John Climacus
579 CE–649 CE · Mount Sinai (Wilderness)
John Climacus (also called John of the Ladder or John of Sinai) was a Byzantine monk and ascetic writer who spent virtually his entire adult life on Mount Sinai, first as a disciple under the elder Martyrius, then as a hermit for some forty years near a place called Thola, and finally as hegumen (abbot) of the Sinai monastic community for approximately four years before resigning and returning to his hermitage shortly before his death. He is best known as the author of The Ladder of Divine Ascent (Klimax tou Paradeisou), a thirty-step manual of monastic and spiritual progress that has been read aloud in Orthodox monasteries every Great Lent for nearly fourteen centuries, ranking in practical influence second only to the Psalter in the Christian East. The work was composed at the request of John, Abbot of Raithu, a monastery on the shores of the Red Sea, and guides the reader from renunciation of the world through the conquest of the passions to the summit of love, faith, and hope. A shorter companion piece, To the Pastor (Liber ad Pastorem), addressed the duties of a spiritual father. His surname "Climacus" derives from the Greek title of his masterwork. His dates and birthplace are disputed; see notes.
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Mount Sinai (Wilderness)Wilderness of Sinai
What they did here
John spent his entire monastic life at and around Mount Sinai: first as a disciple under the elder Martyrius (not the monastery's abbot) for approximately nineteen years, then as a hermit at Thola for roughly forty years (tradition via Daniel of Raithu; other accounts give twenty years), and finally as hegumen for approximately four years before resigning and returning to his hermitage shortly before his death.
About Mount Sinai (Wilderness)
Mount Sinai (Har Sinai, also called Horeb) is, according to the Torah, the mountain in the wilderness where God revealed Himself to Israel and gave the Torah to Moses after the Exodus; the tradition is also honoured in Christianity and Islam. Its original location is uncertain and several sites have been proposed, but since late antiquity it has been identified with Jabal Musa, a 2,285-metre peak in Egypt's southern Sinai Peninsula. Christian monks were living there by the late fourth century, and the Byzantine emperor Justinian built St Catherine's Monastery at its foot in 548–565; it is often described as the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery. Ascetic writers such as John Climacus, author of The Ladder of Divine Ascent, lived there.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with John Climacus’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works
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