Repentance and Mourning

Steps 5 through 7 of The Ladder of Divine Ascent lay down the affective foundations of the active life: repentance (metanoia) as the turning and renewal of the soul, the remembrance of death (mnēmē thanatou) as the motive that sustains the turning, and joy-making mourning (charopoion penthos) as its fruit — the gift of tears that John calls a second baptism. Taken together these three steps form the emotional heart of monastic and Lenten spirituality, and they are a principal reason the Ladder became the great book of Great Lent. This file treats the three steps in sequence, including John’s famous eyewitness account of “the Prison.”

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

This collection cites the Ladder by Step (and, where secure, internal section), following the Luibheid–Russell translation, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Classics of Western Spirituality (Paulist Press, 1982) — a numbering shared with the Lazarus Moore translation as revised by Holy Transfiguration Monastery (Boston, 1979). Migne Patrologia Graeca 88 column references are given only where independently confirmed and are generally avoided here. Step titles vary slightly between editions (e.g., “On penitence” / “On repentance”; “On mourning” / “On joy-making mourning”); the step numbers are stable.

Step 5: Repentance and the Renewal of Baptism

The fifth step, “On penitence” or “On repentance” (Greek metanoia, literally a change of mind), opens the long campaign of the active life with the definitions for which the chapter is famous. John writes that “repentance is the renewal of baptism” and “a contract with God for a second life”; the penitent “buys humility” and makes war on his own self-will. Repentance, in his celebrated phrase, “is the daughter of hope and the denial of despair” — for the one who repents stands condemned yet refuses to despair of his salvation (Ladder 5, “On repentance,” Luibheid–Russell). The definitions are deliberately paradoxical: repentance is at once a return to the grace of baptism already received and a fresh covenant, a beginning that can be begun again.

This is the crux of John’s teaching on the subject. Repentance is not, for him, a single completed act — a discrete moment of conversion left behind — but an ongoing disposition, a permanent reorientation of the whole life toward God that is renewed daily and never outgrown. The monk does not graduate from repentance into the higher virtues; he climbs the whole ladder upon it. Because baptism’s grace can be obscured by post-baptismal sin, repentance is the laborious “renewal” by which the baptismal gift is recovered and kept (Ladder 5). This makes repentance the gateway to everything that follows: the war on the passions (Steps 8–26) is repentance worked out in detail, and the higher virtues are repentance brought to maturity.

The Prison (phylakē)

The greater part of Step 5 is given over to John’s extended account of a place he calls, “rightly,” the Prison (Greek phylakē) — a special enclosure attached to, or set apart near, a great Alexandrian monastery, to which monks who had fallen into serious sin withdrew to do severe, voluntary penance. John relates that he was shown this place and stayed there, and that what he saw overwhelmed him (Ladder 5; reported here in the attested, hagiographical register per the repository’s verification protocol, METHODOLOGY §3.5, “John relates that he saw…”). The Prison is properly Step 5 material: Step 4, on obedience, only points toward it at its close, but the sustained description belongs to the chapter on repentance, where John offers it as a living icon of metanoia carried to its furthest reach.

What John describes is a discipline of extremity. The penitents stood through the whole night, faces pressed to the ground, groaning and beating their breasts; they wore sackcloth and ashes, refused all consolation and comfort, accused themselves without ceasing, and begged not for relief but for severity, reckoning themselves unworthy of life. Some struck their breasts until they bruised; some stood until their legs swelled; all wept, and none excused himself (Ladder 5). John presents the Prison not as a horror to be shunned but as a school whose inmates had grasped the seriousness of sin and the magnitude of the mercy they sought — a sustained, embodied enactment of the “denial of despair” that is repentance’s own definition. The account became one of the most quoted passages in the whole book, the Ladder’s unforgettable image of what wholehearted penance looks like.

Step 6: The Remembrance of Death

The sixth and shortest of these steps, “On the remembrance of death” (mnēmē thanatou), supplies the motive that keeps repentance alive. “The remembrance of death is a daily death,” John writes, and he counsels the monk to keep that remembrance always at hand: “Let the remembrance of death sleep and awake with you” (Ladder 6, Luibheid–Russell). To hold one’s own death continually before the mind is, paradoxically, a way of living — a daily dying that empties the soul of the things that bind it to the world and so frees it for God.

