Stairways to Heaven: Klimakos and Climacus
Stairways to Heaven: Klimakos and Climacus

Summary/Abstract: “Stairways to Heaven: Klimakos and Climacus” is an investigation of an unusual instance in Kierkegaard’s use of names, an attempt to explain the fact that Kierkegaard, whose pseudonyms – generally speaking – cannot be linked to “real” people, made one exception, when he adopted the name Johannes Climacus, the Latin version of the Greek Ioannes Klimakos; and built a bridge between Klimakos – a historical Sinaite hermit (579-649) from Egypt – and his preferred pseudonym, Johannes Climacus – an anti-system Copenhagen student, poet, humorist. I believe that the author’s choice of his Climacus pseudonym, his use of the allegory of the mystical ladder to paradise, might be the result not only of historical facts and events contemporary to Kierkegaard, the prompting of providence, but also of a subtle mythical radiation that Kierkegaard was exposed to; that he was influenced by an unseen corpus of archetypes, religious and mythological motifs related to the idea of the purification of the soul through the body, and to that of a symbolic ladder of spiritual ascent, built in order to “facilitate the gods’ descent to earth, or ensure the ascent of the dead man’s soul”.

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