The Apophthegmata of Sisoes

The sayings preserved under the name of Abba Sisoes in the Apophthegmata Patrum are the primary source for everything known of him. They are short, concrete, almost always given in answer to a brother’s question, and they circle a small constellation of themes: humility and self-accusation above all, then repentance and weeping for sin, the guarding of the heart and the thoughts, and the mastery of anger. This file presents the body of the sayings — how they are formed, what they teach, and how the desert intended them to be received.

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

The Form of the Sayings

The Apophthegmata Patrum — the “Sayings of the Fathers” — are the foundational literature of Egyptian monasticism, a collection of brief utterances and anecdotes attributed to the desert elders of the fourth and fifth centuries. They survive in several arrangements; the most influential is the alphabetical collection, which gathers the sayings under the names of the fathers in Greek alphabetical order, from Antony to (near the end) figures whose names begin with later letters (Ward 1984, introduction; Harmless 2004). Sisoes’ sayings form one such cluster, of substantial size, placed among the fathers whose names begin with sigma. They were spoken in the desert, remembered and transmitted orally by disciples and visitors, and written down and compiled over the late fifth and sixth centuries (Harmless 2004; on the formation and reliability of the collection, see The Apophthegmata and the Tradition).

The characteristic form is the question-and-answer: “A brother came to Abba Sisoes and said …,” followed by the elder’s reply (Ward 1984, introduction). The reply is typically a single sentence or a short exchange, concrete rather than abstract, aimed at the questioner’s actual condition rather than at a general audience. The fathers did not lecture; they gave a “word” (rhēma, logos) suited to the one who asked, to be taken away and lived. This explains both the brevity of the sayings and their occasional severity: a word is a medicine for a particular soul, not a doctrine for all (Harmless 2004; Ward 1984, introduction).

Humility and Self-Accusation

The largest and most characteristic theme of the Sisoes sayings is humility. Again and again the elder deflects honor, confesses his own nothingness, and points the questioner toward self-abasement as the way of salvation. To the brothers who came to him on Antony’s mountain expecting the holiness of the founder, he insisted that he was nothing beside Antony and had attained none of his virtue (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes 28; Ward 1984). To the suggestion that he had reached Antony’s measure, he answered that if he had even one of Antony’s thoughts he would become “all flame” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes 9; Ward 1984). Asked how to please God or to find rest, his answers turn on humbling oneself and accusing oneself rather than one’s neighbor (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes; Ward 1984). The whole cluster is so dominated by this note that the tradition made Sisoes its supreme model of humility (the theme is developed in The Humility of Sisoes).

This self-accusation is the desert’s central therapy of the soul: to lay the blame on oneself is to be at war with no one and so to find peace (Ward 1984, introduction). Sisoes practices it as a habit of being. He does not merely counsel humility; he performs it in every exchange, so that the sayings themselves become a demonstration of the virtue they teach.

Repentance and Weeping

Closely joined to humility is the theme of repentance — metanoia, the continual turning of the soul to God in tears for its sins. Sisoes’ sayings present repentance not as a single act but as an unending labor, never completed in this life. The most famous of all, preserved in the account of his death and echoed in his teaching, is his insistence that he had “not yet begun to repent,” spoken even as his face shone and the saints came to receive him (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes; Ward 1984; the saying is treated in The Word on Repentance and the death in The Luminous Repose). The desert prized penthos, “compunction” or godly mourning — the gift of tears for one’s sins — as a sign of the soul’s healing, and Sisoes is remembered as a father in whom this mourning never ceased (Ward 1984, introduction; on the theology, Repentance Without End).

Guarding the Heart and the Thoughts

A third theme is the nepsis, the watchfulness or “guarding of the heart,” by which the monk observes the thoughts (logismoi) as they arise and refuses to consent to the passions before they take root. The desert developed a precise spiritual psychology of the thoughts — how a suggestion enters, how it grows if entertained, how it is to be cut off at its first appearance — and Sisoes’ sayings participate in this teaching, directing the monk to keep watch over the heart as the seat of the inner life (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes; Ward 1984; on the wider teaching, Harmless 2004; the theme is developed in Controlling the Thoughts and the Tongue). The guarding of the heart is inseparable from the guarding of the tongue: the monk who watches his thoughts speaks little, and the silence of the desert is the outward form of its inward watchfulness.

