Simplicity, Humility, and Discernment

Steps 24 to 26 crown the long ascent of the active life. Having uprooted vainglory and pride at the top of the war with the passions, John leads the monk into the recovered childlikeness of simplicity (Step 24), the nameless grace of humility (Step 25), and the great treatise on discernment (Step 26) — the queen of the virtues and the eye of the soul. Together they complete the praxis and open the way to the contemplative summit of stillness, prayer, dispassion, and love.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

This collection cites The Ladder of Divine Ascent by Step and (where the division is secure) section, following the translation of Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell (Classics of Western Spirituality; New York: Paulist Press, 1982), a numbering shared with the Lazarus Moore translation as revised by Holy Transfiguration Monastery (Boston, 1979). Migne column references (Patrologia Graeca 88) are given only where verified, and are generally avoided here; the titles of the steps vary slightly between editions, and where a sectional decimal is uncertain the Step alone is cited.

The Crown of the Active Life

Steps 24 to 26 are not a fresh subject but a culmination. The long central body of the Ladder — Steps 4 through 26, more than two-thirds of the book — is the campaign of the active life: the practice of virtue and the systematic uprooting of the passions. That campaign reaches its climax in the destruction of the twin roots of all the rest, vainglory (Step 22) and pride (Step 23); and immediately upon their fall John sets the higher virtues that grow in the cleared ground (Ladder 24–26; and see the-bodily-and-mental-passions.md on Step 23). The ordering is itself an argument: simplicity, humility, and discernment are not techniques the beginner acquires but graces that crown a long labour, and they are placed where they are because the soul is only now made fit to receive them (Kallistos Ware, Introduction, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, CWS, 1982).

Step 24: Simplicity and Guilelessness

Step 24 treats simplicity, meekness, and guilelessness — in Greek haplotēs (singleness, the opposite of the double or duplicitous soul) and akakia (the absence of malice, an innocence that does not return evil for evil). Its theme is the recovery of a childlike singleness of soul, a freedom from the folds and complications of duplicity by which the fallen mind divides itself against itself (Ladder 24). John grounds this explicitly in the Gospel: it is the simplicity Christ commands when He says that unless we become as little children we shall not enter the Kingdom (cf. Matthew 18:3), a simplicity not natural to the fallen adult but regained through long ascesis (Ladder 24).

John is careful that this be understood as recovery and not as mere absence of intelligence. The guilelessness he praises is the simplicity of the wise, won back after the soul has passed through the complications of the passions and come out the other side. Hence his famous preference for the simple monk over the clever one: the unsophisticated brother, single in his obedience and his trust, is often further along the ascent than the subtle and many-minded man, whose very cleverness becomes a thicket in which vainglory hides (Ladder 24). Simplicity is thus the first of the crowning virtues precisely because it undoes the self-division that pride had introduced.

Step 25: Humility, the Nameless Grace

Step 25, on humility (tapeinophrosynē, humble-mindedness; tapeinōsis, the state of being made low), is among the most celebrated chapters of the whole Ladder and stands at its very centre of gravity. John opens by confessing that humility resists definition. It is, he writes, “a nameless grace in the soul, its name known only to those who have had experience of it… unspeakable wealth, a name and a gift from God” (Ladder 25). Because no single formula can hold it, John does what he does nowhere else at such length: he assembles an anthology, gathering the definitions of many fathers and brethren, because the virtue is larger than any one description of it (Ladder 25).

Two claims give the step its weight. The first is that humility is the one virtue the demons cannot imitate. They can counterfeit fasting, vigil, almsgiving, even a false stillness and a false tears; but they cannot feign being made low, for their whole nature is the refusal of it, and so humility is the surest mark of the genuine (Ladder 25). The second is its source. John takes humility to be learned not from a method but from a Person: Christ’s own word, “Learn from Me, for I am meek and humble of heart, and you shall find rest for your souls” (Matthew 11:29), means that humility is a participation in the disposition of the incarnate Lord, not a disposition the ascetic manufactures (Ladder 25).

Humility is therefore the destroyer of pride, the very vice whose fall (Step 23) prepared its place, and the mother of dispassion — for the soul that has truly been made low is no longer the soil in which the passions can take root (Ladder 25; cf. Ladder 23). John names signs or tokens by which its presence may be tested: chiefly the readiness to accept dishonour with gladness, the quieting of anger, and a sober distrust of one’s own attainments — a triad of evidences that the grace is real and not its counterfeit, self-display dressed as lowliness (Ladder 25). Above all, humility is the indispensable ground of every higher gift: without it discernment turns to delusion and the contemplative graces turn to pride, so that it functions as the hinge of the entire ascent (Ladder 25; Ware, Introduction, CWS, 1982).

