John Climacus

John Climacus (c.579-649), also called John of the Ladder or John Scholasticus, was a monk of Mount Sinai who entered the Vatos monastery (today Saint Catherine’s) around the age of sixteen and spent some forty years in solitary ascetic struggle before, late in life, being persuaded to serve as abbot (hegumen) of the community.

He takes his surname from his one great book, the Klimax or Ladder of Divine Ascent, written near the end of his life at the request of John, abbot of Raithu. The work maps the contemplative and ascetic life as a ladder of thirty rungs, one for each year of Christ’s life before his baptism, ascending from renunciation of the world through the long labour against the passions to stillness, prayer, dispassion, and finally love at the summit.

Within the Atlas, Climacus is the classical architect of the inner disciplines that later crystallised as hesychasm. He treats the mind as something to be gathered, watched, and guarded rather than merely believed with, and he gives the tradition its most quoted instruction on uniting the invocation of the name of Jesus with the rhythm of breathing.

His themes of hesychia (stillness), nepsis (watchfulness), penthos and the gift of tears, and apatheia (dispassion) supply the vocabulary of Eastern contemplative practice. Read every Lent in Orthodox monasteries, the Ladder became a foundational manual for the Byzantine hesychast revival and for the Jesus Prayer or prayer of the heart.