For where two or three are gathered in My name, there am I in the midst of them.” [Matthew 18: 20).
After renouncing the world, the second step is full “detachment” from it, not longing for its pleasures while in a monk’s cell. “The man who really loves the Lord…will not love, care or worry about money, or possessions, or parents or worldly glory, or friends, or brothers, or anything at all on earth,” hating “even his own flesh” and “follow[ing] Christ without anxiety or hesitation, always looking heavenward and expecting help from there”—depending upon God, not man. “Water-loving plants are not such as to produce fruit in hard and arid training fields,” and “the man who has come to hate the world has escaped sorrow.” Climacus is utterly frank in describing what this entails. The “narrow way,” the regime of the Christian monk, consists of “mortification of the stomach, all-night standing, water in moderation, short rations of bread, the purifying draught of dishonor, sneers, derision, insult, the cutting out of one’s own will, patience in annoyances, unmurmuring endurance of scorn, disregard of insults, and the habit, when wronged, of bearing it sturdily; when slandered, of not being indignant,; when humiliated, not to be angry; when condemned, to be humble.” Be ready for the demons to “inflame our hearts by reminding us of our parents and brethren,” a fire that can only be fought with fire, namely “the remembrance of the eternal fire.” Your sanctuary is no invulnerable fortress; your battle continues there.
“Exile or pilgrimage” constitutes the third step. “Exile means that we leave forever everything in our own country that prevents us from reaching the goal of the religious life,” namely, the Kingdom of God, a pilgrimage “undertaken by the lovers of perfection so that they may live a life of hardship and simplicity.” It is crucial not to undertake this pilgrimage out of vainglory, succumbing to a sense of one’s own superiority to those he has left behind. The Christian regime, the Christian way of life, is indeed superior to the way of ‘the world,’ but the Christian himself remains a sinner in the hands of a vigilant if not angry God. “I do not know whether we must teach all others but teach yourselves at all costs.” Your pilgrimage is not an odyssey: “In going into exile, beware of the demon of wandering and of sensual desire, because exile gives him his opportunity,” as it did to not-so-chaste Ulysses. And you must find a new family, not return to Penelope. “Let him be your father who is able and willing to labor with you in bearing the burden of your sins; and your mother—contrition, which can cleanse you from impurity; and your brother—your comrade, who toils and fights side by side with you in your striving toward the heights.” As for a wife, let her be “separable”—the “remembrance of death,” your children “the sighs of your heart,” your body “your slave,” your friends the angels “who can help you at the hour of your death, if they become your friends.” “This is the family of those who seek the Lord,” since “love of God extinguishes our love for our parents,” bringing a spiritual sword to sever the natural ties. With regard to our home, “choose places where there are fewer opportunities for comfort and ambition, but more for humility,” lest we flee the world “in company with our passions.” All the work we do to develop “a good and firm disposition” can “be lost in an instant” if we do not take care, as “our mind, which is the organ of knowledge, is extremely imperfect and full of all kinds of ignorance,” prey to fantasy, with which we fill its void, whether awake or asleep. “The devils try to disturb us with dreams,” but “he who believes in dreams is like a person running after his own shadow and trying to catch it.” By all means, believe in some of your dreams—those “that foretell torments and judgment for you,” unless they cause despair, in which case they “are also from the devils.”
The reason we need not despair at the experience of grim dreams will be seen at the fourth step on the ladder: obedience, “blessed and ever-remembered,” a virtue that is “entirely foreign to hypocrisy and one’s own will.” Obedience aims at substituting God’s will for our own, as in the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy will be done.” This is a much more daunting command than it might seem at first. “Our treatise now appropriately touches upon prizefighters and athletes of Christ,” those who have succeeded in climbing the ladder, proving that, and how, this arduous battle against the demons can be won. We obey God by renouncing “our own life,” by mortifying “the limbs while the mind remains alive,” entombing our will and resurrecting our humility. “A corpse does not argue or reason as to what is good or what seems to be bad.” He who obeys God distrusts himself “in everything, however good it may be, right up to the end of [his] life.” Climacus has seen this way of life in monasteries, has known this among “these holy fathers,” men “gathered and united in the Lord, with a wonderful active and contemplative life, men “so occupied with divine thoughts,” so “exercised…in good deeds that there was scarcely any need of the superior to remind them of anything.” “Of their own good will they aroused one another to divine vigilance,” conversing of “death and the thought of eternal judgment.” They prayed together, each in his own mind, a practice of which “they reminded one another…by secret signs and gestures,” preempting mental wandering. Nor is this a life lived in vain; on the contrary, “it bears and shows abundant fruit,” proficiency “both in active life and spiritual insight,” both lives “in discernment and humility.” Some had attained “deepest innocence” and “wise simplicity, spontaneous and God-guided,” souls never duplicitous but all of one piece. “Among them there are none who are fatuous and foolish, like old men in the world who are commonly called ‘in their dotage.'” Gentle, kindly, radiant, sincere, “they make God Himself and their superior their very breath, and the eye of their mind keeps a bold and strict watch for demons and passions.”
