John Climacus: On Repentance That Leads to Joy
A study of the spirituality of St John of the Ladder, with particular emphasis on the relationship of repentance and joy in the spiritual struggle.
The Spirituality of St John Klimakos
Those who aim at ascending with the body to Heaven, indeed need violence and constant suffering, especially in the early stages of their renunciation, until our pleasure-loving dispositions and unfeeling hearts attain to love of God and chastity by manifest sorrow.[1]
St John begins forthrightly in his Ladder. He is neither flowery with his words nor soft in his speech, but instead speaks simply and with a driving intent. There is a certain ‘brutal honesty’ to his spiritual direction, for he does not make any attempt to portray the path of salvation and sanctification in a way that will be pleasing to men, but rather in a manner that is truthful to the reality of God. It is not every Father who would begin his 30-step manual for spiritual growth with the daunting ‘Renunciation of the World.’
Yet John Klimakos’ directness, while having prompted him to portray the ascetic struggle in clear pictures of the toil and work involved, also invited him to reflect upon the greater task at hand in the spiritual life.Oftentimes the very harshness of his words, in the same breath that it prompts the reader to action, also reaches out and touches him with a taste of depth with which St John viewed all positive action as leading the human person closer to God. In the quotation above, taken from the first step of his Ladder, the Saint is frank and honest about the toil and labour involved in the ascetic struggle: those who participate therein ‘indeed need violence and constant suffering’ and ‘manifest sorrow’. Yet the same sentence does not end before he has proclaimed the great hope that is the goal of the struggle for which these are tools: that ‘our pleasure-loving dispositions and unfeeling hearts attain to the love of God’. We must be careful, when reading Klimakos’ Ladder, that the harshness and seeming negativity of his words on repentance do not, by their foreignness to modern ears, distract us from the equally poignant and forceful comments on salvation, transfiguration, and deification.
We cannot leave our above quotation without addressing another important point that it makes as to the whole of St John’s theology, and this in its opening line: ‘Those who aim at ascending with the body to Heaven…’ (emphasis mine). Our small investigation of this great teacher’s spirituality of repentance can go nowhere without first absorbing this basic notion, that the spiritual quest and all the labours of the ascetic are not concerned with a ‘soul-freeing liberation’ from our bodily nature, in which the body is killed and repressed so that the soul may spring forth refreshed and new. To the mind of St John there is no question that the ascetic life, indeed the life of every Christian, is a journey upon which the whole of the human person—both body and soul—is engaged; and which, at the resurrection and in the fullness of the Kingdom, will again involve the wholeness of that person. Thus John does not attempt to equate spirituality with a theology of soul, but with a theology of the whole of human personhood—we find in the Ladder no sharp distinction between instruction for bodily and spiritual needs, for that very distinction was foreign to John.The human person is a mysterious, ineffable unity of body and soul, indescribable in its character, and unique among God’s creations.
Of all God’s creations, only the soul has its being in something else (the body) and not in itself.[2]
Indeed, one of the great mysteries of existence seemed, to John, to be that of the temporary separation of these two inseparable elements at the moment of death. In the same phrase as the above, he writes:
It is wonderful how [the soul] can exist outside that body in which it received its being.[3]
When St John pictured the human person, then, he thus saw it as an organic whole from which the body and soul could not be extracted separately without destroying the humanity—except in the great temporary mystery at the moment of death, before the resurrection. Yet he was not unaware that this very understanding of humanity presented a unique challenge; for though the body was an integral part of personhood, John knew that it often presented the greatest and most difficult challenges to the spiritual way of the individual. His realism would not let him ignore the passions of the flesh, and their amazing ability to hold a person in captivity. How to treat this body, then, which stands both as blessing and curse? Klimakos himself asks the question,
What is the mystery in me? What is the meaning of this blending of body and soul? How am I constituted a friend and foe to myself? Tell me, tell me, my yoke-fellow, my nature, for I shall not ask anyone else in order to learn about you. How am I to remain unwounded by you? How can I avoid the danger of my nature? For I have already made a vow to Christ to wage war against you. How am I to overcome your tyranny? For I am resolved to be your master.[4]
Yet in this very question, this very struggle which John had with his own nature, we find further clarified an essential element of his spirituality: we do not find John longing to destroy his body, or to repress it into a lingering non-existence. No, to his body he says, ‘I am resolved to be your master.’ As dramatic as his words may often be, as negative as they may sometimes appear, we will try in vain to locate in John’s Ladder a theology of bodily repression; for such a view is based on a perception of body as evil, and this is far from Klimakos’ understanding. We find instead a theology of bodily transfiguration. J. Chryssavgis, who has written what is possibly the best book on John’s anthropology, asks:
How is one to turn away from the sinful desires of the sarx? In a way, this question is wrongly stated. We do not turn away from the sarx itself but, as has been noted, direct it, as a manifestation of the fallen state, towards God.[5]
