John the Solitary

John the Solitary, also called John of Apamea, from the Syrian city where he lived, wrote in Syriac in the first half of the fifth century. Almost nothing is known about his life outside his own books. He was a monk or hermit, he taught disciples by dialogue and by letter, and he died around the middle of the century. The manuscripts call him ihidaya, the solitary or single one, a Syriac word that carries both 'monk' and 'undivided.'

Even his identity is contested. Several men named John wrote in Syriac in that period, and later Syriac authors sometimes confused or conflated them; Philoxenus of Mabbug condemned a John of Apamea for erroneous teaching, and scholars still argue about whether that is the same man. The safest statement is the plain one: a substantial body of Syriac spiritual writing from fifth-century Apamea comes down under this name, and it is unlike anything else of its time.

His great contribution is a scheme. He read Christian growth as passing through three degrees, taking his vocabulary straight from Paul's contrast of the natural and the spiritual man. The first degree is that of the body, a life governed by appetite and the visible world, where religion is mostly outward observance. The second is that of the soul, the life of struggle, discipline, self-knowledge, and moral effort, where a person genuinely wants God but is still working. The third is that of the spirit, a life given over to God and lived in the light of the resurrection, marked less by effort than by peace, wonder, and a sight of things as they will be.

He insisted that the stages are real and sequential and that most people mistake the second for the third. Much of his writing is the careful diagnosis of that mistake: how a disciplined man may still be full of himself, how spiritual feeling can be counterfeited, how hope is the proper temper of a Christian because the age to come is what he is actually living toward.

His surviving works include a long dialogue on the soul and the passions, letters to a disciple named Hesychius, treatises on prayer and on baptism, and a set of discourses. They are practical rather than speculative, and they are more interested in the state of the person praying than in the technique of prayer.

His influence in the Syriac East was large and quiet. Later writers, including Isaac of Nineveh, the most widely read of all Syriac spiritual authors, took over his three degrees and often his phrasing.

Sources: John the Solitary, Dialogue on the Soul and Passions of Men and the Letter to Hesychius (Syriac texts ed. Sven Dedering and Werner Strothmann); Sebastian Brock, The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life; Philoxenus of Mabbug, Letter to Patricius (for the contemporary dispute).