He offers three examples, each exemplifying a Christian virtue. Isidore had been a cruel and arrogant magistrate before he entered the monastery. He learned humility by being assigned to prostrate himself before everyone who went in or out of the monastery. He obeyed this harsh but loving, agapic, command for the seven years before his death. Laurence exemplified prudence—indeed, “divine prudence.” Climacus tested him, asking him “what he was thinking of when standing by the table.” Laurence told him he was thinking of “the shepherd as the image of Christ,” praying “not as before a table of men, but as before the altar of God.” This elderly monk, who had been tested many times before, advised Climacus “that if anyone surrenders himself to simplicity and voluntary innocence, then he no longer gives the devil either time or place to attack him.” And final, Abbacyrus exemplified patient, “exemplary fortitude.” For fifteen years, he had endured maltreatment by his brother monks. He told Climacus that “my fathers are testing me to see whether I am really a monk,” but “they are not doing this in real earnest.” Some of the brothers have been tested for thirty years; he was only in his fifteenth year at the monastery. “And rightly, Father John, for without trial gold is not purified.” Abbacyrus died two years later, blessing those who tempted him, then “buried with the local saints.”
Another of “those ever-memorable fathers” advised Climacus, “Fix your mind to your soul as to the wood of the cross to be struck like an anvil with blow upon blow of the hammers, to be mocked, abused, ridiculed and wrong, without being in the least crushed or broken, but continuing to be quite calm and immovable. Shed your own will as a garment of shame, and thus stripped of it enter the practice ground.” By such determinations “will all men know, dearest father, that we are disciples of Christ, if while living together, we have love for one another,” avoiding “the devil’s disease,” which is the “will and desire in conversation…to establish his own opinion, even though what he says is true.” If we cannot achieve “such patience and obedience, then it is best for us, having at least discovered our weakness, to live far apart from the athletic lists, and bless the combatants and pray they may be granted patience.” Too many aspirants make their decision to join a holy order too easily. Climacus writes, “To admire the labors of the saints is good; to emulate them wins salvation; but to wish suddenly to imitate their life in every point is unreasonable and impossible.”
To take the fourth step, obey your spiritual father. “Base-born children regard the absence of their teacher as a joy, but legitimate ones think it a loss.” A spiritual father will help to guide you away from the devil’s two principal snares, or sets of snares. The first set aims at reducing the monks’ zeal, “mak[ing] them hard-hearted” by “defil[ing] them with bodily pollution, or making them “sluggish in prayer, drowsy and confused by spiritual darkness,” in order to deceive them into “think[ing] they have gained nothing by their obedience.” But when Providence withdraws “our imagined goods or blessings,” God is really “lead[ing] us to the deepest humility.” The second set of snares is the opposite extreme—spiritual overconfidence or pride, “the thought that they now had the qualifications for the solitary life, and that in solitude they could attain to freedom from passion as the final prize.” Do not be deceived “by the spirit of conceit.” We will sin, even as we ascend the Ladder. Above all, do not conceal those sins or “do so as if we were confessing another’s sin,” or “lay the blame for our sin on others.” On the contrary, tell God, and tell your spiritual father, “No one is to blame for this, no man, no spirit no body, nothing but my own carelessness.” “Be like a condemned criminal in disposition and in outward appearance and thought.” Bear in mind that “everything depends on habit, and follows upon it,” as Aristotle says of the virtues, but as Christians we “have God as their great collaborator.” When “in the presence of a [spiritual] superior,” “practice extreme silence and ignorance,” “for a silent man is a son of wisdom, always acquiring much knowledge.” Pay attention to them, not your fellow novitiates. The saintly Father Acacius recalled, “I have seen innocent and most beautiful children come to school for the sake of wisdom, education, and profit, but through contact with the other pupils they learn there nothing but cunning and vice. The intelligent will understand this.”
Novitiates choose their spiritual fathers, and must do so in self-knowledge, especially in knowledge of their own passions. Those “prone to lust” should choose “an ascetic who will hear of no consolation in food.” Prideful novitiates should choose a “stern and unyielding” spiritual father, not a “meek and kindly” one. Always assume that “that the Superior is trying you, and you will certainly never go wide of the mark.” If we anger God, the father can intercede for us in prayer, but when the father “is incensed against us, there is no one to propitiate him for us. “When the day comes when you “obtain great faith and love” for your spiritual father, “then know that the Holy Spirit has invisibly made His abode in your soul and the power of the Highest has overshadowed you.” Climacus observes that the number four is the number of the four Apostles. “Athlete, keep running fearlessly.”
