Sarah of Sketis
Our Venerable Mother Sarah of Sketis
Venerable · Virgin · b. c. 290 — d. c. 370
Commemorated 13 July — Commemoration of the desert mother of Sketis
Sarah is one of the three women — with Theodora and Synkletike — whose sayings were gathered into the alphabetical collection of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, and she is the sharpest voice of the three. An ascetic of Sketis, the settlement in the salt desert west of the Nile Delta that was the classical home of Egyptian monasticism, she lived some sixty years in a cell above a river without once turning to look at it; fought the spirit of fornication for thirteen years without ever praying that the war should stop, but only for strength to fight it; and, when two celebrated anchorites came to humble her, answered them with the single sentence for which she is remembered — that she was a woman by nature but not in her thoughts. The calendars commemorate her on July 13 and title her, following an old geographical usage, "of Libya."
Sketis
Almost everything transmitted about Sarah comes from the Apophthegmata Patrum, the collection of sayings and anecdotes gathered from the Egyptian desert in the fourth and fifth centuries and written down in the fifth. She is placed at Sketis — Greek Skētis, the Coptic Shiet, today the Wadi el-Natrun, a chain of salt lakes in the desert some forty miles west and south of the Delta. It was the harshest and the most famous of the three great Egyptian monastic districts, founded by Macarius the Great about 330 and inhabited by anchorites who lived apart in cells and came together for the Saturday and Sunday synaxis. The dating usually given for Sarah, about 290 to 370 and a life of some eighty years, follows the reckoning of the printed synaxaria; the sayings themselves carry no dates, and the figure is an inference from the milieu rather than a record.
Sarah lived as a solitary, and by the time the sayings were collected she had disciples and was addressed as amma — "mother," the feminine of abba — which in this literature is a title of spiritual authority, not of office. The notices that call her an abbess and credit her with gathering a community of women read the later institution back into the fourth-century desert; what the sources show is a woman living the anchoritic life with younger ascetics coming to her for a word.
The struggle
Two of her struggles are transmitted in detail, and both are about not looking.
The first is the river. Her cell, the collection says, stood above a river — the Nile, or one of the canals of the Delta — and for sixty years she never leaned out to look at the water. It is an ascetic feat of a very Egyptian kind: not a mortification of the body but a refusal of the one small pleasure that lay closest to hand, repeated for a lifetime.
The second is the war with the demon of fornication. The tradition gives her thirteen years of it. What is remarkable in the notice is her prayer: she never asked that the assault should be taken away, but only that she should be given strength to stand in it, on the understanding that the struggle itself was the work she had been given. At the end of the thirteen years — so the saying runs — the spirit appeared to her bodily and admitted that she had beaten him. She answered that it was not she who had beaten him but her Lord, Christ.
The two anchorites
The best-known anecdote concerns two old men, great anchorites from the district of Pelusium, who came to visit her having agreed beforehand to humble her, on the principle that a woman ought not to be sought out for counsel by monks. They said to her: Take care that your thoughts are not puffed up, and that you do not say, "Anchorites come to me, and I a woman." She replied that by nature she was a woman, but not in her thoughts — and, in the sharper version of the saying, that she was the man and they were the women.
It is easy to read this as bravado; in the logic of the desert it is the opposite. The whole point of the ascetic vocabulary Sarah is using is that "man" and "woman" name states of the soul — courage and slackness in the fight — and that the body's sex determines neither. The saying is quoted throughout the later monastic literature for exactly that purpose.
Her sayings
The alphabetical collection preserves a small group of sayings under her name. Rendered freshly here from the Greek, their sense is:
- If I begged God that everyone should approve of what I do, I should end up standing penitent at every man's door; I would rather pray that my heart be pure towards everyone.
- When I put my foot on the ladder to climb, I set death before my eyes before I climb.
- It is good to give alms for the sake of other people. Even if it is done to be seen, it ends by being done for God.
- (To some brethren who had come from Sketis and whom she had received, when they left without eating anything) You are monks, and you have eaten a monk's meal.
Her repose is not described. The Church numbers her among the venerable mothers and reads her sayings with those of the fathers.
Feast and commemoration
July 13 (church date; New Calendar civil July 13; Old Calendar civil July 26). The commemoration is carried by the Greek synaxaria and by the OCA calendar, which titles her "Virgin Abbess Sarah of Sketis in Libya"; the Slavonic Menaion of general use does not list her on this day, and the Russian calendar for the date does not include her — a divergence recorded here and not resolved. She has no proper office; where she is served, the common of a venerable woman is used. Her sayings are read, with those of the other ammas, throughout the monastic year, and she is a natural commemoration of the pre-Lenten and Lenten reading of the Gerontikon.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8
In thee, O mother, was preserved unimpaired that which is according to the image; for thou didst take up the Cross and follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, for it passeth away, but to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Sarah, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Kontakion — Tone 2
Sixty years thou didst dwell above the waters and never turn thine eyes to them, O mother Sarah, and thirteen years thou didst stand in the battle asking not that it cease but that thou be strengthened; wherefore, having conquered in Christ, thou dost teach the faithful that valour is of the soul and not of the flesh.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Sarah is written as a desert mother: an aged woman in the dark monastic tunic and mantle with the head veiled, gaunt from fasting, holding a scroll or with the hands raised in prayer. She belongs, iconographically, to the small company of ascetic women — Synkletike, Theodora of Alexandria, Melania, Mary of Egypt — who are distinguished from the martyred virgins by having no crown, no palm and no red mantle: their attribute is the habit itself. Where a scene is given her it is her cell above the water, and the Egyptian menologia place her among the ammas of Sketis.
No pre-1900 icon of this Sarah has been located. A search of Wikimedia Commons under her name and under Amma Sarah returns nothing; the images in circulation of "Amma Sarah" are modern panels by living iconographers, which the icon policy of this collection excludes, and no Byzantine or Coptic miniature of her has been identified. The Menologion of Basil II would be the obvious first resort for a saint of this class, but that manuscript covers only September to February and cannot supply a July commemoration. She is entered in the the list of icons still being sought list.
Disputed questions
- "Of Libya." The calendars style her of Sketis in Libya, which puzzles readers who know that Sketis is in Egypt. The usage is ancient geography, not error: the desert west of the Nile, from the Delta to the oases, was the Libyan desert to Greek and Roman writers, and Sketis lies within it. She is an Egyptian desert mother, and "Libya" here names the wilderness, not the modern country.
- Which Sarah? Some later notices confuse or combine her with other ascetic women of the same name, and with the Sarah who appears in Coptic sources in connection with Pelusium — an association that may be no more than a back-formation from the story of the two anchorites of Pelusium who came to test her. She is not Sarah the wife of Abraham, the matriarch of the Old Testament, with whom she shares only a name.
- Abbess or anchorite? See above: the Apophthegmata know her as a solitary with disciples, and the abbatial title in the printed calendars is a later gloss.