The paper discusses the figure of Saint John Climacus (the author of the book “The Ladder of Divine Ascent” or “The Ladder of Virtues”), shedding light on his essential contributions to Orthodox monastic thought and his profound influence on the liturgy and Christian spirituality in the East and the West.
The ideas of the research center on the following main points:
The life of the saint and his upbringing: his entry into monasticism at an early age (sixteen) on Mount Sinai, and his seclusion in the desert of “Thola” for about forty years, before being elected abbot of the monks.
The influence of the desert and experience: how the life of solitude, austerity, and ascetic struggle contributed to refining his personality and deepening his insight into the human soul, keeping away from extremism and following “the royal way”.
The book “The Ladder of Divine Ascent”: considering it a constitution for monastic life, and its being the product of lived and contemplative experience and not merely an academic study, containing a gradual progression for strengthening the soul and its ascent toward God.
The impact and worldwide spread: the translation of the book into multiple languages and its wide influence on the spiritual and hesychast movements and the monastic revivals (in Russia, Romania, and Western Europe), and the Orthodox Church’s honoring of him by dedicating the fourth Sunday of Great Lent to his memory.
The spiritual concept of the ascent: a presentation of Metropolitan Paul Yazigi’s view that the ascent is not spatial but a journey of the heart and a continuous renewal of the mind and communion with God.
Keywords: John Climacus, the Ladder of Divine Ascent, Sinaitic monasticism, Orthodox monastic thought, the hesychast movements, Christian literature.
1. Introduction:
The figure of John Climacus constitutes one of the most important figures in the journey of the Church in general. We see that he directs the Orthodox Church in the depth of the liturgy, for the Byzantine Orthodox Church named the fourth Sunday of Lent the Sunday of John Climacus. He directed, through his thought and teaching, the theology of the Church toward divine love and dyed its entire tradition with his own dye and experience.
This study deals with some aspects of Climacus: his personality, the influence of the desert on the formation of his thought, the importance of his book The Ladder of Divine Ascent, and its influence on the entire Christian world.
2. John Climacus:
The exact birthplace of the saint is not known; some hold that he was born in Palestine in the era of King Zeno, and others hold that he was born around 579 AD, and that he lived about 75 years. It is clear from his book The Ladder of Divine Ascent, his style, and his vocabulary that he was not poor in thought; rather, he was an educated man, and he may have acquired this from his learning before his monasticism or through his reading and study of books during his monasticism. He embraced the monastic life at the age of sixteen, and placed himself in his life under Elder Martyrius, one of the elders of Mount Sinai. When his spiritual father reposed, he went out as a hermit at the age of twenty, and secluded himself in a barren desert about eight kilometers from the monastery, in a place called Thola[1], where he lived for about forty years. Then the monks made him their head, and after a period of unknown length he left the headship and returned to his solitude.
3. His personality[2]:
It is clear from his writings that he was a cultured personality of wide learning and knowledge of people’s conditions, and he possessed keen insight and abundant experience of people, for he knew many matters and would recount them and evaluate them with a personal evaluation. He often contradicts the prevailing opinion, saying, for example, “As for me, I say…”. It is also clear that he was acquainted with the conditions of the people living in the world, their customs and traditions, and that he understood the human soul with profound understanding. It is clear from his writings that he was a man of the royal way: he understands people’s weaknesses and has mercy on them, but does not compromise on seriousness and strictness.
4. The time of Saint John:
The monastic current surged forcefully in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries in Egypt, Palestine, and Asia Minor, then turned toward Mount Sinai beginning in the sixth and seventh centuries. The era in which the saint lived is the era that witnessed the emergence of the new Islamic heritage, which relies for honoring the Christian faith on the fact that among the Christians there are monks who are not arrogant.[3]
5. The influence of the desert on the formation of his thought:
During this period he used to eat all the food permitted in the monastic life, and in this way he was able to overcome the spirit of pride and self-conceit, for the scarcity of food helped him to fast and to fight the passion of the belly, and the commitment to the permitted type helped him to form his inner humility.
His living in the inner exile of the desert made him able to fight the bodily passion; and here I do not mean that he suppressed his passion, but rather that it made him withdraw from people and meet God and turn all his energies into a force that launches him toward God. This withdrawal helped him to fight vainglory, which sprouts in the presence of people and among them.
He contented himself with only as much sleep as was necessary, lest he expose his mind to harm, and before going to sleep he would pray and arrange his texts. This desert life was for him the laboratory that formed his personality and his thought, and all that he wrote later — the Ladder of Divine Ascent — is nothing but the juice of this experience and the product of this furnace he went through.
“…and his balanced Sinaitic spirituality was tempered by the influence of Basil the Great against the character of extreme Evagrian rationalism, without adopting Saint Basil’s preference for the communal monastic way of life; rather, it reflects the experience of the independence of each of the communal life and the solitary life from the other, with the complementing of the one by the other, with a clarity we do not find in Cassian, for example. Moreover, Climacus did not content himself with investigating some aspects of the spiritual life, but dealt with and defined, in a complete and orderly manner, all the stages of the ascetic and mystical life”[4]
6. His writings:
The basic book he wrote is The Ladder of Divine Ascent, or the Ladder of Virtues, and it constitutes the constitution of the monastic life to this day, and it spread in all the monastic orders today — Catholic and Orthodox, with their branches — and he wrote it at the request of Father John, the abbot of the Monastery of Raithu (Al-Tur).
