The Work and Its Structure

The Ladder of Divine Ascent — in Greek the Klimax — was written late in John’s life, when he was abbot of Sinai, at the written request of John, abbot of the monastery of Raithu, who asked for a “rule of life” for his monks. John answered with a book of thirty steps, traditionally understood to answer to the thirty hidden years of Christ before His baptism. Its design is deliberate: a break with the world, a long central campaign against the passions and for the virtues, and a final ascent to stillness, prayer, dispassion, and love. This file maps the whole architecture; the individual steps are treated in Sections 03–06.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Commission

The Ladder was not a treatise John set out to write of his own initiative; it was commissioned. Late in his life, after he had been drawn from his solitude to govern the monastery of Sinai, John received a letter from another John — John, abbot (hegumen) of the monastery of Raithu, a community on the Red Sea coast some distance from Sinai — asking him to set down, “as to unlearned pupils,” a sure rule and guide for the monastic ascent (the Letter of John of Raithu and Climacus’s reply are traditionally printed at the head of the Ladder; St. John Climacus, Catholic Encyclopedia, New Advent; The Ladder of Divine Ascent, OrthodoxWiki). This commissioning correspondence is integral to the work as it has come down to us, and it should be kept clearly distinct from the Life by Daniel of Raithu: John of Raithu, the abbot, asked for the book; Daniel of Raithu, a monk, wrote the biography — two different men of the same community, frequently confused [Disputed: some popular accounts conflate the two Raithu figures, crediting Daniel the biographer with commissioning the *Ladder*; the commissioner was John, abbot of Raithu, while Daniel was the author of the *Life* — they are distinct persons].

Climacus’s reply, prefixed to the work, performs the customary monastic gesture of unworthiness — he protests that the abbot of Raithu, his senior in the spiritual life, should rather be teaching him — and then obeys. The book that follows is thus framed from its first page as an act of obedience, which is fitting for a work whose own fourth and longest step is “On obedience.”

The Title and the Image

John gave his book the form and the name of a ladder (klimax). The governing image is the ladder of Jacob’s dream at Bethel, “set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it” (Genesis 28:12, LXX). Each of the work’s thirty chapters is a “step” (bathmos) or rung; the monk climbs from earth to heaven, from renunciation at the foot to love at the summit. The image is developed at length in the companion file; here it is enough to note that the structure of the book is an argument — that the spiritual life is sequential and cumulative, that the virtues build upon one another, and that there is no reaching the higher rungs without the lower (see the-image-of-the-ladder.md).

Thirty Steps for Thirty Years

The number of the steps is not arbitrary. The thirty rungs were understood, in the patristic and Byzantine reading the book itself invites, to correspond to the thirty hidden years of the life of Christ — the years of obscurity, obedience, and preparation before His baptism in the Jordan and the beginning of His public ministry at “about thirty years of age” (Luke 3:23). The monk who climbs the thirty steps is conformed to the hidden Christ; to reach the thirtieth rung, the rung of love, is to attain the maturity Christ manifested at thirty (The Ladder of Divine Ascent, OrthodoxWiki; the reading is standard in the Orthodox liturgical and patristic tradition). The architecture of the book is, in this sense, Christological before it is psychological.

Genre and Audience

The Ladder is a work of practical ascetical theology, written by a monk for monks. Its primary audience is the cenobitic and eremitic communities of the Christian East — men, like the monks of Raithu, who had renounced the world and needed a sure guide through the warfare of the thoughts. It is not a systematic treatise in the manner of a Maximus or a John of Damascus; it proceeds by aphorism, definition, anecdote, vivid personification, and accumulated counsel, and it is famous for the density and memorability of its sentences. John writes as a physician who has treated the diseases he describes, and the book’s authority is experiential: again and again it reads the inner movements of the passions with a precision that has kept it in use for fourteen centuries.

Yet its address has never been confined to monks. Because the passions it anatomizes — anger, vainglory, despondency, the wandering tongue — are common to all, the Ladder has been read by layfolk and clergy throughout the Orthodox world, and the Church has set it before the whole people each Great Lent (see sinai-monasticism-and-lenten-reading.md). It is, with the Philokalia and the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, one of the few monastic books that became, in practice, a book of the whole Church.

