JOHN CLIMACUS, Monk
#1 in Catechetical Cycle on
Medieval Christian Writers
Dear brothers and sisters,
After 20 catecheses dedicated to the Apostle Paul, I wish to resume today a presentation of the great writers of the Church of the East and West in the medieval era. I will speak about John called Climacus, the Latin transliteration of the Greek word
klimakos, which means ‘of the ladder’(
klimax).
It is taken from the title of his principal work in which he describes the ascent of human life toward God.
He was born around 575, so he lived around the time when Byzantium, capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, experienced the greatest crisis in its history. All of a sudden, the geographical framework of the empire changed, and a torrent of barbarian invasions made all its structures crumble.
The only structure that remained was the Church, whic continued in those difficult times to carry out her missionary, human and socio-cultural activities, especially through a network of monasteries in which great religious personalities like John Climacus worked.
John Climacus lived and wrote about his spiritual experiences among the mountains of Sinai, where Moses encountered God and Elia heard his voice. Information about him is conserved in a brief
Vita (PG 88, 596-608), written by the monk Daniele di Raito.
At age 16, John became a monk on Mt. Sinai as a disciple of the abbot Martyrius, an “ancient’, which meant in those days, ‘a wise man’. When he was about 20, John chose to live as a hermit in a cave at the foot of the mountain, in a locality called Tola, eight kilometers from the present Monastery of St. Catherine.
But solitude did not keep him from meeting persons who were desirous of spiritual direction, nor from visiting other monasteries near Alexandria. Indeed, his hermetic ‘retirement’, far from being an escape from the world and human reality, was channeled into an ardent love for others (Vita 5) and for God (Vita 6).
After 40 years of a hermetic life in the love of God and for his neighbor – years during which he wept, prayed, and fought his demons - he was named hegumen (abbot) of the great monastery on Mt. Sinai, thus returning to the cenobitic (communal) life of the monastery.
A few years before he died, nostalgic for the hermit’s life, he passed on the leadership of the community to his brother, who was a monk in the same monastery. He died after 650.
John’s life 'took place' between two mountains – Sinai and Tabor – and one can truly say that he radiated the light seen by Moses on Sinai and contemplated by the three apostles on Tabor [at the Transfiguration of Jesus].
He became famous, as I noted earlier, for his work
Scala (Climax), which in the West was called
Scala del Paradiso (The ladder to Paradise) (PG 88,632-1164).
Written at the insistent request of the abbot from the nearby monastery of Raito,
Scala is a complete treatise on spiritual life, in which John describes the path of the monk, from his renunciation of the world to his perfection in love.
It is a path which, according to this book, consists of 30 steps, each of which leads on to the next.
The path can be summarized in three successive stages: the first is expressed as a rupture with the world, with the aim of going back to ‘evangelical infancy’ – in which the essential point is not the break {with the world), but connecting to what Jesus said, therefore, a return to true infancy in the spiritual sense, becoming like children.
John comments: “A good foundation is that formed by three bases and three pillars: innocence, fasting and chastity. All who are newly born in Christ (cfr 1Cor 3,1) should begin with this, like newborn babies” (1,20;636).
Voluntary detachment from persons and places near and dear to one allows the spirit to enter in a more profound communion with God. This renunciation flows into obedience, which is a way of humility through humiliation – of which there will never be a lack – by one’s own brothers.
John comments: “Blessed are those who have mortified their own will to the utmost and have entrusted the care of their own selves to the Lord – indeed they will find themselves on the right hand of the Crucified Lord!” (4,37; 704).
The second stage of the path is spiritual combat against the passions. Every step of the ladder is linked to a major passion, which is defined and diagnosed, followed by a proposed therapy through its corresponding virtues. All these steps together, without a doubt, constitute the most important spiritual strategy that we possess.
But the struggle against our passions is vested with positivity – it is not only negative - thanks to the image of ‘fire’ from the Holy Spirit. “All those who undertake this good fight (cfr 1 Tim 6,12), a difficult and arduous one… know that they are casting themselves into the fire if they truly want the immaterial fire to dwell within them” (1,18;636) – the fire of the Holy Spirit, which is the fire of love and truth. Only the power of the Holy Spirit assures us of victory.
But according to John Climacus, it is important to be aware that the passions are not bad in themselves – they become bad through their wrong use by man’s freedom. If purified, passions can open up to man the way towards God with the energies derived from asceticism and grace and, “since virtues have received from the Creator an order and a beginning… the boundaries of virtue are endless” (26/2,37; 1068).
The last stage of the path is Christian perfection, which is developed through the last seven steps of the
Scala. These are the highest stages of spiritual life, which is possible to ‘esicasts’, the solitary souls who have arrived at interior peace and quiet - but they are also accessible to the most fervent cenobites.
