Shenoute of Atripe and the Uses of Poverty. Ariel G. Lopez
villages of the southwestern oases of Egypt—almost two hundred miles from the Nile valley—have drawn attention to this extraordinary diffusion of Greek education: classrooms with rhetorical examples written on the walls, a codex of wooden tablets containing three orations of Isocrates, and—to take just one example—a letter from a mother demanding to be sent, from the Nile valley, “a well-proportioned and nicely executed ten-page notebook” for her son, “for he has become a speaker of pure Greek (hellēnistēs) and an accomplished reader.”39
It is important to stress two crucial aspects of this development. In the first place, it was not an exclusively urban phenomenon. The distinctive products of late antique religion, literature, art, and architecture have been found in villages as much as in cities. All the Manichaean texts found in Egypt, for example, have been discovered in villages.40 In the second place, this development has to be seen in the context of a new relationship between state and society in southern Egypt and elsewhere. The reason late antique Egyptians were so enthusiastic about learning Greek and Latin literature is that this traditional education was the door to a host of new opportunities that had opened up. To take, once again, the well-known example of Dioscorus of Aphrodito: Jean-Luc Fournet has shown that Disocorus was not simply an amateur, self-taught poet who attempted hopelessly to master Greek poetry for fun. For Dioscorus, poetry was above all a vehicle to communicate with the state. Every one of his petitions to the imperial governors and to the courtiers of Constantinople was accompanied by a poetical version of the text.41 The reason the case of Dioscorus is so significant is precisely the fact that he was so mediocre and average. He stands for thousands of little poetasters all over the Near East who now felt—to the dismay of classical scholars—that they had the capacity to express themselves in the language of Homer, to speak as if they belonged.
The ever-increasing role of Roman law in provincial life points in the same direction. The legal documents that have survived in Egyptian papyri are eloquent evidence for this process of cultural integration and for the state’s role in it. We know now that no such thing as “Coptic law” ever existed. The law in use in late antique Egypt was Roman imperial law, and it became more and more Roman throughout late antiquity.42 A vivid example of this is a document from as late as 646, in which an illiterate peasant from the deep south of Egypt, “not versed in legal matters” (so he claims), rejects a document presented by his opponent, an urban deacon from the town of Edfu. The document, he argues, does not follow the rules set up in the laws of Justinian for legal documents, rules that he quotes and claims to have learned from “those who know.”43
Many of the farmers met by an urban notable around Antioch—or anywhere in Palestine or in the Nile valley—were therefore far from being savage rustics who had never had any contact with Graeco-Roman civilization. What the urban landowner or tax collector faced in these recalcitrant, “audacious” farmers were individuals who were far more similar to himself than he would have liked to admit: people who knew how to write petitions, how to appeal to different and competing instances of power, even how to use Roman law to their benefit. And this must have been all the more obnoxious.44
Set against this historical background, the figure of Shenoute of Atripe takes on more familiar contours. For Shenoute may have been an otherworldly prophet with the fiery temperament of an “erupting volcano.” But he is also a particularly well-documented example of late antique “rustic audacity.” Shenoute’s “audacity,” which his enemies denounced as violence, but he called parrhēsia—that is, fearless and truthful speech on behalf of the poor—is proudly displayed and magnified throughout his works. As we shall see, he liked to define his role in society in terms of a principled opposition to the city of Panopolis and its civic elite. As patron of the countryside against the interests of this urban elite, he complained about urban tax-collectors,45 relentlessly defied and denounced urban landowners and their oppressive practices, and—if we believe in his enemies’ complaints—even intercepted and appropriated some of the surplus that these landowners extracted from the countryside around their city. We have unfortunately no contemporary records for the opinions and attitudes of the elite of Panopolis, but Shenoute’s replies leave no doubt that some of them must have felt about him the same way Libanius felt about those military men who protected and fostered the “audacity” of the rural population.
Like the village of Aphrodito in respect to Antaeopolis, Shenoute’s “audacity” threatened the monopoly hitherto enjoyed by the elite of Panopolis over the political, economic, and cultural life of its region. He usurped traditional civic functions: he intruded on the relationship between urban landowner and rural tenant; he preached like a bishop to monks and laity alike—something not common for monks in Egypt; he built, spent, and gave like a civic benefactor, but on his own monastery and for the “poor.” Like Dioscorus of Aphrodito (whose father founded a monastery, just like Shenoute’s uncle), he interacted constantly with the imperial governors and claimed a privileged relationship to them, arousing, thereby, the suspicions and jealousy of the local elite; again, like Dioscorus and his father, he traveled all the way to Constantinople to complain about the poverty of the “poor” and about the “violence” they suffered. Last but not least, he took the law into his own hands, in particular against paganism, both urban and rural.
Hence the importance of Gesios of Panopolis, Shenoute’s great rival and bête noire. Gesios was the social and economic counterpart to Shenoute’s “rustic audacity.” A former imperial governor and great landowner based in Panopolis, he seems to have been a fairly typical representative of the new aristocracy emerging in fifth-century Egypt. His rivalry with Shenoute is an exceptionally well-documented example of the chronic tensions that pervaded rural society in the late antique Near East. Yet this rivalry also had a religious dimension, for Gesios was a pagan with no taste for intolerant Christian monks: Panopolis’s own Libanius. The result was a bitter and protracted conflict between monk and landowner that has, in its viciousness, no parallel in the late antique world. This conflict is one of the leitmotifs of this study, and many of the most important sources I have used deal more or less explicitly with it.
Gesios was in fact more to Shenoute than a political, economic, and religious rival. He was an antitype, unnameable and omnipresent at the same time.46 It was always in contrast to Gesios that Shenoute defined his own public role. A compelling narrative needs two characters: while Shenoute builds a church and monasteries to honor God, Gesios builds mansions, baths, and boats to honor himself. If Shenoute is warmly received by the provincial governors and is their favorite friend, Gesios is rebuffed by them when he denounces Shenoute’s supposed crimes. When Shenoute denounces the hypocrisy of a superficially Christian society, which tolerates paganism in its midst, Gesios himself turns out to be a cryptopagan who worships his “gods” in secret at home. If Shenoute’s monastery receives thankful offerings from the population of the countryside (in fact, from Gesios’s own estate administrators), Gesios extracts this wealth with violence and deceit, a violence that Shenoute never tires of denouncing. Even after Gesios’s death, when Jesus had “scattered” his wealth, when nobody recalled his memory or mourned him anymore, Shenoute cannot stop talking about him and holding him up as a negative example.47 It is clear that he positively needed an enemy. As a result of this obsession, Gesios is scarcely less important for this book than Shenoute himself.
A study of this kind is made possible by the survival of a substantial if fragmentary part of Shenoute’s literary corpus. This corpus was originally divided by Shenoute himself into two parts. The “Canons” contain exhortations and a set of five hundred rules addressed to the monks and nuns at Shenoute’s three monastic communities. The “Discourses,” on the other hand, include sermons, treatises, and open letters that show an all-too-human holy man constantly interacting with the society that he had supposedly renounced.48 Together with a few fragmentary letters, the “Discourses” will be the main body of evidence used throughout this work.49
Much has been traditionally made of the fact that these texts are in Coptic, the last stage of the Egyptian language. The nineteenth-century equation of language with culture has led many scholars to see in Shenoute a “native,” a “Copt.” His works have been read with an Orientalist mind-set: in search of the unique, the alien, and with an overriding