The Bodily and Mental Passions

The long central campaign of The Ladder of Divine Ascent runs from despondency through gluttony, lust, avarice, insensitivity, and the disciplines of sleep, vigil, and fear, to the twin summits of the passions — vainglory and pride. These are Steps 13 through 23, the heart of John’s anatomy of the soul. Here John the physician personifies each disease, traces it to its parent and offspring, and prescribes its cure, with the celebrated portrait of akēdia, “the noonday demon,” at the head of the sequence.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

This file treats the central body of the Ladder‘s war on the passions, Steps 13–23. Throughout, the work is cited by Step (and, where the editions agree, by section) following the translation of Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell in the Classics of Western Spirituality series (Paulist Press, 1982); the same numbering is shared by the older translation of Archimandrite Lazarus Moore (rev. ed., Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston, 1979). The step-titles vary slightly between editions, and the Patrologia Graeca (PG 88) columns are not reproduced here. These steps belong to what the tradition, following Evagrius and the Egyptian fathers, knew as the scheme of the eight evil thoughts — the genealogy of the passions that stands behind John’s diagnostic method (see the monastic psychology).

Step 13: Despondency — the Noonday Demon

The thirteenth step, “On despondency” or “On dejection” (Greek akēdia), is John’s most famous psychological set-piece, and it deserves the fullest treatment here. Akēdia — listlessness, the loss of heart, what the Latin West would call acedia or sloth — is the monastic temptation par excellence, the heavy boredom and disgust with the cell that descends upon the solitary and tempts him to flee. John gives it the classic name drawn from the Septuagint, “the noonday demon” of Psalm 90 (91):6 — “the destruction that wasteth at noonday” — and the name fixes its character precisely (Ladder 13; cf. Psalm 90:6 LXX).

John defines the passion with his usual aphoristic edge. Despondency, he writes, “is a slackness of soul, a negligence of ascesis, a hatred of the vow professed… the friend of chatter” — for the despondent monk, unable to bear the silence of his cell, drifts toward idle talk and the affairs of others (Ladder 13). And he marks its hour with the most memorable of his images: “A doctor visits the sick in the morning, but despondency visits the ascetics about noonday” (Ladder 13). The passion has its season in the long, empty heat of midday, when the morning’s fervour has cooled and the evening’s rest is still far off, and the soul finds the spiritual labour suddenly unbearable.

The genius of the step is its dramatic personification. John, as so often, makes the passion stand up and confess — he interrogates akēdia as a prisoner and forces it to name its conquerors. Pressed to say who can bind and overcome it, the personified despondency replies that “psalmody and manual labour are my opponents,” that it is bound by “the thought of death,” but that “what completely mortifies me is prayer with firm hope of future blessings” (Ladder 13). The confession is the cure stated from the inside out: the demon itself reveals that it cannot survive the three disciplines of work, the memory of death, and persevering prayer.

From this the remedy follows, and it is the opposite of what the passion urges. Akēdia counsels flight — a change of cell, a journey, a visit, any motion to escape the weight of the present place. John’s counsel is to stay: to remain in the cell and meet the demon there, occupying the hands with manual labour, the lips with psalmody, the mind with the remembrance of death, and the heart with prayer that leans forward in hope toward the blessings to come (Ladder 13). The cell that the passion makes a prison becomes, through endurance, the very place of victory. This is why the remembrance of death is so close a companion to this step: the death-memory pierces the listless heaviness with urgency and shames the soul out of its torpor (see repentance and mourning), and the prayer that finally “mortifies” despondency is the work of stillness (see stillness and prayer).

Step 14: Gluttony

The fourteenth step, “On gluttony” (gastrimargia), turns from the soul’s listlessness to the body’s appetite, and again John personifies. He calls the stomach a “clamorous mistress,” an insatiable tyrant whose demands never cease and whose satisfactions only multiply her claims; gluttony he names “the prince of the passions,” the gateway through which the others enter, since the over-fed body is the seedbed of lust and sloth (Ladder 14). He is especially severe on the stomach’s hypocrisy — its endless self-justifications, pleading necessity and weakness even as it seeks indulgence — and against it he sets fasting, the deliberate disciplining of the appetite that frees the soul for prayer (Ladder 14). The remembrance of death is again a cure: it shames the belly’s clamour by setting the coming dissolution of the body against its present demands (see repentance and mourning).

Step 15: Chastity and the War for Purity

The fifteenth step, “On chastity” or “On incorruptible purity” (hagneia), is one of the longest and most searching in the whole Ladder, the great central treatment of the war for purity of body and mind. Chastity, for John, is not merely the restraint of the flesh but a positive and supernatural gift; he calls it “a denial of nature,” a wonder by which a being in the body lives as though beyond the body, an anticipation in the flesh of the angelic life (Ladder 15). Precisely because it transcends nature, it cannot be won by effort alone but must be received as grace, sought through tears and the help of God.

The step is unsparing in its account of the warfare itself — the assault of the unclean thought, the treachery of the body that wars against the soul, the subtlety with which the demon of fornication adapts its attack to each temperament (Ladder 15). John refuses both despair and presumption: the struggle is long and may last a lifetime, yet purity is genuinely attainable, and the labour itself, persevered in with humility, is already victory in the making. The whole step exemplifies his method of reading the passions with clinical precision while never losing the horizon of grace.

