09 — Veneration and Legacy

The feast and the enduring legacy of St. Sisoes the Great: his commemoration on 6 July with its hymnography and cult, and a sober assessment of what this hidden hermit, who left no writings and whose external life is almost unknown, has given to the Orthodox tradition. These two files close the collection by gathering the forms of his remembrance and weighing his lasting significance.

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

Sisoes’ legacy is out of all proportion to the slenderness of his record. A man of whom almost no biography survives, who wrote nothing and sought nothing, became one of the most revered of the desert fathers and the Church’s chosen model of unceasing repentance — honored with the title “the Great,” commemorated across the Orthodox world, and depicted in one of the most powerful icons of Eastern Christian art. The first file treats his feast and cult; the second offers a sober assessment of his significance and of the honest limits within which that significance must be stated.

Files in This Section

File	Description
Feast and Cult	The feast of St. Sisoes on 6 July; the hymnography and liturgical commemoration; the forms of his cult and the diffusion of his veneration.
Legacy and Assessment	A sober assessment of Sisoes’ lasting significance: the model of repentance and humility, the deathbed icon, the Alexander-tomb image; what the thin record permits and what it does not.

See Also

• Veneration — the forms of his veneration across the traditions
• The Word on Repentance — the teaching that is his chief legacy
• The Luminous Repose — the deathbed that crowns his memory
• Monasticism — the tradition his legacy serves

References

• The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Cistercian Studies 59. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984.
• Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966.
• Harmless, William. Desert Christians. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.