The Ladder or "The Ladder of Divine Ascent" is an ascetic book written for a monastic community by John Climacus around the year 600 AD. It was composed for John, the Abbot of Raithu, which is a monastery situated on the shores of the Red Sea.

The work became very popular in the Eastern Orthodox church and remains widely read today, usually during the period of Lent. The work studies the means of ascending to the peak of religious perfection by a sequence of thirty steps, which bring to mind the thirty years of the life of Christ, who is the pinnacle of religious perfection.