Shenoute of Atripe and the Uses of Poverty. Ariel G. Lopez
liars—he claims—but they have good reasons to resent his formidable presence:
As for those of you (people of Panopolis) who will hide behind what you accuse me of having done, you are hateful and hostile to me. And if you (pl.) know God and belong to Jesus (i.e., if you are Christians), truly you are worthy of the curse and you will not escape denying yourselves before the angels of God. For you have lied before Him when you set unlawful words against me in documents. For it is unlawful for you to have written them [but] it is even more unlawful against the crown of your head. For you have left me alive, whereas I deserve to die according to the works that you ascribe to me.
And perhaps this is the reason that such a great curse has come upon that unlawful governor from God, who delivered him into the hands of the emperors that they might take revenge on him, even before he goes into the hands of Him who will judge him and you. Him because he did not take my head, you (pl.) because you have not completed your task, oh friends. For if I had not shaken you (sg.), oh Panopolis, against your works of violence and your servitude of Kronos, you would have accused me to the rulers for nothing. How can a foreign man (i.e., a foreign governor) know whether I am good or I am bad? How will this impure judge—who brought these afflictions onto himself because of bribes—how will he dare say these words, namely, sometimes “What am I going to do with the places of Christ (i.e., Shenoute’s monasteries)?” Sometimes also “Shall I kill him?” Just as also that miserable military governor sent to me saying: “Get wisdom.”17
This confrontational style differs markedly from the self-confident poise of Isidore of Pelusium, Shenoute’s contemporary in the northeastern corner of the Nile delta. Isidore was also a monk of the “desert” heavily involved in the affairs of the “world.” Like Shenoute in Panopolis, he had plenty of enemies in the important harbor town of Pelusium. His blunt denunciations of corruption and injustice recall those so vehemently voiced by Shenoute. Yet Pelusium was his city in a way that Panopolis could never be Shenoute’s. He considered it his particular right and duty to plead in front of governors on behalf of his hometown. On the arrival of a new friendly governor, his address to his fellow citizens opened with an exulting “God still cares for Pelusium!”18 His numerous letters to members of the civic elite emphasize the paideia shared by him and his interlocutors. Shenoute, in contrast, owes nothing—or so he claims—to Panopolis. His rivals and accusers seem to have a tight hold over urban life there. They compete with him and his city on the “hill”—that is, his monastery—for access to usually well-minded but ignorant foreign governors, whose ears they poison with lies about him. Shenoute does not represent Panopolis before Roman magistrates. He represents the “poor,” and the oppressors of the “poor” happened to be landowners who lived and ruled in Panopolis.
His attitude toward the “violent”—as he usually calls these villains—wavers between self-righteous victimization and daring provocation. He is constantly answering their accusations and insisting that he is not afraid of them. He disclaims, time and again, the need to do what he is permanently doing, justifying himself. A good example—one of many—of this “doubletalk in which the provocateur is playing at one and the same time the role of assailant and victim”19 is the “discourse which he preached to the crowd attached to the man worthy of the curse (i.e., Gesios) wishing that they would tell him what he (Shenoute) often says about him”:
What will I fear from senseless men? Will the lawlessness of the pagans surround me?
What will Christ’s enemies say against me except for lying about me and [saying] all sorts of things that are not true?
Those wealthy and violent people? They have nothing to say against me except for saying: “You turn the heart of the poor away from us, so that they no longer labor beyond their power in the vineyards and everywhere else.”
And they also say: “He came into our houses openly. He removed what we worship (i.e., our pagan idols) to our shame for we could not hinder him.”
Therefore I am not worried about these things (i.e., these accusations): Didn’t [even] a pagan military governor dare to say when he came here: “I am amazed that you are happy”? I told him: “Why wouldn’t they be happy, those who have no God but Jesus?”20
When his enemies are not lying, they are invariably accusing him of something he is actually proud of. In any case, all those accusations only show his powerful impact on local society. At the same time as he professes innocence, therefore, he preserves every hostile document and makes a point of mentioning those accusations in other contexts. For he may be innocent, but he is certainly not harmless. He likes to provoke and challenge his rivals and adopts a defiant tone when addressing them. For moments, he seems to be flirting with illegality. “There is no crime for those who have Christ,” is one of his answers to accusations of theft.21 “I do not care [about your accusations]. I do not flee from the laws.” “Only Christ’s tribunal has anything to do with me and I have nothing to confess to its president, Jesus.”22 He claims to be proud of many actions that his foes repudiate, and he never misses an opportunity to proclaim them: raiding the pagan houses of a village and vaunting the spoils removed from them, humiliating his great enemy in Panopolis (i.e., Gesios) by “openly” breaking into his house and destroying his pagan idols with the help of “only seven monks,” burning down a temple at Atripe near his monastery, leading all sorts of audacious actions on behalf of the “poor” against the evil landowners of Panopolis …23 One is reminded of the Syrian monks despised by Libanius: fanatics who “flaunt their excesses, boast of them, advertise them to those who are unaware of them, and claim that they should be rewarded.”24
As he himself sees it, Shenoute’s life has, altogether, an almost epic quality. For he is not simply an abbot, a spiritual guide, or even a holy man. He is an Old Testament prophet with a sacred mission. Overwhelmed by the consciousness of being chosen, enraptured by the possession of truth—a truth that he cannot contain—he has no option but to call the sinners of the world to repentance. This is an emotionally taxing duty (“I often weep until I can no longer”25) that he has not chosen. It has chosen him. As the important studies of Rebecca Krawiec, Caroline Schroeder, and David Brakke have shown, Shenoute takes on such a prophetic role not only in relation to the city of Panopolis but, to begin with, in relation to his own monastic community.26 From his desert cave, a voice cries out in the wilderness and denounces the lawlessness of the world. This lawlessness is often expressed—as in the Old Testament—in sexual terms: the prophet is a male; Panopolis (or the monastic community) is the woman guilty of infidelity and fornication.27 Indeed, Shenoute’s language is so well blended with that of the prophets that they can hardly be distinguished. In his writings, Panopolis takes on the contours of Samaria or Jerusalem; his enemy Gesios those of a sinful Old Testament king. Like a good old prophet, he claims to be an outsider, both to his community and to the world at large; he acts as the (reluctant) intermediary between God and a world for whose sins he can but weep; he is a lawgiver—for his own communities—and an interpreter of the (biblical) law; he stands for social justice and the poor; and last but not least, he endures perpetual persecution.
It has recently been argued that Shenoute’s biographies are but late compilations that were put together centuries after his death.28 This may well be right, but the fact remains that these biographies depict Shenoute precisely how he would have wished to be remembered. He is, here again, an Old Testament prophet whose “righteous anger” cannot be checked,29 who communicates through histrionic gestures, and whose feats defy belief. We see him confronting the patriarch of Constantinople, Nestorius, in the midst of the bishops at the Council of Ephesus; physically defeating an “impious pagan” in Panopolis—on behalf of the poor, of course; miraculously facing down a pagan military governor at Antinoe, the provincial capital, in defense of his fellow Christians …30
One thing is clear here. If Shenoute has a bad reputation—and he has one: impulsive violence, intolerance, lack of self-control—it is he who has made it. Faced with such shocking evidence provided in his own writings and—a fortiori—in his Life, many modern scholars have simply accepted it as too ugly not to be true. As a result, the “great”