Diadochus of Photice

Diadochus was a fifth-century bishop of Photike in Epirus Vetus (modern northwest Greece), a Chalcedonian theologian and one of the most formative spiritual writers of the patristic era. He attended the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and signed the bishops of Epirus' response to Emperor Leo I's encyclical in 457, aligning himself firmly with orthodox Christology against Monophysitism. His principal work, the One Hundred Chapters on Spiritual Perfection, synthesized Evagrian contemplative theology with the developing practice of the unceasing invocation of the name of Jesus, making him a crucial bridge between the Desert Fathers and the later Philokalic and hesychast traditions. He is the earliest major witness to the Jesus Prayer as a sustained spiritual method, and his influence on Maximus the Confessor, John Climacus, and Gregory Palamas was profound. According to Bishop Victor of Vita's Historia persecutionis Africanae Provinciae, Diadochus was carried off in a Vandal raid on Epirus between 467 and 474 and taken to North Africa, where he presumably died before 486.