Tithoes of the Thebaid
Our Venerable Father Tithoes, of the Thebaid
Venerable · d. 4th century, in Egypt
Commemorated 26 August — Peaceful repose
Tithoes is one of the anchorites of fourth-century Egypt whose memory survives almost entirely in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, where he is a byword for two things: an irreproachable life, of which Abba Matoes said that no one could find anything to accuse him of, and a prayer so absorbing that when he stood with his hands raised his mind was carried off before he could lower them, so that in company he learned to bring his hands down slowly in order to hide what was happening to him. The tradition attaches him to Pachomius the Great as a disciple, and preserves from him the sharpest of the desert's definitions of pilgrimage: exile is to keep control of your mouth. He reposed in peace, and the Greek synaxarion keeps him on August 26.
The desert record
Nothing is transmitted of Tithoes' birth, family or entry into the monastic life. He belongs to the great generation of the Thebaid in the fourth century, and the tradition makes him a disciple of Pachomius the Great, the founder of the coenobitic life — which would place him in Upper Egypt, in or around the Tabennesiote houses, though the sayings themselves show him living the anchoritic rather than the communal life, and receiving visitors in his cell in the manner of Scetis.
What survives of him is what the Apophthegmata Patrum and the great later anthologies — the Evergetinos and the Egyptian Paradise of the Fathers — thought worth keeping.
The judgement of Abba Matoes
Of the estimates of him passed by his contemporaries, the one the synaxarion repeats is Abba Matoes': that among all the fathers he had known, Tithoes was the one in whom he could find nothing to blame. In a milieu whose whole conversational habit was the frank assessment of one monk by another, this is a very large statement, and it is the reason Tithoes has a day at all.
Stillness and the raised hands
His asceticism was that of hesychia — stillness, silence, the guarded cell. The characteristic story concerns his prayer. When he stood with his hands lifted, his intellect was seized and carried up before he could put them down again; and because he did not wish this to be seen, when he prayed in the presence of other brethren he would lower his hands by degrees, slowly, so that the others would take it for ordinary weariness and would not guess what was happening to him. The story is transmitted for the concealment as much as for the rapture: the desert reckoned the hiding of a gift to be a greater achievement than the gift.
"Exile is to control your mouth"
The saying most often quoted from him answers a question that occupied the fathers greatly — what xeniteia, the voluntary exile or estrangement from one's own country that the monastic life was thought to consist in, actually is. Tithoes' answer refuses the geography altogether: exile is to keep control of your mouth. A man who has left Egypt and still talks as he pleases has gone nowhere; a man who holds his tongue is a stranger wherever he lives. It is, compressed into six words, the whole desert doctrine that the monastic life is interior or it is nothing.
He reposed in peace, at an age and in a year the tradition does not give.
Feast and commemoration
August 26 (church date; Old Calendar civil September 8), on which the Greek synaxaria give him — the notice deriving from St Nikodemos the Hagiorite's Synaxaristes, which assembles the entry out of the desert collections. He is not carried in the Russian day-lists for this date, which are occupied by the Vladimir icon and the Russian Adrians, nor is he generally printed in the Antiochian books; the day is served with the common of a venerable one.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8
With the streams of thy tears thou didst make the barren desert to blossom, and by thy sighings from the depths thou didst bring forth fruit a hundredfold in labours; and thou becamest a luminary, shining upon the world by thy wonders, O Tithoes our father. Intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
There is no distinct iconographic type for Tithoes, and no image of him is known that carries his name. Where he might be painted he would take the ordinary form of an Egyptian anchorite: an old man, long white beard, in the analavos and koukoulion of the great schema, holding a scroll. The one subject proper to him would be the raised hands — the monk standing in prayer with his arms lifted while the brethren look on, and the deliberate, slow lowering of them — a scene that would place him among that small group of desert saints, with Sisoes and Arsenius, whose iconography is built out of a single remembered gesture. No pre-1900 depiction has been located.
Disputed questions
The form of the name varies: Τιθόης, Τιθόη, Titoes, Tithoe; English translations of the Sayings usually print Tithoes. Whether the Tithoes of the sayings is the same man as the disciple of Pachomius named in the synaxarion notices cannot be demonstrated — the identity is traditional rather than documented, and the sayings themselves place him in a Scetiote rather than a Tabennesiote setting. The entry records the tradition and marks the difficulty.
He is not to be confused with Abba Sisoes, with whom the alphabetical collections place him in proximity and whose sayings are sometimes attributed to him in the manuscripts; see Sisoes the Great.