The life of St John Climacus
Tradition holds that he entered monastic life at Sinai around the age of sixteen and spent roughly forty years afterward as a hermit in the desert surrounding the mountain, choosing that solitude over a life of learning he was well suited for, though some modern scholarship proposes instead that he came to Sinai only in mid-life, after the death of his wife. On either account, only in old age did the monks of Sinai persuade him to become their abbot, an office he held for a few years before resigning it to return once more to the silence he had left, spending his last years preparing for death rather than governing others. His reputation reached far enough in his own time that Pope Gregory the Great is said to have written asking for his prayers and sent money for the hospital Sinai kept for pilgrims passing through.
What has outlasted the uncertainty over his dates is the book he wrote: the Ladder of Divine Ascent, thirty steps of spiritual instruction mirroring the thirty hidden years of Christ's own life before His public ministry. Read continuously in Orthodox monasteries for close to fourteen centuries, it remains one of the very few texts outside Scripture to have held that place in the Church's life without interruption.
