The Ammas

The desert mothers — the ammas whose sayings stand in the Apophthegmata beside the fathers’. The alphabetical collection preserves three by name: Amma Syncletica, Amma Sarah, and Amma Theodora. This file treats their words and the wider, more thinly recorded phenomenon of women’s asceticism in and around the Egyptian desert.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Egyptian desert monasticism)

“Amma” in the Sayings

The desert had mothers as well as fathers. The alphabetical Apophthegmata Patrum — the collection arranged by name — includes among its abbas three ammas (“mothers”): Theodora, Sarah, and Syncletica, whose sayings are transmitted with the same authority as the men’s and are read for the same “word” of salvation (Ward, introduction to The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, Cistercian, 1984, on the ammas; Laura Swan, The Forgotten Desert Mothers, New York: Paulist Press, 2001). The title amma, like abba, marks not office but spiritual authority: a woman to whom others came for guidance. That only three are named in the great collection, and that women’s asceticism is recorded far more thinly than men’s, is itself a fact about the sources — compiled by men, in a world where women’s ascetic lives were more often lived in the towns and in domestic seclusion than in the open desert (Susanna Elm, Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity, Oxford, 1994, on the character and the under-recording of women’s asceticism). The desert mothers we can name are the visible peaks of a much larger movement.

Amma Syncletica

The fullest of the three is Amma Syncletica, to whom the alphabetical collection gives some two dozen sayings and around whom a whole Life was written — the Life of Syncletica, transmitted under the name of Athanasius but generally regarded as the work of a later hand (pseudo-Athanasius), one of the earliest Lives of a woman ascetic (on the Life, Elm, Virgins of God, 1994; Swan, The Forgotten Desert Mothers, 2001). Tradition makes her a woman of Alexandria, of a wealthy family, who at her parents’ death gave away her inheritance, took her blind sister, and withdrew to live in ascetic seclusion, becoming a teacher of other women.

Her sayings are among the richest in the whole Apophthegmata for the psychology of the ascetic struggle. The most celebrated is her image of the fire: “In the beginning there is struggle and a great deal of toil for those who come near to God; but afterwards there is unspeakable joy. It is just like those who wish to light a fire: at first they are choked by the smoke and cry, until they obtain what they seek… so we also must kindle the divine fire in ourselves through tears and hard work” (Syncletica 1, Alphabetical Collection, trans. Ward, 1984). She warns that solitude is no guarantee of virtue — “there are many who live in the mountains and behave as if they were in the town, and they are wasting their time; it is possible to be a solitary in one’s mind while living in a crowd” (Syncletica material, trans. Ward, 1984) — a saying that quietly relativizes the whole geography of “flight to the desert” (see The Flight to the Desert). Her teaching on the passions, on vainglory hiding under asceticism, and on bearing illness as itself an ascesis is as searching as any father’s.

Amma Sarah

Amma Sarah is remembered for austerity and for a sharp, uncompromising strength. The tradition says she lived sixty years beside a river and never once looked out at it — an image of unrelenting custody of the senses (Sarah material, Alphabetical Collection, trans. Ward, 1984). She is said to have been assaulted by the demon of fornication for thirteen years and never to have prayed for the warfare to cease, but only for strength to endure it (Sarah 1–2, trans. Ward, 1984). Two of her sayings turn the gendered expectations of her visitors on their head: when two great anchorites came to test her and meant to humiliate her as “only a woman,” she said to them, “According to my nature I am a woman, but not according to my thoughts” (Sarah 4, trans. Ward, 1984); and again, “It is I who am a man, and you who are women” (Sarah 9, trans. Ward, 1984) — claiming, in the idiom of the age, the “manly” courage (andreia) the desert prized, and refusing to be measured by her sex rather than her virtue. Her word on the fear of God is characteristically severe: “I put out my foot to ascend the ladder, and I place death before my eyes before going up it” (Sarah 6, trans. Ward, 1984).

