The Apophthegmata and the Tradition

Everything known of St. Sisoes the Great comes through the Apophthegmata Patrum, the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. This file treats the Sayings as a source: what the collection is, how the Sisoes dossier sits within the alphabetical arrangement, when and how the sayings were formed and written down, and the named scholars — Benedicta Ward, Derwas Chitty, William Harmless, and the critical editors before them — who edit and study the tradition. The reliability of the whole portrait of Sisoes depends on the reliability of this literature, and so it must be understood on its own terms.

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

What the Apophthegmata Patrum Are

The Apophthegmata Patrum — the “Sayings of the Fathers” — are the foundational literature of early Egyptian monasticism: a body of brief sayings, counsels, and anecdotes attributed to the desert elders of roughly 330–460, transmitted at first orally among the monks and then gathered into written collections (Ward 1984, introduction; Harmless 2004). They are not the work of a single author but a communal deposit, the distilled wisdom of generations of fathers preserved by their disciples. The sayings originated in Coptic-speaking and Greek-speaking Egypt and were compiled, edited, and translated over time into Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, and other languages, becoming one of the most widely diffused bodies of Christian spiritual literature (Harmless 2004; Chitty 1966).

The collections survive in two principal arrangements. The alphabetical collection orders the sayings under the names of the fathers, from Antony onward, and it is here that the Sisoes dossier is found, as a cluster of sayings under his name (Ward 1984, introduction). The systematic (or “anonymous”) collection orders the material thematically — on humility, on discernment, on prayer — and preserves many sayings without attribution (Harmless 2004). The two overlap substantially, and a saying attributed to a named father in one may appear anonymously or under another name elsewhere, a fluidity that bears directly on how the Sisoes material is to be assessed.

The Sisoes Dossier

Within the alphabetical collection, the sayings under Sisoes’ name form a substantial and coherent cluster — one of the larger dossiers in the collection, befitting his standing as a revered elder. The dossier is unusually unified in its themes: humility and self-accusation dominate, with repentance, the guarding of the heart, and the mastery of anger as recurring secondary notes (Ward 1984; the sayings are surveyed in The Apophthegmata of Sisoes). The deathbed scene, in which his face shines and he declares he has not begun to repent, is preserved within this same dossier and is the dossier’s climax (see The Luminous Repose).

The coherence of the dossier is itself a datum worth noting. Where some fathers’ sayings range widely, the Sisoes material returns insistently to a single virtue, suggesting that the tradition remembered him precisely as the exemplar of humility and repentance and selected and shaped his sayings accordingly (Harmless 2004). This does not impugn the sayings’ authenticity but locates them: they are the desert’s portrait of Sisoes-the-humble, transmitted by a tradition that knew what it valued in him. The dossier is a spiritual likeness, drawn by those who revered the man, not a stenographer’s transcript.

Formation, Dating, and Transmission

The sayings were spoken in the fourth and fifth centuries but written down and compiled later. The scholarly consensus, following the foundational studies of Wilhelm Bousset and the work synthesized by Chitty and Harmless, places the formation of the written collections in the late fifth and sixth centuries, with the alphabetical and systematic Greek collections taking their shape in that period, drawing on earlier Coptic and Greek oral and written material (Harmless 2004; Chitty 1966). There is thus a gap of one to two generations, and sometimes more, between the speaking of a saying and its earliest surviving written form — a gap during which sayings were remembered, selected, edited, occasionally conflated, and sometimes reattributed (Harmless 2004; per METHODOLOGY §2.4, this provenance is named rather than hidden).

For Sisoes specifically this means that the dossier under his name reached its written form somewhat after his death (conventionally c. 429), in a tradition that had already fixed his memory as the model of humility. The sayings are early and rooted in genuine desert tradition; they are also shaped, selected, and transmitted, and the prudent reader holds both facts together. The transmission is reliable for the character of the teaching — the desert’s memory of Sisoes is consistent and well-attested across the collections — while individual sayings carry the ordinary uncertainties of oral tradition committed late to writing (Harmless 2004; Ward 1984, introduction).

The Named Scholars

The modern study of the Apophthegmata, and of Sisoes within it, rests on a body of named scholarship:

Jean-Claude Guy, whose critical work on the Greek systematic collection (Les Apophtegmes des Pères, Sources Chrétiennes) provided the modern critical edition that underlies serious study of the systematic tradition (cited in Harmless 2004; Chitty 1966).
Wilhelm Bousset, whose Apophthegmata (1923) laid the foundations of the modern source-critical analysis of the collections and their relationships (Harmless 2004; Chitty 1966).
Derwas J. Chitty, The Desert a City (1966) — the classic narrative synthesis of Egyptian and Palestinian monasticism, which situates the fathers, including Sisoes, in their historical world.
Benedicta Ward, whose translation of the alphabetical collection (The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, rev. ed. 1984) is the standard English version and whose introductions are a principal scholarly guide to the literature; the Sisoes sayings cited throughout this collection follow her translation.
William Harmless, Desert Christians (2004) — the standard modern introduction to the whole desert literature, its formation, reliability, and interpretation, and the methodological control for this collection’s handling of the sources.

