Shenoute of Atripe and the Uses of Poverty. Ariel G. Lopez
use of specific verbal tenses or on the structure of his literary corpus than on his historical significance. This emphasis on Shenoute’s supposed “Copticism” is misleading. Shenoute was bilingual and—like Dioscorus of Aphrodito, for example—could write in both Greek and Coptic. He must have often preached in Greek, and I suspect that many of the letters and sermons contained in his corpus were originally written or delivered in Greek. Only one papyrus (fragments of a sermon) and one inscription related to Shenoute have survived from the fifth century, and both are in Greek.50 And several of his (Coptic) sermons, as preserved in his corpus, are actually “first-person reports” to his monastic audience of sermons and dialogues with the Roman authorities that can only have been held in Greek.51
Furthermore, the equation of language with “national” culture is particularly inappropriate to Coptic. Far from being the product of a native priestly literary tradition or of the reemergence of an ancient underground culture, Coptic was biblical Greek gone native: the linguistic equivalent, in fact, of the Greek mythology one finds in Palestinian mosaics and in Egyptian textiles.52 The Coptic writing system, which includes the Greek alphabet plus a few consonants taken over from Demotic, was invented in the early Roman period by Egyptian priests for whom linguistic virtuosity was a source of professional pride.53 Yet the Coptic language as it emerged in the late third century was a Christian, quasi-biblical language deeply influenced by Greek. And not just Greek: one-third of all the non-Greek words in Coptic have no attested Egyptian etymology, “including some of the most common vocabulary in Sahidic [the principal southern dialect of Coptic].”54
From this point of view, Coptic is not comparable to Syriac, that other late antique language with which it is usually grouped. Syriac was an older language with its own literary traditions, writing system, and educational institutions, and it did not experience a comparable influence from Greek until later. Egypt never had a counterpart to Edessa/Nisibis, their Syriac schools and partially autonomous literary culture. Coptic was used at schools in Egypt—it may have been Christian teachers who created it in the first place as a literary language to translate the Bible—but it was always limited to a primary education that focused on simple reading, writing, and practical skills, such as the writing of letters.55 In late antique Egypt, true literature—that is, the use of language as an art—was with very few exceptions Greek literature.
Shenoute’s Coptic does have a unique flavor and deserves the philological and literary study that it has always received. But the real value of his writings lies less in their literary qualities than in their importance as a historical source.56 For even in their present fragmentary state, these texts are crucial evidence for the more prosaic aspects of the life of a holy man, that religious virtuoso who embodied the ultimate ideals of late antique society. Like few other sources, these documents allow us to follow an abbot’s activities “on the ground” and to set them against a concrete social, economic, and cultural context. An entire history of the relation of a major monastery to the society and economy of the Nile valley can thus be written from them.
Admittedly, if there is one aspect of late Roman religion for which we have plenty of evidence, it is certainly that of holy men. Yet holy men like Shenoute are usually written about by others; they rarely speak directly to us in their own words. The filter of hagiography tends to turn these holy men into stereotypes: they are too holy to be men at all. With Shenoute, in contrast, we have the unique opportunity of comparing and contrasting the devout portrait painted by his disciple and biographer Besa with the real, day-to-day abbot as he dealt with the issues of his time.57
These issues were neither particular to Egypt nor to Shenoute himself. They are, rather, crucial to the interpretation of late antiquity as a historical period and to the problem of the so-called end of the ancient world. Studying the public career of Shenoute involves dealing with some of the distinctive concerns of late antique society: rural patronage, religious violence, Christian and non-Christian systems of gift giving, and the changing relationships between city and countryside and between state and local society. This fundamental fact has been obscured by his monotonous rhetoric on behalf of the “poor,” which transforms these concerns and distorts them so as to fit them into a simplistic paradigm of social relations, the Christian “care of the poor,” in which he and his monastery claimed a primordial role.
Hence the title of this book. By claiming to act and speak on behalf of the “poor” even in the most unexpected contexts, Shenoute could always identify his own interests with those of society at large and thus legitimize his unwelcome emergence as a player in local politics. This constant appeal to poverty, both his own and that of the people he claimed to represent, sets Shenoute firmly in the context of contemporary late Roman politics. It is a somewhat paradoxical aspect of this period that the “audacity” and, in some cases, even the prosperity of new groups and institutions had come to be asserted and defended in terms of the need to protect an ill-defined, helpless, and passive poverty. Christian bishops all over the Roman Empire had been developing, from the middle of the fourth century onward, a distinctive discourse on poverty that explained and justified the public role they now claimed to play in society.58 The representation of social reality that they put forward was nothing less than revolutionary. A society used to glossing over or euphemizing stark disparities in wealth and power was confronted with a discourse that claimed to lay bare those very disparities with brutal honesty.
The vision was as simple as it was powerful: a society divided along purely economic lines into two opposite and complementary groups, the few rich and the many poor. The rich were pictured as if standing on a high peak of infinitely concentrated wealth, only to be urged to stare down at a vast ocean of poverty. This was of course a drastic simplification of social reality. As depicted by Christian preachers, the rich and the poor were simply stereotypes defined against each other. The poor and their poverty, above all, their overwhelming numbers and utter helplessness, were always the main emphasis. For their very existence was a call to action, to charity and condescension. The love of the poor had always been a duty inside the Christian community, but now it was pushed to the fore and advocated as a public virtue that the state was expected to recognize and reward. As such it was embodied above all in the person of the bishop, professional spokesman and protector of the poor and role model for the rich and powerful.
This Christian discourse on poverty should not be taken at face value. The ubiquitousness of poverty in the rhetoric of this period does not reflect the impoverishment of late Roman society but rather a specific political situation: the rise to prominence of the representatives of the Christian church. The reason for the quick success of this discourse was, in no small degree, that it lent to these new participants in late Roman politics the legitimacy to challenge the establishment and to make a name for themselves. By stressing their relationship with a group that had no place in the traditional model of urban society—the “poor”—the bishops projected a form of authority within the city that outflanked the traditional leadership of urban notables.59 Moreover, the fact that this discourse ignored the hierarchical distinction between city and countryside, so dear to the political ideology of the classical world, had important implications. It meant that even villagers or a rural abbot could now use this language to express their growing sense of entitlement.
Hence the significance of this development for Shenoute’s self-presentation. That what was true about Christian bishops was also true about him, that his discourse on the care of the poor explained and legitimized the prominent role he aspired to play in local society, will be shown in detail in the next four chapters. My conclusions can be summed up here in a few words. As analyzed in this book, Shenoute’s discourse on poverty is structured around three parallel antitheses—political, economic, and religious—which tend to be confused and ultimately overlap:
The first, friend/enemy antithesis, “the ultimate distinction to which all action with specifically political meaning can be traced,” will be at the center of the political analysis of the first chapter.60 I will argue that Shenoute’s universal application of the friend/enemy distinction to local and imperial elites betrays his aspiration to be part of these elites. The active political involvement of a Christian abbot was highly