ascent Archives - Saint Sophia

The Twenty-Seventh Day of Christmas Advent: Descent is Ascent

12/11/2023

Sermon preached by Fr. Antony Hughes on Sunday, September 8, 2019 at St. Mary Orthodox Church There are a number of characteristics that mark Christian spirituality. One of them is this: The Christian path is a first a way of descent. Most other spiritual traditions are about making an ascent. To be sure, St. Paul writes about ascending “from glory to glory.” But first there must be a descent, for example, from the mind to

Unknowing: Ascent and Descent

07/01/2021

When it says, “He went up,” it must mean that he first went down to the deepest levels of the earth . . . to fill all things. —Ephesians 4:9-10 Philosophies and religions are either Ascenders, pointing us upward (toward the One, the Eternal, and the Absolute) or they are Descenders, pointing us downward (toward the sacred within the many, the momentary, the mystery, and the earth), seldom both at the same time. Yet that’s what we need. Metaphors of

The Twenty-Sixth Day of Great Lent. The Ladder of Divine Ascent and Moral Improvement

04/05/2019

By Fr. Stephen Freeman, April 11, 2016 The Fourth Sunday of Great Lent in the Orthodox Church, is dedicated to St. John Climacus, the author of the ancient work, The Ladder of Divine Ascent. It is a classic work describing “steps” within the life of the struggling ascetic. There is an icon associated with this work, picturing monastics climbing the rungs of a ladder to heaven, battling demons who are trying to pull them off. However,

The Lord’s Prayer (Part IX)

09/24/2015

The fact that Christ and we become one, means that what applies to Christ applies to us, and that we can, in a way unknown to the rest of the world, call God our father, no longer by analogy, no longer in terms of anticipation or prophecy, but in terms of Christ. This has a direct bearing upon the Lord’s Prayer: on the one hand, the prayer can be used by anyone, because it is

The Divine Ladder of Ascent

03/30/2012

Saint John Climacus the Righteous, Author of the Divine Ladder of Ascent He was surnamed “of the Ladder” (Climacus) because he wrote an immortal work, the “Ladder of Divine Ascent.” In this work, we see how, by means of thirty steps, the Christian gradually ascends from below to the heights of supreme spiritual perfection. We see how one virtue leads to another, as a man rises higher and higher and finally attains to that height

Archive

The Twenty-Seventh Day of Christmas Advent: Descent is Ascent

Unknowing: Ascent and Descent

The Twenty-Sixth Day of Great Lent. The Ladder of Divine Ascent and Moral Improvement

The Lord’s Prayer (Part IX)

The Divine Ladder of Ascent

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