The fifth step is “painstaking and true repentance.” The Apostle John exemplifies obedience, in imitation of Christ at Gethsemane. The Apostle Peter exemplifies repentance, which Christ, of course, never needed to undertake. Peter is the more ‘human’ Apostle, of the two. “Obedience precedes repentance, which is “the renewal of baptism,” a “contract with God for a second life,” a “self-condemning reflection, and carefree self-care.” It is the opposite of despair, being rather its renunciation, “the daughter of hope.” Repentance reconciles us with God and purifies our conscience. Crucially, “a penitent is the inflictor of his own punishments.” He does not wait for God or his superiors at the monastery to punish him. At an establishment set aside for penitents, called “The Prison,” “men endured hardship and bowed down to the end of their life, going about with a sad countenance all day long, the wounds in their body stinking of rottenness, and they took no notice of them, and they forgot to eat their bread, and they mingled their drink of water with seeping; they ate dust and ashes with their bread, and their bones cleaved to their flesh, and were withered like grass.” With supreme understatement, Climacus asks, “Where could you see anything like laughter, or idle talking, or irritation, or anger?” These men “were quite indistinguishable from corpses.” In seeing them, “I nearly despaired of myself, seeing my own indifference and comparing it with their suffering.” Nevertheless, “what is hard and intolerable for others becomes easy and acceptable for those who have fallen away from virtue and spiritual riches.” And “he who really keeps account of his actions considers as lost every day in which he does not mourn, whatever good he may have done on it.” Those who despair may commit suicide, but those who despair have already committed spiritual suicide, since “nothing equals or excels God’s mercies.” At the same time, do not entangle yourself in the opposite trap; do not “sicken in heart from the disease of the godless Origen,” the Neo-Platonist and pretended Christian who espoused universalism, the doctrine that all human beings will be saved, eventually. Climacus offers this prayer, in the stead of such errors: “May the holy convicts mentioned above provide you with a rule, and a pattern, and a model, and a living picture of repentance; and throughout your life you will need no book at all until Christ, the Son of God and God, enlightens you in the resurrection of true repentance.” Repentance purifies the physical senses; “by voluntarily accepting retribution and punishment, you have escaped the punishment that is everlasting.”
Introducing the sixth step, the remembrance of death, Climacus distinguishes between fear of death, “a natural instinct that comes from disobedience,” the penalty human beings paid for Adam’s failure to obey God, and terror of death, which is “evidence of unrepented sin.” Christ Himself feared death, in the sense that he prayed to His Father in Gethsemane, asking if He must go to the Cross while determining to do as He was told; He did not “show terror,” having committed no sin for which He would be bound to repent. Remembrance of death is especially needed if you live in society, where the insistent frivolity of almost everyone will distress and depress you. “But amongst those who are free from noise it produces the putting aside of cares and constant prayer and guarding of the mind,” detachment from the noisemakers. Let no one imagine that renunciation of frivolity, even renunciation of one’s own will, must lead to torpor. On the contrary, “there are many activities for an active mind,” namely, “meditation on the love of God, on the remembrance of God, on the remembrance of the Kingdom, on the remembrance of the zeal of the holy martyrs, on the remembrance of God Himself present,” as well as “remembrance of the holy and spiritual powers, on remembrance of one’s departure, judgment, punishment, and sentence.” After all, “the day is not sufficient to repay in full its own debt to the Lord.” We should think and act as if this day is “the last of our whole life.” “Even the pagans have said something of the sort, since they define philosophy as meditation on death.” Those who remember death will “never sin”—well, perhaps at the same time they are remembering.
With the remembrance of death comes the inclination to mourn, and mourning causes us to pray. Prayerful mourning is the seventh step. It is “a golden spur in which a soul which is stripped of all attachment and of all ties, fixed by holy sorrow to watch over the heart.” At this step, “temperance and silence of the lips” will be yours; “humility, thirst for dishonors, voluntary craving for involuntary afflictions, no condemnation of sinners, compassion even beyond one’s strength”—these are the fruits grasped at the sixth step. Climacus emphasizes that these are the opposite of feelings. Christian compassion is no passion. Christian tears do not betoken an outburst of emotion. “Tears without thought are proper only to an irrational nature and not to a rational one”; that is, they are less than human. Rightly, “tears are the product of thought, and the father of thought is a rational mind.” It is for this reason that “the demons fear concentration as thieves fear dogs.” “My friends,” Climacus tells his brothers in Christ, “God does not ask or desire that man should mourn from sorrow of heart, but rather that out of love for Him he should rejoice with spiritual laughter. Remove sin, and the tear of sorrow is superfluous for your eyes of sense. What is the use of a bandage when there is no wound?” Once again, virtue entails habituation. “Practice produces habit, and perseverance grows into a feeling of the heart; and what is done with an ingrained feeling of the heart is not easily eradicated.” At our judgment, God will not blame us for failing to work miracles, a power He alone can grant, or “for not having been theologians or contemplatives,” men whose gifts He grants to only a few, but “we shall certainly have to give an account to God of why we have not unceasingly mourned.”
