John of Karpathos

John came from Karpathos, a long thin island in the Aegean between Crete and Rhodes. He is usually placed in the seventh century, and some accounts make him a bishop of the island. The record of his life is close to nothing, no dates that can be relied on, no incidents, no death notice. What survives is a single occasion and what he wrote for it.

Monks living in India, most likely the ancient Christian communities of the Malabar coast in southwest India, or possibly Ethiopia, which Greek writers sometimes called India, sent a letter to Karpathos. They were exhausted. They were living under conditions harder than the monks of the Greek world faced, in isolation, and they were asking whether they should give up.

John answered with a hundred short chapters. That is the whole book: For the Encouragement of the Monks in India Who Had Written to Him. Later he sent a second, shorter text on the same theme.

The chapters are not lectures. They are a hand on the shoulder. He writes to men who have prayed and felt nothing, who have fallen after years of discipline, who assume that the dryness means God has gone. He tells them the withdrawal of grace is not abandonment; it is training, and it is temporary. He tells them that the demons attack hardest the man who is closest to progress, and that the very fierceness of the struggle is evidence they are not losing. He tells them a fallen man should get up immediately and not spend a week grieving, because the grief is the enemy's second attack.

One of his lines has travelled far past its original readers: blessed are those who, when grace is withdrawn, find no consolation in themselves but only tribulation and thick darkness, and yet do not despair.

The hundred texts were gathered into the Philokalia, the great Greek anthology of ascetic writing compiled by Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and Makarios of Corinth in 1782, where they sit alongside Maximus the Confessor and Isaac of Nineveh. Through the Slavonic and Russian translations of that collection, John of Karpathos ended up being read by Russian peasants and by nineteenth-century novelists.

He is on this wall for a small and durable reason. Somebody far away wrote to him in despair, and he took the trouble to answer well enough that the answer is still in print thirteen centuries later.

Sources: John of Karpathos, Texts for the Monks in India, in The Philokalia, vol. I, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware; Migne, Patrologia Graeca, vol. 85; Photios, Bibliotheca, codex 201.