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” abbot has become larger than life. His fanatical zeal seems, in many modern accounts, to have no limits. His long arm reaches all the way from his desert cave to Panopolis, where people have apparently nothing better to do than to talk and worry about Shenoute’s latest exploits. Imperial magistrates are rendered powerless by his courage; local society is at his mercy.31
It is essential to avoid this mistake. Given our sources, the question “Who is Shenoute?” can only be answered with another question: “Who did Shenoute say he was?” And his answer—“I am the enemy of Panopolis because the rulers of the city oppress the poor”—is clearly one-sided and by no means innocent. To start with, it should be made clear that Shenoute’s exploits may have been less spectacular, his enemies less numerous and powerful, than he maintains. They may have been less worried about him than he was about them. It is true that the monks’ irruption into the late fourth-century world of politics was deeply disturbing for many traditional civic notables.32 Many of Shenoute’s enemies were certainly only too real. His attempt to become the moral and religious leader of his region threatened the status quo, that is, the monopoly over the economic, cultural, and religious life held by the elite of Panopolis. His provocations cannot have failed to arouse resistance there, though probably more often a passive resistance—simply ignoring him—rather than the active opposition of a Gesios. Yet Shenoute feeds on this opposition and exalts it to a degree out of proportion with reality.
The reasons for this go beyond his self-understanding as a biblical prophet, or his remarkable personality. They have to do with his problematic position in society. In the first place, we cannot take Shenoute’s influence outside his monastery for granted. This was a position that had to be established and earned. What an abbot like Shenoute needed, therefore, was above all to have an impact, to provoke a response. He could take, in fact he needed, the opposition and the “persecution.” What he could not afford was indifference and to be ignored. “The only thing worse than being talked about,” Oscar Wilde has said, “is not being talked about.” In the second place, Shenoute’s pose as the courageous and persecuted prophet who defends the “poor” allowed him to be deeply involved in the life of Panopolis—as he undoubtedly was—while remaining the “supreme stranger” to its corrupt way of life. But his critical statements about the city do not need to be taken literally any more than do similar disapproving statements about his own community.33 The irony, in fact, is that the success of Shenoute’s “counterculture” may have owed much to Panopolis’s own success during late antiquity. That is, his criticisms, however shocking, may have been unwittingly functional to a society that was successful but felt uncomfortable with its sudden prosperity.
Even if answering accusations was a pressing need for his political survival, Shenoute clearly made a virtue out of this necessity. His insistent claim to be a controversial character, both hated and feared by the “violent” of Panopolis, was not simply an inevitable reaction to the inevitable hostility of the powerful. It was, rather, an essential aspect of the role that he had to act out to define and legitimize his problematic involvement in politics, that of the fearless spokesman of the “poor.” To understand this role’s rationale and implications, we need to set Shenoute’s discourse of self-presentation in the context in which it belongs: the political structures, traditions, and ideologies of the later Roman Empire. Faced with such an idiosyncratic character, we need to focus, more than ever, on the fundamental needs and values of the society that admired but also scorned or ignored him. In the apposite words of Clifford Geertz,
No matter how peripheral, ephemeral or free-floating the charismatic figure we might be concerned with—the wildest prophet, the most deviant revolutionary—we must begin with the center and with the symbols and conceptions that prevail there if we are to understand him and what he means.34
“VERTICAL SOLIDARITY”: THE ROMAN STATE AND THE POOR
Let us look now, therefore, at the “center” of Late Roman society: the Roman state. Too much emphasis on Shenoute’s violent rhetoric or on his self-understanding as a prophet has made us overlook something so obvious that it is seldom observed: that he lived in the Roman Empire. Shenoute’s relationship to the representatives of the Roman state and, in particular, to the provincial governors