To quench a fire completely, pour water on it gradually. “The tears of mourning will quench every flame of anger and irritability,” and it is the consequent attitude of meekness that results from the eighth step. “Anger is a reminder of hidden hatred, that is to say, remembrance of wrongs,” and it must be said that truer words have never been written. (The old joke has it, ‘He has Irish Alzheimer’s disease; he only remembers his grudges.’ But not only the Irish.) Anger is against humility. “If you want, or rather intend, to take a splinter out of another person, then do not hack at it with a stick instead of a lancet, for you will only drive it deeper.” The stick is “rude speech and rough gestures,” while the lancet in “tempered instruction and patient reprimand.” Do the latter rarely, “and not with your own hand” but by “the agency of another,” to soften the blow. For yourself and for the one you instruct or reprimand, you want to cultivate the conviction that dishonor “is praise.”
Accordingly, take the ninth step, which is to expunge “remembrance of wrongs,” which is “the consummation of anger, the keeper of sins, hatred of righteousness, ruin of virtues, poison of the soul, worm of the mind shame of prayer, stopping of supplication, estrangement of love, a nail stuck in the soul, pleasureless feeling beloved in the sweetness of bitterness, continuous sin, unsleeping transgression, hourly malice”—altogether, a “dark and hateful passion.” It can only be replaced fully by the agape, which abandons revenge. “He who nurses enmities stores up for himself endless sufferings” in this life and the next. “Let it be put to shame by the Prayer of Jesus, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” That prayer recalls our minds to remembrance of our sins against others, not their sins against us.
Such resentment pushes us to slander, a sin “born of hatred and malice.” If someone disparages his neighbor, ask him to stop, since “I fall into graver sins every day, so how can I criticize him?” How can I join you in your condemnation of him? With this reply, “you will heal yourself and your neighbor with one plaster,” following Christ’s injunction to avoid “judgment,” lest I be judged. This is the tenth step. Avoiding judgment of others does not mean to overlook their sins. Rather, “hasty and severe judges of the sins of their neighbor” have “not yet attained to a thorough and constant remembrance and concern for their own sins.” They leave no sufficient time to mourn for themselves.
The eleventh step is in one sense not a step ‘up’ but a step ‘down.’ Do not mount “the throne of vainglory” by becoming talkative. It is “the friend of silence” who “draws near to God, and by secretly conversing with Him is enlightened by God.” But “garrulity comes especially from vainglory.” People who love to talk too-highly esteem their own opinions and brains.
Lying is an especially pernicious sort of talk, “the offspring of chatter and joking” and “the destruction of love” because it ruins trust. Worse still, joking “destroy[s] in their hearers the habit of mourning,” which isn’t easy to develop or to recover, once lost. In describing this twelfth step, Climacus shows that he has understood the teaching of Plato’s Socrates, however: “When we are completely cleansed of lying, then we can resort to it, but only with fear and as occasion demands.” Socrates’ example is lying to someone who wants to know where a weapon is, so he can kill an enemy. Climacus gives no example, perhaps because he regards the teaching as true but dangerous, particularly in light of the commandment against it. Retreating to safer ground, he observes that “he who has become merry with wine involuntarily speaks the truth on all subjects, and he who is drunk with compunction cannot lie.”
Warring against the sin of acedia or despondency, spiritual sloth, is the thirteenth step. This sin leads to slackness—the “neglect of asceticism, hatred of the vow made,” a “blessing of worldlings” but a curse for Christians, since it amounts to an implied accusation that God is “merciless and without love for men” by thinking, in effect, ‘What’s the use?’ “Community life oppose[s] despondency,” being more the “constant companion of the hermit.” Climacus calls it the “gravest” of the “capital vices,” which may be why he lists it under the number 13, symbol of atheism. For the Christian sliding into it, the antidotes are to remember his sins and to perform manual labor. Both community life and manual labor take the mind off itself, while remembering one’s sins directs the Christian mind toward the soul-labor of repentance, away from listlessness.
