ABSTRACT
The choice of Climacus as the required reading in a monastery is a clear signal of its authority and orthodoxy. The stable continuation of tradition is quintessential to the Orthodox Christian church's understanding of doctrine; approved teaching forms an unbroken and undeviating chain of ideas and their practical outworking which can be traced back to apostolic times. So Climacus' summing up of desert teachings about the body and the human being were and remain of crucial importance. The call to imitation of Christ is significant in terms of the integrity of the human person, as it is only by virtue of full humanity that Christ redeems man; the completeness of Christ's humanity reflects the integration of body, soul and mind in man, otherwise it is a docetic Christology. The framework starts with the monastic sine qua non of renunciation of the world, with physical as well as emotional detachment and culminates in hesychia, apatheia and love.
