St. John of the Ladder (Climacus)

John was born around 579, of unknown parentage in the eastern Roman empire — most likely Syrian or Palestinian. At sixteen he climbed Mount Sinai and presented himself as a novice to the elder Martyrius. Four years later, when his tonsure was given him, an aged ascetic named Anastasius, who had taken no notice of him before, prophesied that he had this day received a hegumen of Sinai. He was given to the elder Martyrius for his guidance and for nineteen years lived under perfect obedience.

At forty he went out into the wilderness — to a small cell at a place called Tholas, on the south face of the mountain, five miles from the main monastery — and lived there forty years in silence. He worked at handcraft and prayed; he ate what monks brought him at the door; he wept (so his disciples said) until the floor of his cave was marked with the channels his tears had cut. He never once made a show of his austerities — when guests came to him he ate with them whatever they brought.

When he was already eighty, the brothers of the great Sinai monastery came to him in deputation and begged him to become their abbot. He came down from his cell and accepted. The Ladder of Divine Ascent he wrote during his abbacy, at the request of the abbot of the related monastery at Raithou on the Red Sea. The book is built as thirty steps — the thirty hidden years of the Lord's life before His public ministry — and walks the soul from the renunciation of the world (step 1) through the major passions (gluttony, lust, avarice, anger, sloth) to the final step which is love. It has been read every Lent in the Orthodox monastic world for fourteen centuries.

After only four years of his abbacy John went back to his cell at Tholas and to his brother George, who was abbot of a smaller community there. He reposed within months — about 649 — at the age of eighty or eighty-four. The Church gives him his name from his book and reads it through Lent; he is commemorated on March 30 and on the Fourth Sunday of Great Lent, which is named for him.