Forty Years at Tholas

After the death of his elder Martyrios, St. John Climacus withdrew to the remote hermitage of Tholas, some five miles from the main Sinai monastery, where he lived as a solitary hesychast for decades of prayer, fasting, study, and tears. Only late in life, traditionally at about seventy-five, was he persuaded to leave that stillness to govern Sinai as abbot for some four years, during which he composed the Ladder of Divine Ascent before resigning to die in solitude.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Withdrawal to the Hermitage

When his spiritual father Martyrios died, John did not remain in the cenobitic community but withdrew to a place of solitude called Tholas (also given as Thola or Thole, and sometimes located as “Wadi Thola”), lying about five miles from the principal Sinai monastery. There he took up the life of a hesychast and anchorite, exchanging the discipline of obedience under an elder for the more exposed warfare of the solitary cell (Daniel of Raithu, Life of John of Sinai [PG 88, cols. 596–608]; Venerable John Climacus, OCA, oca.org; St. John Climacus, Catholic Encyclopedia, New Advent). This move marks the decisive turn of his life: the disciple who had been formed in the active life of the community now entered the contemplative solitude that would make him a teacher of stillness for the whole Church. The earlier phase of his formation — his arrival at Sinai and his nineteen years under Martyrios — belongs to a distinct period and is treated separately (see The Sinai and the Monk).

The length of this solitude is not uniformly reported. [Disputed: length of the Tholas solitude — most sources (OCA; Antioch Patriarchate) give forty years; Wikipedia gives “some twenty”; the “nineteen years” sometimes cited belongs to the earlier obedience under Martyrios, not the solitude]. The conflation of the nineteen-year obedience with the years of solitude is a recurring confusion in popular accounts, and the two must be kept apart: the nineteen years describe John’s submission to a living elder, whereas the Tholas decades describe his independent hesychast struggle after that elder’s death (Daniel of Raithu, Life of John of Sinai; Venerable John Climacus, OCA).

The Character of the Solitary Life

The texture of John’s life at Tholas can be reconstructed from the very work that grew out of it. His days were given to unceasing prayer, to a measured fasting, to study, and above all to the labor of compunction — the gift of tears that the later tradition would remember as one of his marks. The interior battlefield of the solitary is the logismoi, the warfare of thoughts, and it is precisely this warfare that the Ladder of Divine Ascent anatomizes with such exactness (Ladder, Step 26, “On discernment”; trans. Luibheid and Russell, CWS, Paulist, 1982). What John would later set down as the rungs of ascent was first lived in the cell: stillness (hesychia) as the discipline of the body and tongue in the service of the heart (Ladder, Step 27, “On stillness”), and mourning as the joy-bearing grief that purifies (Ladder, Step 7, “On joyful mourning”). The fortieth-century reader of the Ladder is reading, in effect, the distillation of these solitary years (see Stillness and Prayer; Repentance and Mourning).

The solitude was also a time of reading and writing. The breadth of reference in the Ladder — its dense weave of earlier monastic authorities and even occasional classical allusion — presupposes a man who had spent decades with books as well as with prayer, and the structured, almost architectural ascent of the thirty steps reflects a mind long disciplined by both Scripture and the desert fathers (Daniel of Raithu, Life of John of Sinai; Venerable John Climacus, OCA). The formation of the author, in other words, is inseparable from the formation of the book; the work’s structure is treated in its own place (see The Work and Its Structure).

What Daniel’s Life Relates

Much of what we know of John’s interior life comes through the hagiography of his near-contemporary Daniel of Raithu, and these accounts should be received as what Daniel attests rather than as independently established fact (per Methodology §3.5). Daniel’s Life relates that John ate in moderation of all permitted foods, refusing none, so as to crush vainglory while concealing his abstinence — a strategy of hidden asceticism — and that he likewise slept enough to keep his mind sound, defeating the demon of self-display by ordinary-seeming behavior (Daniel of Raithu, Life of John of Sinai; Venerable John Climacus, OCA). Daniel’s Life further relates that John kept his cell apart from the others, and that he was granted the gifts of clairvoyance and of tears (Daniel of Raithu, Life of John of Sinai; Venerable John Climacus, OCA).