The fourteenth step aims at crushing that “clamorous yet wicked master, the stomach.” If wonder is the first step toward philosophy, here Climacus takes it: “I wonder if anyone has got free of this master before settling in the grave.” In addition to being a vice in itself, gluttony is “the father of fornication,” an illicit attempt to work off all those extra calories without going to the trouble of more rigorous exercise. (If Adam “had not been overcome by his stomach he would not have known what a wife is.”) A disciple of the dubious Origen, Evagrius, “afflicted by an evil spirit,” supposing himself “to be the wisest of the wise,” told his readers to combat gluttony by consuming only bread and water. “This is like saying to a child: ‘Go up the whole ladder in one stride.'” Be more “cunning” than that, first “only deny[ing] ourselves fattening foods, then heating foods, and only then what makes our food pleasant. Just “give your stomach satisfying and digestible food, so as to satisfy its insatiable hunger by sufficiency.” While despondency is the gravest of sins, the stomach is “the prince of the passions.” It “alone…is the cause of all human shipwreck,” he avers, with some exaggeration. Fasting, on the other hand, “is the coercion of nature and the cutting out of everything that delights the palate, the prevention of lust, the uprooting of bad thoughts, deliverance from dreams, purity of prayer, the light of the soul, the guarding of the mind, deliverance from blindness, the door of compunction, humble sighing, glad contrition, a lull in chatter, a means to silence, a guard of obedience, lightening of sleep, health of body, agent of dispassion, remission of sins, the gate of Paradise and its delight.”
If gluttony encourages fornication, that makes purity, successful resistance to lust, the logical fifteenth step. “Purity means that we put on the angelic nature”—a very big step, indeed. It is “the supernatural denial of nature,” which is why Climacus warns his readers not to “expect to confute the demon of fornication by arguing with him; for with nature on his side, he has the best of the argument.” The way to proceed is to expel erotic love with agapic love, “extinguish[ing] the material fire by the immaterial fire.” Chastity is “common to all the virtues” because it means that you have achieved “perfect insensibility to difference in bodies,” i.e., the sexual difference between them, but more: “the rule and limit of absolute and perfect purity is to be equally disposed towards animate and inanimate bodies, rational and irrational.” Obviously, this achievement is humanly impossible, due rather “to the presence of Him who is above nature,” stronger than nature. “He is great who remains free from passion when touched. But greater is he who remains unwounded by sight, and who has conquered the fire caused by the beauties of earth by meditation on the beauties of heaven.” By contrast, the sensual person loves bodies so much that “a kind of shameless and inhuman spirit openly asserts itself in the very feeling of the heart,” producing “a feeling of physical pain in the heart, fierce as from a blazing stove,” abandoning the fear of God and thereby the beginning of wisdom, “disdain[ing] prayer” and being “perpetually drunk with desire for creatures, rational and irrational.” In warring against ascetics, especially, those who, with God’s grace, have conquered their nature, the devil sets them to desiring “what is unnatural.” While ascetics are no longer tempted by women, they do not know, “poor things, that where a worse downfall has been prepared for them, there was no need for the lesser one.” He does not specify what the worse downfall is, and the story about St. Anthony, who lamented of a young monk that he had sinned after helping some elderly monks by miraculously bringing wild asses for them to ride, isn’t explicit, either, although Climacus hints first at bestiality, then at masturbation (“bodily intercourse is possible without intercourse with another body”). And finally, there is the sin that consists of “a flick of the mind”—a “simple remembrance with which the soul has no time to dally, since it is independent of time, unconnected with any image, impervious to analysis, and in some cases even unknown to the person himself”—the effect of “a mere glance, or touch of the hand, or hearing of a song, without any notion or thought.” In this circumstance, physical “violence in bodily prayer”—that is, “stretching out the hands, beating the breast, sincere raising of the eyes to heaven, deep sighing, frequent prostration”—will help you if you are alone. If you are with others, and such gestures are out of place, silently pray the Jesus Prayer, and “with invisible help you will invisibly drive away the invisible ones,” the demons who have taken aim at you.
Love of bodies is one kind of materialism, love of money another, amounting to an instance of the more general love of external things, which we may ‘idolize.’ “The worship of idols, a daughter of unbelief, an excuse for infirmities, a foreboder of old age, a harbinger of drought, a herald of hunger,” must be resisted as the sixteenth step. Money is indeed the proverbial root of all evils inasmuch as it “produces hatred, thefts, envy, separations, enmities, storms, remembrance of wrong, hard-heartedness, murders.” Following it, the seventeenth step is poverty, which minimizes the number of material things to which we have become attached. To become impoverished is to resign one’s cares, one’s anxieties, becoming “an unencumbered traveler” alienated from sorrow and faithful to God’s commandments. Truly, “a poor monk is lord of the world,” having “entrusted his cares to God and by faith…[having] obtained all men as his slaves” as “a son of detachment,” “pilgrims for the Lord.” The only danger in poverty comes to the one who “impoverishes himself for no reason,” unintentionally. Such a person merely “abstains from present goods and is deprived of future ones.” This is the poverty ‘moderns’ lament, as they declare ‘war on poverty.’
