03 — The Sayings
The heart of what survives of St. Sisoes the Great: the cluster of sayings preserved under his name in the Apophthegmata Patrum, the alphabetical collection of the desert fathers. These are the primary source for everything else in this guide. This section presents the sayings as a body — their themes of humility, repentance, guarding the heart, and controlling anger — and then dwells on the central one, the word on repentance that gives Sisoes his place in the tradition.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; model of repentance)
Sisoes wrote nothing. His teaching reaches us only as logia — short sayings spoken to disciples and visitors, remembered, handed on, and gathered into the great collections of the desert. The alphabetical Apophthegmata Patrum preserve a substantial cluster of them under his name. They are terse and concrete, almost always given in answer to a question, and they circle a small set of themes: humility above all, then repentance, the guarding of the heart and the thoughts, and the mastery of anger. This section reads the sayings as the desert intended them to be read — as words to be done, not discussed — and then isolates the saying that the tradition made the center of his memory.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Apophthegmata of Sisoes | The sayings under Sisoes’ name in the Apophthegmata Patrum: the themes of humility, repentance, guarding the heart, and controlling anger; how they are formed, transmitted, and read. |
| The Word on Repentance | The central saying — that he had “not yet begun to repent” — and the cluster of sayings around it; the word that made Sisoes the model of unceasing repentance. |
See Also
- The Humility of Sisoes — the keynote the sayings express
- Repentance Without End — the theology drawn from the sayings
- The Apophthegmata and the Tradition — the source-critical treatment of the collection
- Monasticism — the wider ascetic context
References
- The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 59. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984.
- Ward, Benedicta. The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks. London: Penguin, 2003.
- Harmless, William. Desert Christians. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.