Fairacres Publications 171

The anonymous fourth-century Syriac author of the Book of Steps wrote to and about his local Christian community. It is a manual of Christian living written before monasticism had taken its traditional shape. However, the distinction between the duties and expectations of ‘the Perfect’ and ‘the Upright’ hint at a development towards monastic life. Robert Kitchen points out that the text has always had trouble getting noticed; to put this teaching into a modern context he summarizes the content of its thirty chapters, and gives a short commentary on a core passage from each one.