Veneration

St. Sisoes the Great is venerated across the Orthodox traditions — Greek, Slavic, and the others — and remembered in the broader Christian commemoration of the desert fathers. This file describes the forms his veneration has taken: his commemoration in the liturgical calendars and synaxaria, his title “the Great,” the diffusion of his cult through the Apophthegmata and the iconographic tradition, and his place among the holy fathers of the desert whom the Orthodox Church honors as teachers of the ascetic life.

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

Commemoration in the Calendars

St. Sisoes is commemorated in the Orthodox liturgical calendar on 6 July (Julian/Old Style; for the Churches following the Julian calendar this falls on 19 July of the civil New Style reckoning) (the feast and its hymnography are treated in Feast and Cult). His commemoration appears in the synaxaria and menaia of the Greek and Slavic traditions alike, where he is listed among the venerable fathers (hosioi, prepodobnye) — the monastic saints honored for the holiness of their ascetic lives rather than for martyrdom or episcopal office (Ware/Mother Mary, The Festal Menaion and the synaxarion tradition; cf. the Great Synaxaristes of the Greek Church). The title by which he is universally known — Sisoes the Great (Sisoēs ho Megas) — places him among the small number of desert fathers distinguished by that epithet, alongside Antony the Great, Macarius the Great, Pachomius the Great, and a few others, marking the special eminence the tradition accords him.

The title “the Great” is significant. It is not given for greatness of office — Sisoes held none — nor for learning or for the founding of institutions, but for the greatness of his sanctity, and specifically for the depth of his humility and repentance. The tradition’s willingness to call so self-effacing a man “the Great” is itself a comment on his holiness: the one who counted himself least is honored among the greatest, in exact fulfillment of the Gospel paradox he embodied (cf. Matthew 23:12; see The Humility of Sisoes).

The Forms of the Cult

Sisoes’ veneration took the forms proper to a desert father. He is commemorated liturgically on his feast with the hymnody appointed for a venerable monastic saint; his sayings are read and cited in the ascetic and spiritual literature of the Church; and his image is venerated in iconography — both in the standard portrait of the holy elder and, distinctively, in the later and famous type of the saint over the tomb of Alexander the Great (see The Icon of Vanity). The diffusion of his cult followed the diffusion of the Apophthegmata: wherever the Sayings were read, Sisoes was known and honored, so that his veneration extended across the whole Orthodox world and into the monastic memory of the West (see Sisoes in Monastic Memory).

Because Sisoes left no great relics-shrine or pilgrimage center comparable to those of some saints, his cult is carried above all by his words and his image rather than by a fixed holy place. This is fitting for a hermit whose whole teaching was self-effacement: he is venerated not at a tomb of his own but through the sayings and the icon that carry his lesson. The remembrance of death that the icon teaches, and the unceasing repentance that the sayings teach, are the substance of his cult — a veneration that consists less in honoring a place than in learning a way (cf. Memento Mori in Orthodox Art).

The Title “the Great”

The epithet “the Great” warrants a closer look, for it is shared by only a handful of the desert fathers and carries a definite weight. In the Orthodox tradition the title is bestowed sparingly on those whose sanctity or significance is judged preeminent — Antony the Great, Macarius the Great, Pachomius the Great, Basil the Great, Athanasius the Great, and a few others. Among the desert fathers it marks the founders and the supreme exemplars, those whose lives became patterns for the whole tradition. That Sisoes is numbered among them places him in the first rank of the desert’s memory, alongside the founders of the monastic life itself (Chitty 1966; Ward 1984).

What is striking is the basis on which Sisoes earns the title. Antony is “the Great” as the father of the anchorites; Macarius as the father of Scetis; Pachomius as the father of the cenobium. Each is great for a foundational achievement. Sisoes founded nothing and led nothing; he is “the Great” purely for the depth of his humility and repentance — for being, not for doing. The tradition’s willingness to rank a self-effacing hermit among the greatest of the fathers, on the strength of his self-abasement alone, is itself a profound statement of the desert’s values: it declares that the greatest greatness is the humility that thinks itself nothing, and that the soul most pleasing to God is the one that counts itself the least (cf. Matthew 23:12; see The Humility of Sisoes). In honoring Sisoes as “the Great,” the Church confesses its own deepest understanding of holiness.

