The Disciple of the Desert

St. Sisoes the Great belongs to the second and third generation of the Egyptian desert fathers — the monks who did not found the desert life but received it from Antony, Macarius, and their peers and carried it into the fifth century. This file locates Sisoes within that network: his own roots in Scetis, the fathers he is shown beside in the Apophthegmata Patrum, and above all his disciple Abraham, through whom several of his most important sayings are transmitted. The desert was a web of relationships of fathers and disciples, and Sisoes is known to us only as he stands within it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; model of repentance)

The Generations of the Desert

The Egyptian monastic movement of the fourth and fifth centuries was not a single institution but a succession of generations, each receiving the life from the one before. The founders — Antony in the eastern desert, Amoun in Nitria, Macarius the Great in Scetis, Pachomius in the cenobia of the Thebaid — are the first generation; their immediate disciples and the great fathers of the Apophthegmata are the second; and the monks who learned from these, into the fifth century, are the third (Chitty 1966; Harmless 2004). The Sayings of the Desert Fathers are, in large part, the record of this transmission: a father speaks a word, a disciple receives it and hands it on, and the word is eventually written down with the name of the elder attached (Harmless 2004; on the structure of the collection, see The Apophthegmata and the Tradition).

Sisoes stands in this succession as a father of the second and third generation. He had lived in Scetis, the great monastic settlement of the western desert (the Wadi al-Natrun), in the company of Abba Or, before withdrawing to the eastern desert and the mountain of Antony (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes; trans. Ward 1984; on Scetis, cf. St. Macarius the Great and St. Moses the Black). He did not know Antony as a living teacher — he came to the mountain after Antony’s death — but he is remembered as continuing Antony’s anchoritic life, and so as a living link between the founding generation and the desert of the fifth century (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes 28; Ward 1984; see The Hermit of Antony’s Mountain).

Sisoes Among the Fathers

The Apophthegmata show Sisoes in a web of relationships with other fathers, named and unnamed, who came to him or to whom he came. He is associated with Abba Or, with whom he had lived in Scetis (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes; Ward 1984). He is shown receiving brothers who travel to consult him as an elder of authority, and he is shown himself seeking the counsel and humility of others (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes 33, 45; Ward 1984). The sayings preserve his exchanges with monks who ask him how to make progress, how to keep the heart, how to deal with anger and with the thoughts, and his answers — terse, weighty, often turning the question back upon the questioner’s pride — are the substance of his memory (the sayings are gathered in The Apophthegmata of Sisoes).

It is characteristic of the Apophthegmata that the fathers are known relationally: a saying typically takes the form “a brother came to Abba Sisoes and said …,” and the elder is revealed in his response (Ward 1984, introduction; Harmless 2004). Sisoes is thus not a biography but a voice within a conversation — the desert’s collective conversation about how a soul is saved. His distinctiveness within that conversation is his relentless self-accusation: where other fathers give measured counsel, Sisoes again and again deflects honor and confesses that he himself has not begun (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes 9, 13, 14; Ward 1984; see The Humility of Sisoes).

The Disciple Abraham

Among the disciples who attended Sisoes, the tradition names Abraham, who served the elder and through whom several sayings are preserved. The Apophthegmata show Abraham as the disciple present with Sisoes in his cell, the one to whom the elder speaks and the one who reports what the elder said and did — including, in the tradition of his repose, the disciple who witnesses and records the radiant deathbed scene (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes; trans. Ward 1984; the deathbed scene is treated in The Luminous Repose). The disciple’s role in the Apophthegmata is twofold: he is the servant who cares for the elder in his old age, and he is the channel of transmission, the one whose memory carries the elder’s words into the written collection (Harmless 2004). That Sisoes’ sayings reach us at all is owed to disciples like Abraham who heard and handed on.

The figure of the disciple is essential to the desert’s understanding of spiritual life. The desert held that the soul is not healed in isolation but under obedience to a father, and that the father is in turn purified by the humility of having a disciple to serve and to instruct (Ward 1984, introduction; on this principle, see Spiritual Direction). Sisoes’ relationship with Abraham is one instance of the abba–disciple bond that structures the whole literature: the elder forms the younger, and the younger preserves the elder. In Sisoes’ case the relationship is especially poignant, for it is the disciple who records the master’s last words — that even now, at the threshold of death and with his face shining, the great elder had “not yet begun to repent” (the saying is examined in The Word on Repentance and Repentance Without End).

