The Humility of Sisoes

If the Apophthegmata Patrum preserve one note above all others in the memory of St. Sisoes the Great, it is humility carried to its furthest point: a refusal of every honor, a constant confession of his own nothingness beside the founders and before God, and the conviction — held to his last breath — that he had not yet begun the work. This file gathers the keynote of his whole witness, the self-accusation that made Sisoes the desert’s chosen image of humility and that opens directly into his theology of unceasing repentance.

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

Humility as the Root of the Desert

The desert fathers held humility (tapeinosis, tapeinophrosyne) to be the foundation and the safeguard of every other virtue — the soil without which prayer, fasting, and almsgiving feed only pride. The Apophthegmata return to it constantly: Antony saw all the snares of the enemy spread over the world and asked, “What can get through from such snares?”, and heard the answer, “Humility” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Antony 7; Ward 1984). Macarius, asked how to be saved, told a brother to flee from men, or to sit in his cell and weep for his sins (Apophthegmata Patrum, Macarius 41; Ward 1984; cf. St. Macarius the Great). The whole tradition is summed up in the conviction that the way up is the way down — that the soul rises to God only by descending into a true knowledge of its own poverty (Ward 1984, introduction; on the later codification of this teaching, see St. John Climacus, whose Ladder devotes its summit steps to humility).

Within this tradition Sisoes is remembered as the supreme exemplar. Where humility is the desert’s universal teaching, in Sisoes it becomes the entire portrait: nearly every saying attributed to him turns on the deflection of honor and the confession of his own nothingness (Ward 1984; Harmless 2004). He is the father in whom the desert’s teaching on humility is not one theme among many but the whole substance of the memory.

The Deflection of Honor

The Apophthegmata repeatedly stage Sisoes refusing the holiness that others attributed to him. Because he dwelt on Antony’s mountain, visitors came expecting to find the heir of the founder’s sanctity; Sisoes met that expectation with self-abasement, insisting that he was nothing beside the fathers and had attained none of their virtue (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes 28; Ward 1984; see The Hermit of Antony’s Mountain). The pattern is constant: praised, he confesses his poverty; honored, he names his sins; held up as a model, he points to the founders and declares the distance between himself and them.

This is not a pose but a discipline. The desert understood that the praise of men is among the subtlest of the enemy’s weapons, capable of undoing in a moment the work of decades, and that the antidote is to receive every honor as an occasion for deeper self-knowledge (Ward 1984, introduction; Harmless 2004). Sisoes’ deflection of honor is the practice of this antidote raised to a habit of soul. He does not merely decline praise; he uses it as a mirror in which to see how far he stands below what is praised in him. The more he is exalted by others, the more he abases himself — which is precisely the desert’s definition of true humility, the humility that cannot be flattered because it never forgets its own measure (cf. St. John Climacus, Ladder 25, on humility).

“I Have Not Yet Made a Beginning”

The most famous expression of Sisoes’ humility is his refusal to grant that he had attained anything at all. The Sayings preserve a cluster of such sentences. Asked about his progress, or compared to the great fathers, he answers that he has not laid even a single foundation — that he must still begin (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes 9, 13, 14; Ward 1984). One saying confronts him with the example of Antony himself: a brother suggests that Sisoes has reached Antony’s measure, and Sisoes replies that if he had even one of Antony’s thoughts he would become “all flame” — placing himself immeasurably below the founder (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes 9; Ward 1984). The image is exact: Antony is fire; Sisoes, in his own reckoning, has not caught a single spark.

This refusal is the hinge between Sisoes’ humility and his theology of repentance. To say “I have not yet begun” is to deny that the long ascesis has accumulated any merit, and so to keep oneself perpetually at the starting line of metanoia (the theology is developed in Repentance Without End). It is also, the tradition insists, the truest possible self-knowledge: the closer a soul comes to God, the more clearly it sees its own distance from Him, so that the holiest are precisely those most convinced of their poverty (Ward 1984, introduction; Harmless 2004). Sisoes’ insistence that he had not begun is therefore read by the tradition not as false modesty but as the sign of a soul so far advanced that it had outgrown every illusion of advance.

Self-Accusation and the Healing of the Soul

Bound up with Sisoes’ humility is the desert practice of self-accusation — the habit of laying the blame for everything upon oneself rather than upon one’s neighbor or one’s circumstances. The fathers taught that to accuse oneself is to find peace, because the soul that blames itself is at war with no one and can be wounded by no insult (Ward 1984, introduction; the principle is shared across the Apophthegmata, e.g., Poemen and Moses). Sisoes embodies this: his answer to nearly every question about how to make progress is some form of “humble yourself, accuse yourself, and you will find rest” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes; Ward 1984).

