Hagiographie topic in the life of John of Sinai (on the material of the old printed edition of the Ladder of 1647)

The article analyzes the topic in the brief Life of John of Sinai, compiled by Daniel of Raifa, on the material of the old printed edition of the Ladder of 1647. As a translation into Russian, the Optina text of the Ladder (Lestvitsa) is used as the most authoritative. The author solves the question of the relationship between the universal hagiographic “scheme” of the lives of the venerable saints and the variability of the forms of expression of the topic in a particular life. To identify the originality of the topic, a hermeneutic method of reading the text penetrating into its semantic content is used. The canonicity of the structure of the life, the presence of key topoi characteristic of the monastic type of hagiographies are revealed. At the same time, the peculiarities of the forms of expression of the topoi are revealed, which is mostly determined by the content of the image of the saint, his personal traits, the characteristic features of his feat, as well as the writing style of the hagiographer. The main topos from the point of view of the value hierarchy in this Life is the image of the Heavenly Mountain which is a synonym for the Kingdom of Heaven, to which the ascetic ascends along the “lestvitsa” (the old Slavonic version of the word “ladder”), consisting of 30 steps (degrees) of spiritual perfection. The motif of the ladder is the second most important plot topos, which has a structure-forming function. The main conflict in the Life is expressed in the struggle of the saint with the passions and his movement from the “material” (corporal) to the “immaterial” (spiritual), which determines the structure of the topic, also divided according to this principle. The semantic meaning of the topos is determined by the focus on the image of not the external, but the internal path of the ascetic. On the whole, recurrent motifs, formulas, images of this Life are characterized by symbolism, metaphoricalness, extreme brevity of expression, a high degree of rhetoric, which is explained by the proximity of this Life to the genre form of the panegyric.