Sisoes in Monastic Memory

St. Sisoes the Great is remembered not only in the Christian East but across the whole monastic tradition, East and West, carried by the extraordinary diffusion of the Apophthegmata Patrum. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers travelled in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and other languages, and became foundational reading for monks of every land. This file traces Sisoes’ place in that shared monastic memory: how his sayings reached the Latin West through the Verba Seniorum, how the desert became the common patrimony of Eastern and Western monasticism, and what Sisoes in particular contributed to it.

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

The Diffusion of the Sayings

The Apophthegmata Patrum were among the most widely copied and translated texts of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Originating in the Greek- and Coptic-speaking monasticism of Egypt, the collections spread rapidly across the Christian world: into Latin as the Verba Seniorum (the “Sayings of the Elders,” gathered in the great compilation later printed in Migne’s Patrologia Latina and associated with translators such as the deacon Pelagius and the subdeacon John), into Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Arabic, Ethiopic, and eventually the Slavonic of the Christian East (Chitty 1966; Harmless 2004). This diffusion made the desert fathers the common teachers of monks everywhere, and carried the memory of individual fathers — Antony, Macarius, Poemen, Arsenius, Sisoes, and the rest — far beyond Egypt.

Sisoes travelled with the collection. Wherever the Apophthegmata were read — in the lavras of Palestine, the monasteries of Constantinople and Mount Athos, the houses of the Latin West, the Slavic foundations of the Christian north — his sayings on humility and repentance were read with the rest, and his name was known to monks who had never seen the eastern desert (Chitty 1966; Harmless 2004). The wide reach of the Sayings is the reason a hermit who left no writings and whose external life is almost unknown became a teacher of the universal Church.

The Desert in Western Monasticism

The desert fathers were foundational for Western monasticism as much as for Eastern. St. Benedict of Nursia, in his Rule (c. 540), commends to his monks the reading of “the Lives of the Fathers” and “the Conferences of the Fathers” — the Apophthegmata-derived literature and the Conferences of John Cassian, who had brought the wisdom of the Egyptian desert to the Latin West — as a guide to monastic perfection (Benedict, Rule 73; Chitty 1966). Through Cassian and through the Verba Seniorum, the teaching of the Egyptian fathers on humility, the guarding of the thoughts, discretion, and unceasing prayer became part of the bloodstream of Western monastic life. Sisoes’ characteristic teaching — humility carried to total self-accusation, repentance without end — belongs to this shared inheritance, even where the Western reader knew it without the name attached.

This shared patrimony is one of the deepest bonds between Eastern and Western Christian monasticism, and it predates the divisions of later centuries (see The Pre-Schism Church). The desert was the common school of both traditions, and Sisoes one of its masters. That he is venerated in the East and remembered in the West reflects the era of the undivided Church in which the Apophthegmata were formed and first diffused.

The route by which the desert reached the West is worth tracing, for it shows how a figure like Sisoes became a teacher of Latin monks. John Cassian (c. 360–435), having spent years among the monks of Egypt, composed in southern Gaul his Institutes and Conferences, presenting the teaching of the Egyptian fathers — on the eight principal faults, on discretion, on unceasing prayer, on humility and compunction — in a form accessible to Latin readers (Chitty 1966; Cassian, Conferences, passim). Through Cassian the very themes that define Sisoes’ sayings entered the Latin tradition as living instruction. Alongside Cassian, the Verba Seniorum — the Latin translations of the Apophthegmata — carried the sayings themselves, often anonymously or under the fathers’ names, into the libraries of Western monasteries, where they were read and excerpted for centuries (Harmless 2004). The result was that the wisdom of the Egyptian desert, Sisoes’ included, became part of the formation of monks who would never see Egypt and might never have heard the saint’s name, but who absorbed his teaching on humility and unceasing repentance as part of the common inheritance of the monastic life.

The Greek Continuity and Athos

In the Greek-speaking world the desert’s inheritance passed without interruption into the monasticism of Byzantium and, supremely, of Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain that became from the tenth century the living heart of Orthodox monastic life. The Athonite fathers read the Apophthegmata as their own charter, and the desert’s teaching on humility, the guarding of the heart, and unceasing prayer of repentance formed the substance of their spirituality (Chitty 1966; on the continuity of the tradition, see Monasticism). Sisoes’ memory travelled into this world with the rest of the desert dossier, and it was in this Greek and Athonite milieu, with its deep meditation on death and the vanity of the world, that the iconographic type of Sisoes over Alexander’s tomb took its characteristic form, especially in the post-Byzantine centuries (see The Icon of Vanity).

