John Climacus
author: Herman G. B. Teule
source date: 2011
edition published: 2016-09-22-16:00
availability: Copyright ©2011 by Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute Distributed under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

John Climacus

https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/John-Climacus http://syriaca.org/bibl/313 304 http://syriaca.org/person/574 [person] [Abbot of the monastery of Sinai around the year 600.]

Abbot of the Monastery of Sinai around the year 600. Climacus (klimakos) means ‘of the Ladder’, after the title of an important spiritual treatise in which he describes the monk’s ascent to God as a ladder of thirty steps, each step being a particular stage of the spiritual life. The work was originally composed in Greek and enjoyed great popularity in the Byzantine tradition. A Syriac translation originated in Melk. circles, but was in the East mostly read in Arabic. In the W.-Syr. tradition this Melk. Syriac version (ktābā d-massqāne) remained virtually unknown until Bar ʿEbroyo (d. 1286) inserted important fragments into his ‘Ethicon’ and the ‘Book of the Dove’.

Sources

CPG 7850–7853.
C. Luibheid and N. Russell, John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent (1982).
H. Teule, ‘L’Echelle du Paradis de Jean Climaque dans la tradition syriaque: Premières investigations’, ParOr 20 (1995), 279–93.

Herman G. B. Teule