Love of money can bring “insensibility,” the “deadening of the soul and the death of the mind before the death of the body.” Such a man “is a brainless philosopher, a self-condemned commentator, a self-contradictory windbag, a blind man who teaches others to see,” a hypocrite whose “mouth prays against his passion, and his body struggles for it,” “philosophiz[ing] about death” wile “behav[ing] as if he were immortal,” “prais[ing] prayer, but run[ng] away from it as from the plague.” Climacus admits “my own powerlessness, since I am sorely afflicted with this sickness,” fighting with “with the scourge of the feat of the Lord and with unceasing prayer.” It is a “tyrant” who tells him, to “be constant in vigil, meditating on the eternal judgment; then perhaps I shall to some extent relax my hold on you.” If so, he will have taken the eighteenth step.
The prayer of “the really obedient man, his nineteenth step, can make him become “suddenly radiant and exultant,” having been “prepared and fired beforehand by his sincere service” to God and neighbor. Prayer and singing psalms in chapel is best for most, “solitary prayer [being] for the very few.” The closely related twentieth step, which encompasses first bodily and then spiritual vigil, begins with literal standing at prayer “during day and night.” We also stand while singing songs and while reading Scripture. Such pious sleeplessness in the all-night vigil can be mitigated by working with one’s hands or thinking of death, but “God accepts and values the offerings of each according to their intention and power.” And once sleep comes, “the soul which has spent all day unceasingly engaged with the word of the Lord will love to be occupied with it in sleep, too.”
Solitaries are especially vulnerable to “unmanly and puerile cowardice,” strength being found in numbers. “Cowardice is a falling away from faith that comes from expecting the unexpected,” a “loss of conviction.” It readily comes to the man who is alone, who leaves himself open to groundless imaginings. To counter it, “do not hesitate to go late at night to those places where you usually feel afraid,” rather as someone who has a natural fear of the dark can overcome it by long walks at night. “Arm yourself with prayer,” since “it is not darkness and loneliness of place that gives the demons power against us, but barrenness of soul.” Take this twenty-first step, for the very good reason that “he who has conquered cowardice has clearly dedicated his life and soul to God.”
Traditionally, pride takes pride, if that is the right word, in being the worst of sins. Vainglory is the beginning of pride, “unholy self-esteem” a “perversion of character” that squanders the virtues won in previous struggles. It delights “at the sight of increasing virtue,” but just as “the sun shines on all alike,” so does “vainglory beam on all activities,” making them evaporate. Vainglory is idolatry aimed not outward at visible objects but at other men. “A vainglorious person is a believing idolator; he apparently honors God, but he wants to please not God but men.” His asceticism “exhausts his body” without earning him any reward from God—cheating the ascetic twice. He mouths self-depreciation, but so what? It is “he who maintains the same love for the very man who reproaches him” who exhibits genuine humility. A vainglorious man may live with the monks, “but in mind and thought he is in the world.” As his vainglory increases, “it gives birth to pride.” Stopping vainglory before it reaches that culmination is the twenty-second step.
A treatment of “mad pride” and its worst consequence, “unclean blasphemous thoughts,” accordingly follows. Pride and blasphemy are related because “pride is denial of God” and “flight from divine assistance.” To understand that one needs divine assistance requires humility. Pride affords “a foothold for satanic possession,” which is madness, the sure way to Hell. Climacus finds the beginning of mad pride in false gratitude. “I have seen people who thank God with their mouth but mentally magnify themselves.” But it is “utter madness to fancy one deserves God’s gifts.” We monks should rather “constantly be examining and comparing ourselves with the holy Fathers and the lights who lived before us,” finding “that we have not yet entered upon the path of the ascetic life, and have not kept our vow in holy fashion, and in disposition are still living in the world.” A true monk “experiences rapture of mind and sorrow of life.” He has taken the twenty-third step of overcoming pride. Blasphemous thoughts, “born from foul pride,” can be remedied by prayer. There will be times, nonetheless, when demons will push blasphemous thoughts into our minds; God forgives us for those.
The countermeasure to pride is humility, whose “precursor” is “weakness,” that is, a circumstance irremediable by the exercise of our own powers. Meekness, simplicity, and guilelessness” constitute the twenty-fourth step. They originate not in nature but from habit—for example, “praying calmly and sincerely for a troublesome neighbor.” The soul “finds rest” in a meek heart, while “a turbulent soul is a seat of the devil.” Meedness may be gained only to be lost, however. “I have seen honest sous who learnt to be evil from evil people.” Another snare is knowledge, which “puffs up many people,” although ignorance can be another: “There are here and there people who pride themselves on their ignorance.” Climacus offers a paradoxical but telling definition of “a simple-hearted monk”: he “is like a rational dumb animal, who lays his burden on his director.” “Dumb animal” in the original sense of not talking, or at least not much. “Rational” in that he understands that his director, his spiritual father, knows better than he. As for those knowledge-clever men, “a fall has often corrected” them, “giving them salvation and innocence in spite of themselves.” With divine intervention, a Saul can become a Paul.
