The sun

At the top of the Ladder stand three virtues that hold all the others. John Climacus compares them to the sun: faith is the ray, hope is the light, and love is the disc of the sun itself, and all three are one radiance. Faith can do all things. Hope is kept by mercy, so that it is not put to shame. And love never fails.

For love John gives a definition surprising in its practicality. Love, in the proper sense of the word, is the abandoning of every unpleasant thought about another person, for love thinks no evil. It does not begin with a great feeling, but with one thought that is not allowed to take root.

With it he gives a test that cannot be avoided. Whoever loves God has first loved his brother, and the second is the proof of the first. Whoever says he loves God but is angry with his brother is like a man who dreams that he is running. John also uses images from ordinary life: blessed is the one who loves God as a man in love loves his beloved, who carries the face of the one he loves in his heart and speaks with her even in his sleep. The love a man already knows in marriage and towards his children is an image of the love of God, and a road to it.

Hope, for John, is the strength of love and the knife that slays despondency. And it is born from the experience of gifts: whoever has not felt them cannot help but doubt.

So the practice is brought down to earth. Every day, when you catch a bad thought about someone, your wife, a colleague, a neighbour, replace it with a good one or a short prayer. Choose one person you find it hard to love and this week do him one concrete good. Keep a list of gifts: what you have received, what you were pulled out of, what came true, and read it when things are hard. And for a man who lives in a family, this rung is lived every day: in patience with his wife, in time with his children, in care for his old parents, in honest work for them. That is no less spiritual than a monastery. It is his monastery.

There are three traps. Love in words, which dreams that it is running. Fear instead of love: John says fear appears as love disappears. And the loss of hope, after which love disappears too. When you lose hope, do not increase your effort; remember the gifts.

At the end of the book John writes that love told him he could not see her as she truly is while he was in the body, but that he should build in his heart a ladder of virtues, at whose top she stands. So the summit is not a place you reach once, but a direction. Christ, John recalls, was baptised in his thirtieth year, as if he had reached the thirtieth rung. And John’s last word is a call:

Climb, climb, brothers.

Only one thing remains: tomorrow you begin again, from the first rung.

N. Ž.