Among the Fathers of the Desert

Sisoes is venerated as one of the company of the holy desert fathers, the hosioi whom the Orthodox Church honors as the great teachers and exemplars of the monastic life. He is commemorated individually on his feast and collectively in the Church’s general remembrance of the venerable fathers — for example in the synaxarion’s frequent grouping of the desert saints and in the monastic tradition’s reverence for the fathers of Egypt as a whole (Chitty 1966; Ward 1984). Within this company he holds the recognizable place already described: the model of humility and unceasing repentance, the hermit of Antony’s mountain, the saint of the luminous death (see Sisoes in Monastic Memory).

His veneration is thus inseparable from the veneration of the desert tradition itself. To honor Sisoes is to honor the whole ideal of the desert — renunciation, humility, the guarding of the heart, the remembrance of death, the unceasing turning to God — of which he is one of the purest embodiments. The Orthodox Church venerates him not as an isolated wonder-worker but as a master of the ascetic way, one of the fathers through whom the desert continues to teach the Church how the soul is saved.

Intercession and the Communion of Saints

The veneration of Sisoes, like that of every saint, rests on the Orthodox doctrine of the communion of saints — the conviction that the holy ones who have departed this life are not dead but alive in Christ, and that they pray for the Church on earth and may be invoked as intercessors (cf. the Orthodox understanding of the saints; Hebrews 12:1, the “great cloud of witnesses”). To venerate Sisoes is therefore not merely to honor a memory but to enter into living relationship with a member of the Body of Christ who, the Church believes, continues to intercede for those who call upon him. The faithful ask the humble hermit who counted himself nothing to obtain for them, by his prayers, the humility and repentance he attained — confident that the one who pleased God so wholly in life is heard by Him now.

This intercessory dimension gives the veneration its warmth and its practical force. Sisoes is not venerated as a distant exemplar only but as a present helper, a father to whom the struggling Christian may turn for aid in the very struggle he mastered — the struggle against pride, against anger, against the illusion of having done enough. The Church’s veneration of him is thus a two-way relationship: it honors the saint and receives his intercession, holds him up for imitation and asks his help in the imitating. In this Sisoes takes his place among the cloud of witnesses who surround and assist the Church on its way, one of the desert fathers who, having run the race, now pray for those still running it (cf. The Word on Repentance).

Greek and Slavic Forms

Within the Orthodox world Sisoes’ veneration takes the forms proper to each tradition, while remaining substantially one. In the Greek-speaking Churches he is Hosios Sisoēs ho Megas, the venerable Sisoes the Great, commemorated in the menaia and the Great Synaxaristes and depicted in the iconography of the desert fathers, including the celebrated panel and wall-painting type of the saint over Alexander’s tomb that flourished especially in the post-Byzantine Greek world (see The Icon of Vanity). In the Slavic Churches he is prepodobnyi Sisoi Velikii, commemorated on the same day in the Slavonic menaion and synaxarion, his sayings read in the Slavonic translations of the Paterikon (the Slavic name for the desert-fathers collections) that were among the foundational ascetic texts of Russian and other Slavic monasticism (Chitty 1966; Harmless 2004, on the diffusion of the collections into Slavonic). The Coptic tradition, the heir of the very Egyptian desert in which Sisoes lived, preserves his memory among the fathers of its own monastic inheritance.

These traditions differ in language and in the particular shape of their hymnody and iconographic conventions, but they venerate one saint with one portrait: the humble hermit of the desert, the model of repentance, the father of the luminous death. The unity of the veneration across the traditions reflects the unity of the source — the single, widely diffused dossier of the Apophthegmata — and the era of the undivided Church in which that dossier was formed (see Sisoes in Monastic Memory and The Pre-Schism Church).

A Veneration That Teaches

The character of Sisoes’ veneration is, finally, didactic. The Church honors him chiefly by learning from him — by reading his sayings, contemplating his icon, and keeping before its eyes the lesson of his life and death. His cult is a school of humility and repentance, and his feast an occasion for the faithful to take up, however little, the discipline he mastered: to count themselves not yet begun, to remember death, to turn again to God. In this sense the veneration of Sisoes is exactly suited to the saint: a man who sought no honor is honored in a way that points always away from himself and toward the God he served, and toward the repentance he taught. The faithful who venerate him do not so much praise him as imitate him — which is the only praise he would have accepted.

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; the desert fathers as venerated saints.)
Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware, trans. The Festal Menaion. London: Faber, 1969. (The liturgical commemoration of the venerable fathers and the structure of the synaxarion.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The desert fathers and their veneration.)
Scripture: Matthew 23:12 (the humble exalted), the paradox underlying the title “the Great”; Hebrews 12:1 (the great cloud of witnesses), the communion of saints underlying intercession.