The Hermit of Antony’s Mountain

St. Sisoes the Great is remembered, above all else, as the hermit who took up his solitude on the “Inner Mountain” of St. Antony the Great in the eastern desert of the Thebaid after Antony’s death, and dwelt there in the desert tradition for many decades. To settle on Antony’s mountain was, in the memory of the desert, to step into the place of the father of all the monks and to continue his ascesis on the very ground he had hallowed. This file establishes the geography and the tradition of Sisoes’ long dwelling there, distinguishing what the sources attest from the round numbers the tradition supplies.

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

The Mountain of Antony

The “Inner Mountain” (Greek to esō oros) of St. Antony the Great is one of the fixed places of the Egyptian desert tradition. According to Athanasius’ Life of Antony, when the saint sought a deeper solitude away from the crowds that pressed upon him, he travelled three days’ journey into the eastern desert toward the Red Sea and found a high mountain with a spring and a few date palms, and there he settled for the remainder of his long life (Athanasius, Life of Antony 49–50; trans. Gregg 1980). This Inner Mountain — to be distinguished from the “Outer Mountain” nearer the Nile valley at Pispir where Antony had earlier lived — became the most hallowed of the anchoritic sites, the place from which Antony went out to die and to which his disciples returned (Athanasius, Life of Antony 49–50, 91; Chitty 1966). The site is traditionally identified with the location of the present Monastery of St. Antony (Deir Anba Antonios) by the Red Sea, which preserves the memory of Antony’s cave on the mountain above it (Chitty 1966; Harmless 2004).

Antony died on the Inner Mountain in the year 356, in extreme old age, having charged the two disciples who attended him in his last years to keep the place of his burial secret (Athanasius, Life of Antony 89–92; trans. Gregg 1980). [Disputed: Athanasius' *Life of Antony* (89–92) places Antony's death in extreme old age, conventionally dated to 356; some older references give 337. The 356 date, derived from the chronology of the *Life* and Antony's reported age of 105, is the one generally accepted by modern scholarship (Chitty 1966); the discrepancy in popular sources is noted here rather than resolved.] It was to this mountain, sanctified by Antony’s presence and death, that the tradition remembers Sisoes coming to make his own dwelling.

Sisoes Settles on the Mountain

The Apophthegmata Patrum preserve, in the Sisoes collection, the memory that Sisoes lived on the mountain of Abba Antony. One of the sayings opens precisely there: a brother asks Abba Sisoes, “Why have you left Scetis, where you lived with Abba Or, and come to live here in this place?” — and the dialogue presupposes that “here” is the mountain associated with Antony (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes; trans. Ward 1984). Another saying records that “Abba Sisoes lived in Abba Antony’s mountain after the latter’s death” and describes the visitors who came to him there expecting to find the heir of Antony’s holiness (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes 28; trans. Ward 1984). The detail that he came after Antony’s death is significant: Sisoes did not sit at Antony’s feet as a living disciple but inherited his place, taking up the mountain as a vacant inheritance and continuing the anchoritic life upon it.

This makes Sisoes a figure of the second and third generation of the desert — a monk who had not known the founders in their prime but who deliberately attached his own ascesis to their legacy (Chitty 1966; Harmless 2004). The move from Scetis (in the western desert, the Wadi al-Natrun) to Antony’s mountain (in the eastern desert toward the Red Sea) is itself attested in the Sayings as a real displacement, and Sisoes’ answer to the brother’s question turns it into a lesson: he had not come for a better place but for greater quiet, “because the place had become crowded and I lost my interior peace” — or, in the tenor of the Sisoes sayings, because he sought a solitude where his repentance might deepen undisturbed (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes; trans. Ward 1984).

The Tradition of Seventy-Two Years

The later tradition, especially in the liturgical and synaxarion sources, holds that Sisoes dwelt on Antony’s mountain for some seventy-two years. [Disputed: the figure of ~72 years on Antony's mountain is given in later synaxarion and liturgical tradition (and is repeated in many modern hagiographical notices and Church calendars); it is not stated in the early *Apophthegmata Patrum*, which simply record that Sisoes "lived in Abba Antony's mountain after [Antony's] death" (Sisoes 28; Ward 1984). The number is best read as a traditional round figure expressing the great length of his ascesis rather than a precise chronological datum; the *Apophthegmata* themselves supply no count of years.] Such large round numbers are characteristic of desert hagiography, where length of years is a way of expressing the depth and constancy of a life given wholly to God; the Life of Antony itself assigns Antony 105 years and some eighty-five of them in ascesis (Athanasius, Life of Antony 89; Gregg 1980). The seventy-two-year tradition should be received in that spirit — as the Church’s way of saying that Sisoes’ solitude was vast and unbroken — rather than as a figure to be added to a birth date.

