Syncletica

Saint Syncletica of Alexandria was a Christian ascetic of the fourth century and one of the principal Desert Mothers, the women who pursued lives of prayer, fasting, and spiritual counsel in Egypt in the same era as the Desert Fathers. She was born in Alexandria to a wealthy family of Macedonian origin that was Christian. The principal source for her life is the Greek Vita Syncleticae, a fifth-century hagiography long attributed to Athanasius of Alexandria but not actually his work. According to that Life, her parents hoped she would marry, but from youth she was drawn to consecrated virginity. She had a sister who was blind; the two remained closely associated throughout Syncletica’s later withdrawal from the world.

After her parents died, she distributed her inheritance to the poor, cut her hair as a public sign of consecration, and withdrew with her sister to a tomb or abandoned crypt outside Alexandria. There she lived in extreme simplicity. Word of her holiness spread, and women gathered around her, so that she became a teacher of the monastic life rather than a solitary recluse. Sayings attributed to her were later collected in the same tradition as the Apophthegmata Patrum; about two dozen of her apophthegms survive, and the Vita itself contains long discourses on fasting, prayer, humility, the discernment of thoughts, and the dangers of vainglory and premature withdrawal from community.

In old age she suffered a severe and disfiguring illness, described in the Life as a cancer affecting the lungs and mouth, which she is said to have borne with patience and without abandoning her way of life. Tradition holds that she lived to about eighty. Precise years of birth and death are not independently documented; she belongs to the fourth-century Egyptian monastic world and died in the vicinity of Alexandria. Her cult is ancient. She is commemorated on 5 January in the Roman Martyrology and in the calendars of the Eastern Orthodox Churches. She is venerated as a model of female monasticism and as a Desert Mother alongside figures such as Sarah of the Desert and Theodora of Alexandria. Almost all narrative detail depends on the Vita and the sayings collections; later legend did not substantially expand a separate historical dossier.