The ladder for ascending to God
In accord with our created state, the universe itself is a ladder for ascending to God
(Saint) Bonaventure, The Mind's Journey to God2
The symbol of a ladder appears throughout Christian mystical writing. It's as close to a perfect symbol as human language can come up with when speaking of “the thing that thought cannot think.” Approaching God requires us to strip away our human limitations one by one.
In order to come to thoughtful consideration of the First Principle, which is totally spiritual and eternal and above us, we must pass through the vestiges that are corporeal and eternal and outside us; this is “to be led along God's path”
Bonaventure (ibid)
We have to reach into our minds and begin stripping away everything that is “not God”.
Then we must enter into our own mind, which is God's image, everlasting, spiritual, and within us: this is “to go to God's truth”; finally we must pass beyond to what is eternal, totally spiritual, and above us, by gazing toward the First Principle; this is “to rejoice in the knowledge of God”
Bonaventure (ibid)
This is what Wittgenstein means, at the end of his treatise on the nature of logic:
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, 6.54
Those who really delve deeply into the nature of logic and language will begin to see that, in the end, these are woefully under-powered tools for understanding the nature of reality.
Image is in the public domain. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Ladder_of_Divine_Ascent_Monastery_of_St_Catherine_Sinai_12th_century.jpg
Quoted in Bernard McGinn (ed) Essential Writing of Christian Mysticism