Our acts of repentance and our life of asceticism are, to St John, our personal efforts at the transfiguration of our person. The fallen humanity which is our ‘flesh’ (sa/rc), is trained and conditioned in the great athletic ‘race’ of life, that it might shed its fallen condition and return once again to be our healthy, divine body (sw~ma). In other words, the ascetic labours form, for John, our human contribution to the process of deification, which is the living focus of the life of salvation. He is not writing a treatise to educate men about some future salvation, but to instruct them in the active life of the present, of theosis and transfiguration of the body—of the person—into that which is pure and divine. Chryssavgis writes:
ohn has not analysed any particular person, let alone a sick person. He has analysed, observed and examined, in his cell in the Sinai desert, the deified, transfigured sinner, the genuine human person. And he assures us that we are all like Christ on Mount Tabor. It is Christ who is a fully healthy man because he is God-Man.[6]
This is a noteworthy comment, for it identifies St John’s perception of the ascetic life as one of deification and transfiguration, but also because it shows him to be squarely in the tradition of the Fathers in speaking of the deification of man as a return to humanity’s natural state. Our salvation is not an ascent to some supernatural realm or mode of existence, but rather our elevation out of our self induced sub-existence, back into the nature that is properly ours. And John makes an original point when he professes that this lifting of humanity out of its fallen death is not something that is afar off, not merely a promise awaiting reality at the Second Coming. Speaking of transfiguration in terms of dispassion, he writes, ‘dispassion is the resurrection of the soul before the body.’[7] It is a process of deification that happens in the here and now, where in our struggle against a fallen nature (that which is para\ fu/sin) we attain once again to our true nature, and become properly human.[8]
This anthropology of a humanity contra naturam and seeking transfiguration ‘back’ into its natural, divine state, moulds the entire shape of Klimakos’ Ladder. From it he has the framework upon which he can elucidate a spirituality of genuine asceticism; for asceticism, in his understanding, is nothing more than the forceful training or conditioning of the human person into its natural state. It is the human (and here, again, we speak of ‘human’ as both body and soul) alignment with the will of God, such that our wilful opposition to His divine plan is removed, piece by piece, little by little, and true theosis can occur.
In discussing the practical application of such an asceticism, we once again come across St John’s characteristic directness of speech. He does not gloss over the fact that our nature is not only fallen, but indeed far fallen, and the friend that is our body (sw~ma) has become conditioned to act as our enemy. Our struggle, then, is not one to be taken lightly, nor are we to expect it to be easy. John warns the monks of Raithu of the toil and pain it will involve, and in so doing uses the metaphor of fire:
All who enter upon the good fight, which is hard and close, but also easy, must realise that they must leap into the fire, if they really expect the celestial fire to dwell in them.But, let everyone examine himself, and so let him eat the bread of it with its bitter herbs, and let him drink the cup of it with its tears, lest his service lead to his own judgement.[9]
Askesis, and indeed transfiguration, are essentially actions of divine purification, and just as gold is purified by the scorching heat of the flame, so are we to expect our own purification to involve elements which are as ‘bitter herbs’ to our senses, so accustomed to pleasure as they are. And we must be careful, John warns, that we accept these elements as essential and necessary to our own transfiguration, and do not try to avoid them; for an askesis of word only is one thing, but true askesis involves all the bodily toils. ‘Let us try to learn Divine truth,’ he writes, ‘more by toil and sweat than by mere word, for at the time of our departure it is not words but deeds that will have to be shown.’[10]
And so the ascetic willingly plunges himself into the fire, trusting that this very act is not one of death, but one that leads to life. But what is he to do during this lifelong process of purification? What is to be his focus and aim in all his earthly movements? To this, St John responds with a mode of instruction that seems squarely founded on the scriptural injunction of St John the Baptist: ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!’ (Mt 3.2).
Repentance seems to be a concept most sorely misunderstood in our modern day. It has come to mean sorrow, or regret for sin; an acknowledgement of wrong and the heartfelt feeling of penitence by which it is accompanied. But while these are certainly valid and essential elements of repentance, they are far from capturing the full depth of the Fathers’ understanding of this act. Repentance in the patristic tradition is not something relegated to the emotions—a mere sorrow or grief, no matter how intense or sincere. It is instead a full and active course upon which the whole human person engages; a true act of metanoe/w, of ‘changing one’s mind or purpose’. We see in this very definition an element that pushes beyond the emotional: sorrow, mourning, pe/nqoj, all are integral parts of true repentance, but they must be of the character that prompts change in the repentant person. One must not simply grieve, but must go from grief ‘and sin no more’.Repentance is an act of change, where the pin-prick of compunction (kata/nucij) inspires man to move out of his habits of sin, and into a purer, more Godly life.
