The Ladder of Divine Ascent (John Climacus) 1.11

The Ladder of Divine Ascent, is an ascetic work written for monastics around 600 AD for John, the Abbot of Raithu, a monastery located on the shores of the Red Sea.

The work proved to be very popular in the Eastern Orthodox church and is still widely read today, often during the period of Lent. The book examines the means of ascending to the highest degree of religious perfection by a sequence of thirty steps, which recall the thirty years of the life of Christ, the most virtuous example of Christian perfection.