Shenoute of Atripe and the Uses of Poverty. Ariel G. Lopez
if they listened to him with such unfailing respect and invariably protected him from his enemies, why did he feel such a pressing need to reassure his audience of it? Behind the plethora of names and titles listed by Shenoute among his powerful “friends,” there lies a deep sense of insecurity and uncertainty. It could not have been any other way. With a new foreign governor showing up at Antinoe every one or two years, the struggle for the governor’s favor was a never-ending affair. We know from Dioscorus’s archive, for example, that petitions had to be repeated every time a new governor took office.79 For every “God-loving” governor praised by Shenoute, there may have been several others—both pagan and Christian—who were either indifferent or hostile. The use of the language of “friendship” to describe a relationship to imperial magistrates was a rhetorical device regularly used in the later Roman Empire to co-opt a powerful stranger of uncertain intentions.80 Libanius knew only too many such “self-styled friends” of the powerful, who induced the emperor—he complained—with their “hurtful counsel” to behave unlike his “true self.”81
We cannot therefore take Shenoute’s success for granted. In any case, the power of a short-term foreign governor would have been limited in a strange province. He would have been highly dependent on the local aristocracy, that is, on people like Shenoute’s own bête noire, Gesios. Gesios himself was a former governor—although probably not of the Thebaid—and therefore a honoratus.82 As such, he must have claimed the right to “fill the governor’s headquarters with turmoil” and to feel offended when the governors did not visit him.83 Honorati “felt entitled to treat the incoming governor as a junior colleague.”84 Such a situation must have been as intolerable to Shenoute as it was to Libanius, and it helps to explain the former’s exasperating self-promotion in front of provincial governors.
Altogether, Shenoute’s penchant for branding the “rulers” of the world as either his friends or his enemies should not be interpreted simply as the result of a prophet’s black-and-white perception of the world. For this is a distinction with a profound political meaning.85 Shenoute may have been an abbot, a holy man, and even a prophet. But his ostentatious display of powerful “friends” and “enemies” in front of powerful visitors conveyed a clear message: I am one of you, and I cannot be ignored.
“VIOLENCE” AND PARRHĒSIA
Any analysis of Shenoute’s role as spokesman of the “poor” needs to define two notions that are fundamental to his self-understanding: “violence” and parrhēsia. As Shenoute puts it, his enemies are the “violent” (nrefči-nqons), who do “violence” (či-nqons) to the “poor.” Gesios, above all, is “the prince of the violent.”86 But the accusation of “violence” was also leveled against Shenoute himself by disgruntled monks, and against his own monasteries by malicious outsiders. The Coptic word that we usually translate as “violence” has a wider range of meaning than its English counterpart. As used by the Coptic Bible—particularly in the Prophets, the Psalms, Job, and Proverbs—and by Shenoute himself, it means essentially “social injustice.”87 A “violent” man is an unrighteous man who takes advantage of his power or wealth to abuse those weaker than him, that is, the “poor.” “Violence” is therefore an active transgression against the ideal of vertical solidarity that may but does not need to include a physical assault. As Shenoute sees it, much of the wealth of the rich has been wrung from the “poor” through “violence,” that is, largely economic abuses.
The use of this language to describe the world and petition the authorities is by no means particular to Shenoute. One only needs to read late antique petitions from Egypt to notice how widespread this so-called violence had become. By the sixth century, it seems, every crime had become a crime of the rich and powerful against the weak and poor—“violence” in Shenoute’s language. Social contrasts and inequality come to be portrayed in dramatic terms and form the background to every petition. The poor, miserable petitioner represents himself in the bleakest possible terms while complaining about the abuses endured at the hands of his all-powerful rivals.88
Shenoute himself contributed actively to the spread of this language. And not only with his preaching. It has been argued that the very existence of a monastic sector tends “to raise the pitch of the ideological discourse and articulation of other groups and sectors—themselves influencing, at least in part, monastic discourse and organization.”89 In Peter Brown’s apposite words, “The monks functioned much as a chemical solution functions in a photographers’ darkroom: their presence brought out with greater sharpness of contrast the new features of a Christian image of society.”90 Like Shenoute—whose Discourses and Letters can be considered a long, single-minded, and ultimately successful petition—the writers of these petitions never run the risk of understatement when begging for justice and attention from the provincial governor.
What such a “violent” world needed was a courageous truth-teller who would speak truth to power and denounce all this “violence” to the emperor and his representatives. What it needed, in other words, was parrhēsia, fearless speech, a concept Shenoute uses when describing his words and deeds against the “violent.”91 The ideal of parrhēsia was of course very old. For centuries it had been incarnated by the philosopher who was expected to act as an honest and courageous adviser and critic of the powerful. In late antiquity, the concept was infused with new life with the emergence of bishops first and then monks as its new embodiment. The Christian takeover of the old role of the philosopher as the public conscience of society introduced important Old Testament echoes into the classical ideal. Someone like Shenoute was as much a parrhēsiastēs as an Old Testament prophet. His truth-having was guaranteed not only by his objectivity and moral rectitude, but also by a privileged relationship to the divine. His parrhēsia before the powerful of this world derived to a large degree from his parrhēsia before God himself. His criticisms, therefore, attacked not only the abuse of power and wealth but also impiety and sinfulness.
What are the specific implications of parrhēsia as a discursive style? Michel Foucault’s brief lectures on this topic are particularly helpful to understand Shenoute’s self-presentation.92 In the first place, the relation between parrhēsia and rhetoric deserves some consideration:
The word parrhesia, then, refers to a type of relationship between the speaker and what he says. For in parrhesia, the speaker makes it manifestly clear and obvious that what he says is his own opinion. And he does this by avoiding any kind of rhetorical form which would veil what he thinks. Instead, the parrhesiastes uses the most direct words and expressions he can find. Whereas rhetoric provides the speaker with technical devices to help him prevail upon the minds of his audience (regardless of the rhetorician’s own opinion concerning what he says), in parrhesia, the parrhesiastes acts on other people’s minds by showing them as directly as possible what he actually believes.93
The idea that Shenoute’s style of preaching derives somehow from the Greek rhetoric of the Second Sophistic94 is misleading not because as a “Coptic,” uneducated peasant he bitterly resented Greek culture and language, but rather because for a parrhēsiastēs the only legitimate mode of communication was straight talk. The desired effect of parrhēsia was in fact to silence rhetoric, the “loquacity” and impertinent questioning of a self-indulgent audience—whether in Greek or Coptic.95 This is particularly important because Shenoute’s rivals lived at Panopolis, a “college town” overflowing in poetry—and poetry had taken over many of the traditional functions of rhetoric in late antiquity. While Shenoute attempted to impress imperial magistrates with his plain speaking, his opponents composed epics comparing the same magistrates to Homeric heroes who fought the barbarians to save the Thebaid.96 As a traditional rhetorician Shenoute stood no chance against Panopolis: “Because the old power-holders work within a code of formalization, they cannot be challenged gradually but only altogether, by an almost deliberate, sacrilegious disregard for a traditional culture which the holders of old power are busily creating and evermore formalizing to exclude the usurpers.”97
One of the many interesting points raised in Foucault’s illuminating lectures is that the use of parrhēsia implies necessarily a specific self-presentation.98 The truth of