The Monastic Psychology of the Ladder

Beneath its thirty rungs The Ladder of Divine Ascent carries a sustained anatomy of the inner life: an analysis of the thoughts that assault the mind, of the faculties of the soul they disorder, and of the stages by which a fleeting suggestion ripens into a ruling passion. John Climacus is not a systematic psychologist but a physician of souls, and his diagnostic shrewdness — his genealogies of the vices, his dramatic interrogation of the passions — is what has made the book the great Eastern manual of spiritual self-knowledge.

Tradition: Athonite-Hesychast

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). References to Migne’s Patrologia Graeca 88 are avoided unless secure; the titles of the steps vary slightly between editions, and where a sectional decimal is uncertain the Step alone is cited.

The Logismoi: Thoughts as the Field of Battle

The fundamental category of John’s psychology is the logismos — the tempting thought. The inner life, for the Ladder, is essentially the discernment and combat of thoughts: the nous (the perceiving intellect, the eye of the soul) is continually assailed by suggestions that present themselves, and the whole ascetic enterprise is the work of recognising them, refusing the evil and the deceptive, and keeping the mind clear. This is why John can treat the unseen warfare of the mind as more decisive than outward acts; the act is only the visible end of a process that began with a thought (Ladder 26; Kallistos Ware, Introduction, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, CWS, 1982).

The whole framework descends from the desert. It is the analysis of Evagrius of Pontus, who reduced the inner combat to a struggle against eight ruling thoughts (logismoi) — gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, akedia, vainglory, and pride — and behind Evagrius lies the lived experience of the Egyptian fathers, Antony and Macarius, who had named the demons as the suggesters of these thoughts. John inherits this Evagrian-Egyptian psychology, refines it for the Sinaite community he governed, and transmits it to the hesychast future for which his book became the indispensable handbook (Ware, Introduction, CWS, 1982; John Chryssavgis, John Climacus: From the Egyptian Desert to the Sinaite Mountain, Ashgate, 2004).

The Three Sources and the Discernment of Thoughts

Because not every thought that enters the mind is to be treated alike, John insists that the monk learn to read a thought’s origin. In the great treatise on discernment he sets out the classic teaching of three sources: a thought may come from God, from the demons, or from the man’s own nature. The first draws toward humility and prayer, the last is the mind’s ordinary movement, and the demonic suggestion masquerades — often clothing itself as good — so that the central labour is to distinguish the spirits and not to be deceived by an evil that wears the face of virtue (Ladder 26).

This is why discernment (diakrisis) is for John the queen of the virtues and the eye of the soul. It is the trained capacity to tell which thought is which, to judge times and measures, and so to govern the inner life rather than be governed by it; and it is itself ranked — a natural prudence in beginners, a spiritual discernment in the proficient, and in the perfect the charism of reading souls. The discernment of thoughts is treated more fully under Step 26 in this collection’s companion file on the higher virtues (Ladder 26; see Simplicity, Humility, and Discernment).

The Stages of a Thought

John works throughout with the ascetic tradition’s analysis of how a thought develops, the so-called stages of temptation by which a passing suggestion becomes a ruling passion. The sequence runs from the first provocation or suggestion — the bare appearance of the thought, which carries no guilt because it is not chosen — to the coupling, a dialogue or entertaining of the thought; thence to assent or consent, where the will inclines and embraces it; and finally to captivity and the formed passion, where the thought has become a settled habit that drags the soul against its resistance. The decisive moment is early: the thought is to be cut off at the suggestion, before the mind has begun to converse with it, for once the dialogue starts the fall is already half made (Ladder 15; cf. Ladder 26).

John applies this most vividly in the long Step on chastity and the war against the flesh, where he traces the workings of lust through exactly such a progression — the image presented, the lingering, the consent — and warns that the combatant who parleys with the thought has already conceded the ground. The same anatomy underlies his treatment of every passion: each begins as a thought, and each can be arrested only at the gate (Ladder 15).

The Faculties of the Soul

Beneath the thoughts lies the threefold soul of the patristic tradition, which gives John’s steps their underlying anatomy. The soul has a rational faculty (the logistikon), an incensive or irascible faculty (the thymikon, the seat of anger and the drive to repel), and a desiring or appetitive faculty (the epithymētikon, the seat of the longing for food and for sexual pleasure). Each faculty is good in its created order and disordered in its fall: a passion is a faculty turned against its purpose, and a virtue is that same faculty rightly ordered, so that anger directed against the demons is good while anger against one’s brother is the disease (Ware, Introduction, CWS, 1982; Chryssavgis, John Climacus, Ashgate, 2004).