These scholars do not always agree on details of dating and textual relationship, but together they establish the framework within which the Sisoes dossier is read: an early, communally transmitted, late-redacted body of sayings, reliable for the desert’s portrait of the man and to be handled with the cautions proper to oral tradition committed to writing (Harmless 2004; Chitty 1966; Ward 1984).

The Reliability Question

A central question for any use of the Apophthegmata is how reliably they preserve the words and deeds of the fathers they name. The scholarly answer, as synthesized by Harmless and others, is nuanced. On the one hand, the sayings are not verbatim transcripts: they passed through oral transmission, were translated and re-translated, were selected and arranged by compilers, and sometimes migrated between fathers or between the named and anonymous collections (Harmless 2004). On the other hand, they are not free invention either: they emerge from a continuous living tradition, transmitted by communities with a strong interest in preserving the words of their fathers accurately, and they display a consistency of voice and concern that argues for genuine roots in the desert they describe (Harmless 2004; Chitty 1966). The sayings are best understood as reliable tradition — faithful to the spirit and substance of the fathers’ teaching, transmitted with the ordinary fidelity and the ordinary imprecision of oral culture, and not to be treated either as stenography or as fiction.

For Sisoes this means the dossier can be trusted to convey the desert’s genuine memory of him — a memory consistent across the collection and centered unmistakably on humility and repentance — while individual sayings carry the normal uncertainties of the genre. The deathbed scene, for instance, is reliably the tradition’s witness to a holy death cast in the desert’s characteristic form, even though it cannot be checked against any external record (see The Luminous Repose). The methodological discipline this collection observes — trusting the sayings for what they are good for, naming their provenance, and pinning hagiographic and miraculous material to its attestation — follows directly from this assessment of the sources’ reliability (per METHODOLOGY §2.4 and §3.5).

The Languages of the Tradition

The diffusion of the Apophthegmata across many languages is not merely a fact of transmission but a key to assessing the tradition, and it bears on the Sisoes dossier. The sayings exist in Greek (the alphabetical and systematic collections), in Latin (the Verba Seniorum), in Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, Arabic, Ethiopic, and Church Slavonic, and the comparison of these versions is one of the chief tools of modern scholarship for reconstructing the history of the collections and the relative antiquity of their sayings (Harmless 2004; Chitty 1966). Where a saying appears in multiple independent language-traditions, its antiquity and wide circulation are confirmed; where it appears only late or in a single branch, more caution is warranted. This comparative method, pioneered by Bousset and refined by Guy and others, underlies the scholarly confidence in the core of the tradition (Harmless 2004).

For the study of Sisoes this multilingual transmission is largely a confirmation: his memory and his characteristic sayings circulated widely and early across the language-traditions, consistent with his standing as a revered elder. It also reminds us that the dossier we read in Ward’s English translation rests on a Greek text that is itself the product of a long and many-branched transmission — a point that grounds both the trust we place in the tradition and the modesty with which we hold its particulars (Harmless 2004; Ward 1984, introduction). The Sisoes we know is the Sisoes of a tradition that carried his memory across the whole Christian world in a dozen tongues, and the breadth of that carrying is itself part of the evidence for the genuineness of what it carried.

How the Tradition Is to Be Used

The upshot for this collection is a disciplined confidence. The Apophthegmata are a genuine window onto the desert and onto the Sisoes the desert remembered; they are not a modern biography and must not be read as one. Where a saying is cited here, it is cited as the tradition’s word — what the desert preserved and valued — and the gap between the speaking and the writing is acknowledged. The later developments built upon the dossier — the elaborated deathbed scene and, far later, the icon of Sisoes over Alexander’s tomb — are treated as what they are: extensions of the tradition, to be distinguished from the early sayings and pinned to their own attestation (see The Historical Sisoes, The Luminous Repose, and The Icon of Vanity). The tradition is trusted for what it is good for, and questioned where it claims more.

References

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 59. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (The Sisoes dossier; introduction on the formation and use of the collection.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (Historical synthesis; the world and chronology of the fathers.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The genre, formation, dating, transmission, and scholarship of the Apophthegmata; Bousset, Guy, and the critical tradition.)