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After leaving the city with her blind sister, she lived as a hermit among the graves outside Alexandria. After her parents died, she sold everything she had and gave the proceeds to the poor. Syncletica may have been born around AD 270, as it is said that she came to be around eighty in AD 350, with wealthy parents in Alexandria and that she was well educated, including a study of the Father’s of the Desert in the writings of the Evagrius Pontus. The Desert Mothers described in The Lausiac History compiled by Palladius of Galatia include Melania the Elder, Melania the Younger, Olympia The Deaconess of Nicomedia, Paula of Rome and her daughter Eustochium Julia, and several other women whose names the author does not mention.Īccording to written sources, St. Two other ammas, Theodora of Alexandria and Sarah of the Desert, also had sayings in that book. One of the most famous Mothers of the Desert was Saint Syncletica, who had 27 sayings attributed among the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. The Desert Mothers were known as ammas (“spiritual mothers”), comparable to the Desert Fathers (abbas), due to the respect they had earned as spiritual teachers and directors.
AMMA SYNCLETICA FULL
While for those who teach, we recall a thought by Theodora: “A teacher ought to be a stranger to the desire for domination, vain-glory, and pride one should not be able to fool him with flattery, nor blind him by gifts, nor conquer him by the stomach, nor dominate him by anger but he should be patient, gentle and humble as far as possible, he must be tested and without partisanship, full of concern, and a lover of souls” (from the ‘ Sayings of the Desert Fathers’ Theodora 5). Of Syncletica we remember a thought that is often and willingly repeated in monasteries even today: “Obedience is preferable to asceticism, the one teaches pride the other humility”. Her true identity as a woman was not discovered until after her death.
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Therefore, very often, in this kind of warfare, women have been seen to fight with greater courage and generosity than the men and therefore they win the most glorious of victories”Īmong the Mothers of the desert we must remember the noblewoman Syncletica of Alexandria in Egypt, who renounced a wealth inheritance to live in a crypt with her blind sister, and Theodora, wife of a Prefect and the Roman Governor of Egypt, who in order to perform penance for a sin she committed, she disguised herself as a man and joined a monastery in Thebaid. These struggles do not require a strength of body, but the good will of the soul. The fragility of their gender is in no way an impediment to these battles. With the men they battle a common enemy, a war against the devil and the powers of darkness. “ The women here have no less philosophy and vigour than the men: vigour not to handle the shield or to ride, as the most severe Greek legislators and philosophers would like, but to participate in a much more bitter and harsher battles.
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John Chrysostom (344-407), a monk in his youth and later bishop of Constantinople, a great preacher, so tells the virgins whom he met in the Egyptian deserts: At the dawn of monastic life, in the Middle Eastern and African deserts, not only men sought the solitude and entered the desert, there were also women of extraordinary pre-eminence called the Mothers of the desert.