Daniel’s Life also preserves the account of John’s disciple Moses (Moyses), whom John had taken under his care. According to that source, Moses lay down to rest at midday beneath a great overhanging rock; John, at prayer in his own cell, saw him in danger and called upon him, and Moses awoke and fled the spot just before the rock fell — saved, the tradition holds, through his elder’s prayer and vision (Daniel of Raithu, Life of John of Sinai; Venerable John Climacus, OCA). Daniel’s Life relates as well that some of the brethren accused John of being a talkative man who spoke too freely, and that John, rather than defend himself, fell silent for a whole year, neither teaching nor conversing, until the same brethren, grieved at the loss of his word, begged him to speak and teach again (Daniel of Raithu, Life of John of Sinai; Venerable John Climacus, OCA). These anecdotes are the desert’s own portrait of a master of hesychia — and the resonance with the Ladder’s teaching on stillness and on talkativeness is unmistakable (Ladder, Step 11, “On talkativeness and silence”; trans. Luibheid and Russell, CWS).

The Reluctant Abbacy

Only after these long decades was John drawn out of his solitude. Late in life — traditionally at about the age of seventy-five, after the forty years of stillness — he was chosen and persuaded to become hegumen (abbot) of the monastery of Sinai, governing the community of St. Catherine’s at the foot of the holy mountain (Venerable John Climacus, OCA; St. John Climacus, Catholic Encyclopedia, New Advent; Antioch Patriarchate life, antiochpatriarchate.org). He held the office for about four years and then resigned, shortly before his death, returning to solitude and appointing as his successor his brother George, who had himself lived the hesychast life (Venerable John Climacus, OCA; Antioch Patriarchate). The Sinai setting of this abbacy — the monastery, its desert, and its later place in the Lenten cycle — is developed elsewhere (see Sinai Monasticism and Lenten Reading; on the wider Byzantine ecclesial world, The Byzantine Church).

Although the roughly four-year duration of the abbacy and the “abbot at about seventy-five” life-stage are stable across the tradition, the absolute calendar dates float with the wider dispute over John’s chronology. [Disputed: absolute dates of the abbacy — on the short chronology the abbacy falls c. 600–604, on the long chronology c. 644–648; the ~4-year duration and the “abbot at ~75” life-stage are stable, but the calendar dates are speculative] (Venerable John Climacus, OCA; St. John Climacus, Catholic Encyclopedia, New Advent; on the chronological problem more broadly, The Sinai and the Monk and Modern Scholarship and Translations). It was as abbot that John, at the request of John of Raithu, composed the Ladder — a matter narrated in its own section and not repeated here (see The Work and Its Structure).

The Death of the Saint and His Brother

The tradition preserves a final exchange between John and his brother George, to be received as tradition rather than as established fact (per Methodology §3.5). As John lay dying, George grieved that he was being left behind without his brother and guide; John reassured him that, if he should find grace before God, he would not allow George to remain even a single year after him. George is said to have reposed about ten months later, the promise thus fulfilled (Antioch Patriarchate life, antiochpatriarchate.org; Daniel of Raithu, Life of John of Sinai tradition).

St. John is commemorated on March 30, the day of his repose, and again on the movable Fourth Sunday of Great Lent, when the Ladder is set before the faithful as Lenten reading — a liturgical placement treated in its proper section and not developed here (see Sinai Monasticism and Lenten Reading).

References

Daniel of Raithu, Life of John of Sinai [Vita S. Joannis], PG 88, cols. 596–608. The earliest hagiographical life, prefixed to the manuscript tradition of the Ladder; all anecdotes herein are pinned to this source per Methodology §3.5.
Venerable John Climacus, Orthodox Church in America (OCA), oca.org (synaxarion life and commemoration).
St. John Climacus, Catholic Encyclopedia, New Advent, newadvent.org/cathen/08457a.htm.
Antioch Patriarchate, life of St. John Climacus (St. John of the Ladder), antiochpatriarchate.org.
John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1982). Step and Step.section numbering and step titles follow this edition, shared with the Archimandrite Lazarus Moore translation, rev. ed. (Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1979).
Methodology: Citation Standard and Verification Protocol (this repository), ../../METHODOLOGY.md.