The Ladder of Divine Ascent

Climacus Invented the Phenomenology of Inner Combat That Depth Psychology Later Rediscovered

The Ladder of Divine Ascent is the founding document of systematic introspective cartography in the Christian East. Written by a seventh-century abbot at Mount Sinai who had spent forty years as a hermit, it accomplishes something no prior monastic text had managed: a comprehensive taxonomy of inner states — passions, virtues, demons, consolations — organized not as abstract theology but as clinical observation drawn from direct experience. Climacus insists that “the true teacher is one who has received directly from heaven the tablet of spiritual knowledge, inscribed by God’s own finger” and that “you cannot discover from the teaching of others the beauty of prayer.” This empiricist stance anticipates the phenomenological method that would not appear in Western psychology for over a millennium. When Evagrius of Pontus catalogued eight logismoi (thought-patterns) in the fourth century, he provided the raw classification. What Climacus does is integrate that classification into a lived developmental sequence, complete with causes, symptoms, effects, and remedies for each passion — a structure that reads less like a rule book and more like a diagnostic manual. The parallel to Edward Edinger’s work on ego-inflation and deflation is instructive: both authors treat psychological states as stations on a transformative journey, each requiring specific recognition before the next becomes accessible. But where Edinger draws on the ego-Self axis as his orienting metaphor, Climacus uses the ladder — and then subverts it.

The Ladder Is a Spiral, Not a Staircase: Climacus Against His Own Metaphor

Kallistos Ware’s introduction makes a crucial observation that most readers miss: the Evagrian division between active life (praxis) and contemplative life (theoria) that ostensibly structures The Ladder is not followed consistently. Steps nominally devoted to virtues contain contemplative material; the final step on love “transcends the differentiation between the two.” Christos Yannaras noted that Climacus deploys the Evagrian scheme “without any great exactitude,” and the reason is structural, not accidental. Climacus designed his text as what the preface calls “the text of a play or the notations of a musical composition whose internal patterns and consistencies may well be described and established, but which really come to true being only in a living enactment.” This is the language of initiation, not instruction. The ladder image catches the eye and organizes the reader’s expectation, but the actual experience of reading — and living — the thirty steps reveals recursive confrontation with the same demons at deeper levels. Pride reappears within humility; vainglory infects penitence; the monk who masters lust discovers subtler forms of avarice in his attachment to spiritual achievement. This recursive structure maps directly onto the alchemical process that Jung identified in his reading of medieval texts — the circulatio in which solve and coagula repeat at progressively more refined levels. Climacus is not building a staircase; he is describing an opus.

Obedience as Ego-Death: The Monastic Laboratory for Relativizing the Self

The longest and most psychologically penetrating section of The Ladder is Step 4, on obedience, and it deserves to be read alongside Jung’s concept of the ego’s necessary subordination to the Self. The monk “puts aside the capacity to make one’s own judgment” and submits to a spiritual father “in everything great or small, reserving to himself not even the tiniest domain of personal initiative.” The story of Isidore, who spent seven years at a monastery gate begging passersby to pray for him because “I am an epileptic,” traces a phenomenological arc from bitter self-recrimination through expectation of reward to genuine self-abasement — a sequence that precisely mirrors what Marion Woodman would describe as the ego’s progressive stripping before the archetypal feminine, or what Edinger maps as the repeated deflation necessary for individuation. Climacus is explicit that this is not blind obedience but purposeful dissolution: the monk “knowing his own special failings and proclivities, chooses a director” and the submission becomes “the avenue by which to transcend weakness.” The self is not annihilated but relocated. The preface captures this with striking precision: “the self, reduced through obedience not only to a humble recognition of its own insignificance, but also to an actualization of that insignificance, will then lie open to receive the grace of becoming someone pleasing in the sight of God.” Replace “grace” with “the energy of the Self” and you have Jung’s formula for individuation through ego-relativization.

Eros Transfigured, Not Suppressed: Climacus as the Desert’s Depth Psychologist of Desire

The passage that most decisively separates Climacus from the caricature of world-hating asceticism is his treatment of eros. “I have watched impure souls mad for physical love (eros) but turning what they know of such love into a reason for penance and transferring that same capacity for love (eros) to the Lord.” Fire is quenched by fire, not by water. This is not sublimation in the Freudian sense — a defensive displacement of instinct into culturally acceptable channels. It is closer to what James Hillman called the “deepening” of an image: the erotic impulse is not redirected away from the body but carried through the body into its archetypal ground. Climacus affirms that “physical love can be a paradigm of the longing for God” and that dispassion (apatheia) is “resurrection of the soul prior to that of the body” — a positive, dynamic state indistinguishable from love itself. “Love, dispassion and adoption are distinguished by name, and name only.” This is a man writing from within the tradition that produced the most extreme mortifications in Christian history — and he is saying that the body is to be transfigured, not destroyed. “Sin is evil, but not the body and its natural impulses.” The warfare against the passions carries the watchword “transfigure, not suppress; educate, not eradicate.” No text in the depth psychology library articulates the difference between repression and transformation with greater economy.

For contemporary readers, The Ladder matters not as a historical curiosity but as the most rigorous pre-modern attempt to map the full phenomenology of psychospiritual transformation — from the grossest passions to the most refined states of union — while insisting throughout that the map is worthless without the territory. It is the text that proves ascetic Christianity and depth psychology share a common object of study: the soul’s war with itself, and the possibility that this war ends not in victory but in transfiguration.