02 — The Desert Father
The shape of Sisoes’ life in the desert: the decades of solitude on Antony’s mountain, the radical simplicity of his existence, the brevity and weight of his words — and the single virtue that the Apophthegmata Patrum place at the center of his portrait, total humility and unceasing self-accusation. These two files describe first the texture of his ascesis and then its keynote, the humility that became the desert’s standard for what repentance is.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; model of repentance)
Sisoes is not remembered for a system, a rule, or a writing, but for a manner of life and a single dominant note. The manner of life was the long anchoritic solitude of the eastern desert — years of prayer, manual labor, fasting, and silence, broken only by the visitors who came for a word. The dominant note was humility carried to its furthest point: a refusal of all honor, a constant confession of his own nothingness, and the conviction that he had not yet begun the work of repentance. This section treats both, for in Sisoes the two are inseparable: the long ascesis did not make him think himself advanced but convinced him, the longer it went on, of how far he stood below the founders and below the demand of the gospel.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Long Ascesis | The decades of solitude; the simplicity of food, labor, and cell; the brief, weighty words; the rhythm of the anchoritic life Sisoes kept on Antony’s mountain. |
| The Humility of Sisoes | The keynote of his whole witness: total humility and self-accusation; the deflection of honor; the conviction of his own nothingness beside the fathers and before God. |
See Also
- The Hermit of Antony’s Mountain — the place and years of the long ascesis
- The Apophthegmata of Sisoes — the sayings that record both the ascesis and the humility
- Repentance Without End — the theology into which the humility opens
- Monasticism — the wider Orthodox theology of the ascetic life
References
- The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 59. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984.
- Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966.
- Harmless, William. Desert Christians. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.