Steps of Renunciation

The first four steps of The Ladder of Divine Ascent form the foundation of the whole climb: the break with the world in renunciation (Step 1), detachment from things and persons (Step 2), voluntary exile from homeland and kin (Step 3), and — the longest and most celebrated step of all — obedience (Step 4), the cutting-off of self-will that is the heart of cenobitic formation. Here John lays the foot of the ladder on the earth, severing the ties that bind the soul to its former life and grounding the ascent in the surrender of the will. The fourth step closes by pointing forward to “the Prison,” a place of severe penance properly developed in Step 5.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

This collection cites the Ladder by Step and section, following Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell, John Climacus: The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1982); the Step.section numbering is shared with the Archimandrite Lazarus Moore translation as revised by Holy Transfiguration Monastery (Boston, 1979), cited where its wording differs. The Greek stands in Migne, Patrologia Graeca 88 (column references are given only where verified). Note that the titles of the individual steps vary slightly between editions.

Step 1: On Renunciation (apotagē)

The Ladder opens not with a counsel but with a definition of the Christian himself: “A Christian is an imitation of Christ in thought, word and deed, as far as this is humanly possible, and a true and exact confession of faith in the Holy and Undivided Trinity” (Ladder 1, “On renunciation of life”). From this anchor John moves to the monk’s particular vocation, which is to take that imitation to its furthest reach by withdrawing from the world. Renunciation — Greek apotagē, literally a “saying-farewell” or formal renouncing — is the deliberate severing of the soul from the world and its loves for the sake of the Kingdom (Ladder 1).

John distinguishes the motive of monastic withdrawal from the act itself, for not all who leave the world leave it for the same reason. He sorts those who renounce into kinds according to what draws them: some are moved by the desire of the Kingdom, some by fear of judgment and the memory of their sins, others by lesser or mixed motives, and he counts as blessed even the imperfect beginning, provided it is set toward God (Ladder 1). What matters is that the will, once turned, presses forward; the worth of a renunciation is measured not by its first impulse but by its perseverance.

Within the tradition John inherits, the act of withdrawal carries a threefold structure: the renunciation of things and persons, the renunciation of one’s own will, and the renunciation of vainglory that follows upon obedience — the three renunciations later thinkers schematize from his teaching and from the desert fathers before him (Ladder 1; cf. John Cassian, Conferences 3.6, who names the three renunciations John here presupposes). The first step thus does not stand alone: it already contains in seed the detachment, exile, and obedience that the next three steps unfold. To renounce the world outwardly while keeping it inwardly is, for John, no renunciation at all.

Step 2: On Detachment (aprospatheia)

If Step 1 is the act of leaving, Step 2 guards against the leaving being undone. Aprospatheia — freedom from attachment, dis-passion toward created things — is the inward counterpart of the outward break: the soul must be unbound not only from possessions but from the persons and affections that still tether it to its former life (Ladder 2, “On detachment”). John’s governing warning is terse and unsparing: “Do not, after renouncing the world, touch it again” (Ladder 2). The danger is not that the monk will physically return but that the heart will reach back, that memory and longing will smuggle the world into the cell.

For this John reaches, as the tradition does, for the figure of Lot’s wife. To look back after setting one’s hand to the plough is to be turned, like her, into a pillar of salt — fixed, lifeless, neither here nor there (Ladder 2; cf. Genesis 19:26; Luke 9:62). Detachment is therefore not coldness or contempt for what one has left; it is the refusal to let the affections that belong to the abandoned life govern the new one. John relates that even natural loves — for parents, for kin, for friends — must be reordered and not merely indulged, lest they become the cords by which the world draws the soul back over the threshold it has crossed (Ladder 2).

Step 3: On Exile (xeniteia)

The third step gives the break a geography. Xeniteia — voluntary exile, the condition of the stranger and pilgrim — is the leaving of homeland, household, and kin for God’s sake, so that the monk lives as a foreigner with no settled place to return to (Ladder 3, “On exile”). John’s definition is among the most quoted lines of the early section: “Exile is separation from everything, in order that one may hold on totally to God” (Ladder 3). The stranger has cut the visible ties — country, family, reputation, the comfort of the familiar — precisely so that there is nothing left to hold but God.

Exile, for John, is also a discipline of humility, for the stranger has no standing, no name, no claim on those around him; he is unknown, and being unknown he is free from the vainglory that flourishes where one is honoured (Ladder 3). Yet the step carries its own warnings. The exile must not let his body wander while his heart stays home, nor make of his pilgrimage a restless roaming from place to place; true xeniteia is an inward estrangement from the world that may be lived even in stillness (Ladder 3).

