Faith, Hope, and Love

The thirtieth and final rung of The Ladder of Divine Ascent is the summit toward which the whole climb has tended: the linked trinity of faith, hope, and love, with love supreme among them. Here John of Sinai caps his thirty steps not with a virtue the monk masters but with a Person the monk is joined to, for “Love, by its nature, is a resemblance to God, insofar as this is humanly possible” (Ladder 30.7). The ascent ends in deification — likeness to the God who is Love.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

References here follow the Step-and-section numbering of The Ladder of Divine Ascent in the translation of Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell, Classics of Western Spirituality (Paulist Press, 1982); this numbering is shared with the Lazarus Moore translation (rev. ed., Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston, 1979). Titles of individual steps vary between editions, so steps are cited by number and, where verified, by section. Patrologia Graeca (PG 88) column references are avoided unless certain.

The Summit of the Ladder

Step 30, the thirtieth and final rung of the Klimax, is titled in the tradition “On faith, hope, and love” — named for John as the “linking” or “bond of the supreme trinity among the virtues.” It is the goal of the whole ascent: every preceding rung, from the renunciation of the world at the foot to dispassion near the top, has been ordered toward this end, and the architecture of the book makes the point structurally — the thirty steps are not a list but a climb, and love stands at the top of it (Ladder, Step 30; cross-referenced in the-image-of-the-ladder.md and the-work-and-its-structure.md). To reach the thirtieth rung is to reach the place where Christ, leaning out from heaven in the Sinai icon, receives the climber by the hand.

John builds this closing step on a single biblical text: St Paul’s hymn to charity. “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity” (1 Corinthians 13:13). The three theological virtues that Paul names as those which “abide” become John’s three crowning rungs-in-one, and Paul’s verdict — that the greatest is love — becomes the inner logic of the summit (Ladder, Step 30; 1 Corinthians 13:13). The thirtieth step is thus a meditation on 1 Corinthians 13 turned into the capstone of an ascetical program: the labor of thirty steps issues in the Pauline triad, and the triad culminates in love.

“A Resemblance to God”

The decisive sentence of the step — and one of the most quoted lines in the whole Ladder — defines love by what it makes of the one who loves: “Love, by its nature, is a resemblance to God, insofar as this is humanly possible” (Ladder 30.7). The qualification matters. John does not say the human person becomes God by nature but that love confers a likeness, a resemblance, as far as a creature can bear it — the classic grammar of Orthodox theology, which distinguishes always between God’s incommunicable essence and the deifying participation offered to the saints.

Love is, in this sense, the deifying virtue. The reason John can call it a resemblance to God is given by Scripture: “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). If God’s own life is love, then to love is to share in what God is — to become like Him at the very point where He has revealed His nature. The other virtues purify, order, and prepare; love alone makes the human person resemble the divine, because love alone is named as God’s own being (Ladder 30.7; 1 John 4:8, 16). This is why the summit of the Ladder is not finally a psychological state but a participation: the monk who attains love does not merely possess a good quality, he is conformed to God who is Love. The whole ascetical machinery of the book — the war on the passions, the cultivation of the higher virtues — exists to bring the soul to this likeness, which the tradition calls theosis, deification.

From Dispassion to Love

The summit does not stand alone; it is born from the rung just beneath it. Step 29 treats apatheia, dispassion — the soul made calm, integrated, and free from the tyranny of the passions — and John presents dispassion not as the end but as the threshold: dispassion gives birth to love. Apatheia is the near-summit, the purified and quieted soul; agape is the true summit, the soul filled with God (Ladder, Steps 29–30; see dispassion-and-the-ladder-of-virtues.md). The relation is generative: where the passions have been stilled and the heart no longer torn by competing loves, love itself can take possession of the whole person. Dispassion clears the ground; love builds the house.

This sequence expresses the deepest rhythm of the Ladder, which Kallistos Ware describes as a movement “from labour (kopos) to gift (charisma).” The lower rungs are the monk’s strenuous toil; the summit is received, not earned outright. Love, the highest rung, is supremely a gift — the crowning grace that completes what no amount of ascetic effort could secure by itself (Ware, Introduction, Ladder, CWS 1982; Ladder, Steps 29–30). The monk labors all the way up the ladder; at the top, love is given. The ascent that began in renunciation and self-denial ends in participation in the divine life, which is pure gift.