And here we find again the interconnectedness of St John’s thought; for though the term metanoe/w may literally mean a change of mind, John, as we have already discussed, would allow no sharp separation of mind (nou~j) and body. Thus repentance, for him, was an active change of the whole and complete human person.Not only the mind must turn from its sin, but so must the flesh; not only the soul must be pushed to change by compunction and mourning, but so too must the body strive to abandon its sin and climb closer to the image of God. St John understands repentance in its most holistic sense: it is humanity’s recognition of the sinfulness in its entire being, and its active work to change out of that ‘garment of skin’ and into the transfigured state of life in Christ.
Thus can Klimakos’ speak of repentance in moving, driving, even harsh terms. The changing of the person seems, to him, analogous to a battle; for just as a soldier’s enemy has spent years in training to defeat him, so has an individual’s flesh (sa/rc) spent a lifetime growing accustomed to its fallen and sinful state, and thus presents the repentant ascetic with a formidable foe. What might be the helper is often—and especially at first—the enemy. To defeat an enemy requires active combat, and this is precisely what is described in theLadder. Indeed, St John might be considered the penultimate Father of what has now become the sorely misused term of ‘spiritual warfare,’ for he sees the askesis of the repentant Christian as nothing less than a battle against the fallen self, and against the forces of the Enemy who attempt to prevent him from climbing out of his self-induced fall. At times the battle is fierce, and to fight it involves pain, yet that pain is always set in perspective—the ‘negative’ aspects of John’s views on repentance are always cornered by the view of the Heavenly Goal which is constantly set in sight.
‘Eagerly drink scorn and insult,’ he writes, yet not without a transfiguring motivation, for we are to drink it ‘as the water of life (…), and then a deep purity will dawn in your soul and the light of God will not grow dim in your heart.’[11] In the same step he speaks what seems another harshly negative word of instruction: the beginning of our ascetic struggle must involve self-mortification, toil, and work. Yet this is not left on its own; the goal of these efforts is ‘insensibility and insusceptibility to toil and pain.’[12] Even when he speaks of coming to ‘hate the world’—perhaps one of the most misunderstood concepts in ascetic spirituality—he does so with the clear understanding that ‘the man who has come to hate the world has escaped sorrow.’[13] John does not deny the negative aspects of repentance (indeed, he is far more realistic about them than most writers before or after), but he never sets up repentance itself as a negative act. Each labour, each pain, no matter how intense or extreme, is always set in correspondence to its ultimate good. Thus he can even describe with great enthusiasm the squalid conditions of the Prison and its inhabitants, where
One could see how the tongues of some of them were parched and hung out of their mouths like a dog’s. Some chastised themselves in the scorching sun, others tormented themselves in the cold. Some, having tasted a little water so as not to die of thirst, stopped drinking; others having nibbled a little bread, flung the rest of it away, and said that they were unworthy of being fed like human beings, since they had behaved like beasts.[14]
One almost hopes, upon first reading the fifth step of the Ladder in which the Prison is described, that St John is inventing a fictitious place and fictitious sufferings, for the scenes described are hard to bear. Yet this is unlikely, knowing the author’s characteristic honesty and simplicity. Chryssavgis writes,
The Prison is of particular parabolic significance. But it is not a piece of fiction. John is surely describing an actual place of monastic penitential internment in Alexandria, a place of wailing and lamentation.[15]
Chryssavgis goes on to note that, despite its intensity, John did not intend to repel his readers by recounting the story of the Prison, and he is surely right in this. John himself notes that the things described are ‘incredible’, ‘hard to believe’, and will even seem to some to breed despair. ‘But to the courageous soul,’ he writes,’ they will serve as a spur, and a shaft of fire; and he will go away carrying zeal in his heart.’[16] Hearing the tales of extreme suffering is not meant to make us despair, but to give us hope; for it assures us that though the battle be often long and hard, and the measures extreme that are needed to fight it, still it is an upward battle of joy that has been trodden before by the saints.