Steps 16–17: Avarice and Non-Possession

The sixteenth and seventeenth steps form a contrasting pair: the passion and the virtue that uproots it. “On avarice” (philargyria, the love of money) defines the vice with a phrase John draws from the apostolic tradition — avarice is “the worship of idols, the daughter of unbelief” — for the man who hoards trusts in his possessions rather than in God, and so makes mammon his god (Ladder 16; cf. Colossians 3:5). Against it stands “On non-possessiveness” or “On poverty” (aktēmosynē), where John commends voluntary poverty not as deprivation but as liberation: the monk who possesses nothing is anxious about nothing, and his renunciation sets him free for the single-minded ascent (Ladder 17). The two steps together show John’s genealogical method — every passion is paired with the virtue that is its proper denial.

Step 18: Insensitivity

The eighteenth step, “On insensitivity” (anaisthēsia), diagnoses one of the gravest and most hidden conditions of the soul: spiritual numbness, the loss of compunction, “a deadened feeling,” the soul grown cold and unfeeling toward the very things it knows to fear (Ladder 18). John’s portrait of the insensible monk is mercilessly exact: such a man “speaks about death as though it concerned others,” and — in the line that has lodged in the tradition — “his mouth prays against a passion while his body works for it”; he discourses on healing while clinging to his disease, and weeps no tears because his heart has gone hard (Ladder 18). Insensitivity is the soul dead before the body, the cooling of penthos into indifference, and its cure lies precisely in the recovery of the death-memory and the tears the passion has stifled (see repentance and mourning).

Steps 19–21: Sleep, Vigil, and Fear

Three shorter steps treat the disciplines that guard the soul through the hours of weakness. “On sleep, prayer, and psalmody in chapel” (Step 19) and “On bodily vigil” (agrypnia, Step 20) concern watchfulness — the conquest of excessive sleep and the labour of standing at prayer through the night, when the demons press hardest and the vigilant monk keeps guard over his heart (Ladder 19; 20). “On unmanly fear” or cowardice (deilia, Step 21) treats the nighttime terrors and faint-heartedness of the solitary: such fear John names a symptom of a divided soul, “a falling away from faith,” and its cure is a good conscience and the firm trust in God’s presence that casts out dread (Ladder 21).

Step 22: Vainglory

The twenty-second step, “On vainglory” (kenodoxia), brings the campaign to its penultimate and subtlest enemy. Vainglory is the craving for the praise and esteem of others, and John names it “the precursor of pride” — its scout and forerunner, the passion that prepares the soul for the deeper ruin (Ladder 22). What makes it so dangerous is its universality and its cunning: vainglory, he says, beams upon every activity and attaches itself to every virtue, glorying in fasting and equally in the breaking of a fast, in speech and in silence, so that the monk is praised for his discipline and, failing that, praised for his humility. Most insidiously of all, it preens upon its own renunciation, taking pride in the very act of refusing pride. It is the most protean of the passions, and the hardest to detect because it hides within the good (Ladder 22).

Step 23: Pride and Blasphemous Thoughts

The twenty-third step, “On pride” (hyperēphania), stands at the summit of the passions as their root and their consummation. John’s definitions are the most absolute in the book: pride is “denial of God, an invention of the demons… the root of blasphemy,” the contempt of God and of one’s neighbour, the source from which the whole tree of the vices springs (Ladder 23). It is the exact opposite of humility, and where vainglory courts the esteem of men, pride sets the self against God Himself. As vainglory is the forerunner, pride is the end to which all the passions tend, and its only true cure is the humility of the steps that follow (see simplicity, humility, and discernment).

Appended to the treatment of pride is John’s counsel on blasphemous thoughts — the sudden, horrifying intrusions of impiety that torment scrupulous souls. His teaching here is a masterstroke of pastoral discernment: such thoughts, when unwilled, are to be despised as the demons’ own work, not the soul’s, and the right response is contempt, not anguish. The monk is neither to despair over them nor to confess them with tortured detail, for to take them seriously is to give them the foothold they seek; they belong to the demon who suggests them, and the soul that refuses to own them is guiltless (Ladder 23). The remembrance of the Name of Jesus is the surest weapon against such intrusions (see the Jesus Prayer).

The Twin Roots and the Method

Read as a whole, Steps 13–23 disclose the logic of John’s campaign. The many passions are not a random catalogue but a connected order, each traced — in the genealogical manner John inherited from Evagrius and the Egyptian desert — to its parent and its offspring, and the whole tending toward two final roots: vainglory and pride, the passions of the self before men and before God (Ladder 22–23; Ware, Introduction, CWS 1982). The conquest of these twin roots is the true goal of the active life’s warfare, and their defeat opens directly onto the higher virtues — above all the humility that is pride’s cure and the gateway to dispassion and love (see the work and its structure; simplicity, humility, and discernment). John’s diagnostic genius — personifying each passion, making it confess, naming its hour and its cure — is everywhere in service of this single architecture: the soul that knows its enemies by name can fight them, and the Ladder is, before all else, a field manual of that war.

References

John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1982. (Steps 13–23, cited by Step throughout: 13 “On despondency”; 14 “On gluttony”; 15 “On chastity”; 16 “On avarice”; 17 “On non-possessiveness”; 18 “On insensitivity”; 19–20 on sleep and vigil; 21 “On unmanly fear”; 22 “On vainglory”; 23 “On pride.”)
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; step-titles vary slightly.)
Ware, Kallistos. Introduction to The Ladder of Divine Ascent (Luibheid–Russell, CWS, 1982). (The genealogy of the passions, the Evagrian eight-thoughts scheme, and vainglory and pride as the twin roots of the active life’s warfare.)
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 on the reporting and citation conventions followed here.