medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

According to his Bios by Daniel (BHG 882), John Climacus (John of Sinai; d. earlier 7th cent.) was a monk of Sinai who after nineteen years of communal life spent the next forty as an hermit on Mt. Sinai, after which time he was elected abbot of his monastery.  He is famous for his ascetic treatise _Klimax tou Paradeisou_ ("_The Ladder of Divine Ascent_", "_The Ladder of Paradise_"), from whose title and controlling image his appellation Climacus is derived (the latter is a latinization of John's appellation in Greek _tēs klimakos_,  "of the ladder").  Herewith some icons illustrating John's concept:
Holy Monastery of the God-trodden Mount Sinai, St. Catherine (South Sinai governorate), Egypt (twelfth-century):
http://tinyurl.com/gpg2ud7
Pantokrator monastery, Mt. Athos (sixteenth-century):
http://tinyurl.com/3364ye
The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg (sixteenth-century):
http://tinyurl.com/2tawnv

Today is John's feast day in the Synaxary of Constantinople and in its modern descendants in Byzantine-rite churches.  It is also his day of commemoration in the Roman Martyrology.


Some period-pertinent images of St. John Climacus:

a) as depicted in the frontispiece of an eleventh-century copy of his _Klimax_ (Paris, BnF, ms. Coislin 88, fol. 1v):
http://tinyurl.com/blqz8yl

b) as depicted in an eleventh-century copy, of Mesopotamian origin, of his _Klimax_ (Paris, BnF, ms. Coislin 263, fol. 9r):
http://tinyurl.com/79l55n4

c) as depicted the beginning of an eleventh-century copy of his letter to abbot John of Raithou customarily accompanying the _Klimax_ (Paris, BnF, ms. Coislin 263, fol. 147v):
http://tinyurl.com/735u3ec

d) as depicted in an illumination from an early twelfth-century copy of his _Klimax_ in the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC:
http://www.asia.si.edu/collections/edan/object.php?q=fsg_F1909.151&bcrumb=true

e) as depicted (at center) in a late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century fresco in the naos of the Palaia Enkleistra (Old Hermitage) of the St. Neophytus monastery near Tala (Paphos prefecture) in the Republic of Cyprus:
http://tinyurl.com/2f4e83u

f) as depicted (at center; at left, St. George of Lydda; at right, St. Blasius / Blaise of Sebaste) in a thirteenth-century Novgorod School icon in the Russian Museum in Leningrad:
http://tinyurl.com/ybl7krg

g) as depicted (detail of a damaged fresco) in the very late thirteenth- or very early fourteenth-century frescoes attributed to Manuel Panselinos in the Protaton church on Mt. Athos:
http://www.groca.org/images/klimakos2.jpg

h) as depicted in a fourteenth(?)-century fresco in the church of Agios Nikolaos tis Stegis at Kakopetria (Limassol prefecture) in the foothills of the Troodos Mountains on Cyprus:
http://tinyurl.com/yb3bwnm

i) as depicted in a fourteenth-century fresco in the church of the Timios Stavros (Holy Cross) at Pelendri (Limassol prefecture) in the Republic of Cyprus:
http://tinyurl.com/ylz8pxu

j) as depicted in an early fourteenth-century mosaic (ca. 1312) in the parecclesion (now a museum) of the former church of the Pammakaristos (Fethiye camii) in Istanbul:
http://tinyurl.com/2exe43k
http://tinyurl.com/7gefp9k

k) as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. ca. 1312 and 1321/1322) in the chapel of the Most Holy Theotokos in the monastery church of the Theotokos at Gračanica in, depending upon one's view of the matter, either Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija or the Republic of Kosovo:
http://tinyurl.com/7cbhjas

l) as depicted (at left in the panel at upper right) in an earlier fourteenth-century pictorial menologion from Thessaloniki (betw. 1322 and 1340; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gr. th. f. 1, fol. 33v):
http://image.ox.ac.uk/images/bodleian/msgrthf1/33v.jpg

m) as depicted (at right; at left, St. Onuphrius) in the later fourteenth-century frescoes (either betw. 1371 and 1389 or ca. 1397-1398; cleaned and conserved, 1960) on the north wall of the church of the Presentation of the Theotokos in the Nova Pavlica monastery in Pavlica (Raška dist.) in Serbia:
http://tinyurl.com/2cd9m5d

n) as depicted in the later fourteenth-century frescoes (1378) by Theophanes the Greek in the church of the Transfiguration on Ilin Street in Veliky Novgorod:
http://tinyurl.com/zbgq7dz

o) as depicted (at right; at left, St. Sabas of Jerusalem) in the later fourteenth-century frescoes (1389; restored, 1971-1972) in the monastery church of St. Andrew at Matka (near Skopje) in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia:
http://tinyurl.com/zadb4z3

p) as depicted in a late fourteenth-century copy of the _Klimax_ in an Italian-language version in the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore:
http://art.thewalters.org/detail/9603

q) as depicted in a fifteenth-century copy of the _Klimax_ in a Russian Church Slavonic version in the Novgorod Museum of History, Architecture and Art:
http://www.novgorod.ru/english/read/information/manuscripts/the-ladder-of-divine-ascent/

Best,
John Dillon
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