Doctrine's Role in the Ascent to God according to John Climacus

Ascend! Ascend, my brethren who have so eagerly set ascents in your heart (Ps 83:6 LXX), as you hear him say, ‘Come, let us ascend to the mountain of the Lord and to the house of our God (Isa 2:3, Mic 4:2 LXX) who has made our feet like hart’s, and set us on the high places (Ps 17:34 LXX), that we may conquer in his way!’
So wrote pious devotees of the Ladder of Divine Ascent by St. John Climacus, sometime abbot of St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai (c.579–649 CE). This compendious work of spiritual direction is particularly suited to the interests of the present volume—conceptions of Christian life and practice in terms of ascent. The Ladder is fraught with images of maturation, education, and improvement. Its manuscripts are illustrated with depictions of ladders and climbing,3 and its own figuration in the famous twelfth-century icon from St. Catherine’s is perhaps the central image of spiritual ascent and its dangers—in Eastern Orthodox spirituality. If progress and maturation are spatially conceived as the movement from an earthly to a heavenly life, John blazes an upward path to God, marked out in its stages as a ladder.

Copyright 2022 by Don W. Springer and Kevin M. Clarke. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.