Amma Theodora

Amma Theodora, associated in the tradition with Alexandria and with Archbishop Theophilus, gives teaching notable for its stress on humility and on the qualities a spiritual teacher must have. She holds that neither asceticism, nor vigils, nor any labor avails without humility, telling of a hermit able to cast out demons who asked them by what they were driven off — not fasting, not prayer, they answered, but humility (Theodora 6, Alphabetical Collection, trans. Ward, 1984). She teaches that the teacher must first be dispassionate, free from love of money and vainglory, before presuming to guide others, and she speaks with unusual directness about acedia — the noonday listlessness that is the monk’s great enemy — and how it must be resisted by steadfastness in prayer and psalmody (Theodora material, trans. Ward, 1984; on Theodora and acedia, Swan, The Forgotten Desert Mothers, 2001). In Theodora the amma appears fully as a teacher of teachers, her authority resting on the same discernment that gave the abbas theirs.

The Wider Movement

Beyond the three named ammas, the sources give glimpses of a much larger women’s asceticism. Palladius devotes chapters of the Lausiac History to holy women — to Amma Talis and the virgin Taor in a women’s monastery of the Thebaid, and, more fully, to the great aristocratic ascetics of his acquaintance: Melania the Elder, Melania the Younger, and Olympias, women of wealth who renounced it for the ascetic life and founded communities (Palladius, Lausiac History 59 on Talis and Taor; 46, 54, 56 on the Melanias and others; trans. Meyer, ACW 34, 1964). The Pachomian koinonia included from early on communities of women — the tradition names Pachomius’ own sister Maria as the first — organized on the same coenobitic pattern as the men’s (Rousseau, Pachomius, Berkeley, 1985; and see The Coenobitic Revolution). And the Historia Monachorum and the Apophthegmata alike assume the presence of ascetic women throughout the Egyptian landscape.

Modern scholarship has emphasized both the reality and the difficulty of recovering this movement. Susanna Elm has argued that women’s asceticism was, if anything, older and more domestic than men’s — rooted in the household virgins and widows of the earliest Church — and that the “desert” model, with its heroic solitaries, both drew on and partly obscured the women’s forms (Elm, Virgins of God, 1994). [Disputed: the extent and character of women's monasticism in the Egyptian desert is debated because of the state of the sources (METHODOLOGY §4). The named ammas are few, and their sayings and Lives were transmitted and shaped by men; scholars such as Elm (*Virgins of God*, 1994) stress that much women's asceticism was urban and domestic rather than desert-dwelling, and caution against reading the male-centered "desert" model as the whole of the phenomenon. The ammas of the *Apophthegmata* are reported here as the tradition attests them; the thinness of the record is a feature of the sources, not a measure of the women's holiness or numbers.]

The three ammas of the alphabetical collection thus stand for a far larger reality than the sources let us see. That the compilers of the Apophthegmata placed Syncletica, Sarah, and Theodora among the abbas — gave them the title amma, transmitted their words as authoritative “words” of salvation, and let Sarah’s retort “it is I who am a man” stand uncorrected — is itself the tradition’s own witness that the desert’s holiness and its spiritual authority were not the possession of men alone (Swan, The Forgotten Desert Mothers, 2001; Ward, introduction, 1984).

References

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo / London: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Syncletica 1 and material; Sarah 1–2, 4, 6, 9; Theodora 6 and material; the ammas’ place in the collection.)
Palladius. The Lausiac History. Trans. Robert T. Meyer. Ancient Christian Writers 34. New York: Newman Press, 1964. (Talis and Taor, ch. 59; the Melanias and Olympias.)
Elm, Susanna. Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (Women’s asceticism, its domestic roots, and the state of the sources.)
Swan, Laura. The Forgotten Desert Mothers: Sayings, Lives, and Stories of Early Christian Women. New York: Paulist Press, 2001. (The ammas and the wider women’s movement.)
Rousseau, Philip. Pachomius: The Making of a Community in Fourth-Century Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. (The Pachomian women’s communities.)
Ward, Benedicta. Introduction to The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, 1984. (The ammas in the collection.)
The Life of Syncletica (pseudo-Athanasius). (The Life of Amma Syncletica.)