Step 26: The Treatise on Discernment

Step 26, on the discernment of thoughts, passions, and virtues (diakrisis), is the longest step in the Ladder — a treatise in its own right rather than a single chapter, and the natural summit of the active life. John defines it comprehensively: discernment is, “in a general sense… the assured understanding of the divine will in all times, places, and things” — the faculty that reads the will of God in the concrete situation, neither rigid nor lax (Ladder 26). It is the practised judgement that knows what to do, and the kind of soul this is, and the hidden quality of a given thought.

John distinguishes three levels of discernment, graded to the soul’s maturity. Among beginners it is true self-knowledge — the unflattering, accurate seeing of one’s own condition. Among the intermediate it is a spiritual sense that infallibly distinguishes the genuinely good from the merely natural and from its opposite, telling the gift of God from the suggestion of the enemy. Among the perfect it is the knowledge given by divine illumination, which can light up with its lamp what is dark in others — the discernment of the spiritual father who reads souls not his own (Ladder 26). The same virtue thus deepens from honesty about oneself, through a trained spiritual taste, to a charism of illumination.

Closely joined to this is the discernment of the three sources of thoughts. A movement arising in the mind comes either from oneself, or from God, or from the demons; and the whole art of the inner life is the testing of spirits — learning, by long attention and by humility, to recognise which of the three is speaking, and to receive or repel it accordingly (Ladder 26; cf. 1 John 4:1). This is why John calls discretion the queen and crown of the virtues and the very “eye of the soul”: it is the faculty that keeps the ascetic on the narrow ridge between the two ditches that flank the whole path — excess on the one side, laxity and presumption on the other — so that every other virtue, lacking it, may overrun into a vice (Ladder 26).

Because discernment in its highest form is given to few and only after long humility, John ties it firmly to spiritual direction: the beginner’s safety lies not in trusting his own untested judgement but in submitting his thoughts to a discerning father, in whom the charism of reading souls is found. Discernment is thus the gift that makes the spiritual father what he is, and the reason obedience is no mere discipline but a sharing in another’s clearer sight (Ladder 26; and see spiritual-direction.md).

Step 26 closes with a long recapitulation — a “brief summary” of counsels in which John gathers up the teaching of the whole Ladder to this point, condensing into short maxims the wisdom of the foregoing twenty-five steps before the book turns to the contemplative summit (Ladder 26). The placement is deliberate: discernment is where the active life takes stock of itself.

The Bridge to the Summit

These three steps complete the ascent of the active life and form the bridge to the contemplative summit. The logic is cumulative and unmistakable. Pride having been uprooted (Step 23), the monk is grounded in simplicity (24) and humility (25); and it is humility above all that is the hinge, for it alone makes the gifts that follow safe — discernment (26) without humility becomes delusion, and the contemplative graces without it become a more refined pride (Ladder 23–26; Ware, Introduction, CWS, 1982). Only now, standing on this ground, can the monk pass to stillness and prayer (Steps 27–28; see stillness-and-prayer.md) and to the linked summit of dispassion (Step 29; see dispassion-and-the-ladder-of-virtues.md) and faith, hope, and love (Step 30; see faith-hope-love.md). Those rungs are treated in their own files and are not developed here; what matters at the close of the active life is that the higher gifts have been given their indispensable foundation.

References

John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1982. (Steps 24 on simplicity and guilelessness; 25 on humility — the “nameless grace” definition, the demons’ inability to imitate it, the three signs; 26 on discernment — the definition, the three levels, the three sources of thoughts, and the closing recapitulation.)
Moore, Lazarus (Archimandrite), trans. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Rev. ed. Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1979. (Step and section numbering shared with the CWS edition and followed here; the slightly varying step titles.)
Ware, Kallistos. Introduction to The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1982. (Humility as the hinge of the ascent; discernment as the queen of the virtues; the structure of the active life.)
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 CWS and HTM editions.)
Scripture: Matthew 11:29 (humility learned from Christ); Matthew 18:3 (becoming as little children); 1 John 4:1 (the testing of spirits).

Methodology

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