Resumen de The Role of Death in the Ladder of Divine Ascent and the Greek Ascetic Tradition
John Chryssavgis (res.)
The unique contribution of the latest academic monograph in the Englishspeaking world on John Climacus lies not so much in its development of scholarship regarding the place or role of John Climacus within the history of ascetic thought in general as in its emphasis on the importance and memory of death in definitive and formative monastic spiritual treatises through the centuries, especially seminal texts such as the Life of Antony, the Apophthegmata Patrum, and the Letters of Barsanuphius and John. The fact that my book John Climacus: From the Egyptian Desert to the Sinaite Mountain, 2004), tracks the very same development as the author's (through patristic foundations and fundamental sources) in the thought of John Climacus, along the very same trail of the Sayings of the desert fathers and the Letters of Barsanuphius and John, might have merited some attention-if only for the objective information of the reader. [...]to engage in a detailed study of the correspondence of Barsanuphius and John, consistently referring to the critical edition and French translation in Sources Chrétiennes even while superficially citing the only existing English translation (!) of this literature (two volumes in The Fathers of the Church series), is surely difficult to justify from an objective scholarly perspective.
