How ‘The Ladder of Divine Ascent’ is constructed

A brief overview of its linear and chiastic fractal design

I promised something short and sweet this week. What simpler topic can I choose than the entire multivalent structure of St. John Climacus’s Ladder of Divine Ascent? Maybe it’s a little less short than I intended, but Substack’s calling it a seven-minute read, which is a big improvement from last week — even if Substack doesn’t know one of my images is nothing but ponderous words! Anyways, St. John of the Ladder was commemorated this past Sunday, the fourth of Lent, so that work is on my mind. I’ll just include here an outline and a few brief thoughts. There are thirty rungs on this Ladder — although the Greek word climax can also mean stairway, the work has always been imagined as a ladder. (And I’ll save you the pain of counting: yes, the ladder in the famous 12th-century icon from St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai pictured above has thirty rungs.) The text of this unrivaled masterpiece of ascetical theology is undoubtedly linear; it describes an ascent. It says as much in the title. As such it is a threefold fractal. But there’s also something to be gained by looking at it chiastically, by seeing the first and third elements of the threefold pattern as having some symmetrical correspondence, pivoting on the second.

But let’s just look at the outline here. I’ve used indentation to indicate the chiastic structure, but the notation indicates linear threefold ascent. I’ll explain after the outline.

So if you disregard the Arabic numerals labeling the chapters, you’ll see a triadic pattern repeated on three layers notated in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Starting from the inner layer, there’s the threefold struggle against the passions numbered with the Roman numerals vi, vii, and viii. Six, seven, and eight are used because St. Maximus the Confessor, in his Chapters on Knowledge, associates the sixth, seventh, and eighth days of the week with the three ascending stages of the spiritual life: practical philosophy, natural contemplation, and mystical theology — alternately called purification, illumination, and perfection.

Then zoom out one notch to the intermediate layer where the struggle against the passions is but the central element of another triad, this time marked with the Greek numerals stigma, zeta, and eta (six, seven, and eight). This triad concerns the practice of the virtues more comprehensively, the struggle against the passions preceded by the fundamental virtues and succeeded by the advanced virtues.

The outer layer encompasses the whole, and it is marked by the Hebrew numerals vav, zayin, and chet (six, seven, and eight). It moves from a break with the world, through the practice of the virtues, ending in union with God. Here the correspondence to purification, illumination, and perfection is most limpid. By breaking with the world, we purify ourselves from the source of contamination corrupting our lives. Illumination, then, is the perception of the energies of God in the world. The virtues are energies of God; they are, in part, what God does, the ways by which God is recognized in the things that He does. When we practice the virtues, and not the passions, we begin to do what God does and are recognized with Him; we are illumined. Thus, issuing out of this purification and illumination is union with God, which is perfection. In the beginning there was communion with the world of corruption; that link broken, in the end we have communion with the God of love. Hence what is triadic and linear also has a chiastic aspect.

This pattern repeats fractal-wise within the practice of the virtues mediating those two extremes. The fundamental virtues in chapters 4–7 are activities of the soul radiating from the actions of renunciation in chapters 1–3. And the advanced virtues in chapters 24–26 are activities radiating from the union with God in chapters 27–30. In the middle is the struggle against the passions. Each of these middle chapters is about overcoming its respective passion, presenting knowledge of its genealogy and instructing how to evade it. So we have here an image of illumination in the negative, but this section functions even more clearly as a chiastic center, insofar as Christian chiasms typically center on the paschal victory over sin, death, and the devil.

Now, within the struggle against the passions, we have again this threefold pattern, which Kallistos Ware identifies simply as non-physical, then physical and material, and then non-physical reprised (his outline is not chiastically presented, nor reflected upon as a fractal, but I adopt his aggregation of chapters unchanged). I retain those physical/non-physical descriptions in my outline because it’s a good way to begin to look at the pattern, but there is much more going on here since the three groups of passions correspond to the three faculties of the soul: thymos, epithymia, and logos. As love of neighbor is the antidote to thymic ills (according to St. Maximus the Confessor),¹ thymic passions entail a social dimension, plus sure enough this section begins directly with anger (the vernacular translation of thymos). The material passions of gluttony, lust, and avarice then are straightforward diseases of desire (the vernacular translation of epithymia) — desire which should be turned to God in fulfillment of the first great commandment. In this order of thymos–epithymia, the second great commandment and then the first, there seems to be an inversion, perhaps the likes of which Kenneth Florence is picking up on.² Putting epithymia in the middle appears to be not a Beauty-first method as Timothy Patitsas would have it, since he sensibly has Beauty corresponding to epithymia and Goodness to thymos, but a Beauty-central method — what we have here in the Ladder is chiastic rather than linear.³ However, in St. John’s scheme of things, it’s also easy to see how thymos rather corresponds to purification in its sense of repulsion from corruption, as with the opening chapters on renunciation, detachment, and exile. Epithymia then corresponds to illumination in its sense of attraction to the virtues. These associations run contrary to Patitsas’s, whereby purification entails epithymetic desire and illumination entails thymic striving. I by no means would call that wrong, but this reading of The Ladder makes the Patitsas model appear to be only half of the story.⁴ The linear must be balanced with the chiastic to achieve a full Christian model even as Christ unites the human and the divine.

Either way, victory over the logos passions follows in the eight position, signaling a type of perfection clearly enough. These passions start with insensibility, which is a lack of feeling, a kind of morbid detachment from the body, not the good kind. And then they end with pride and blasphemy, blasphemy being the social passion of anger presumptively turned against God, which is a chiastic correspondence to thymic repulsion that starts the triadic pattern and which centers epithymia. St. John seems very knowingly to be constructing a chiastic pattern at the same time he is building a linear ladder. At the end of the central chapter on lust, which overturns our basest, most generative desire and turns it towards the good (recall that St. John constantly refers to genealogy and begetting to describe the origins of both the passions and the virtues), which point of the book is exactly the median of the thirty rungs, this divine author announces the following: “This is the fifteenth reward of victory. He who has received it, while still living in the flesh, has died and risen, and from now on experiences the foretaste of future immortality.”⁵

Drawing from The Ladder of Divine Ascent (Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 2001).

So, like the type of image seen here, the Ladder is both linear and chiastic. And it’s also a fractal! To close, I’d like to point out that the relationship of the fractal layers also conforms to the same triadic pattern they repeat. In what I’ve labeled Latin, Greek, and Hebrew we see the progressive concentric expansion from purification to illumination to perfection, each stage containing the previous. Purification is represented by the Latin center in its renunciation of the passions. The Greek middle layer on the virtues signifies illumination even as it plays this role within the outer layer’s linear progression. Then of course the Hebrew layer represents perfection, as in completion, comprehending the whole and containing each previous stage by means of circumscription.

Oh, if only I could be worthy of the least bit of any of this knowledge....

1. Four Hundred Texts on Love 4.75. See my post “To end war and create peace, put on the whole armor of God,” at footnote 3.

2. See Kenneth’s Newletter, various articles.

3. Timothy G. Patitsas speaks of the three transcendentals Beauty, Goodness, and Truth throughout his highly unsystematic magnum opus The Ethics of Beauty (St. Nicholas Press, 2019) and aligns them with the triad of purification, illumination, and deification on p. 98. For his mentions of the tripartite soul, see pp. 69–70, 187, and 583 fn. 29.

4. However, I think Patitsas might have his finger on the dynamic I’m highlighting here when, in a footnote on p. 452, he describes the two great commandments as both sequential and concentric.

5. Saint John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent (Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 2001), p. 121.