To the Shepherd

Alongside the Ladder, John of Sinai wrote a short companion treatise, To the Shepherd, for the same abbot who had commissioned the larger work. Where the Ladder teaches the disciple to climb, To the Shepherd teaches the one who must lead others up — the abbot as shepherd, physician, pilot, and teacher of souls. It is brief and less famous than the Ladder, but it is a foundational text of Orthodox pastoral and spiritual-direction theology.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

A Note on Citation

This collection cites the Ladder by Step and section following the Luibheid–Russell translation (CWS, 1982), a numbering shared with the Lazarus Moore translation as revised by Holy Transfiguration Monastery (Boston, 1979). To the Shepherd, however, is not included in the Luibheid–Russell volume, which translates only the Ladder; it is found appended to the Moore/HTM edition and in John Chryssavgis’s translation in Soul Mending: The Art of Spiritual Direction (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2000). The Greek of both works stands together in Migne, Patrologia Graeca 88 — the Ladder at cols. 632–1164 and To the Shepherd at cols. 1165–1208. Because the chapter-and-section divisions of To the Shepherd vary between editions and titles differ from one edition to another, this file cites the treatise generally rather than by a precise section number wherever a confident reference cannot be given.

A Separate Work for the Same Abbot

To the Shepherd (Latin Liber ad Pastorem; Greek Logos pros ton Poimena) is a short, self-standing treatise that John composed as a companion to the Ladder of Divine Ascent. It is addressed to the very man who had commissioned the Ladder: John, abbot (hegumen) of the monastery of Raithu, on the Red Sea coast. Having written for that abbot a guide for the monks who must ascend, John added a second, smaller book of counsel for the abbot himself — for the shepherd who must lead the flock up the rungs (St. John Climacus, Catholic Encyclopedia, New Advent; Chryssavgis, John Climacus: From the Egyptian Desert to the Sinaite Mountain, Ashgate, 2004).

The abbot of Raithu should be kept clearly distinct from Daniel of Raithu, the monk who wrote the Life of Climacus: John of Raithu, the abbot, asked for and received both the Ladder and To the Shepherd; Daniel of Raithu, the biographer, wrote the saint’s Life. The two are different men of the same community, and popular accounts sometimes conflate them, crediting the biographer with the commission; the commissioner was the abbot John (St. John Climacus, Catholic Encyclopedia, New Advent).

Because To the Shepherd travels with the Ladder in the manuscript and printed tradition — following it directly in PG 88 — it is sometimes counted as a sort of “thirty-first” chapter appended to the thirty steps. Properly, however, it is an independent work with its own subject, address, and form, and it should be read as such (Chryssavgis, Soul Mending, 2000).

The Office and Art of the Spiritual Father

The single theme of To the Shepherd is the office and the art of the spiritual father — the abbot, the hegumen, the shepherd of souls. The disciple’s task is to be governed; the abbot’s task is to govern, and John treats that task as the most delicate and dangerous of all spiritual arts. To set out what the superior must be and do, he gathers a cluster of governing images, each illuminating a different facet of the office (Chryssavgis, John Climacus, 2004; To the Shepherd, PG 88, cols. 1165–1208).

The first and titular image is the shepherd (poimēn): the abbot is pastor of a flock, answerable for every sheep, going out after the strayed and bearing the weak. The second is the physician or doctor of souls: the abbot diagnoses the particular disease of each soul and prescribes the particular remedy, knowing that what heals one will harm another, that the same passion takes different forms in different men, and that the cutting and the cautery must be matched to the case. The third is the pilot or steersman, who must steer the ship of the community through storms, reading the weather and holding the course when the sea rises. The fourth is the teacher, who instructs not only by precept but by the whole bearing of his life (To the Shepherd, treatise generally; Chryssavgis, Soul Mending, 2000).

The image of the physician binds the treatise to the Ladder‘s teaching on discernment (diakrisis), the subject of Step 26. Discernment in the disciple is the gift of distinguishing the thoughts and weighing one’s own movements; discernment in the abbot is that same gift turned outward, to the reading and care of other souls. The whole burden of To the Shepherd is that the shepherd must know each soul’s illness and prescribe accordingly — that the care of others is discernment applied (see Simplicity, Humility, Discernment; The Monastic Psychology).

