Shenoute of Atripe and the Uses of Poverty. Ariel G. Lopez
manuscripts found at his own monastery.1
An “incomparable” character, indeed, living in an apparently self-contained world. Everything we know about Shenoute comes, inevitably, from his own writings and a biography that is heavily dependent on them, when not biased by an all-too-obvious hagiographic intention.2 It is not an accident, therefore, that his own self-presentation has shaped our modern perception of him. What we know about Shenoute is what he has decided to let us know about himself. And self-presentation was, for this very egocentric holy man, no light matter.
His literary corpus, as we have it today, is not simply a random group of works that have happened to survive by chance. Even in its present fragmentary state, we can discern, behind its structure, Shenoute’s hand administering his literary legacy as carefully as he administered his own reputation. No text seems to be entirely out of place. His Letters and Discourses, in particular, should be read as a whole and not just individually.3 For seemingly disparate texts, discourses dealing with topics as varied as the devil, the martyr cult, or the plight of the poor, letters both hostile—quoted to be refuted—and friendly, add up to a consistent self-portrait of his persona in action. A hint that this was in fact Shenoute’s original intention—and not simply the modern reader’s illusion—is provided by his own introduction to the last volume of Canons. Looking back at the end of his life, he makes plain with what spirit he engaged in this last compilation of his writings:
These words and commands were in my heart, and I was concerned to establish them before I depart. I had written them on tablets (pinakis), so when I came to the monasteries [from my desert cave], we copied them onto papyrus sheets during those distressful days before Lent. Thus the great disturbances and all the tearful distress that this miserable man has suffered at the hands of pagans, the violent, and he who goads them against us, Satan, have not been able to keep us from doing everything we want.4
This final declaration of victory reads, in a way, like a programmatic statement about Shenoute’s life and work. Self-assertion in the face of the world and its powers had always been one of his central preoccupations. One of the most striking aspects of his works is, in fact, the extent to which so many of them can be described as “ego-documents.” Everything revolves around his public status, his exploits, the reactions he provokes, and the admiration he evokes. His writings are “full of himself.” He is the kind of public character who will often refer to himself in the third person. Against the evil rich who do not listen to him, he declares, with a threatening voice, that “this one has torn his garments and others have torn theirs with him [on behalf of the poor]. But not in vain: he knows what he is doing!” Vis-à-vis provincial governors, he claims that “the good fame of he who tramples upon the love of authority (i.e., my fame) has quickly spread” to Alexandria, Ephesus, and the imperial court. Teaching his own monks, he does not hesitate to exalt his own exemplary courage:
Don’t you know all the evil that they (the evil tax collectors) have tried to do to your brother (i.e., to me, Shenoute) because he says [to them]: “You are evil because you oppress the poor”? Above all, they have tried to do evil to the poor because of your brother, but God has hindered them in their impious plan.
One gets the feeling that, for moments, his public self was too massive a burden for his ego to bear.5
It certainly was too massive a burden for many of his contemporaries. That is, at least, the impression conveyed throughout his works. One of the most interesting aspects of his strategy of self-presentation is his insistence on the widespread negative reactions provoked, in local society, by his actions on behalf of the poor and against paganism. Shenoute’s enemies seem to be everywhere, and he claims, with ill-concealed pride, to be the victim of their constant accusations. What other abbot or bishop has ever talked so much about his own alleged crimes? Who preserves so many hostile documents only to refute them? Harboring thieves, “gathering men to fight each other on account of the villages” and distributing bread to them, destroying temples, causing trouble and tumults, being violent, maltreating the poor, making demands of other landowners’ tenants, beating up his own monks, helping murderers because they owe money to his monastery, slaughtering cows and pigs in the houses of pagans during Easter, “turning the heart of the poor away” from their pagan masters, breaking into his enemies’ houses to destroy their pagan idols, stealing books from “the godless man,” using an antipagan raid as a pretext to plunder a village—these are only some of the “crimes” Shenoute was, according to himself, accused of.6
Being hated by the “right” people and for the “right” reasons seems to have been one of Shenoute’s major claims to prominence. He is the sort of controversial figure who thrives on threats, whether real or perceived. This is particularly true of his relationship to Panopolis, the local town across the river, where he likes to claim for himself the status of persona non grata. Panopolis was one of the success stories of late antique Egypt. The city is well known to have been an important center of Hellenism in this period. Numerous poets and grammarians—many of them pagan—were educated there and went on to have successful careers in the imperial bureaucracy. During Shenoute’s lifetime, for example, Cyrus of Panopolis, a poet and bureaucrat, managed to become both praetorian prefect and urban prefect in Constantinople. His power and popularity were such that the emperor himself felt threatened. Nonnus of Panopolis, on the other hand, also a contemporary of Shenoute, reformed Greek poetry and became one of the most influential poets of his age. His Dionysiaca is considered the last great epic poem from antiquity. Shenoute’s mockery of Aristophanes—who had displaced Menander as one of the “four pillars” of literary education in late antiquity—and of philosophers who “grow their hair like women” also point to the importance of Hellenistic schools in the city.7
Like Madaura in Africa, also a provincial center of education associated with paganism, Panopolis had a bad reputation among Christian ascetics. When Pachomius established a monastery outside the city in the mid-fourth century, a delegation of philosophers, “who prided themselves on being teachers,” came out to challenge the Christian monks in a vain attempt to humiliate them. And the later “Apocalypse of Čarour,” a text that attacks the moral decadence of the Pachomian monastic communities, complains that “the roads of Phbow (the main monastery of the Pachomian federation) have become like the roads of Panopolis; we yell like in the agora of Panopolis.”8
But Panopolis was also a Christian city with its own bishop. Its temples had been converted into churches, and it was surrounded by an impressive number of monasteries. Numerous Christian texts, in Greek and Coptic, have been found in the city’s environs. They show a remarkable symbiosis between Christianity and Greek literature.9 Shenoute’s own writings, in fact, leave no doubt that many of his supporters and admirers must have lived there, and that many wealthy and powerful Panopolitans attended his sermons, offered gifts to his monastery, and were moved to tears by his denunciations.10 The pious rich man from Panopolis who—according to Besa’s account—came to the monastery every weekend to make an offering and attend Mass must have been a fairly typical character.11 Yet Shenoute sees only enemies in Panopolis. He addresses curses and rebukes to the city as a whole (a feminine “you”), while speaking of himself—again in the third person—as “he from whom the people of Panopolis hate to hear about the glory of God.”12 He never mentions the Christian bishop of the city, not even when protesting against the invasion of the city’s churches by dubious martyrs’ relics—a sacrilege he has witnessed “only in Panopolis.”13 “That worthless city,”14 he argues in a revealing pun, deserves to be called not Panos polis (the city of Pan) but instead Panomos polis, “Sin City.”15 It is there that his archenemy, Gesios, whom he never names but always references (“the fox,” “the fruitless tree,” “the liar,” “that hostile man from Panopolis,” “that pestilent child,” “the man worthy of being cursed,” “he who does not deserve to be named,” etc.), lives and rules. This rich pagan—whose impiety was matched only by his avarice—is such an obsessive concern to Shenoute that he keeps preaching against him even after he and “his companions” had died, and when nobody “recalled his memory.”16 And he was by no means Shenoute’s only enemy in Panopolis. By not naming Gesios, he generalizes his rivalry with one