There is humility, and then there is “sublime” or “holy” humility, “rooted in spiritual feeling.” This is the twenty-fifth step. Climacus does not attempt to describe the experience of it, which attempt would be “like a man who by words and comparisons wants to give an idea of the sweetness of honey to people who have never tasted it.” The monk who has taken this step accepts indignity “with the greatest pleasure” because it “relieves and cauterizes diseases of the soul and great sins” Such a man has jettisoned “all bad temper” and lives in “true distrust of [his] own qualities and [in] a constant desire to learn.” That is, he does not resemble a philosopher in one way—he does not rely on the unassisted power of human reason—while very much resembling a philosopher in his eros for wisdom. He desires wisdom but seeks it from God and from Godly men. Such men are now immune to “the poison of hypocrisy,” having no reason to attempt to conceal their faults. “Having in mind Christ’s passion, [they] regard themselves always as debtors.” Whatever intellectual or other natural powers they possess, they understand as “gifts of God,” and “so live as to account themselves unworthy of such wealth and each day add it to their debt.” The Socratic philosopher seeks self-knowledge; the man of holy humility understands it as “a true ideal of one’s spiritual growth and an unbroken remembrance of one’s slightest sins,” knowing that “it is better to offend men than God.” At the same time, they do not seek contention with others: “Birds fear the sight of a hawk, and those who practice humility fear the sound of argument,” which betokens prideful striving to assert the superiority of one’s own convictions over those of others.
Rationality grows beyond the step of obeying one’s spiritual father—an elder who one day will pass on—when one achieves “discernment of thoughts, passions, and virtues,” the twenty-sixth step. Discernment begins with self-knowledge, moves to “a spiritual sense that faultlessly distinguishes what is truly good from what is of nature and opposed to,” then becomes perfect in knowledge from “divine illumination,” which “can enlighten with its lamp what is dark in others.” With this step, the passions of gluttony, cupidity, and vainglory, along with those of lust, anger, despair, despondency, and pride have been “piously destroyed,” although Climacus cautions that “he who has been negligent” about the first three “will not conquer even one passion.” You can’t jump over any step on the Ladder. Conflicts with Satan come from “three generic causes”: negligence, which is “pitiable”; pride, which is “disastrous”; or “the envy of demons,” which is actually “blessed.” He explains the last, surprising, claim by first identifying the “three pits” that the demons dig for us. They try “to prevent any good at all from being done,” to frustrate us; monks should counter this “by zeal and fear of death.” They try to ensure good results will “not be done according to the will of God” but by means unacceptable to Him; monks should counter this by “obedience and humiliation.” Finally, “when these rogues fail in this too, they stand “quietly before our soul,” praising us “for living a thoroughly godly life”; counter this appeal to vanity with “unceasing self-condemnation.” (A holy man might respond to a person who praises his virtues by saying, ‘No, I am the greatest of sinners.’) “Perilous, truly perilous is the sea that we humble monks are crossing.” Our very efforts provoke the demons to redouble their efforts to ruin us. Therefore, “let us try to learn divine truth more by toil and sweat than by mere word, for at the time of our departure it is not words but deeds that will have to be shown.” Although the later Protestants will accuse such Christians as Climacus as trying to earn their way to salvation by works, not by faith, what he means is works animated by faith, and by the Word if not by words. He regards learning as a matter of such doing, not only as an act of reading or of listening. He retains profound esteem for reading and listening to the Gospel. The main virtues of which “the active life” of a Christian consists are fasting and obedience; “the first destroys sensuality, and the other reinforces this destruction with humility.”
How is this possible, given human sin? Human beings still ‘stand a chance’ because “vice or passion is not originally planted in nature, for God is not the Creator of passions.” What is more, “there are in us many natural virtues from Him, among which are certainly the following: mercy, for even the pagans are compassionate; love, for even dumb animals often weep at the loss of one another; faith, for we all give birth to it of ourselves; hope, for we lend, and sail, and sow, hoping for the best.” And “love is a natural virtue in us,” as “the bond and fulfillment of the law,” as seen in Romans 13:10: “Love worketh not ill to his neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.” In all things, “ask yourself: Am I really doing this in accordance with God’s will?” To learn what God’s will is, first mortify your own, pray, and ask advice from the fathers “or even the brothers with humility of heart and no thought of doubt”; “God is not unjust, and will not la astray souls who with faith and innocence humbly submit to the advice and judgment of their neighbor.” As to consulting the Bible, at least “at the beginning of the monastic life some of the unclean demons instruct us in the interpretation of the Divine Scriptures,” which the Devil himself has been known to quote. “Vainglorious people and…those who have been educated in secular studies” are particularly vulnerable to their scheme of gradual deception, “lead[ing] them into heresy and blasphemy,” perhaps because vainglorious souls will find what they want to find and former secularists will likely bring un-Christian philosophic notions to their study of the Bible. “We can recognize this diabolic divinity, or rather, devilry, by the disturbances and the confused and unholy joy which are felt in the soul during the instruction.” And while it is true that “an energetic soul rouses the demons against itself,” as our “conflicts increase, so do our crowns.