It is in this third step that John inserts his treatment of dreams, particularly the dreams of beginners. He warns that the demons exploit the sleeping imagination, dressing falsehood in the garments of revelation, and that the novice who trusts his dreams — who takes the figures of his sleep for messages from God — is already half-deceived; the one who believes in dreams is inexperienced, while the one who distrusts them all is wise (Ladder 3). The placement is deliberate: the soul newly torn from its homeland is precisely the soul most vulnerable to the counterfeit consolations of the night.

Step 4: On Obedience (hypakoē)

The fourth step is the longest in the Ladder by a wide margin and the most famous, for here John turns from the break with the world to the foundational virtue of the common life. Obedience — hypakoē — receives the great opening definition that the tradition has carried ever since: “Obedience is the absolute renunciation of our own life, clearly expressed in our bodily actions… It is the burial place of the will and the resurrection of lowliness… unquestioning movement, voluntary death, a life free of curiosity” (Ladder 4, “On obedience”; the definition stands near the head of Step 4 in the Luibheid–Russell text). Obedience is thus not one virtue among many but the very mechanism by which the renunciation of Step 1 is made real day by day: the will, which cannot renounce itself by its own act, is laid down into the hands of another.

The cutting-off of self-will is, for John, the surest and shortest path of the cenobitic monk, safer than the solitary’s because it does not leave the will its own judge (Ladder 4). To exhibit what such obedience looks like, John relates what he saw or was told of a great coenobium near Alexandria, a monastery he describes as bound together “by the indissoluble bond of love,” in which he reports some two hundred and thirty monks living the common life in extraordinary humility (Ladder 4; treated throughout in the hagiographical register, as John’s report of what he witnessed and was told). The step becomes, in its central portion, a gallery of exemplars of obedience and self-abasement.

John relates the figure of Isidore, once a man of rank — a magistrate or dignitary of the world — who on entering the monastery was stationed by the abbot at the gate, and who there for seven years greeted each who passed with the words, “Pray for me, father, I am an epileptic,” accepting this public self-abasement as the medicine of his pride (Ladder 4). He tells of Lawrence, the aged priest who stood unsummoned for long stretches in humble service; and of the cook who kept the kitchen fire before his eyes as a deliberate memento of the fire of judgment, turning his daily labour into the remembrance of the last things (Ladder 4).

Above all John relates the story of Acacius, a young monk of Sinai who for nine years endured an exceptionally harsh and abusive elder, bearing every cruelty in obedience until he died. When another elder, doubting the death, came to the tomb and called out as to one living, asking whether he had died, the buried Acacius answered: “No, father — it is not possible for an obedient man to die” (Ladder 4). John offers the account as he received it, in the manner of the desert gerontika, as a testimony that the obedient monk, having put his will to death, has already passed beyond the reach of death’s victory (Ladder 4; the Acacius narrative belongs to Step 4, where John reports it as told to him).

The fourth step closes by turning the reader’s gaze toward “the Prison” — the phylakē, the place of severe penance for those who have fallen — which John names here at the end of obedience but does not yet develop. The treatment of the Prison properly belongs to Step 5, “On repentance,” and is taken up there; Step 4 only points toward it, as the lower rung points to the next (Ladder 4, closing; the Prison itself is developed in Ladder 5; see repentance-and-mourning.md). Obedience, having buried the will, opens directly onto repentance and the labour of mourning that the following steps unfold.

References

John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1982. (Steps 1–4; the definitions of renunciation, detachment, exile, and obedience; the Alexandrian coenobium and its exemplars; the story of Acacius; cited by Step and section.)
Moore, Lazarus (Archimandrite), trans. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Rev. ed., Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1979. (Step and section numbering followed here; cited where its wording differs.)
Ware, Kallistos. Introduction to The Ladder of Divine Ascent (Luibheid–Russell). Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1982. (The threefold path and the place of Steps 1–4 within the structure of the work.)
John Cassian. Conferences 3.6. (The three renunciations John presupposes; used to locate the schema, not as the text of the Ladder.)
The Ladder of Divine Ascent. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org/The_Ladder_of_Divine_Ascent). (Used to locate the step titles and the outline of the early steps; cross-checked against the translations and Ware’s Introduction.)
John Climacus. Klimax. Greek in Migne, Patrologia Graeca 88, cols. 632–1164.
See also the repository Methodology for the citation and verification standard applied throughout.