St John Climacus

John came to Mount Sinai as a youth of sixteen, was tonsured there, and after his elder's death withdrew to a hermitage at Tholas, where he lived some forty years in stillness, prayer, and study. Late in life, the fathers of Sinai compelled him to become abbot of the great monastery at the foot of the mountain. At the request of another abbot, John of Raithu, he wrote the book that gave him his name: the Ladder (Klimax) of Divine Ascent, thirty steps from renunciation of the world to faith, hope, and love, one for each year of Christ's hidden life. Shrewd, severe, and unexpectedly funny about human self-deception, the Ladder became the most widely used handbook of ascetic life in the Christian East; monasteries still read it aloud every Great Lent, and the fourth Sunday of the Fast is dedicated to its author. Precise dates for his life are uncertain; his ladder is not.