What the tradition unanimously affirms, and what the Apophthegmata support, is that Sisoes’ dwelling on the mountain was long enough to make him an elder of great authority, sought out by monks and laypeople alike, and remembered as one who had grown old in the desert (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes 28, 33; Ward 1984). His death is conventionally placed around the year 429, which would make him a man of the late fourth and early fifth centuries, overlapping the last of the first-generation fathers and the rise of the great compilers of the Sayings (Chitty 1966; Harmless 2004). [Disputed: the death of Sisoes is conventionally dated c. 429 in synaxarion and modern hagiographical tradition; the *Apophthegmata* give no date, and the figure is a tradition-based estimate consistent with his being a father of the second/third desert generation, not a documented year.]

The Two Mountains and the Geography of Solitude

The desert tradition distinguished, in Antony’s life, between two dwelling-places, and the distinction bears on Sisoes’ inheritance. Antony had first withdrawn to the “Outer Mountain” at Pispir, nearer the Nile valley, where he received the crowds of disciples and visitors who sought him; only later, seeking a deeper solitude, did he travel far into the eastern desert to the “Inner Mountain” by the Red Sea, the remote height where he spent his last decades and died (Athanasius, Life of Antony 49–50, 84–85, 91; Gregg 1980; Chitty 1966). The Inner Mountain was the place of Antony’s profoundest solitude — the desert within the desert — and it was this place, the most hidden and hallowed, that Sisoes took up after the founder’s death.

The choice is significant for Sisoes’ own portrait. He did not settle at the more accessible Outer Mountain, where a monk might gather disciples and renown, but at the remote Inner Mountain, the place of severest solitude. This is consonant with everything the Sayings record of him: the man who fled honor and sought the quiet in which his repentance could deepen would naturally choose the most hidden of the holy places (see The Long Ascesis). The geography of his withdrawal is itself a statement of his spirituality — a deliberate movement away from the crowds and toward the silence, in imitation of the very withdrawal Antony had made before him (Athanasius, Life of Antony 49; Gregg 1980).

The Meaning of the Inheritance

To dwell on Antony’s mountain was a charged act in the symbolic geography of the desert. Antony was, in the phrase that the Life fixed for all later monasticism, the one whom God “made known throughout the world,” the father of the anchorites and the pattern of the solitary life (Athanasius, Life of Antony, prologue and 93; Gregg 1980; on the founding role, see St. Antony the Great). For a monk to take up his cell on that mountain was therefore to claim, and to be held to, the highest standard of the desert. The Sayings show that visitors came to Sisoes precisely because of this association, expecting to find in the heir of the place the holiness of the one who had hallowed it (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes 28; Ward 1984).

Sisoes’ response to that expectation is the keynote of his whole portrait in the Apophthegmata, and it inverts the logic of inheritance. Far from presenting himself as Antony’s equal or successor, he insisted that he had not even begun the work — that beside the founders he was nothing, and that the longer he lived the less he had attained (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes 9, 13, 14; Ward 1984; the theme is developed in The Humility of Sisoes). Thus the very inheritance that might have exalted him became, in his hands, the occasion of his deepest self-abasement. He dwelt on the mountain of the greatest of the fathers and used the place not to magnify himself but to measure how far he stood below those who had gone before — which is precisely why the tradition remembered him as the model of unceasing repentance (see Repentance Without End).

The geography, then, is theology. Antony’s mountain is the silent backdrop against which Sisoes’ humility is staged: the heir of the holiest place insisting that he had “not yet begun,” the man who possessed the founder’s solitude convinced that he possessed none of the founder’s virtue. The desert remembered him on that mountain because the mountain made the lesson visible.

References

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 59. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Sisoes collection; the mountain of Antony at Sisoes 28; the move from Scetis; the length of his dwelling.)
Athanasius of Alexandria. The Life of Antony. Trans. Robert C. Gregg. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1980. (The Inner Mountain at 49–50; Antony’s death at 89–92.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The geography of the desert and the chronology of Antony.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The generations of the desert and the formation of the Sayings.)