This book was not written within an academic intellectual study; rather, it is a personal experience that the author lived, whether his own experience or his observation and witnessing of the experiences of his peers in monasticism. The book includes teachings, stories, and illuminations on the lives of other monks, and the drawing of lessons and conclusions for the various methods followed by monks in their different behaviors. So he writes warning against one behavior, envies another, and gives the results of this act and that.
7. The influence of the book of the Ladder[5]:
This book was translated into the Syriac language, and was translated into Arabic, Armenian, and Slavic, and also into Romanian, Serbian, and Greek, and then, for more than a century, translations followed into Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, English, and German.
Its influence appears clearly in the rise and development of the hesychast movement in solitude. Philotheos deals with the subject of the guarding of the heart, relying on the experience of John Climacus and delving into it. Saint Symeon the New Theologian takes a new direction influenced by the Ladder, and when the problem of hesychasm appeared in the fourteenth century, the supporters of Saint Gregory Palamas relied on the book of Climacus. Saint Gregory of Sinai introduced the hesychast movement to Mount Athos, and Saint Mark of Ephesus relied on his definition of divine illumination to determine the concept of blessedness at the Council of Florence in the face of the Latins.
This book of Climacus was the most important reference upon which the Russian monastic revival in the fifteenth century was based, for his book was the main inspiration for Saint Nilus of Sora. The book The Way of a Pilgrim clarifies the spread of The Ladder of Divine Ascent in the Russian popular circles in the second half of the nineteenth century, but this spread increases in breadth in the Church of Romania, where we see its traces in the art and painting of icons and in the popular legends.
As for the West, we see the current of the Ladder in the fourteenth century, and it sets out from the Balkans, where some Franciscan spirituals were exiled and became acquainted with the Ladder.
There is no doubt that the influence of the book and its author on the Orthodox Church is completely clear, for the Church was influenced by him, and he dyed it and kneaded its thought, to the degree that one of the Sundays of Great Lent came to be named the Sunday of John Climacus. The student here should begin reading and studying Climacus from where his journey and his life ended, not from where he began his life.
8. The concept of the Ladder of Divine Ascent according to Metropolitan Paul Yazigi[6]:
The concept of the ascent in Saint John Climacus is an inner spiritual movement in which man moves from the state of fall to the state of communion with God — not a spatial ascent, but a journey of the heart in which the believer ascends gradually from the earthly passions and attachment to material things to the freedom of the spirit.
This ascent takes place, according to Climacus, through repentance, struggle, prayer, fasting, and the practice of the virtues. For the ladder he speaks of is a way of transformation: the old man stamped with sin is put off, and the new man is built up”. Therefore the ascent means a constant renewal of the mind (metanoia), and a change of the direction of life from the lower to the higher, where God becomes the center of existence.
The ascent is a continuous movement throughout life; stopping it is considered a descent, for the spiritual life knows no neutrality. The goal of the ascent is the deification of man and the formation of Christ in him, so that he no longer lives according to the instincts but according to the spirit. Thus the ascent becomes a daily return to true human dignity and to the image upon which man was created.
9. Conclusion:
Saint John does not constitute in the history of the Church merely a striking figure; rather, he is an influential figure, and the experience he acquired was able to change many traditional concepts. He was in truth a revolutionary movement in the history of the Church, and the heart of the monastic movement; with him the entire concept of the relationship itself with God changed, for it is not a relationship of traditional worship, but a relationship of love between two. This relationship is a rising relationship, from the dust of the earth to the light of divinity. This movement he launched did not remain confined to Sinai and buried in its caves; rather, it moved to the whole Church, East and West, and the divisions that struck the Church were not chasms and barriers, for his experience was a spirit that blew and unified every goal of the monastic traditions that it revived.
References
- The Ladder of Divine Ascent, the Fathers of the Church series, John Climacus, Arabized by the monastic order of Deir al-Harf, Lebanon, no year, 13
- Paul Yazigi, The Book of the Word (Homilies on the Gospels of Sundays and Feasts, Part One), (Aleppo: Orthodox Light Cooperative, 2006), pp. 80-84.
- George Athanasius Fahmy, (Saint John Climacus: Life – Teachings – Sayings), a book Introduction to Patrology, Anba Takla Himanot website, accessed: 4/2/2026. To view: https://st-takla.org/books/fr-athnasius-fahmy/patrology/daragy.html
Footnotes
[1] This place remains until now and is two hours’ journey from the monastery. In it is a cave composed of two large granite rocks that fell from the heights of the mountains and joined together at the bottom in the form of an angle (The Book of John Climacus, p. 31).
[2] The Ladder of Divine Ascent, the Fathers of the Church series, John Climacus, Arabized by the monastic order of Deir al-Harf, Lebanon, no year, 13
[3] The Ladder of Divine Ascent, the Fathers of the Church series, John Climacus, Arabized by the monastic order of Deir al-Harf, Lebanon, no year, 87
[4] The Ladder of Divine Ascent, the Fathers of the Church series, John Climacus, Arabized by the monastic order of Deir al-Harf, Lebanon, no year, 14
[5]The Ladder of Divine Ascent, the Fathers of the Church series, John Climacus, Arabized by the monastic order of Deir al-Harf, Lebanon, no year, 14
[6] Paul Yazigi, The Book of the Word (Homilies on the Gospels of Sundays and Feasts, Part One), (Aleppo: Orthodox Light Cooperative, 2006), pp. 80-84.