Doubts about sacrifices, prayers, fate, and providence in the second- to
fifth-century Mediterranean world produced new concepts of individual
prayer for Christians and non-Christians alike. The Ladder of Prayer
and the Ship of Stirrings explores the discourse on the praying self
as an ascetic way of life, as an aspect of interiority, and as a path to
the divine in Late Antique Eastern Christianity. It deals with the
transposition of Greek ascetic literature — mainly the writings of
Evagrius Ponticus, Abba Isaiah, Mark the Monk, and the Apophthegmata
patrum — into East Syrian thought, and its assimilation with
indigenous features. Specifically, the book probes the emergence of
different sorts of prayer as a pivotal part of the profound religious
shifts and cultural developments that unfolded in Late Antique Eastern
Christianities. The chronological scope of this study ranges from the
second- to fifth-century cultural world of sophists and philosophers,
Iamblicus, Porphyry and Proclus, up to the East Syrian mystical authors
in the fifth-eighth centuries, among them John of Apamea, Isaac of
Nineveh, Dadisho‘ Qatraya, Shem‘on d-Taybutheh, John of Dalyatha, and
Joseph Hazzaya. The book presents how these figures incorporated this
literary legacy into their teachings and melded it with indigenous
Syriac spirituality.