Love Without End

Love is the summit, but it is a summit that opens onto the unending. In the same Pauline chapter John builds upon, Paul declares that “charity never faileth” (1 Corinthians 13:8) — love alone, of all things, never falls away or comes to an end. The thirtieth rung is therefore unlike every rung below it: the lower virtues serve the conditions of this life and the struggle of the ascent, but love passes beyond the ascent into eternity (1 Corinthians 13:8, 13; Ladder, Step 30). The ladder of thirty steps reaches its top, and at that top love does not terminate but continues — the climber steps off the ladder into the endless life of God.

So John closes his book by naming God Himself as Love. Of the three abiding virtues, love is the greatest “for God Himself is so called” — an allusion to the Johannine word that God is love (1 John 4:8). The summit of the Ladder is thus not a state the monk achieves and holds but a relation he is drawn into: union with the Person who is Love. Faith and hope belong to the journey; love belongs to the arrival and to what lies beyond it, for it is the very life of the One the journey was always toward (1 John 4:8, 16; Ladder, Step 30). The thirtieth step is the point at which the ascetical program of the whole book discloses its true goal — not self-perfection but God, possessed and possessing in love.

“Ascend, Brethren”: The Closing Exhortation

The Ladder ends as it climbs: with a summons upward. In the conclusion of Step 30, John turns from teaching to exhortation, urging his readers to climb — “Ascend, ascend, brethren” — and gathering the whole book into the image with which it began, the ladder of thirty rungs set up to the heavenly Bridegroom, with love standing at the top (conclusion of Step 30; cf. the-image-of-the-ladder.md). Beyond that topmost rung, as in Jacob’s dream at Bethel, the ladder reaches to God Himself. The exhortation is the book’s last word because the ascent is never finished while the soul is in this life: there is always another rung, and at the summit there is always more of the love that never ends.

It is fitting, then, that the Orthodox Church reads the Ladder through Great Lent and commemorates St John on the Fourth Sunday of the fast, for the whole journey of the fast is precisely this ascent toward the Pascha of love (see sinai-monasticism-and-lenten-reading.md, which treats the Lenten setting). The climb of the thirty steps and the climb of the forty days converge on the same end: the God who is Love, met at the summit and at the empty tomb.

See Also

• Dispassion and the Ladder of Virtues — Step 29 and how dispassion gives birth to love
• The Image of the Ladder — Jacob’s ladder, the Sinai icon, and the Bridegroom at the summit
• The Work and Its Structure — the thirty steps and the movement of the ascent
• Sinai Monasticism and Lenten Reading — the Lenten reading of the Ladder and the Fourth Sunday commemoration
• Influence on the Tradition — the afterlife of John’s teaching on love and ascent
• The Church Fathers — the patristic doctrine of theosis and likeness to God
• St Maximus the Confessor — the great patristic theologian of love and charity

References

• John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1982. (Step 30, “On faith, hope, and love”; the verified text Ladder 30.7, “Love, by its nature, is a resemblance to God, insofar as this is humanly possible”; the closing exhortation.)
• Moore, Lazarus (Archimandrite), trans. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Rev. ed., Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1979. (Shared Step and section numbering.)
• Ware, Kallistos (Bishop). Introduction to The Ladder of Divine Ascent (Luibheid–Russell, CWS, 1982). (The ascent as a movement “from labour to gift”; dispassion and love as the summit.)
• The Ladder of Divine Ascent. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org/The_Ladder_of_Divine_Ascent). (Step 30 as the trinity of faith, hope, and love; love as the summit; the Lenten reading and Fourth Sunday commemoration.)
• Scripture: 1 Corinthians 13:8 (“charity never faileth”), 13:13 (“the greatest of these is charity”); 1 John 4:8, 16 (“God is love”).
• See also METHODOLOGY.md for the verification conventions governing this collection.