Self-accusation is not morbid self-hatred but its opposite — a liberation. The soul that has stopped defending itself, that no longer needs to be right or honored or vindicated, is free to weep for its sins without despair and to receive correction without resentment (Ward 1984, introduction; cf. Spiritual Direction). In Sisoes this freedom shines through the radiance of his repose: the man who had accused himself all his life met death not in terror but in light, still confessing that he had not begun, yet visibly received by the saints and the angels (see The Luminous Repose and The Radiance of the Saint). The humility that looked like the deepest poverty was, the tradition saw, the very substance of his glory.

The Two Kinds of Humility

The desert distinguished, at least implicitly, between humility as an outward practice and humility as an inward reality, and Sisoes is remembered for the latter. The outward practices — lowering oneself in speech, taking the worst place, performing the menial task, declining honor — are the disciplines by which humility is cultivated, and the fathers counseled them; but they can be performed by a soul still inwardly proud, and the desert warned against a “humility” that is merely a more refined form of self-display (Ward 1984, introduction). True humility is an inward state: a real conviction of one’s own poverty, so deep that it is not assumed for effect but is simply how the soul sees itself. The mark of this inner humility is that it cannot be flattered, because it does not depend on the opinion of others; the soul that truly knows its own measure is unmoved alike by praise and by blame (Ward 1984, introduction; cf. St. John Climacus, Ladder 25).

Sisoes’ humility is consistently presented as the inward kind. His deflection of honor is not a performance but the spontaneous reaction of a soul that genuinely sees nothing in itself to honor; his confession that he has not begun is not a formula but his actual self-estimate. This is why the tradition trusted it. A performed humility collapses at the threshold of death, when there is no longer any audience to impress; Sisoes’ humility, by contrast, was most intense precisely at his death, when he had nothing left to gain and still insisted he had not begun (see The Word on Repentance). The genuineness of the inner state is proved by its persistence to the very end, in the absence of any motive but truth.

Humility and the Knowledge of God

The desert held that humility is not only a moral virtue but an epistemological one — that is, that the humble soul sees more truly than the proud, both itself and God. The proud soul, full of itself, is blind to its own faults and incapable of receiving the knowledge of God, which is given only to the lowly; the humble soul, emptied of self-regard, sees its own poverty clearly and is opened to the truth of God (Ward 1984, introduction; cf. the beatitude, “blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God,” Matthew 5:8). On this understanding, Sisoes’ deepening humility was at the same time a deepening vision — the clearer sight, granted to the lowly, of both his own distance from God and the holiness of God Himself.

This explains the paradox at the heart of his portrait: that the holiest of the fathers was the most convinced of his own nothingness. It was not that Sisoes was in fact more sinful than other men, but that he saw more truly, in the clear light of his nearness to God, what every soul’s true condition is. The closer he came to the divine light, the more his own remaining darkness was exposed to him, and the more there was to repent of — not because his sins increased but because his sight sharpened (Ward 1984, introduction; Chitty 1966; see Repentance Without End). His humility was thus the fruit of his vision, and his vision the fruit of his humility, in a deepening circle that culminated in the luminous clarity of his death.

Why Sisoes Became the Model

The desert produced many humble fathers, but it remembered Sisoes as the model of humility and repentance for a particular reason: in him the virtue is taken to a point where it can go no further. To confess on a shining deathbed, surrounded by the visible presence of the saints, that one has “not yet begun to repent” is to hold humility and theosis together in a single image — the lowest self-estimation joined to the highest grace (Ward 1984; Chitty 1966). The tradition seized on this image because it teaches, more vividly than any treatise, the desert’s central paradox: that the saints are those who never think themselves saints, and that the nearer one stands to the light, the more one weeps for one’s darkness. Sisoes is the icon of that paradox, and his humility is the reason the Church keeps his memory.

References

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 59. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Sisoes collection, esp. Sisoes 9, 13, 14, 28; Antony 7 on humility; Macarius 41 on weeping for sins.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The desert’s understanding of humility and the portrait of Sisoes.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Humility and self-accusation in the Apophthegmata; Sisoes as exemplar.)
Scripture: Matthew 5:8 (the pure in heart shall see God), the link between purity, humility, and the vision of God.