It is to this very notion of joy that we arrive at the end of our short discussion. Here, in a single word, John encapsulates what he sees as the ultimate goal and end of the spiritual life. We have already discussed this as being theosis, a true transfiguration and deification of the human person, and we have no need to change that definition now. But once we have come to understand St John’s view of repentance and human change, we can begin to see how his notion of personal transfiguration involves the entry of an individual into the true bonds of joy.
There is a darkness to sin which the Saint readily admits, and this darkness is caused by a separation from ourselves and from God. If God is joy, then our distance from Him means our absence of participation in joy itself. And so, as we progress and ascend along the path of mournful repentance, and as we attain again to the natures which are properly ours, we begin to feel joy in new and powerful ways. This is not the joy that we have formerly known, brought on by the gratification of our fallen desires. It is, rather, a holy and spiritual joy, given of God Himself and wrought in the human person through the process of spiritual growth. It is ‘joyful sorrow’ (xaropoio\n pe/nqoj), stemming from our mourning and the grace of God. Perhaps more than any other, this is John’s most creative and original contribution to spiritual theology: the sorrow of repentance, the deep pe/nqoj of the ascetic life, is ultimately joy-creating. John closely links this concept to another element which takes up much space in his Ladder: the gift of spiritual tears. As God sanctifies man and brings him closer to his divine nature, He brings together, in a kind of mysterious unity, the seemingly disparate emotions of joy and sorrow until, at some point on the individual’s spiritual way, the two merge into one great act of love.
When I consider the actual nature of compunction, I am amazed at how that which is called mourning and grief should contain joy and gladness interwoven with it, like honey in the comb.[17]
This unique blending of emotion, wrought by the grace of God, produces in the struggling ascetic a fount of tears different from those he has known before, for these come from God and are not mere tears of grief, but tears of true spiritual sanctification. They are tears that wash from us our sins,[18] show us that our prayers have been accepted,[19] and invite us to realise that ‘the Lord has come uninvited’ into the depths of our being.[20] We are thus prompted to a greater and more intense love for God, the Giver of tears—and here John uses not a)gaph/ but e)/roj, showing that even this passion, so often feared, can be of good and holy use when directed in a sanctified way.
Chryssavgis writes, ‘There is an underlying optimism in John, consisting in his belief that man was created by God for joy and not for sorrow, for laughter and not for tears.’[21] As we ascend the ladder of ascetic struggle, and obtain an ever more intense and heartfelt repentance, we are pulled by God into the heart of true joy; and this is St John’s great promise to those in his spiritual care. At the end of his Ladder, he capstones his thought with a plea to God that restates the full desire of the human person:
Enlighten us, quench our thirst, guide us, take us by the hand; for we wish at last to soar to Thee. Thou rulest over all. And now Thou has ravished my soul. I cannot contain Thy flame.[22]
And then, never wishing to leave his readers without the most intense hope and encouragement, he exhorts them,
Ascend, brothers, ascend eagerly, and be resolved in your hearts to ascend and hear him who says: Come and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of our God, who makes our feet like hind’s feet, and sets us upon high places, that we might be victors with His song.[23]
WORKS FOR FURTHER STUDY:
Commentary and Critique:
Chryssavgis, John. Ascent to Heaven: the Theology of the Human Person According to Saint John of the Ladder. Brookline: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1989.
Texts:
Greek:
Migne, et al. Patrologia Graeca, vol. 88.
English Translations:
Holy Transfiguration Monastery (based on Moore’s trans.). St. John Climacus: the Ladder of Divine Ascent (rev. ed.). Boston: Monastery Press, 1978.
Moore, Lazarus (trans.). St. John Climacus: the Ladder of Divine Ascent. London: Faber and Faber, 1959.
Luibheid, Colm (trans.). John Climacus: the Ladder of Divine Ascent (from the Classics of Western Spiritualityseries). New York: Paulist Press, 1982.
NOTES:
[1] Ladder, 1.8
[2] Ladder, 26.107.
[3] Ladder, 26.107.
[4] Ladder, 15.89.
[5] Chryssavgis, p. 54.
[6] Chryssavgis, p. 50.
[7] Ladder, 29.4.
[8] This is elaborated upon by Chryssavgis, p. 56.
[9] Ladder, 1.9.
[10] Ladder, 26.36.
[11] Ladder, 4.85.
[12] Ladder, 4.4.
[13] Ladder, 2.7.
[14] Ladder, 5.14.
[15] Chryssavgis, p. 131.
[16] Ladder, 5.27.
[17] Ladder, 7.49.
[18] Ladder, 7.6.
[19] Ladder, 7.7.
[20] Ladder, 7.25.
[21] Chryssavgis, p. 149.
[22] Ladder, 30.36.
[23] Ladder, 30.36.
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