John of the Ladder

Saint John Climacus is one of the most quietly influential saints of the entire Christian East. He went to Mount Sinai when he was sixteen years old, became a monk under the spiritual father Abba Martyrius, and spent the next sixty years of his life there — first as a disciple, then as a hermit, finally as the abbot of Saint Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of the mountain where Moses had received the Law. When he was about seventy, the abbot of the nearby Raithu Monastery asked him to write a book teaching how to climb the spiritual ladder from earth to heaven. He called what he wrote The Ladder of Divine Ascent. It has thirty steps, one for each year of the Lord’s hidden life. It is read every year in every Orthodox monastery during Great Lent. It is honored on the Fourth Sunday of Lent. It is one of the most quoted and commented-on books in the entire Orthodox tradition. The man who wrote it had spent forty years alone in a desert cave at a place called Tholas, weeping and praying. Everything in his book is the fruit of those forty years.

When John was sixteen, he made his way to Mount Sinai — the holy mountain at the foot of which the great Monastery of Saint Catherine had stood for two centuries already, the mountain where Moses had received the Law and where God had appeared to Elijah. He went straight to a wise old elder named Abba Martyrius and asked to become his disciple. Martyrius accepted him. For the next nineteen years John lived in complete obedience to his spiritual father. He did nothing on his own initiative. He never spoke unless asked. He labored in whatever obedience Martyrius assigned him. He learned to crucify his own will. The whole Orthodox monastic tradition is built on this principle: the disciple does not become a spiritual father by reading books or by attaining theological degrees. He becomes a spiritual father by submitting himself, for many years, to a real spiritual father, until the same Holy Spirit who has been at work in his elder begins to be at work in him.

When Abba Martyrius reposed, John was free of his obedience. Most monks at that point would have settled in to ordinary monastic life. John did the opposite. He went off into a wild place called Tholas, deeper in the Sinai desert, and lived there alone for forty years. Forty years. The Synaxarion describes what he did there in five words: "silence, fasting, prayer, and tears of penitence." That was the substance of forty years. He spoke to no one for long periods. He ate the bare minimum that the monastic rule allowed. He prayed almost without ceasing. He wept over his sins. He made one obedience: when a disciple named Moses asked to be his student, John accepted him, and through one beautiful incident (the Lord appeared to John in his cell and warned him that Moses, asleep under a rock in the noonday sun, was in danger; John’s prayer caused Moses to wake up just before the rock fell on him), we get a glimpse of what the years at Tholas were really doing to him. They were making him transparent to grace. By the end, the prayer that flowed through him was strong enough to move rocks at a distance.

There is a beautiful story in the Synaxarion. John, gifted with discernment by all those years at Tholas, lovingly received people who came to him for spiritual counsel. He talked with them about their souls. Some of the other monks got jealous and accused him of being too talkative — a very serious charge in a monastic context, where silence is one of the great virtues. What did John do? He did not defend himself. He did not explain. He did not argue. He simply stopped talking. For a whole year he kept complete silence. The other monks watched. They realized their accusation had been wrong. They went to him and begged him to start talking again, because they had come to depend on his counsel and could not bear the loss. He resumed his ministry. The whole episode shows what kind of soul he was. The man who could give up his ministry without protest the moment he was accused of misusing it was the man whose ministry was worth listening to.

After forty years alone in his cell at Tholas, John was very old. He had come to Sinai when he was sixteen. He had lived in obedience to his elder for nineteen years. He had lived as a hermit for forty years. By the simple math of those numbers, he was in his mid-seventies. The monks of Saint Catherine’s Monastery, having watched him from a distance for decades, finally came and asked him to be their abbot. He accepted with reluctance. He governed the monastery for four years. Toward the end of his life, the Synaxarion says, "the Lord granted him the gifts of clairvoyance and wonderworking." It was during these four years as abbot that he wrote The Ladder. The man who had spent forty years learning the spiritual life by living it now spent four years writing it down for everyone who would come after him. He died around the year 649. He had been a monk for sixty years.

The Ladder of Divine Ascent has thirty steps because that is how many years the Lord lived hidden in Nazareth before he began his public ministry. The first step is the renunciation of the world: turning away from everything that competes with God for the soul’s loyalty. The middle steps cover the major passions and how to fight them: gluttony, lust, avarice, anger, despondency, vainglory, pride. Each gets a chapter, sometimes two. The book teaches what each passion looks like, how it works, what its symptoms are, and how to overcome it. The closing steps cover the highest virtues: prayer, dispassion, and finally, on the thirtieth step, love. The Lord, says the very last word of the book, is love. Saint John writes with extraordinary humanity and even humor. He uses analogies, jokes, riddles. He never imposes rigid rules but offers practical wisdom, experiential insight, and the kind of advice that only comes from someone who has actually walked the road. The book has been read every single Lent in every Orthodox monastery for fourteen hundred years.

The seventh step of the Ladder is about something the Orthodox tradition calls "joy-creating mourning" — the gift of tears. It is the deep, healing weeping that comes when the soul finally sees its own sins clearly and turns toward Christ in repentance. These are not the bitter tears of despair. They are the tears that wash the soul. They burn through impurity the way fire burns through wood, leaving the soul cleaner than before. Saint John spent forty years at Tholas weeping these tears. He knew them intimately. He says they are not optional for the Christian life but essential. The soul that has never wept over its sins has never really faced them. The soul that has wept them through is the soul that begins to know the deeper joy that lies on the other side of repentance.

The image at the heart of Saint John’s book comes from a dream the patriarch Jacob had long ago in the Old Testament. Jacob was running from his brother Esau, who wanted to kill him. He came to a place called Bethel, lay down with a stone for a pillow, and fell asleep. He dreamed of a ladder reaching from earth to heaven, with angels going up and coming down on it, and the Lord standing at the top. When he woke up he said: surely the Lord was in this place, and I knew it not. The Orthodox tradition has always read Jacob’s ladder as a foreshadowing of the spiritual life: there is a real ladder set up between earth and heaven, with real angels coming and going on it, with the real Lord at the top. Saint John structured his entire book around that image. His thirty rungs are the rungs of Jacob’s ladder. Every Christian climbs them, slowly, painfully, joyfully, all the way to where the Lord is waiting.

Saint John of the Ladder matters to every Orthodox Christian because he gives us the road map. Most of us know we want to be closer to God. Most of us do not know how to get there. The Ladder shows us. It does not promise quick results. It does not flatter us. It tells us, step by step, what the journey actually looks like. The first step is renunciation of the world. The thirtieth step is union with the Lord who is love. In between are twenty-eight other steps, including the long, painful, necessary work of recognizing and overcoming our own particular passions. The Orthodox Church has dedicated the Fourth Sunday of Great Lent to Saint John’s memory because every year, in the middle of the Great Fast, we need his help. We need to be reminded that the road has steps. We need to be reminded that the steps go somewhere. We need to be reminded that the Lord is at the top. Saint John, who climbed all thirty steps in his own life, prays for every Orthodox Christian who is climbing them now.