Sarmatas the Ascetic
Our Venerable Father Sarmatas, Ascetic of the Egyptian Desert
Venerable · d. 4th century, in the Egyptian desert
Commemorated 30 August — Commemoration of the desert father
Sarmatas is one of the desert fathers of Egypt, known not from a Life but from the sayings-collections — the Apophthegmata (the "Paradise of the Fathers") and the Evergetinos — where he appears as a master of fasting and vigil whose command over sleep became proverbial, and as a spiritual father with a hard, dry, entirely practical answer for the logismoi that talk a monk out of his cell and his rule. The Greek synaxarion keeps him on August 30, noting only that he was an ascetic of the desert and reposed in peace.
The abba who commanded sleep
The Evergetinos records of him that by constant fasting and self-restraint he so far overcame sleep that he could dismiss and recall it at will — "if he said to it, go from me, it went; and if he said, come, it came." The saying is preserved as an extreme case rather than a model, in the manner of the collections, which liked to record the outer limits of what the fathers had achieved so that ordinary monks might measure their own middle distance by it. The couplet in the Greek synaxarion turns on the same theme, imagining the angel of God descending at the end and saying: Rise, Sarmatas, and follow rejoicing.
Two sayings
The Paradise of the Fathers preserves two exchanges, both of them about the thoughts that attack a monk in stillness.
A brother sitting in hesychia came to him and said: "My thoughts tell me, go out and visit the brethren." Sarmatas answered: "Do not listen to them. Say rather: I listened to you once already; now I cannot listen to you any more."
Another came and said: "My thoughts tell me, do not work; eat, drink and sleep." And the old man said to him: "When you are hungry — hungry past bearing, so that you are worn out — then eat. And when you are thirsty past bearing, so that you can endure it no longer, then drink. And when you have kept vigil so long that you cannot hold out, then sleep."
The second answer is characteristic of the tradition: it does not deny the body's demands but refuses to let them be anticipated. The thought is not to be argued with, only outlasted.
Feast and commemoration
August 30 (church date; Old Calendar civil September 12), in Greek usage. He has no proper office and no service of his own; he is named at the synaxarion reading of the day, whose office belongs to the three patriarchs of Constantinople.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
In thee, O father, was preserved unfailingly that which is according to the image; for taking up the cross thou didst follow after Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, for it passes away, but to care for the soul, a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Sarmatas, thy spirit rejoices with the angels.
Iconography
He has no distinct type. Where he is painted at all it is as one of the anonymous elders of the Egyptian desert: an old man, deeply lined and thin, in a plain dark tunic and the analavos, the koukoulion on his head or thrown back, holding a scroll or with hands open in prayer, and set among the fathers in a synaxis of the venerable. The image the synaxarion couplet suggests — the angel standing over him at the end with the summons to rise and follow — is not, so far as can be established, a painted subject. No pre-1900 image inscribed with his name has been located for this collection, and the Menologion of Basil II covers only September to February and cannot supply one for an August day.
Disputed questions
- Who was he? The synaxarion gives no place, no date and no master. The Coptic and Greek sayings-traditions know an Abba Sarmatas among the disciples of Anthony the Great, and the fourth-century desert is where the name belongs; but the identification is by association only, and this reference dates him no more precisely than the fourth century. Some later Western repetitions make him a martyr killed by Saracens; the Greek synaxarion says explicitly that he reposed in peace, and there is no early support for the martyrdom.
- The day. He is kept on August 30 in the Greek books; the Slavonic calendars do not carry him, and the OCA's August 30 does not list him.