For John this remembrance is no morbid fixation but a purifier and a spur. The thought of death drives out the passions at their root: it shames gluttony, scatters the daydreams of vainglory, and is a particular remedy against despondency (akēdia), the listless heaviness that the death-memory pierces with urgency (Ladder 6; on these passions see the bodily and mental passions). John insists, against any suspicion of mere fear-mongering, that a genuine, abiding remembrance of death is itself a gift and a grace, a fruit of the Spirit and not a natural dread — for natural men fear death, while the one whom God has visited longs for it as the threshold of life, and weeps over his unreadiness. The remembrance of death thus stands between repentance and mourning as the hinge that turns the one into the other: it makes the turning of Step 5 a daily reality and presses it on toward the tears of Step 7.

Step 7: Joy-Making Mourning (penthos and charmolypē)

The seventh step, “On joy-making mourning” (charopoion penthos), is the climax and the fruit of the three, and it carries one of the most influential teachings in all of Eastern Christian spirituality: the theology of penthos, compunction and the gift of tears. John’s central paradox is contained in the very title and in his coinage charmolypē — “joy-grief” or, as it is often rendered, “bright sorrow.” Godly mourning over sin is not unrelieved misery; it is grief shot through with consolation. The tears of the penitent, John says, are mingled with joy “like honey in the comb” — penthos is a compunction that gladdens even as it weeps (Ladder 7, Luibheid–Russell).

At the heart of the step stands John’s teaching on tears as a renewal of baptismal grace. The fountain of tears after baptism is, in his estimate, in a certain sense greater than baptism itself — for baptism washes away the sins that preceded it, while the tears of repentance cleanse the sins committed since, and so are a “second baptism” available to the fallen (Ladder 7; the comparison is John’s own and is to be read as his hortatory teaching, not as a doctrinal subordination of the sacrament). Here the three steps close their circle: tears are repentance made visible, and repentance was itself defined in Step 5 as “the renewal of baptism.”

Everything in the step turns on distinguishing this godly sorrow from its counterfeit. The mourning John commends is the “godly grief” of the Apostle that “worketh repentance unto salvation,” and it must be sharply separated from the worldly despondency and despair that destroy the soul (Ladder 7; cf. 2 Corinthians 7:10). True penthos humbles without crushing; it softens the heart, loosens the passions, and ends not in gloom but in the quiet gladness of a conscience at peace with God. False mourning — sterile self-pity, or the despair that is the very thing repentance was called the “denial” of — apes the outward grief but bears none of its fruit. The gift of tears, for John, is the surest sign that mourning has become joy-making, and the monk is to seek and guard it as a treasure (Ladder 7).

The Three Steps Together

Steps 5, 6, and 7 are best read as a single movement in three beats: repentance is the turning, the remembrance of death is the motive that sustains the turning day by day, and joy-making mourning is the fruit — and the joy — in which the turning is consummated. This is why these three foundational steps of the active life are rightly called its affective core: they supply not a technique but a disposition of heart, the compunction and tears out of which all the later warfare against the passions must be waged (Ladder 5–7; Ware, Introduction, CWS 1982). It is also why the Ladder became, above all, a Lenten book. The Church reads it through Great Lent and keeps a Sunday in John’s honour because Lent is itself the season of metanoia, of the remembrance of death, and of bright sorrow — the very spirituality these steps distill (see Sinai monasticism and Lenten reading). John wrote, moreover, out of his own long life of tears and solitude at Tholas, so that the teaching is offered as the report of one who had lived it (see forty years at Tholas).

References

John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1982. (Step 5, “On repentance,” and the account of the Prison; Step 6, “On the remembrance of death”; Step 7, “On joy-making mourning”; cited by Step throughout.)
Moore, Lazarus (Archimandrite), trans. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Rev. ed. Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1979. (Step and section numbering shared with the Luibheid–Russell edition.)
Ware, Kallistos. Introduction to The Ladder of Divine Ascent (Luibheid–Russell, CWS, 1982). (Penthos, charmolypē / “joy-grief,” tears as second baptism, and the place of Steps 5–7 in the active life and in Lenten spirituality.)
The Ladder of Divine Ascent. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org/The_Ladder_of_Divine_Ascent). (Used to locate the steps and their titles; cross-checked against the translations and Ware.)
See also Methodology §3.5 on the reporting of hagiographical and eyewitness accounts (the Prison).