Memento Mori in Orthodox Art

The icon of St. Sisoes over the tomb of Alexander the Great belongs to a long and serious tradition: the Orthodox remembrance of death (mneme thanatou) and the meditation on the vanity of worldly glory. This file sets the image within that tradition — the ascetic discipline of keeping death before the eyes, the Scriptural and liturgical sources of the “vanity of vanities” theme, and the place of memento mori in Orthodox iconography and funeral hymnody — and shows why the Church found in Sisoes the ideal teacher of so sobering a lesson.

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

The Remembrance of Death

The “remembrance of death” is one of the central disciplines of the Orthodox ascetic tradition. The desert fathers and their heirs taught that to keep one’s own death constantly before the eyes — to live each day as if it were the last, to remember that the body will become dust and the soul will stand before God — is among the most powerful spurs to repentance and the most effective guard against sin (Ward 1984, introduction; cf. Sirach 7:36, “in all you do, remember the end of your life, and then you will never sin”). The discipline is not morbid but clarifying: the one who remembers death rightly is freed from the tyranny of passing things, sees the world in its true proportion, and turns with urgency to the one thing needful. St. John Climacus devotes an entire step of the Ladder of Divine Ascent to the remembrance of death, ranking it among the great gifts that order the whole of the spiritual life (cf. St. John Climacus, Ladder 6).

This discipline is the soil in which the Sisoes-and-Alexander icon grew. The image is the remembrance of death made visible: an open tomb, a skeleton, a fallen crown, and a saint who reads in them the lesson that the discipline teaches. To stand before the icon is to practice, for a moment, the very ascesis it depicts — to keep death before the eyes and to let it work its sobering effect (see The Icon of Vanity).

The Vanity of Worldly Glory

Joined to the remembrance of death is the theme of the vanity of the world — the recognition that all earthly glory, wealth, and power are passing and end in dust. The theme is rooted in Scripture: in the refrain of Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2); in the Psalmist’s “man is like a breath; his days are like a passing shadow” (Psalm 144:4, LXX 143:4); and in the Lord’s parable of the rich fool, to whom God says, “This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” (Luke 12:20). The Orthodox tradition took up this theme with particular intensity, above all in its funeral and memorial hymnody. The funeral stichera of St. John of Damascus lament that all human glory is “weaker than a flower, more fleeting than a dream,” and ask, of the dead, “where now is the beauty of the flesh? where the kings, where the rulers?” — naming the mighty of the earth and answering that all alike are reduced to bones and dust (cf. the Orthodox funeral service, the idiomela of St. John of Damascus).

The Sisoes icon is the visual counterpart of this hymnody. Where the funeral verses ask “where are the kings?”, the icon answers by showing one — Alexander, the greatest of them — as a skeleton in a broken tomb, contemplated by a saint who renounced the world the king sought to conquer. The image and the hymns teach the same lesson by different means: the glory of the world is a passing shadow, and the only wisdom is to set the heart on what does not die.

Memento Mori in the Iconographic Tradition

The remembrance of death and the vanity of glory found various expressions in Eastern Christian art, of which the Sisoes type is among the most concentrated. The broader tradition includes the depiction of the Last Judgment, with its sober reckoning of all souls; the imagery of the funeral and memorial services; and the wider Byzantine meditation on mortality that the Sisoes icon distills (on the theology and function of the icon as such, see Icons and Iconoclasm). Within this field the Sisoes-and-Alexander type is distinctive for its directness: it does not depict the abstract Judgment or the general dead but a single named conqueror, the most famous of all, brought low — and a single named saint, the model of humility, contemplating him. The particularity gives the image its force; the lesson is not “all men die” in the abstract but “even Alexander died,” which strikes harder.

It is worth restating, as the previous file did, that this iconographic meditation is a later development and not a scene from the early Sayings (see The Icon of Vanity and The Historical Sisoes). But its lateness does not diminish its place in the tradition. Orthodox iconography has always developed new images to teach old truths, and the Sisoes type is a legitimate and powerful instance: it took the Church’s ancient discipline of the remembrance of death and gave it an unforgettable visual form, anchored in the memory of the saint who, of all the fathers, had most fully lived that discipline.

