Anger and the Tongue

Steps 8 through 12 of The Ladder of Divine Ascent form a single sustained campaign against the passions of the incensive faculty and of the tongue: anger and its cure in meekness (Step 8), the remembrance of wrongs (Step 9), slander and rash judgment (Step 10), talkativeness and the discipline of silence (Step 11), and falsehood (Step 12). Here John Climacus moves systematically through the sins by which the monk wounds the brotherhood and himself, anatomising each passion with a psychological precision that is among the hallmarks of the whole work. The community is the furnace in which these passions are exposed and burned away.

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. Greek references to Migne, Patrologia Graeca 88, are given only where verified; where the exact section is uncertain the citation is to the Step itself. The titles of the individual steps vary slightly between editions.

The Passions of the Incensive Faculty

These five steps belong together because they treat a single region of the soul. In the tripartite psychology John inherits from Evagrius and the desert tradition, the soul has a rational part (logistikon), a desiring part (epithymētikon), and an incensive or irascible part (thymikon) — the seat of anger, indignation, and the energy of resistance (Ladder 8; cf. the standard Evagrian schema presupposed throughout the work). The passions of the desiring faculty — gluttony, lust, avarice — John reserves for the steps that follow; here he addresses the disorders of the thymikon and of the instrument through which they most readily escape into the community, the tongue. Anger, grudge-bearing, slander, idle speech, and lying are thus not five unrelated faults but a connected pathology, each feeding the next, and John treats them in a deliberate descending sequence so that the reader sees how a single unguarded movement of irascibility ramifies into the destruction of charity (Ladder 8; Ladder 10).

Step 8: On Freedom from Anger and on Meekness

The eighth step pairs a vice with its cure. Against anger (orgē) John sets aorgēsia, freedom from anger, and the meekness (praotēs) that is its positive form. His definition is among the most quoted in the work: “Meekness is an immovable state of soul which remains unaffected whether in dishonour or in praise” (Ladder 8, “On freedom from anger and on meekness”). Meekness is therefore not weakness or mere placidity but a settled steadiness that neither flattery nor insult can disturb; it is the calm that remains when the incensive faculty has been healed and reordered toward its proper object, which is hatred of sin rather than of the brother (Ladder 8).

Anger, by contrast, John describes as a passion that boils up and disfigures the soul, an ugliness of the heart that the face betrays — and he gives the cure in a phrase of characteristic paradox: “freedom from anger is an insatiable appetite for dishonour” (Ladder 8). The meek man does not merely endure contempt; he hungers for it as the very food that empties him of the self-love anger defends. Hence the labour of the step is patience and the deliberate swallowing of insult: the monk learns to receive injury without returning it, to let the provocation die in him rather than pass it on, and so to convert each occasion of anger into an exercise of the meekness that draws the soul toward stillness (Ladder 8). John notes too that singing psalms and the company of the brethren can quench anger’s first heat, while solitude can sometimes inflame it — an observation that ties the cure of this passion to the common life (Ladder 8).

Step 9: On the Remembrance of Wrongs

If anger is the flame, the ninth step treats the ember that survives it. Mnēsikakia — the remembrance of wrongs, the nursing of malice or a grudge — is anger that has cooled into a settled disposition, crystallised resentment that the soul keeps and tends. John’s images are vivid and clinical: “Remembrance of wrongs is the consummation of anger, the keeper of sin, hatred of righteousness, a rusty arrow in the soul, a perpetual sin, an unsleeping wickedness, a worm in the mind” (Ladder 9, “On remembrance of wrongs”). The arrow has lodged and corroded; the worm gnaws unseen. What anger does in a moment, malice does perpetually, poisoning prayer at its root.

The cure John presses is reconciliation, and he grounds it directly in the Lord’s Prayer. The monk who keeps a grudge while asking God to “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” pronounces his own condemnation, for he asks to be measured by the very mercy he refuses (Ladder 9; cf. Matthew 6:12). To remember wrongs is therefore not a private wound but a spiritual contradiction: it makes prayer itself a lie. John holds that the man who has overcome this passion shows it by praying sincerely for the one who injured him, and that such intercession is the sign that the remembrance of wrongs has truly been uprooted rather than merely suppressed (Ladder 9). The step thus turns the reader from the management of anger toward the active labour of forgiveness, without which the higher rungs cannot be climbed.

