During Great Lent, we commemorate the great monastic saint and writer, John Climacus (of the Ladder). Saint John, who fell asleep in the Lord in the mid-seventh century, was the abbot of one of the most ancient monasteries in the Christian world, at the foot of Jebul Musa—Moses’ Mount—on the Sinai Peninsula. An austere ascetic, he wrote what may be the classic work of our spiritual tradition: The Ladder of Divine Ascent.
According to Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, “With the exception of the Bible and the service books, there is no work in Eastern Christendom that has been studied, copied and translated more than The Ladder of Divine Ascent by Saint John Climacus.” It is a work, then, that has nurtured endless generations of Christian believers seeking to deepen their relationship with God in and through Christ.
Commemorating Saint John on the Fourth Sunday of Great Lent reminds us that a major component of our lenten effort is focused on being ascetical to some degree, and that any ascetical effort must be placed within a larger context of warfare against the passions and the attainment of those key virtues that mark the life of a committed Christian. Saint John provides an example and a body of teaching both through his mode of life and again, through his enduring spiritual classic, The Ladder of Divine Ascent—something to keep in mind as our lenten efforts may be starting to sag at this point in the season.
There is no doubt, from the beginning of his work, that Saint John is writing as a monastic, for fellow monastics. But that hardly limits Saint John’s scope of intended readers. To again turn to Metropolitan Kallistos, “Yet does it therefore follow that The Ladder is of no interest to those in the ‘world’? Surely not. It has in fact been read with the utmost profit by many thousands of married Christians, and whatever the author’s original intention, there is nothing surprising in that…. Whether monastic or married, all the baptized are responding to the same Gospel call; the outward conditions of their response may vary, but the path is essentially one.”
There is a wonderful passage at the outset of The Ladder that clearly affirms the “universal” appeal of Saint John’s teaching: “God is the life of all free beings. He is the salvation of believers and unbelievers, of the just or the unjust… of monks or those living in the world, of the educated or the illiterate, of the healthy or the sick, of the young or the very old. He is like the outpouring of light, the glimpse of the sun, or the changes of the weather, which are the same for everyone without exception. ‘For God is no respecter of persons’ [Romans 2:11]” (STEP 1).
And more specifically, with married persons in the world in mind, Saint John writes, “Do whatever good you may. Speak evil of not one. Rob no one. Tell no lie. Despise no one and carry no hate. Do not separate yourself from the church assemblies. Show compassion to the needy. Do not be a cause of scandal to anyone. Stay away from the bed of another…. If you do all of this, you will not be far from the kingdom of heaven” (STEP 1).
Therefore, Saint John’s succinct definition of what it means to be a Christian embraces both those “in the world,” and those who practice withdrawal “from the world.” 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,” Saint John continues (STEP 1).
Contrary to many “self-help” Christian writers today, who may prove to be less than insightful about the rebellion of our sinful minds and bodies, Saint John is very sober and realistic—we could say very “up front”—about the intense challenges that a life based on the precepts of the Gospel will be for the honest seeker: “Violence [cf. Matthew 11:12] 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” (STEP 1).
Concerning the role of the body in the over-all Christian life, and the difficult question of the relationship between soul and body, and the inherent tensions—if not outright struggle/warfare—in that relationship, Saint John provides a text of extraordinary insight concerning the “mystery” of the relationship between body and soul that has hardly been matched since. He wrote, “By what rule or manner can I bind this body of mine? By what precedent can I judge him? Before I can bind him he is let loose, before I can condemn him I am reconciled to him, before I can punish him I bow down to him and feel sorry for him. How can I hate him when my nature disposes me to love him? 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? How can I make him incorrupt when he has received a corruptible nature? How can I argue with him when all the arguments of nature are on his side…? 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?” (STEP 15).
The main section of The Ladder is made up of the Steps in which Saint John lists and analyzes the most prominent and troubling of the “passions,” so as to offer guidance as to how to overcome them and replace them with a corresponding virtue. One way of many to describe a major component of the spiritual life is to say that it is a “warfare against the passions.” Without success in this battle, we cannot hope to attain purity of heart. According to how Metropolitan Kallistos helps to summarize the contents of The Ladder, the “passions” can be listed as those that are physical and material, such as
- gluttony. “Gluttony is hypocrisy of the stomach. Filled, it moans about scarcity; stuffed, and crammed, it wails about hunger” (STEP 14).
- lust. “This demon is especially on the lookout for our weak moments and will viciously assail us when we are physically unable to pray against it” (STEP 15).
- avarice. “Anger and gloom never leave the miserly” (STEP 16-17).
He also lists passions that are non-physical, such as
- anger. “Anger is an indication of concealed hatred, of grievance nursed. Anger is the wish to harm someone who has provoked you” (STEP 8).
- malice. “Worms thrive in a rotten tree; malice thrives in the deceptively meek and silent” (STEP 9).
- slander. “Slander is the offspring of hatred, a subtle and yet crass disease, a leech in hiding and escaping notice, wasting and draining away the lifeblood of love” (STEP 10).
- talkativeness. “It is hard to keep water in without a dike. But it is harder still to hold in one’s tongue” (STEP 11).
- falsehood. “Lying is the destruction of charity, and perjury the very denial of God” (STEP 12).
- despondency. “Tedium is a paralysis of the soul, a slackness of mind, a neglect of religious exercises… a laziness in the singing of psalms, a weakness in prayer” (STEP 13).