Of the first three steps – simplicity, humility and discernment – John, in line with the desert Fathers, considers the last one as the most important, the capacity to discern. Every action must be subjected to discernment – in fact, everything depends on profound motivations that need to be weighed.
This goes to the very heart of the person, and seeks to awaken in the hermit, in the Christian, a spiritual sensitivity and the ‘sense of the heart’ – which are gifts from God.
“As our guide and rule in every thing, after God, we should follow our conscience” (26/1,5;1013). This is how one achieves peace of spirit,
esichia, thanks to which the soul can face the abyss of divine mysteries.
This state of quiet, of interior peace, prepares the ‘esichiaast‘ for prayer, of which there are two kinds, according to John: ‘corporeal prayer’ and ‘the prayer of the heart’. The first is that of those who need to be aided in prayer by bodily gestures: extending the hands, making crying sounds, beating the breast, etc (15,26;900).
The second is spontaneous, because it is the result of an awakened spiritual sensibility, a gift of God to those who are dedicated to corporeal prayer. John calls it ‘the prayer of Jesus' (
Iesoû euché), and consists simply in invoking the make of Jesus, a continuous invocation like breathing: “The memory of Jesus becomes one with your breath, and thus you will know the usefulness of esichia”, of interior peace (27/2,26; 1112). So ultimately, prayer becomes very simple – it is the word Jesus that has become one with our every breath.
The last step on the ladder (#30), suffused with the 'solemn inebriation of the Spirit', is dedicated to the supreme ‘trinity of virtues” – faith, hope, and above all, charity. John too speaks of charity as eros, human love, a symbol of the soul’s matrimonial union with God.
And once again he uses the image of fire to express the burning, the light, the purification coming from God’s love. The power of human love can be re-oriented towards God, just as the wild olive tree can be grafted to the good tree (cfr Rom 11,24)(15,66;893).
John is convinced that an intense experience of eros can help the soul to progress much more than a hard struggle against passions, because its power is great. Thus, it is positivity that prevails along our spiritual path.
But charity is also seen tightly linked to hope: “The power of charity is in hope, thanks to which we expect a reward for charity…. Hope is the gateway to charity… The absence of hope annuls charity: our efforts are linked to hope, our travails are sustained by hope, and thanks to hope, we are surrounded by the mercy of God” (30,16; 1157).
The conclusion of
Scala contains the synthesis of the work in words that the author takes from God himself: “May this ladder teach you the spiritual disposition of virtues. I am at the top of this ladder, as my great initiator, St. Paul, says: “So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor 13,13) (30,18; 1160).
At this point, a last question presents itself: Can this work, written by a hermit monk who lived 1400 years ago, still say something to us today? Can the existential itinerary of a man who only ever lived on Mount Sinai in a remote time have any relevance for us?
At first, it might seem that the answer is No, because John Climacus is too remote from us today. But if we look closer, we see that the monastic life is merely a great symbol for baptismal life, for Christian life. It shows, so to say, in capital letters that which we write daily in fine print. It is a prophetic symbol that reveals what it means to live as a baptized person, in communion with Christ, his death and his resurrection.
For me it is particularly important that the top of the ladder, the last steps. are also the fundamental virtues, the initial and simplest ones – faith, hope and love. They are not virtues accessible only to moral heroes, but are a gift of God to all baptized persons. Our life grows in and with these virtues.
The beginning is also the end. The point of departure is also the point of arrival. The entire path follows an ever more radical application of faith, hope and charity. The entire ascent is found in these virtues.
Faith is fundamental, because this virtue implies that I renounce my arrogance, my own thought, the claim of judging by myself, without recourse to others. This path to humility, towards spiritual infancy, is necessary. One must overcome the arrogant attitude which leads us to say, “I know better – in my time, during this 21st century – than those in his time could ever have known”.
Instead, one must trust only in Sacred Scripture, in the Word of the Lord, to face the horizon of faith with humility in order to be able to enter the enormous vastness of the universe, of God’s world. This is how our spirit - the sensitivity of our heart to God – grows.
John Climacus rightly says that only hope can make us live in charity - the hope with which we transcend everyday things, not expecting success in our earthly days but looking forward in the end to the revelation of God himself.
Only in this expansion of our spirit, in this self-transcendence, can our life become great – we can support the efforts and the disappointments of every day, and we can be good to others without expecting a reward.
Only if there is God, the great hope towards which I aspire, can I take the small steps of my life daily and, doing so, learn to love. In love is hidden the mystery of prayer, of personal knowledge of Jesus – simple prayer that aims only to touch the heart of the divine teacher. In this way, our own heart opens up and learns goodness directly from him, from his love.