still they do not care for the affairs of God, that is, justice, mercy, and all his commands.118
To care for the poor, to extirpate paganism, to criticize the unjust, to scold the ignorant or corrupt governor: this is not wrongdoing—Shenoute argued—but the true spirit of the law, what the emperor really wants but incompetent governors, too cowardly or involved in local interests, will not dare do themselves.119 An overzealous application of the laws was Shenoute’s only “crime,” and he was very proud of it.
A LANGUAGE OF CLAIMS: POVERTY AND POLITICS
Shenoute’s single-minded, relentless, and, for moments, crude campaign of self-definition—his “ego of epic proportions,” in other words—cannot be explained by appealing solely to psychological factors or biblical role models. Its raison d’être lies rather in the structurally unclear position he occupied in contemporary society. The reason so many of his works answer the questions “Who am I?” “Who are my enemies?” “What gives me the right to do and say what I do?” is that his ill-defined position did not grant him any clear-cut legitimacy to intervene in society at large as he aspired to do. “Friends,” enemies, and his own monks—whose interaction with the world was strictly controlled—had to be constantly reassured. Above all, he embodied a new kind of leadership whose success—in the late fourth and fifth centuries—we cannot take for granted. This was a man who, as far as we know, had inherited neither the wealth nor the education traditionally necessary to be a member of the provincial elite. Here as elsewhere, the power of a self-made man who had acquired and not inherited his status was inherently suspect.
This was particularly true in this case, since Shenoute was a monk, and monks, it could be and was often argued, belonged to the “desert,” not to the “world.” An impious governor was imagined to have said, after reading Shenoutes’s demands in a letter: “Let Shenoute talk in his church and among the monks. He has no jurisdiction over me as far as administrative affairs goes.” “He has nothing to do with me.”120 Indeed, who was Shenoute to tell anyone else what to do? No other Egyptian abbot, before or after him, is known to have been so active outside his monastery. His involvement in politics was beset with dilemmas and ambiguities. His very involvement in the world, which contributed to his public status, could also undermine it by compromising the withdrawal and segregation from society on which his spiritual prestige depended.121 This is why when accused by provincial governors, Shenoute’s answer to them is to stress that he is a monk, that he stays inside his monastery, that only God’s tribunal has anything to do with him, that the “things of this world” are not his concern. His answer, in other words, is to stress the otherworldliness that underlay his spiritual prestige but was threatened by his passion to be actively involved in the world at large.
It is interesting to compare Shenoute from this point of view with his better-known contemporary Theodoret. Theodoret was a wealthy Antiochene who had been sent as bishop to the small nearby town of Cyrrhus. His enemies, however, repeatedly accused him of spending more time in Antioch than in Cyrrhus: he supposedly preached, gathered synods, and even kept an apartment there. His answer was a flood of letters to every important authority in the empire. Although it is hard to imagine somebody more different from Shenoute than Theodoret, these letters show that he had to deal with comparable dilemmas. While Shenoute replied to his critics that he was indeed a monk and always stayed at his monastery, Theodoret felt the need to state, time and again, that he liked “a peaceful life free from cares” and that he was completely dedicated to the small town of Cyrrhus. He claimed to have built public bridges, baths, porticoes, and even an aqueduct for this “little ugly town … whose ugliness I have dissimulated with multiple and magnificent buildings.” He had even distributed his inheritance there. Yet the paradox, here again, is that the very letters that he wrote to make this point show how involved he was in imperial politics. He clearly felt that he was too big a man for such a small town.122
The only way for Shenoute to validate his anomalous involvement in politics while preserving his externality was to stress the oppositional aspects of this involvement. We have seen how he cultivated the status of persona non grata in Panopolis and claimed to be the sworn enemy of its elite, the “violent.” We have also seen that when he does admit to having “friends” among the powerful, all these “friends” happen to be imperial magistrates. They are foreign, and their appointments are brief. They are not a threat to his outsider status. They are Shenoute’s friends, in any case, only if and when they are willing to accept his courageous criticism. We have seen, above all, that he always presented himself as the spokesman of “the poor,” who suffered unremitting “violence” at the hands of the powerful of this world. His legitimacy to challenge Panopolis and the “violent” stemmed neither from divine inspiration—to which he was reluctant to appeal123—nor from extraordinary asceticism, whose intrinsic value he questioned because he took it for granted.124 It stemmed, rather, from his representativeness, that is, his claim to stand for “the silent majority.” In contrast to his enemies, who spoke only for themselves and their own individual interests, all of Shenoute’s interventions in the “world” were presented as actions on behalf of the helpless and needy “poor.”
Hence his frequent reference to the “crowds” (mēēše) that apparently followed him around and congregated at his monastery. Although he had to answer more than once the accusation that he had gathered dangerous “crowds,” which caused disturbances in city and countryside, both Shenoute’s works and biography consistently portray him surrounded by “crowds” of the harmless “poor,” who flocked spontaneously to him. They gathered at his church every weekend, at his monastery’s gate to receive alms; they listened to his preaching; they defended him at a trial in the provincial capital; and they marched behind him when attacking rural paganism. It seems as if Shenoute positively needed a “critical mass” around him to send the clear message that what he did was actually done by the “poor,” and what he said was not the expression of a particular interest but the voice of the silent majority.125
Shenoute’s answer to the question “Who are you to tell me what to do?” was, therefore, “I am the poor.” We should not take such an answer for granted. It is true that, by the fifth century, the Christian “care of the poor” was already an imperially sanctioned practice, a public service provided by the church that the government could be expected to recognize and reward in very concrete terms. “Since it is part of our duty to provide for the needy,” the emperors Marcian and Valentinian declared in 451, “and to take care that nourishment is not lacking for the poor, we order that the payments of diverse kinds that have been assigned so far to the holy churches from the public treasury shall remain as heretofore and shall be furnished undiminished by anyone, and we assign to this most ready bounty perpetual endurance.”126 The care of the poor defined and delimited the public role of the Christian church in late Roman society. Yet it had been bishops, not monks, who had been at the forefront of this development. It was only in the fifth century that large monasteries—such as Shenoute’s—began to take over this public service and to develop it on a large scale in the countryside, where it was “unevenly distributed and erratically maintained.”127 The wholehearted appropriation of this institution and discourse by certain monks had important consequences for the relationship between monasticism and society. It encouraged and legitimized a stronger and more active involvement in public life. Together with the defense of orthodoxy, the care of the “poor” became the primary argument for a Christian monk to justify his actions in the “world.”
But for a social historian such rhetoric is not self-explanatory. It raises a basic question: Who were the “poor”? What kind of people made up the “crowds” that followed Shenoute? These are questions that will come up again in every other chapter of this book, but it is important to understand why our answers can never be completely clear. In the first place, Shenoute’s notion of the “poor” could refer to the voluntary poor, that is, the poor who lived in the desert as monks. When Shenoute complains about the violence the “poor”
