John of Dalyatha

John was born early in the eighth century in Ardamut, in the region of Beth Nuhadra, in the mountains of what is now northern Iraq. He entered the monastery of Mar Yozadaq as a young man, spent seven years learning the common life, and then went up into the mountains of Dalyatha, the name means the vine-branches, to live alone. He is often called John Saba, John the Elder. He spent decades in that solitude, came down late in life to found a monastery, and died around 780.

He left letters, around fifty survive, along with a set of homilies and short chapters on the spiritual life. They are among the most vivid first-person accounts of prayer in Christian literature.

What John describes is not doctrine about God but sight of God. He writes about the soul becoming clear like glass, about the light of the Trinity seen within the purified heart, about weeping that turns to joy, about the body itself being caught up. He writes with a directness that is almost uncomfortable: he tells his correspondents what happened to him, and asks whether it happens to them.

That directness cost him. In 786 or 787, a synod of the Church of the East under the patriarch Timothy I condemned John of Dalyatha along with two other mystical writers, Joseph Hazzaya and John of Apamea. The charge was essentially that he claimed the divine nature could be seen, that the vision he described crossed a line the church had drawn between the Creator and every created eye. His writings were formally banned in his own communion.

The ban did not hold, and the way it failed is telling. The West Syriac church, a different communion, technically hostile, copied and preserved him. So did monks in the Greek world, where some of his work travelled under the name of Isaac of Nineveh. Through those channels his writing reached Mount Athos, and pieces of it were eventually printed in Greek among the works of other authors. He was condemned by his own church, kept alive by its rivals, and read for a thousand years under other men's names.

His reputation was rehabilitated in the East Syriac tradition itself within a couple of centuries. Modern editions have restored his letters to him, and he is now recognized as one of the great voices of Syriac spirituality, alongside Isaac of Nineveh and Sahdona.

Sources: John of Dalyatha, The Letters, ed. and trans. Mary T. Hansbury; Sebastian Brock, The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life; William Wright, A Short History of Syriac Literature; Bar Hebraeus, Chronicon Ecclesiasticum.