The Ladder of Divine Ascent by St John Climacus

Recommendation by Eileen Claire Grant, Oblate of Pluscarden Abbey

The Ladder of Divine Ascent by St John Climacus is read every year by many Orthodox Christians and the 4th Sunday of Orthodox Great Lent is kept for him. Climacus was successively a cenobite, an anchorite (for 40 years) and then a monastic superior, reluctantly becoming abbot of St Catherine’s of Sinai in the last years of his life. He wrote The Ladder to warn monks of the pitfalls along the spiritual journey and of the demons lying in wait for them; to give them the benefit of his personal experience and that of ‘wiser Fathers’; and to teach them the practical steps necessary to cleanse their souls of bodily passions, using the established metaphor of a spiritual ladder with advice on how to avoid slipping off and how to reach ever upwards. Few could expect to reach the summit in this life and achieve spiritual union with God, but much inner joy and peace awaits anyone who strives for the topmost rung, provided he has an intense awareness of the reality of God’s love and a willingness to renounce the world – not only its fleshly pleasures but one’s family, one’s delight in scholarship and even one’s joy in the glories of the created world. Such total renunciation is made worthwhile by the hope of finally coming face-to-face with God.

The Ladder was written for monks, especially for those drawn to hesychasm, prayer of the heart, to which many lay people also were drawn. It warns against the illusions of withdrawing only from the external world and urges monks to aspire to inner silence, with ‘a total lack of concern for all things, intellectual or otherwise’. His advice to laymen in Step 1 echoes Our Lord: to keep the Commandments and to love one another, then ‘you will not be far from the Kingdom of Heaven’; and in Step 15 he reminds us of St Peter ‘who had a mother-in-law and who nevertheless received the keys of the Kingdom’! St John is no monastic elitist; at the very start he tells us: ‘God is the life of all free beings. He is the salvation of all, of believers or unbelievers, of the just or the unjust, of the pious or the impious, of those freed from the passions or caught up in them, 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 old.’

For those who are interested in prayer of the heart, of which the ancient Jesus Prayer is an example, I’d thoroughly recommend this book. Its 30 chapters or ‘steps’ (one for each year of Jesus’s life before his public ministry began) make it a good fit for Lent, as you don’t have to read each chapter in one gulp. It’s published in two translations, the better one being by the late Archimandrite Lazarus Moore. There’s also an e-book available for free download from "The Ladder of Divine Ascent" (carmelitepriory.org)

Eileen Claire Grant