John’s steps map onto this anatomy with some precision. The disorders of the thymikon — anger, malice, the unbridled tongue, slander — are diagnosed in the cluster of steps on the incensive passions (Ladder 8–9; see Anger and the Tongue). The disorders of the epithymētikon — gluttony and the lust that feeds on it — are diagnosed in their own steps, where John shows the belly as the gate through which the desiring power is corrupted (Ladder 14–15; see The Bodily and Mental Passions). The pattern is consistent: name the faculty, name its sickness, and prescribe its cure.

The Genealogy and Personification of the Passions

John’s hallmark method is genealogical. He does not treat the vices as a flat list but as a connected family, tracing each to its “mother” and naming its “offspring”: talkativeness gives birth to vainglory and is despondency’s friend, vainglory in turn is the mother of pride, and so on through a whole branching tree in which the destruction of a root vice topples those that grew from it. This is why the order of the steps is itself an argument — the passions are arranged as they generate one another, and the ascent is the unweaving of their descent (Ladder 22–23; Ware, Introduction, CWS, 1982).

The most striking feature of this diagnostic art is John’s personification of the passions. In several places he stages the vice as a captive brought to trial and compelled to confess its own nature, its kindred, and the virtue that vanquishes it. The famous instance is akedia, the noonday despondency, which John interrogates like a prisoner until it names its conquerors; he uses the same dramatic device for the demon of lust and, most memorably, for the demon of vainglory, made to expose its own contradictions. The technique is not ornament but method: by forcing the passion to speak, John lays bare its psychology — its disguises, its alliances, its weak point — and gives the monk the knowledge by which to fight it (Ladder 13).

Self-Knowledge, Watchfulness, and the Physician of Souls

The whole enterprise rests on attention. John’s psychology is a psychology of prosochē — the unceasing watchfulness by which the monk observes the traffic of his own mind — and its first principle is that the beginning of discernment is self-knowledge: a man must learn to read the symptoms of his own passions before he can hope to be healed of them (Ladder 26). This watchful self-observation is the inner side of the hesychast labour, and it is developed in this collection’s companion file on nēpsis and the remembrance of Jesus (see Watchfulness and the Remembrance of Jesus).

The monk thus becomes the physician of his own soul, and the same diagnostic skill is required, on a larger scale, of the abbot who must read the souls of others — the theme of John’s appended treatise to the shepherd of a community (see To the Shepherd). Within this medicine, compunction and tears occupy a special place: for John, the gift of tears (penthos) is at once a spiritual grace and an inner, almost clinical event, a softening of the heart whose presence or absence the monk is to observe as the surest sign of his condition (Ladder 7).

John’s Realism and the Healed Soul

What preserves all this from cold technique is John’s humanity. He treats the soul as a battlefield, but also as a sick thing to be healed, and his counsel is shot through with compassion for the struggler. He warns repeatedly against despair, holding that to despair after a fall is worse than the fall itself, since it surrenders the very hope by which one rises; he distinguishes genuine graces from their counterfeits with a sober, experiential shrewdness; and he refuses the tidiness of a closed system, preferring the un-systematic realism of a man who has watched souls (Ware, Introduction, CWS, 1982; Chryssavgis, John Climacus, Ashgate, 2004).

The goal of the whole psychology is therapeutic, not merely analytic. The faculties rightly ordered, the thoughts discerned and refused, the passions traced to their roots and uprooted — all of this aims at the soul restored to health, the state of apatheia in which the inner life is no longer torn by the warfare of thoughts. The diagnosis serves the cure, and the cure is the healed and peaceful soul of the summit (Ladder 29; see Dispassion and the Ladder of Virtues).

References

John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1982. (Step 7 on the gift of tears and compunction; Steps 8–9 on the incensive passions; Steps 14–15 on gluttony and lust, with the stages of a thought; Step 13 on the personification of despondency; Steps 22–23 on the genealogy of vainglory and pride; Step 26 on discernment, the three sources of thoughts, and self-knowledge.)
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. (The Evagrian-Egyptian background; the threefold soul and its faculties; discernment as the queen of the virtues; John’s realism and his warning against despair.)
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.)
Chryssavgis, John. John Climacus: From the Egyptian Desert to the Sinaite Mountain. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. (The desert inheritance of the logismoi; the anatomy of the passions and faculties; John as physician of souls.)

Methodology

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