Sisoes the Great

Origins and the desert of Scetis

Sisoes was an Egyptian, born about the year 332 into a poor and numerous family. The Greek tradition relates that he was called to the monastic life while still young, and went down into Scetis — the great salt valley south-west of the Nile Delta where Macarius the Great had gathered the first disciples, and which in the fourth century was the schoolroom of Egyptian monasticism. There he was formed among fathers whose names the Apophthegmata sets beside his own: he is associated in the sayings with Abba Or (Hor), who is remembered as his elder, and he converses with John the Dwarf, Poemen, Ammoun of Ray, Amoun of Nitria, and Abraham, his own disciple and the reporter of much that survives of him.

The desert of Scetis in that generation was already becoming crowded. Sisoes belonged to the generation for whom the eremitical ideal was under pressure from its own success: seekers came in numbers, monasteries multiplied along the Nile, and the fathers of the strictest sort went looking for emptier ground. Asked why he had gone away to a harsher place, Sisoes is said to have answered simply that where he had been there was no longer any solitude.

The mountain of Anthony

Anthony the Great reposed in 356 on his inner mountain — the crag above the Red Sea coast known later as Mount Colzim (Qulzum), the site of the present Monastery of St Anthony — having made his two disciples swear to hide his grave. Some while after, Sisoes went up to that mountain and settled there, and remained on it, by the reckoning preserved in the Greek tradition, about seventy-two years, so that his whole monastic life ran to sixty years and more of unbroken ascetic labour in the place Anthony had hallowed. Only his disciple Abraham and a few others shared the solitude with him, and at long intervals visitors came up from the inhabited world to ask him a word.

He was severe with himself and lenient with others. The sayings show him forgetting to eat for days together and having to be reminded; refusing, when guests came, to let his own rule of abstinence be a burden on them; and answering questions about food and wine with a plain contempt for the whole subject, since the body's regimen was not, in his eyes, where the battle lay. When Abraham asked him whether after all those years he had conquered the passions, he would not allow the claim. The one virtue he pressed on everyone was the low estimate of oneself.

The teaching: humility and the short road

The chapter of Sisoes in the alphabetical Apophthegmata is one of the fullest in the collection, and it is remarkably consistent. Its centre is the exchange that has passed into the common speech of Orthodox ascetic writing: a brother said to him that he kept the remembrance of God unceasingly, and Sisoes replied that this was no great matter — the great matter was to see oneself as lower than every creature, for bodily labour without humility does not bring a man to humility.

To the same purpose is his counsel on repentance. A brother who had fallen asked how long he must repent; the old man said three years; the brother thought it long; he said one year; still long; forty days — and when the brother pleaded that even this was beyond him, Sisoes answered that if a man repents with his whole heart God will receive him in three days. The saying is not an indulgence but a doctrine: the measure is not time but the completeness of the turning.

Others of his words are proverbial. Asked what a man should seek, he answered that one should seek God, and not seek where God dwells. He told a brother that to be despised, to throw one's own will away behind one, and to be free of anxiety, is the whole of monastic rest. To a monk who wished to leave the desert for a place where he could live undistracted, he answered that the place would follow him. Asked why the fathers of the earlier generation had wrought such wonders and their successors did not, he laid the difference to charity grown cold and to the loss of that self-abasement which had been their strength.

Miracles and traditions

Sisoes received the gift of wonderworking, and hid it. The most celebrated instance is the raising of a dead child. A layman of the region, whose son had died on the road up to the mountain, carried the body into the old man's cell, set it at his feet as though asking a blessing, and went outside weeping. Sisoes, not knowing the child was dead, spoke to him and told him to rise, and the boy stood up alive; and when the father came in and fell down giving thanks, the old man was distressed at what he had unwittingly done and charged him to tell no one until Sisoes himself had died. Other sayings show him discerning thoughts, foretelling the approach of visitors, and driving away demons by a word — always with the same reluctance to be known for it.

Repose

He died on his mountain in 429, at about ninety-seven years of age. The account of his death is one of the great set-pieces of Egyptian hagiography, and is transmitted in the Apophthegmata itself. The fathers were sitting around him as he lay dying, and his face began to shine. He said: Behold, Abba Anthony has come. A little after: Behold, the choir of the prophets has come. His countenance shone the brighter, and he said the apostles were come. They asked with whom he was speaking; he said the angels had come for him, and that he was asking them to leave him a little longer, that he might repent. The fathers protested that he, of all men, had no need of repentance, and he answered that he did not think he had so much as begun to repent. Then his face shone like the sun, and he said, Behold, the Lord is come, and He says: Bring me the vessel of the desert — and immediately he gave up his spirit like a flash of lightning, and the whole place was filled with a sweet fragrance.

That last word — the refusal of a man of sixty years' asceticism to allow that his repentance had even started — is the reason the Church calls him great, and is the burden of every hymn appointed to him.