The Discipline Behind the Image

The remembrance of death was, for the desert, not a mood but a deliberate ascetic practice with concrete forms. Some fathers kept a skull or a tomb before their eyes; some rehearsed in their minds the hour of their death and the judgment to follow; all sought to live with the end continually in view, so that the brevity of life might press them toward repentance and free them from attachment to passing things (Ward 1984, introduction; cf. Climacus, Ladder 6, on the remembrance of death as a daily discipline). The practice was understood to be a gift as much as a labor: the fathers spoke of the remembrance of death as something to be prayed for, a grace that, once given, transforms the soul’s whole relation to the world by stripping away its illusions (cf. St. John Climacus).

The Sisoes-and-Alexander icon is this discipline rendered in paint. It does not merely illustrate a doctrine; it performs the practice, placing before the viewer’s eyes exactly what the discipline asks the soul to keep before its inner eyes — the open tomb, the bones, the fallen crown, the certainty of the end. To stand before the icon attentively is to be drawn, however briefly, into the remembrance of death that the saint depicted practiced his whole life. In this the image is functional as well as didactic: it is a tool of the spiritual life, a visible aid to an invisible discipline, in keeping with the Orthodox understanding of the icon as a window and a means of grace rather than a mere depiction (see Icons and Iconoclasm).

Not Morbidity but Freedom

It is important to grasp that the Orthodox remembrance of death, and the icon that depicts it, are not morbid. The modern reflex is to see in a skull, an open tomb, a meditation on mortality, something gloomy or unhealthy — a fixation on decay. The desert understood the matter exactly oppositely. The remembrance of death is, for the tradition, a liberating discipline: it frees the soul from the tyranny of passing things, from the anxious grasping after wealth, status, and pleasure that the certainty of death exposes as folly (Ward 1984, introduction; cf. Luke 12:20, the rich fool whose soul is required of him). The one who truly remembers death is not crushed by it but lightened — released from the false weight of the world and freed for the one thing that does not pass, the love of God.

The Sisoes icon, read rightly, communicates this freedom. The saint over the tomb is not despairing but clear-sighted; he sees the world as it is, and the sight does not darken him but frees him, as it had freed him his whole life. The contrast with Alexander makes the point: it is the conqueror, grasping the world, who ends in the darkness of the tomb; it is the hermit, who renounced the world, who stands living in the light above it. The remembrance of death leads not to gloom but to the joy of the free — and this is the lesson the icon, like the discipline behind it, is meant to teach (cf. The Radiance of the Saint). The memento mori of Orthodox art is, paradoxically, a school of joy: it teaches the soul to die to the world that it may live to God.

Why Sisoes Is the Teacher

The Church’s choice of Sisoes as the contemplative of Alexander’s tomb is not arbitrary but exact. The remembrance of death and the vanity of glory are precisely the truths Sisoes’ whole life proclaimed. He renounced the world utterly, possessing nothing and seeking no honor; he kept death before his eyes so faithfully that even on his shining deathbed he begged for time to repent; and he counted himself, the heir of Antony’s holy mountain, as nothing (see The Humility of Sisoes and The Luminous Repose). Who better to stand over the bones of the world-conqueror and read the lesson of vanity than the man who had already lived the opposite of Alexander’s life and found in renunciation the only lasting glory?

The icon thus completes the portrait of Sisoes that the whole collection has drawn. The desert remembered him as the model of humility and unceasing repentance; the later tradition, meditating on the remembrance of death, found in him its ideal teacher and gave him a final image — the saint above the tomb, lamenting the vanity of all that passes. In that image the lesson of his sayings, the meaning of his luminous death, and the Church’s ancient discipline of memento mori are gathered into one: that earthly glory is dust, that death comes to all, and that the only wisdom is the humble and unceasing turning of the soul to the God who does not die.

References

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 59. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (The desert discipline of the remembrance of death and the portrait of Sisoes.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The ascetic background of the remembrance of death.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The remembrance of death and the vanity theme in the desert literature.)
Scripture: Ecclesiastes 1:2 (vanity of vanities); Psalm 144:4 (LXX 143:4; man like a passing shadow); Luke 12:20 (the rich fool); Sirach 7:36 (remember the end). The funeral idiomela attributed to St. John of Damascus (Orthodox funeral service) for the “where are the kings?” theme.