The classic formulation, given by the twelfth-century Carthusian Guigo II in a work titled "The Ladder of Monks," describes four movements that lead upward like the rungs of a ladder. Lectio, reading, attends closely to the text and lets a word arrest the attention. Meditatio, meditation, chews on that word, turning it over and drawing out its meaning for the reader. Oratio, prayer, responds to God from the heart the reading has stirred. Contemplatio, contemplation, rests silently in God's presence, the words falling away into a wordless attention that is received rather than achieved. Guigo pictured the movement as reading that seeks, meditation that finds, prayer that asks, and contemplation that tastes.
The four are not a rigid sequence but a rhythm, and practitioners move back and forth among them. Lectio divina thus bridges the reading of scripture and the wordless contemplative prayer of the Christian mystical tradition, providing an ordinary, text-based path by which the attentive reader may be led from the letter of the word toward the silence beyond it. Its structure has close analogues in the meditative reading practices of Judaism and other scriptural religions, though its specific ladder is a distinctively Christian and monastic inheritance.