The Mastery of Anger

The Sisoes sayings give particular attention to anger (orgē), one of the eight “thoughts” or passions catalogued by the desert tradition (Harmless 2004; Ward 1984, introduction). One saying shows a brother confessing that he is troubled by anger and asking for help; Sisoes counsels the patient, persistent work of self-restraint and the refusal to let the passion master the will (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes; Ward 1984). The desert held anger to be especially corrosive of prayer, since the soul cannot stand peacefully before God while it is at war with its neighbor, and the mastery of anger is therefore a precondition of the inner life (Ward 1984, introduction). Sisoes’ counsel on the passion is of a piece with his whole teaching: the cure for anger is humility and self-accusation, the refusal to insist on one’s own rights, the readiness to bear wrong rather than to avenge it (cf. Controlling the Thoughts and the Tongue).

Discretion and the Refusal of Excess

A note running through the Sisoes sayings, easily missed beneath the dominant theme of humility, is the desert virtue of discretion (diakrisis) — the discernment that measures every practice against the soul’s actual good and refuses both laxity and excess. The desert prized discretion as the mother and guardian of all the virtues, the faculty without which even ascetic feats become dangerous, feeding pride or breaking the body to no spiritual profit (Ward 1984, introduction; Harmless 2004). The fathers told cautionary tales of monks undone by undiscerning austerity, and they counseled the moderation that keeps the soul in humility. Sisoes’ sayings participate in this wisdom: where he is asked about fasting and bodily discipline, his counsel directs the questioner away from the spectacular feat and toward the inward work, the guarding of the heart and the humbling of the self that are the real substance of the monastic life (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes; Ward 1984).

This is consonant with his whole portrait. The man who refused all honor would naturally refuse the ostentatious austerity by which a monk might win honor; the man who counted himself a beginner would not trust his own zeal but would measure it against the humble standard of discretion. Sisoes’ moderation is thus not a lowering of the bar but the fruit of his humility — the discernment of one who knows that the soul is saved not by feats but by the patient, hidden work of repentance (Ward 1984, introduction; see The Long Ascesis). The sayings on measure and the sayings on humility are, in the end, one teaching: distrust yourself, and seek the hidden work rather than the visible feat.

The Concreteness of the Word

A feature of the Sisoes sayings, shared with the desert tradition as a whole, is their resolute concreteness. The fathers did not deal in abstractions; a brother came with a real difficulty — a particular passion, a specific trouble of soul — and the elder gave a particular word for it, aimed at that brother’s actual condition (Ward 1984, introduction; Harmless 2004). This concreteness is why the sayings can seem, on the surface, slight: a single sentence about anger, a brief command to humble oneself, a short exchange about progress. But the slightness is deceptive. Each word is the precise medicine for a precise ailment of the soul, distilled from the elder’s long experience of his own healing, and its very particularity is its power. The desert distrusted general teaching precisely because the soul is healed not in the abstract but in its concrete struggles, one at a time.

This bears on how Sisoes’ teaching is to be understood. We do not possess from him a doctrine of the spiritual life laid out in system; we possess a scatter of concrete words, each given to a particular need. To gather them, as this collection does, into themes — humility, repentance, the thoughts, anger — is a legitimate aid to study, but it must not obscure their original character as living words for living souls. The coherence of Sisoes’ teaching is real, but it is the coherence of a single deep disposition expressed in many concrete situations, not the coherence of a treatise (Ward 1984, introduction). His sayings teach best when they are received as he gave them: not as propositions to be assembled but as words to be done, one at a time, in the concrete struggles of an actual life.

How the Sayings Are to Be Read

The desert insisted that a saying is not information but a summons. The fathers warned against the monk who collects words without doing them, and held that one word truly lived is worth more than the whole collection merely known (Ward 1984, introduction; Harmless 2004). Sisoes’ sayings are therefore best read as the desert read them: each one a word for a soul, to be taken away and obeyed. Their brevity is not a lack but a discipline — the refusal to multiply talk where a single command will do — and their severity is the severity of medicine. Read this way, the small cluster of Sisoes sayings is not a meager record but a concentrated one: a handful of words that carry the weight of a lifetime of solitude and that the Church has kept for fifteen centuries because they still heal those who do them.

References

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 59. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (The Sisoes collection; the form and themes of the sayings; esp. Sisoes 9, 28.)
Ward, Benedicta. The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks. London: Penguin, 2003. (Translation and introduction to the desert sayings.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The genre, formation, and themes of the Apophthegmata; the eight thoughts and the guarding of the heart.)