Teaching by Example, Not by Word

A central emphasis of the treatise is that the shepherd teaches not primarily by words but by example. The abbot must himself be a living model of the virtues he commends; he leads, John insists, by guilelessness, by zeal, and by prayer, and he is to instruct out of his own experience and not from what he has merely read. The pastor who would heal a passion in another must first be free of that passion in himself, for he cannot cleanse in his disciples what still clings to him; he must be a physician already healed (To the Shepherd, treatise generally; Chryssavgis, Soul Mending, 2000).

With this John joins a strong insistence on the weight and danger of the office. The shepherd will answer to God for the souls entrusted to him, and the higher the charge the heavier the account; the office is therefore to be approached with fear and held with humility. The one who governs must be more humble, not less, than those he governs, since the height of his position is precisely the height from which he may fall. The spiritual father, in John’s portrait, is one who bears the burdens — and even, in a sense, the sins — of his disciples, carrying their weakness as his own and standing answerable for them before God (To the Shepherd, treatise generally; Chryssavgis, John Climacus, 2004).

The Other Side of the Ladder

To the Shepherd is best understood as the other side of the Ladder. The Ladder teaches the disciple to climb; To the Shepherd teaches the guide who leads others up. The two works together describe a single relationship from its two ends. In the Ladder, Step 4 (On obedience) is the disciple’s-eye view of the bond — the surrender of one’s own will to a trusted father (see Steps of Renunciation). In To the Shepherd, and in the Ladder‘s Step 26 (On discernment), we are given the director’s-eye view — the father’s responsibility to receive that surrender rightly, to read the soul placed in his hands, and to lead it without crushing it (To the Shepherd, treatise generally; cf. the Ladder, Steps 4 and 26, Luibheid–Russell, CWS, 1982).

Read together, then, the two books form a complete theology of the spiritual father–disciple bond, the abba and his child, which lies at the heart of Eastern Christian asceticism (see Spiritual Direction). John wrote To the Shepherd not as a theorist but as a sitting abbot: he had himself been drawn from solitude to govern the great monastery of Sinai, and the treatise is the distillation of that responsibility carried in practice (see Forty Years at Tholas; Sinai Monasticism and Lenten Reading).

Place and Reception

Shorter and far less famous than the Ladder it accompanies, To the Shepherd has nonetheless remained a foundational text of Orthodox pastoral and spiritual-direction theology, drawn upon whenever the tradition has reflected on eldership, the office of the geron or starets, and the perils of guiding souls. Its images — the shepherd, the physician, the pilot — recur across the later literature of the spiritual father, from the Byzantine monastic typika to the Russian elders of Optina and the Athonite elders of the modern age, who inherited John’s conviction that the director must himself be healed before he heals (Chryssavgis, Soul Mending, 2000; To the Shepherd, treatise generally). Because Luibheid and Russell left it out of their widely used translation, the treatise was for a time less accessible to English readers than the Ladder; the Holy Transfiguration Monastery edition, which appends it, and Chryssavgis’s dedicated translation and study in Soul Mending have since restored it to its proper place beside the great book it completes (Moore, rev. HTM Boston, 1979; Chryssavgis, Soul Mending, 2000).

Its Place in the Tradition

Relatively short and far less celebrated than the Ladder, To the Shepherd has nonetheless remained a foundational text of Orthodox pastoral and spiritual-direction theology. Whenever the Tradition reflects on eldership, on the office of the geron or starets, and on the art of the abba, it returns to this small treatise, which set down with rare precision what the shepherd of souls must be (Chryssavgis, Soul Mending, 2000; Chryssavgis, John Climacus, 2004; see The Work and Its Structure).

See Also

References

  • John Climacus. To the Shepherd (Liber ad Pastorem; Logos pros ton Poimena). Greek in Migne, Patrologia Graeca 88, cols. 1165–1208 (following the Ladder at cols. 632–1164).
  • Moore, Lazarus (Archimandrite), trans. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Rev. ed., Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1979. (To the Shepherd appended; Step and section numbering followed here for the Ladder.)
  • Chryssavgis, John, trans. Soul Mending: The Art of Spiritual Direction. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2000. (Translation of To the Shepherd.)
  • Chryssavgis, John. John Climacus: From the Egyptian Desert to the Sinaite Mountain. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.
  • St. John Climacus. Catholic Encyclopedia. New Advent.
  • See also Methodology for this collection’s citation and verification conventions.