The Architecture in Three Movements

Scholars conventionally divide the thirty steps into three great movements, mapping onto the threefold path of the ascetic tradition — renunciation, the active life (praxis), and the contemplative life (theoria) (Kallistos Ware, Introduction, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, CWS, Paulist Press, 1982; G. Couilleau, art. “Jean Climaque,” Dictionnaire de spiritualité VIII, 1974):

I. The break with the world — Steps 1–3. Renunciation of the world (1), detachment from things and persons (2), and exile or pilgrimage (3): the severing of the ties that bind the soul to its former life. (Treated in steps-of-renunciation.md.)

II. The active life, the practice of virtue and the war on the passions — Steps 4–26. This is the long central body of the book, more than two-thirds of it. It opens with the foundational virtues of the cenobium — obedience (4), repentance (5), the remembrance of death (6), and joy-making mourning (7) — then turns to the systematic uprooting of the passions: anger, malice, slander, talkativeness, falsehood (8–12); despondency, gluttony, lust, avarice, and non-possession (13–17); insensitivity, and the disciplines of sleep, vigil, and fear (18–21); and the twin roots of all the rest, vainglory and pride (22–23). It crowns the active life with the higher virtues of simplicity, humility, and discernment (24–26). (Treated across Section 03, Section 04, and Section 05.)

III. The contemplative life, union with God — Steps 27–30. Stillness (27), prayer (28), dispassion (29), and, at the summit, the linked trinity of faith, hope, and love (30): the gifts that crown the labour. (Treated across Section 05, Section 06, and Section 07.)

A subtler architecture has been discerned within this scheme. Guerric Couilleau’s analysis in the Dictionnaire de spiritualité reads the book as a concentric structure, its opening and closing chapters mirroring one another around a central axis, with the central steps on the bodily passions at the heart (Couilleau, “Jean Climaque,” DS VIII). Whether one reads it as a straight ascent or as a great arch, the design is unmistakably deliberate: this is a composed book, not a loose anthology, and its order is part of its teaching.

The Companion Treatise

The Ladder did not stand quite alone. John also wrote, for the same John of Raithu, a short companion treatise, To the Shepherd (Liber ad Pastorem; Logos pros ton Poimena), on the office of the abbot as physician and guide of souls — sometimes counted as a thirty-first chapter, but properly a separate work. It is treated in its own place (see to-the-shepherd.md).

The Text

The Greek of the Ladder is found in Migne, Patrologia Graeca 88 (cols. 632–1164, with To the Shepherd following at 1165–1208), reprinting the 1633 edition of Matthew Rader; a separate edition was issued at Constantinople in 1883 by Sophronios the Hesychast on a different manuscript base. No complete critical edition has ever been made — a consequence of the sheer scale of the tradition, more than seven hundred Greek manuscripts (St. John Climacus, Catholic Encyclopedia, New Advent; and see modern-scholarship-and-translations.md). This collection cites the work by Step and section, following the Luibheid–Russell translation (CWS, 1982), a numbering shared with the Lazarus Moore translation as revised by Holy Transfiguration Monastery (Boston, 1979).

References

John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1982. (The prefatory Letter of John of Raithu and Climacus’s reply; the threefold structure; Ware’s Introduction.)
Moore, Lazarus (Archimandrite), trans. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Rev. ed., Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1979. (Step and section numbering followed here.)
John Climacus. Klimax and To the Shepherd. Greek in Migne, Patrologia Graeca 88, cols. 632–1164 (Ladder) and 1165–1208 (To the Shepherd); Rader’s text of 1633.
Couilleau, Guerric. “Jean Climaque.” In Dictionnaire de spiritualité, vol. VIII (Paris: Beauchesne, 1974), cols. 369–389. (The concentric analysis of the structure.)
St. John Climacus. Catholic Encyclopedia. New Advent (newadvent.org/cathen/08457a.htm). (Composed at the request of John, abbot of Raithu; the prefatory correspondence; the manuscript tradition.)
The Ladder of Divine Ascent. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org/The_Ladder_of_Divine_Ascent). (Thirty steps for the thirty hidden years of Christ; the Jacob’s-ladder image; used to locate the structure, cross-checked against Ware and Couilleau.)
Venerable John Climacus. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org). (John as abbot of Sinai at the time of writing.)