... on whom the book focuses: Galen of Pergamon, Basil of Caesarea, Evagrius Ponticus, John Cassian, and John Climacus. Basil, Evagrius, Cassian, and John may be taken to represent threads—albeit influential ones—in a variegated tapestry of late antique spiritual direction. I do not aim...

...Spiritual Direction as a Medical Art in Early Christian Monasticism. Jonathan L. Zecher, Oxford University Press. © Jonathan L. Zecher 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198854135.003.0012 This final chapter returns to the Ladder, but also takes in John Climacus’ other...

...This book introduces readers to John Climacus’ Ladder of Divine Ascent, a seventh-century monastic text of spiritual direction written in the tradition of Chalcedonian Christianity. Engagement with death provides the Ladder’s organizing principle, shaping...

... menologion Gregory Nazianzus John Chrysostom John Climacus Akathistos Basil of Caesarea Psalter Most Byzantines neither read nor owned religious manuscripts. They learned the stories of their faith in other ways: listening to others read to them from lectionaries, the Bible, and patristic...

...Spiritual Direction as a Medical Art in Early Christian Monasticism. Jonathan L. Zecher, Oxford University Press. © Jonathan L. Zecher 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198854135.003.0007 Pathologies of thought, passion, and embodiment are at the heart of John Climacus’ Ladder...

...The book concludes that John Climacus not only drew upon a variety of ideas of memory and practice of death from earlier ascetic literature, but that he drew these ideas together to make of them a unifying and generative principle of the ascetic life. For him the great inheritance of Desert...

...The final figure to be examined is St John of the Ladder, or John Climacus. His work, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, a spiritual classic written on the eve of the Islamic conquests, came to serve as the ultimate expression of Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox ascetic ideals. It would...

... variety of meanings and applications of the concept of repentance are examined, with a particular focus on the writings of several key ascetic theologians of the fifth to seventh centuries: SS Mark the Monk, Barsanuphius and John of Gaza, and John Climacus. It is shown how they predominantly see...

... participants in his reading of the text. Bell Mountain Wilderness John Climacus Monasticism Ozarks Trees aphobia bears distractions fear reading Books, not [the ones] which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one...

... (Precepts) Progn. Prognosticum (Prognostic) Vict. De Victu I IV (Regimen) John [Climacus] Past. Ad pastorem (To the Shepherd). In citations, Arabic numerals refer to divisions in Moore (1979), while bracketed Roman numerals refer to those in PG 88. Scal. Scala paradisi (Ladder of Divine Ascent). Citations...