St Sisoes

After the death of St Antony, Sisoes was counted among the brightest lights of the Egyptian desert, and the story presents him with a depth that goes beyond simple austerity. He leaves the world while still young, first lives at Skete, and then crosses the Nile to hide himself on the mountain where Antony had died. The memory of that great hermit steadies him there. Sisoes drives himself hard in silence, prayer, and penance, trying with all his strength to imitate the holiness he admires. But the shape of his sanctity becomes clearer when solitude is interrupted. Other solitaries hear of him, come from afar for counsel, and he has to surrender his love of hiddenness to the greater work of charity. This life lingers over that side of him. Sisoes is severe with himself, but not bitter with others.

When disciples fall, he does not respond with astonishment or contempt. He helps them rise again with patience and tenderness. It keeps returning to humility as the one thing no monk can do without. Even when speaking of God, he warns others to place themselves beneath every creature lest they lose the safety of lowliness. He distrusts his own progress so deeply that after decades in the desert he still laments his idle words and says that he lives more by trust in God’s mercy than by confidence in himself. Old age and sickness drive him for a time to Clysma near the Red Sea, but he pines for the peace of the desert and is not content until he returns. At the end, as the brethren stand by, he speaks of Antony, the prophets, the angels, and then of the Lord Himself. He dies about 429, after more than sixty years of desert life, still poor in spirit at the very end.