The Word on Repentance

Of all the sayings attributed to St. Sisoes the Great, one stands at the center of his memory: his insistence, held even on his radiant deathbed, that he had “not yet begun to repent.” Around it cluster a handful of related sayings in which the elder refuses to grant that his long ascesis had accumulated any merit and keeps himself perpetually at the starting line of repentance. This file dwells on that word — its form in the sources, its meaning, and why it made Sisoes the desert’s enduring model of unceasing repentance.

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

The Saying and Its Setting

The word that fixes Sisoes’ place in the tradition is preserved in the account of his death within the Sisoes collection of the Apophthegmata Patrum. As the elder lay dying, his face shining, the fathers around him saw him conversing with unseen visitors and asked with whom he spoke; he answered that the angels had come for him and that he was asking for a little time to repent. When the brothers protested that he, of all men, had no need of repentance, Sisoes replied that he did not think he had even begun to repent — and the fathers understood that he was a man made perfect (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes; trans. Ward 1984; the full scene is treated in The Luminous Repose). The saying thus reaches us embedded in a death-narrative, and its force comes from its setting: it is spoken not by a careless sinner but by one of the holiest of the fathers, at the very moment when the saints and angels are visibly coming to receive him.

The same conviction is attributed to Sisoes in life as well as at his death. The Sayings show him answering questions about his progress with the same refusal: he has laid no foundation, attained no measure, and must still begin (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes 9, 13, 14; Ward 1984). The deathbed word is therefore not an isolated saying but the climax of a lifelong disposition — the last and most luminous expression of a humility he had practiced for decades (see The Humility of Sisoes).

What “Not Yet Begun” Means

The saying is easily misread as exaggeration or false modesty, and the tradition is careful to read it otherwise. To say “I have not yet begun to repent” is not to deny that one has repented at all; it is to deny that repentance is ever finished, and to refuse the soul any resting place where it might count itself arrived. The desert held that repentance is not a single act of contrition but the permanent posture of the Christian life — a continual turning toward God that deepens without end, because God is infinite and the soul’s approach to Him is therefore without term (Ward 1984, introduction; the theology is developed in Repentance Without End). On this understanding, the holiest soul is precisely the one most aware that it has not arrived, because it sees most clearly the infinite distance still to be crossed.

Sisoes’ word is therefore the expression of the deepest possible self-knowledge, not its denial. The nearer he stood to the light, the more his own darkness was exposed to him; the longer he repented, the more there was to repent of, because each step toward God revealed a further distance to be travelled (Ward 1984, introduction; Harmless 2004). “I have not yet begun” is the cry of a soul that has come so near to God that it can no longer measure itself by any human standard but only by the infinite holiness it now beholds — and beside that, every human attainment shrinks to nothing.

The Witness of the Brethren

A crucial feature of the saying is that its meaning is supplied not only by Sisoes but by the brethren who heard it. Their reaction is part of the text: when he says he has not begun to repent, they do not take him at face value as confessing real sinfulness, but “understood that he was perfect” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Sisoes; Ward 1984). The desert audience, schooled in the logic of holiness, reads the confession correctly — as the very proof of his perfection rather than its denial. This interpretive frame is the tradition’s own guide to how the saying should be heard: not as the literal self-assessment of a man uncertain of his salvation, but as the supreme expression of a humility so complete that it can no longer see itself at all.

The brethren’s witness thus does for the saying what an inspired reader does for a difficult text: it fixes the sense against misreading. Without it, one might take Sisoes’ words as anxiety or scruple; with it, one sees them as the desert intended — the words of a perfected soul, spoken in light, that confess unworthiness precisely because the soul is full of God and empty of self. The Church has always read the saying through the brethren’s eyes, and so has received it not as a problem to be solved but as a revelation of what holiness is (Ward 1984, introduction; Chitty 1966; the theology is developed in The Radiance of the Saint).

The Paradox the Saying Holds

The power of the saying lies in the paradox it holds together. It is spoken by a man whose face is shining, whom the angels have come to receive, and whom his brothers recognize as perfected — and yet what he says is that he has not begun. The tradition does not resolve this tension but treasures it, because it captures the very logic of holiness as the desert understood it: glory and self-abasement are not opposites but the same thing seen from two sides. The saint is glorified precisely because he does not seek glory; he is received by the angels precisely because he counts himself unworthy of them; his face shines precisely because he is convinced of his own darkness (Ward 1984; Chitty 1966). The deathbed scene stages this paradox as a single image, and Sisoes’ word is its caption (on the theology of the radiance, see The Radiance of the Saint).

This is why the saying became, for the Orthodox tradition, the model statement of what repentance is. It teaches that metanoia is not a stage to be passed through on the way to perfection but the very form of perfection itself — that the perfected soul is the one still repenting, and that to stop repenting is to fall. The Church keeps Sisoes’ word because it guards against the deadliest of all spiritual illusions: the belief that one has arrived (cf. St. John Climacus, whose Ladder makes the same point at its summit).

A Word Against Two Errors

The saying does precise spiritual work by warding off two opposite errors that the desert feared. The first is presumption — the conviction that one has done enough, attained holiness, secured salvation. This the desert regarded as the deadliest of states, because the soul that thinks itself arrived has stopped travelling and is therefore lost without knowing it (Ward 1984, introduction). Sisoes’ word is the perfect antidote: if the great elder, with the angels at his bed, dared not claim to have begun, then no one may presume. The saying cuts the root of spiritual pride at its deepest, denying the soul any ground on which to congratulate itself.

The second error is despair — the conviction that one’s sins are too great, one’s progress too slight, one’s case hopeless. Against this the saying is equally medicinal, though the medicine is subtler. For Sisoes’ “not yet begun” is spoken not in anguish but in peace, by a man whose face is shining and who is being received into glory; it teaches that to confess oneself a beginner is not to despair but to stand in the truth, and that the God who receives the unceasing penitent is a God of mercy, not of condemnation (Ward 1984; Chitty 1966). The saying thus holds the soul on the narrow path between the precipices of presumption and despair, teaching it to repent without ceasing and yet to hope without limit — to weep for its sins and to trust in the mercy that meets the weeping. This double guard is why the tradition treasured the word as a complete spiritual teaching in a single sentence.

The Word in the Life of the Church

Sisoes’ word on repentance entered the liturgical and ascetic memory of the Orthodox Church as a touchstone. It is invoked wherever the tradition wishes to teach that no one may count himself saved while he lives, that the saints are those who weep most for their sins, and that the goal of the Christian life is not a self-satisfied attainment but an ever-deepening compunction (Ward 1984, introduction). The word functions as a permanent corrective to spiritual pride: if the great Sisoes, with the angels at his bedside, dared not say he had begun to repent, then no one may. In this way the single saying does the work of a whole ascetic theology, and Sisoes the man becomes, through it, a fixed point in the Church’s teaching on repentance — the elder whose last breath was a confession that the labor of turning to God is never done.

It is in this sense that the tradition calls him “the Great.” The title marks not a greatness of office or learning — he held none — but the greatness of a humility so total that it could meet death in light while still claiming to be a beginner. The word on repentance is the reason the Church remembers Sisoes at all, and it remains his gift to every soul that fears it has done enough.

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 deathbed word; the sayings on having “not begun,” esp. Sisoes 9, 13, 14.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The desert’s theology of repentance and the portrait of Sisoes.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Repentance and compunction in the desert tradition.)