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The Ladder of Divine Ascent

The Ladder of Divine Ascent

The Ladder of Divine Ascent is a work by John Climacus (600).

Core claims

  • The Ladder of Divine Ascent is not a manual of repression but a phenomenology of psychic transformation in which fallen passions are transfigured rather than eradicated — making it the earliest systematic Christian text to articulate what depth psychology would later call the reorientation of libido.
  • Climacus’s doctrine of obedience functions not as authoritarian submission but as a deliberate technology for dismantling the ego’s claim to sovereignty — a practice structurally identical to what Jung described as the relativization of the ego before the Self.
  • The ladder image is deliberately misleading: Climacus himself undermines linear spiritual progress by insisting that contemplative and active life interpenetrate at every step, producing a spiral phenomenology of the soul closer to alchemical recursion than to any rationalist stage model.
  • How does Climacus’s doctrine that “fire is quenched by fire, not by water” compare with James Hillman’s critique of ego-psychology’s attempt to manage rather than deepen the archetypal image, particularly in Re-Visioning Psychology?
  • In what ways does the phenomenology of obedience in Step 4 of The Ladder parallel or diverge from Edward Edinger’s account of ego-deflation as a precondition for individuation in Ego and Archetype?
  • Climacus draws on Evagrius’s eight logismoi but reorganizes them into a developmental sequence; how does this compare with Gabor Maté’s reframing of addiction as attachment disorder in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, particularly regarding the relationship between despondency (akedia) and compulsive behavior?

See also

  • Library page: /library/ancient-roots/climacus-ladder-divine-ascent/

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