Writing about the twenty-seventh step us risky. It is “the holy solitude of body and soul.” “We, who are weak and infirm, hesitate to philosophize in our discourse about the haven of solitude,” for the demons lurk around “the table of good brotherhood,” waiting to snatch a soul, “run[ning] off with it in its mouth and devour[ing] it on the quiet.” He therefore refuses to talk about peace of soul to those who have yet to attain it. He is willing, however, to “speak briefly about solitude, if only to explain what it is.” Disengagement from all worldly affairs and “earnest prayer” are the first actions to take, followed by a deliberate attempt to concentrate mind and heart on God, channeling them away from considerations of the lower things. This is difficult. “Those who are thoroughly versed in secular philosophy are indeed rare; but I affirm that those who have a divine knowledge of the philosophy of true solitude are still more rare.” Read, but “let what you read lead you to action,” for as a Christian “you are a doer,” and putting the right words “into practice makes further reading superfluous.” “Seek to be enlightened by the words of health through your labors, and not merely from books,” especially allegorical books, “because they are dark words, and they darken the weak.”
At this point on the Ladder, “holy and blessed prayer” becomes even more important as the twenty-eighth step. Prayer, “the converse and union of man with God,” which “upholds the world and brings about reconciliation with God,” yields “invisible progress” towards Him. “For him who truly prays, prayer is the court, the judgment hall and the tribunal of the Lord before the judgment to come.” Prayer should be “completely simple.” The publican and the prodigal son “were reconciled to God by a single phrase.” God knows, and so needs no elaboration. The right order of prayer is thanksgiving followed by confession, “heartfelt contrition of soul,” and then only then petition. Because “instability is natural to the mind,” you should “shut off your thought within the words of your prayer.” When distracted, return. Always remember, faithfully, that “Spirit cannot be bound, but where the Creator of the spirit is, everything obeys.”
The penultimate, twenty-ninth step is “heaven on earth,” by which Climacus means “godlike dispassion and perfection.” This is “the resurrection of the soul before the general Resurrection.” That “soul has dispassion who is immersed in the virtues as the passionate are in pleasures.” Dispassion means “to hold all persons in the same regard as inanimate things” in the sense that God is no respecter of ‘persons,’ those of high earthly rank and reputation. The humble man knows that all men are created equal, and at this step you will “have humble thoughts” even “in the midst of high undertakings and achievements.” To unite with God means disuniting with men insofar as men concern themselves with less-than-godly things, animated by less-than-godly passions.
The thirtieth and final step brings together faith, hope, and agapic love, “the supreme trinity among the virtues.” Like the Holy Trinity, these three are three-in-one, the first a ray, the second a light, the third a circle, but “in all, one radiance and one splendor.” “The first can make and create all things; the divine merc surrounds the second and makes it immune to disappointment; the third does not fall, does not stop in its course and allows no respite to him who is wounded by its blessed rapture.” Of these three, love is the greatest because it is “the progress of eternity,” ruling “over all.”
Praying to Love, he receives an answer: “Unless you renounce your gross flesh, you cannot know my beauty May this ladder teach you the spiritual combination of the virtues.” And so Climacus calls his brothers to the ascent.
The spiritual, spirit-centered, body-sacrificing ascent John Climacus describes and defends has a ‘worldly’ or ‘secular’ dimension. It concerns the question of aristocracy. The aristocrats of antiquity and the later aristocrats of the Middle Ages were warriors. They too sacrificed their bodies—in their case, for the sake of their families, political regimes, countries, and for the sake of honor, even glory. These were men of thumos, of spiritedness, as distinguished from spirituality, holiness. Their thumos caused them to despise the dishonorable, merely mortal body. Classical philosophers attempted to steer such aspiring Homeric heroes into willing rule by philosophers, by reason (Plato, albeit with irony) or to a life of virtue (Aristotle, who understood the aristocratic regime of genuine virtue to be the rarest of all regimes). Such modern philosophers as Locke and Montesquieu attempted to steer the Christian aristocrats away from chivalric conflicts and towards the peaceful competition of commerce and industry. The strict ascetic hierarchy of the monastery that Climacus is still another attempt to re-channel honor-loving aristocrats, here a spiritual aristocracy. Tocqueville’s claim, that Christian began the long-term trend toward ‘democracy,’ i.e. social equality, became true, but not without this profoundly undemocratic claim, which goes so far as to suggest not only that many are called but few are chosen by God, but that God chooses very few, indeed, and only those who undertake a way of life that amounts to a new kind of heroism, a heroism of the spirit.
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