The continuity is important for understanding Sisoes’ place in the living tradition. He is not a figure recovered by modern scholarship from a closed past but a saint continuously venerated and a teacher continuously read, from the Egyptian desert through Byzantium and Athos to the present Orthodox world. The monks who keep his feast and read his sayings today stand in an unbroken line with those who first remembered him, and the lesson he taught — humility and unceasing repentance — has been handed down within that line as a living possession, not a historical artifact (Chitty 1966; Harmless 2004).

What Sisoes Contributed

Within this vast shared memory, Sisoes occupies a particular and recognizable place. He is remembered as the model of two things the whole tradition prized: the humility that refuses all self-satisfaction, and the unceasing repentance that never counts itself arrived. Other fathers are remembered for other gifts — Antony for the founding of the anchoritic life, Pachomius for the cenobium, Poemen for his discernment, Arsenius for his silence and flight from men, Macarius for his fatherhood of Scetis. Sisoes is remembered for the depth of his self-abasement and for the luminous death that crowned it (Ward 1984; Chitty 1966; on the wider company, cf. St. Macarius the Great, St. Moses the Black, and St. Antony the Great). His near-contemporaries among the great sayings-fathers — figures such as Arsenius the Great and Poemen the Great, whose dossiers stand near his own in the collection — share this world of the second- and third-generation desert and its concentrated teaching on the inner life.

This makes Sisoes’ contribution to the monastic memory specific and enduring: he is the father to whom the tradition turns for the lesson that no one is ever done repenting, and that the holiest are precisely those who think themselves least advanced. His deathbed word — “I have not yet begun” — became a touchstone of monastic self-understanding wherever the Sayings were read, a permanent guard against the spiritual pride that the desert feared above all (see The Word on Repentance).

The Hesychast Inheritance

The desert’s teaching on the guarding of the heart, the watchfulness over the thoughts, and the unceasing prayer of repentance — the very disciplines Sisoes embodied — flowed forward into the later Orthodox tradition of hesychasm, the spirituality of inner stillness and the Jesus Prayer that came to its fullest development on Mount Athos and in the Byzantine and Slavic worlds. The hesychast tradition understood itself as the heir of the desert, and it read the Apophthegmata as foundational texts of the inner life (Chitty 1966; on the continuity, see Monasticism). The great compilation of hesychast and ascetic texts, the Philokalia, gathered the wisdom of the fathers from the desert forward, and the desert’s teaching on watchfulness and compunction — Sisoes’ teaching among it — became part of the living spiritual practice of Orthodox monasticism into the modern age.

In this long continuity Sisoes’ lesson finds its enduring home. The hesychast who watches his heart, who prays the prayer of repentance unceasingly, who counts himself the least of sinners, stands in the line that runs from the desert through Byzantium to the present, and Sisoes is one of the fathers at its source. The Slavic monastic revival associated with St. Paisius Velichkovsky and the translation of the Philokalia, and the spirituality of the Russian elders, drew on this same desert inheritance; through it the memory of Sisoes — the model of humility and unceasing repentance — passed into the bloodstream of the Orthodox spiritual tradition far beyond the Egyptian sands where it began (Chitty 1966; Harmless 2004).

A Universal Memory

The result is that Sisoes, for all the thinness of his historical record, is held in a genuinely universal monastic memory. He is venerated across the Orthodox East — Greek, Slavic, and the other traditions — and remembered in the monastic literature of the West that drew on the same desert sources. He belongs to no single nation or jurisdiction but to the whole tradition of Christian monasticism, as one of the fathers whose words the monks of every land have read for fifteen hundred years. The hermit of Antony’s mountain, hidden in the desert silence, became through the Apophthegmata a teacher of the universal Church — and his lesson, that the soul is never done turning to God, travelled with the Sayings to every place the monastic life took root.

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 within the diffused collection.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The diffusion of the Sayings; Cassian and the desert in the West.)
Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The translation and diffusion of the Apophthegmata; the Verba Seniorum.)
Benedict of Nursia. The Rule of St. Benedict. (Chapter 73, commending the Lives and Conferences of the Fathers.)
John Cassian. The Conferences and The Institutes. (The transmission of the teaching of the Egyptian desert to the Latin West.)