ABSTRACT
The mosaics of the Sinai and Tabor theophanies in the apse and wall of the Mount Sinai Monastery Church show how the community understood the great eschatological events of the Old and New Testaments. They thus complement the text of the Ladder and expand its spiritual and theological scope. To sixteenth century Franciscans and Dominicans in the New World, the Egyptian death camp was a familiar place. Seen eschatologically, it prefigured their punitive asceticism and the world that they encountered in the new colonies: alien and terrifying, plagued by famine, epidemics, and death, and haunted by demons. The stigmatization of St. Francis (1182–1226) by the crucified Christ that appeared to him on Mount Alverna in the form of a seraph, encouraged visceral and angelomorphic asceticism, among orthodox and rigorist Franciscans, that echoed the program of the Ladder.
