Teaching and Spiritual Method
Synkletike's teachings and sayings were rich in Biblical quotation, allusion, and metaphor, drawing especially on images of sailing, the sea, domestic chores, and women's work. Scholars count seven direct Scripture quotations and some fifty allusions in her recorded sayings, and note her use of nautical metaphors turned into what has been called a parable for the spiritual life.
Unlike many male ascetics of her time, she connected domesticity with spirituality and treated it as fully capable of expressing the ascetic's spiritual growth. Rather than emphasizing extreme ascetic feats or radical breaks with convention, her teaching presented the spiritual life as a dynamic, embodied reality, drawing on everyday and specifically female life experience as means of growth toward purity of heart. One summary of her ascetic teaching reads: that the great ascetic practice is to remain steadfast and to offer up to God hymns of thanksgiving.
Comparison to Anthony the Great
Scholars Tim Vivian and William Veder compare Synkletike to Anthony the Great. Like Anthony, she left her home, distributed her wealth to the poor, embraced voluntary poverty, and lived as an anchorite in the desert, and like him her teaching drew others, mostly virgins who came to visit and perhaps settled nearby.
She was also, apart from Anthony, the only anchorite to have a vita written about her, the Life of Syncletica.
Final Illness
By tradition her vita compares her suffering during her final three-year illness to that of Job, while regarding hers as more severe because it included both physical and spiritual distress. The illness is described in graphic physical terms: it afflicted first her lungs and vocal cords, then her teeth and gums, and finally blackened her entire jaw, producing such a stench that her disciples could not bear to remain near her.
According to the account she at first refused treatment despite the disfigurement, but eventually consented in order to keep from infecting those who cared for her. She bore the long, agonizing illness with thanksgiving.
Sources and Legacy
Synkletike is the subject of the Life of Syncletica, a Greek hagiography attributed to Athanasius of Alexandria (died 373) but not published until 450. Twenty-eight of her sayings and teachings were preserved in the Alphabetical and Systematic Apophthegmata, probably compiled in the 6th century.
Within the Sayings of the Desert Fathers (the Apophthegmata Patrum Aegyptiorum), a collection of stories and sayings attributed to the Desert Fathers of Egypt dating from roughly the 5th century, her 28 sayings appear among those of three ammas (women elders), including Theodora of Alexandria and Sarah of the Desert, alongside notable figures such as Anthony the Great and Abba Arsenius.