- insensitivity. “Detachment he praises, and he shamelessly fights over a rag…. He looks people in the eye with passion and talks about chastity” (STEP 18-20).
- fear. “Fear is danger tasted in advance, a quiver as the heart takes flight before unnamed calamity. Fear is a loss of assurance” (STEP 21).
- vainglory. “A vainglorious person is a believer—and an idolator. Apparently honoring God, he actually is out to please not God, but men” (STEP 22).
- pride. “Most of the proud never really discover their true selves. They think they have conquered their passions and they find out how poor they really are only after they die” (STEP 23).
Saint John, however, was not content with merely analyzing the passions that torment us and lead us away from God. He also wrote with great eloquence of the virtues that we are to “acquire” with and by the grace of God, so that as the passions are overcome, we recover and restore our human nature by becoming what we were meant to be—vessels of the virtues that come from God, essentially a gift of the Holy Spirit present within us.
This, as we noted earlier, is hard work. But it is worthy work that sets us apart as both rational and spiritual beings, created “according to the image and likeness of God.” Although Saint John enumerates a lesser number of virtues in comparison to the number of the passions that he describes, the passages dealing with the virtues are often much longer. Some of these virtues are the “fundamental” virtues of
- obedience. “Obedience is unquestioned movement, death freely accepted, a simple life, danger faced without worry, an unprepared defense before God” (STEP 4).
- penitence. “Repentance is the daughter of hope and the refusal to despair. (The penitent stands guilty, but undisgraced.) It is the purification of conscience” (STEP 5).
- remembrance of death. “Fear of death is a property of nature due to disobedience, but terror of death is a sign of unrepented sins” (STEP 6).
- sorrow. “Hold fast to the blessed and joyful sorrow of holy compunction and do not cease laboring for it until it lifts you high above the things of the world” (STEP 7).
Ultimately, as one ascends the ladder, “higher virtues” may be experienced. Since these higher virtues are listed in steps beyond those describing the passions, it is implied that to experience these virtues is to have reached a certain level of “dispassion” which, of course, has nothing to do with indifference or impassivity. (Often apatheia is translated as “apathy,” and this is completely misleading). An earlier saint, Diachochus of Photice, speaks of the “fire of dispassion.” As Saint John wrote, “to have dispassion is to have the fullness of love, by which I mean the complete indwelling of God.” In other words, a successful “warfare against the passions” has its own rewards as the grace of God begins to illuminate genuine repentance. These “higher virtues” are
- simplicity. “Simplicity is an enduring habit within a soul that has grown impervious to evil thoughts” (STEP 24).
- humility. “The man with humility… will be gentle, kind, inclined to compunction, sympathetic, calm in every situation, radiant, inoffensive, alert and active” (STEP 25).
- discernment. “Discernment is… understanding of the will of God in all times, in all places, in all things, and it is found among those who are pure in heart, in body and in speech” (STEP 26).
It was Saint John of the Ladder who created the term “joy-creating sorrow.” We experience “sorrow” when we acknowledge our sinfulness and estrangement from God, but this becomes a “joyful sorrow” through repentance and an awareness of the forgiving nature of God experienced as God’s grace. In a well-know passage, Saint John offers a wonderful description of this experience: “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” (STEP 7).
At the summit of the ladder, we find what could be described as the “transition to the contemplative life,” according to Metropolitan Kallistos. With words that must reveal a real experience, Saint John describes
- stillness. “Stillness of soul is the accurate knowledge of one’s thoughts and is an unassailable mind” (STEP 27).
- prayer. “Future gladness, action without end, wellspring of virtues, source of grace, hidden progress, food of the soul… an axe against despair, hope demonstrated” (STEP 28).
- dispassion. “By dispassion I mean a heaven of the mind within the heart, which regards the artifice of demons as a contemptible joke” (STEP 29).
- love. “The person who wants to talk about love is undertaking to speak about God. But it is risky to talk about God and could even be dangerous for the unwary. Angels know how to speak about love, but even they do so only in proportion to the light within them. ‘God is love’ [1 John 4:16]. But someone eager to define this is blind, striving to measure the sand in the ocean. Love, by its nature, is a resemblance to God, insofar as this is humanly possible. In its activity it is inebriation of the soul. Its distinctive character is to be a fountain of faith, an abyss of patience, a sea of humility. Love is the banishment of every sort of contrariness, for love thinks no evil” (STEP 30).
A spiritual psychologist seemingly without peer, Saint John leads up The Ladder of Divine Ascent through victory over the passions and the acquisition of the virtues. On however a modest level, that is our goal during Great Lent—and throughout our entire lives, in fact. It is a blessing, indeed, to have as a guide such a master of the Christian life who can inspire us to rise above our fallen nature. Saint John closed his classic work of the spiritual life with the following exhortation: “Ascend… ascend eagerly. Let your hearts’ resolve be to climb. Listen to the voice of the one who says, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of our God’ [Isaiah 2:3], Who makes our feet to be like the feet of a deer, “Who sets us on the high places, that we may be triumphant on His road” [Hebrews 3:19]. Run, I beg you, run with him who said, ‘Let us hurry until we arrive at the unity of faith and of the knowledge of God, at mature manhood, at the measure of the stature of Christ’s fullness’ [Ephesians 4:13]. Baptized in the thirtieth year of His earthly age, Christ attained the thirtieth step on the spiritual ladder, for God indeed is love, and to Him be praise dominion, power. In Him is the cause, past, present, and future, of all that is good forever and ever. Amen.”