The Ladder of Divine Ascent

St John Climacus’ book on the monastic life, written at Sinai in the seventh century at the request of the abbot of Raithu, and the reason he is called Climacus, from klimax, a ladder. It has thirty steps, one for each hidden year of Christ before His baptism, and they climb from renunciation of the world through obedience, mourning, the war with each passion in turn and the long battle with pride, to discernment, stillness, prayer and dispassion, and at the top to faith, hope and love, the greatest of which is love. It is written in short, hard sayings that are easy to remember and hard to forget. Monasteries read it through every Great Lent, and the Fourth Sunday of Lent keeps his memory. The twelfth-century Sinai icon of the Ladder shows what the book warns of: monks climbing toward Christ, and some of them pulled off the rungs by demons.