Early medieval (7th century)
Feast: March 30
His book describes thirty steps from earth to heaven. Step one is renunciation. Step thirty is love. Everything in between is the fight.
Somewhere around the age of sixteen, John entered the monastery at the base of Mount Sinai and spent the next sixty years there — first as a monk, then as a hermit in a cave nearby, then reluctantly as abbot. He was seventy-five when the monks asked him to write down what he knew about the spiritual life. The result, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, has been read in Eastern monasteries every Lent for fourteen hundred years. It describes thirty rungs — one for each year of Christ’s hidden life — climbing from the decision to leave the world all the way to the summit of faith, hope, and love. The middle rungs are where it gets uncomfortable. John writes about anger with surgical precision: ‘I have seen people who seemed angry but kept silence; to me they seemed more worthy of praise than those who argued courteously.’ He describes monks who wept so hard in prayer that their tunics were soaked. He tells of a monastery near Alexandria where the dying whispered their worst sins to each other as a final act of honesty. Nothing in the Ladder is abstract — it’s all particular monks doing particular things, failing in particular ways. An icon tradition shows monks climbing the ladder while demons try to pull them off; some fall. John never pretends the ascent is guaranteed. He only insists it’s worth attempting.