Step 10: On Slander or Calumny

The tenth step follows the passion as it breaks out upon the neighbour through speech. Katalalia — slander, backbiting, calumny — John names as “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” (Ladder 10, “On slander or calumny”). The metaphor is exact: slander works secretly, often under the guise of zeal or concern, and what it drains is charity itself, the bond on which the whole common life depends. To speak against a brother behind his back is to attack the body of which one is a member.

Bound up with slander is the deeper sin of judging, and here John states the principle for which the step is most famous: to condemn another is to usurp the prerogative of God, who alone is judge of the living and the dead (Ladder 10; cf. “Do not condemn,” Luke 6:37; James 4:11–12). The monk who sits in judgment on his brother steals the seat that belongs to Christ, and in doing so robs himself, for he forfeits the mercy he denies and binds upon his own account the sins he so eagerly catalogues in others. John warns that even a true accusation, repeated to wound, is slander, and he counsels that the one tempted to condemn should recall his own falls; the readiness to judge is itself the surest evidence of self-ignorance (Ladder 10).

Step 11: On Talkativeness and Silence

The eleventh step addresses the channel through which slander and idle thought escape. Against polylogia, much-speaking, John sets the discipline of silence, and his praise of it is unstinting: “Silence is the mother of prayer… the friend of silence draws near to God” (Ladder 11, “On talkativeness and silence”). Talkativeness he identifies as the seat of vainglory, the means by which the soul displays itself, and as the enemy of compunction, for the floodgate of speech lets out the tears and the inward gathering on which contrition depends (Ladder 11). The mouth that runs cannot keep watch over the heart.

Yet John is careful to distinguish true silence from mere muteness. The discipline he commends is not the failure to speak but the guarding of the mind — a knowing silence, exercised in discernment, that knows the time to speak and the greater value of restraint (Ladder 11). Idle talk dissipates the soul’s gathered attention and opens the door to the very passions the earlier steps have fought, since slander and the remembrance of wrongs travel most readily on the tongue. The friend of silence, by contrast, holds his attention inward and so draws near to God; for John, the guarded mouth is inseparable from the guarded heart, and the recovery of stillness here anticipates the hēsychia that crowns the later ascent (Ladder 11).

Step 12: On Falsehood

The twelfth and briefest of these steps treats lying (pseudos). John presents falsehood as the destruction of love and the offspring of hypocrisy, for the liar divides his outward word from his inward truth and so corrodes the trust on which fellowship rests (Ladder 12, “On lying”). A community cannot hold together where words cannot be relied upon; the lie, like slander, drains away charity at its source. John does note the case sometimes pleaded — the falsehood told to spare another harm — but he treats it with caution rather than endorsement, warning that the soul which permits itself even a well-intentioned lie loosens its hold on truth and opens a door it cannot easily close (Ladder 12). The shortness of the step matches its place: having traced the passions of the tongue to their depth, John seals the section with a final guard upon the word.

The Furnace of the Common Life

These five steps share a setting as well as a subject. Anger, malice, slander, idle speech, and falsehood are passions that require a neighbour to manifest; they are exposed precisely in the friction of the cenobium, the common life in which obedience and shared labour bring the brothers up against one another (Ladder 8; see Steps of Renunciation, on Step 4 and the coenobium). The community is the furnace in which these passions are made visible and burned out, and the patience, forgiveness, restraint, and truthfulness John commends are the very means by which the furnace does its work.

A further hallmark of the Ladder is on display throughout this section: John’s psychological acuity, his habit of personifying the passions and making them confess their own weaknesses, so that the reader hears each vice declare what defeats it (Ladder 8; Ladder 11). This dramatic device reaches its most extended form in the step that immediately follows, where John stages the demon of akēdia, the noonday demon, in a confession of its own undoing — a passage treated in the companion file on the bodily and mental passions (Ladder 13; see The Bodily and Mental Passions). The campaign against anger and the tongue thus opens directly onto the war with the remaining passions, the will having been laid down and the mouth at last brought under guard.

References

John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1982. (Steps 8–12; the definitions of meekness, the remembrance of wrongs, slander, silence, and falsehood; 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; note that step titles vary slightly between editions.)
Ware, Kallistos. Introduction to The Ladder of Divine Ascent (Luibheid–Russell). Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1982. (The tripartite psychology and the place of the war with the passions within the structure of the work.)
The Ladder of Divine Ascent. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org/The_Ladder_of_Divine_Ascent). (Used to locate the step titles and the outline of Steps 8–12; 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.