The Web of Visitors

The Apophthegmata show Sisoes not as a hermit cut off from all human contact but as an elder embedded in the constant traffic of the desert — the visitors, brothers, and seekers who came across the sands for a word. This traffic is the social form of the desert’s spiritual economy: the elder’s solitude was real, but it was punctuated by those who sought his counsel, and the encounters they produced are the very stuff of the Sayings (Ward 1984, introduction; Harmless 2004). Sisoes is shown receiving brothers troubled by their passions, monks asking how to make progress, and visitors drawn by the fame of the man who dwelt on Antony’s mountain; he is also shown going to others and submitting himself to their judgment, for the desert held that even the great elder must keep the humility of a disciple (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes; Ward 1984; see The Humility of Sisoes).

This web of relationships is the reason a hermit’s words survive at all. Had Sisoes truly lived in total isolation, nothing of him would remain; it is precisely because the desert was a community of solitaries — paradoxical as that is — that his sayings were heard, remembered, and handed on. The anchoritic life of Egypt was never pure isolation but a solitude within a network: cells scattered across the desert, joined by paths the brothers walked to seek a word, to confess a thought, to receive correction (Chitty 1966; Harmless 2004). Sisoes lived at one node of this network, and his memory is the deposit of the countless small encounters in which his solitude opened, for a moment, to teach.

The Abba and the Obedient Disciple

The bond between the abba (spiritual father) and his disciple was the central institution of the desert’s spiritual life, and understanding it illumines Sisoes’ place in the tradition. The desert held that no one could heal his own soul unaided; the passions blind the soul to itself, and only by submitting one’s thoughts and one’s whole life to the judgment of an experienced father could a monk be safely guided toward God (Ward 1984, introduction; Harmless 2004; see Spiritual Direction). The disciple opened his heart to the father, confessing his thoughts; the father, by long experience and the gift of discernment, prescribed the remedy; and the disciple’s obedience — even unto what seemed unreasonable — was the medicine that broke the self-will at the root of the passions. This relationship of trust and obedience is the matrix in which nearly every saying of the Apophthegmata was spoken.

Sisoes stands within this matrix as a father, the abba to whom disciples like Abraham and visitors brought their thoughts. But the deeper lesson of his portrait is that he never ceased to be, in spirit, a disciple himself. The man who counted himself a beginner did not exempt himself from the humility he taught; the Sayings show him seeking the judgment of others and submitting himself, keeping the disciple’s lowliness even as an elder of renown (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes; Ward 1984; see The Humility of Sisoes). This is the desert’s ideal: the father who remains a disciple, who forms others without ceasing to be formed, who teaches humility by never imagining he has graduated from it. Sisoes embodies the ideal so fully that he became its emblem.

A Father Known Only in the Tradition

Because Sisoes left no writings and no contemporary biography, everything we know of him comes through this network of transmission — the sayings handed down by disciples and visitors, gathered into the Apophthegmata, and preserved in the desert’s collective memory. This has two consequences that the rest of this collection observes. First, the portrait we possess is a spiritual portrait, shaped by the desert’s own ideals of humility and repentance, not a documentary record of a life (Harmless 2004; see The Historical Sisoes). Second, the later developments of his memory — the elaborated deathbed scene and, much later, the icon of Sisoes over the tomb of Alexander — are extensions of this tradition that must be distinguished from the early sayings (see The Death of Sisoes and Sisoes and the Tomb of Alexander).

What the network of the desert hands down, then, is not a man whose external life we can reconstruct but a voice and a virtue: the voice of an elder who, beside the founders he had inherited, insisted on his own nothingness, and the virtue of a humility so total that it became the desert’s standard for what repentance means. Sisoes the disciple of the desert is, in the end, the desert’s chosen image of the disciple who never graduates — who remains, to his last breath, a beginner.

References

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 59. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Sisoes collection; Abba Or and Scetis; the disciple Abraham; the relational form of the sayings.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The generations of Egyptian and Palestinian monasticism.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The transmission of the Sayings; the abba–disciple relationship; the formation of the alphabetical collection.)