knowledge of the real economy of Shenoute’s monastery comes only from bits of circumstantial evidence. It is best to begin, therefore, in the one area where we have some concrete physical remains: the buildings.2 A section of Shenoute’s seventh Canon deals explicitly with the issue of the monastery’s wealth and buildings. It was written during and after the monastery was involved in its greatest building project: the new church, the “Great House,” as he calls it.3 Far from feeling uncomfortable about the grandeur of the new building, Shenoute shows no reticence when discussing the magnificence of the new church or the monastery’s expenses:
This great house of such magnitude! And by the providence of God, not only did we spend just four months constructing it, or five in all, but also all the things we gave as wages and expended on it—everything we had—indeed, they have not become scarce, but rather He who is Blessed, the Son of Him who is Blessed, God Almighty, blessed them and added even more.4
The church was later seen as one of Shenoute’s great achievements. Besa’s biography tells us that an angel had already predicted to Shenoute’s uncle the wonderful building activities of his nephew, and it had been the Lord himself who had commanded Shenoute to undertake this bold project: “Take care to build a church in My name and in your name. It will be called the Holy Congregation, and the saints will gather in it, everybody will want to look at it and they will trust in it.”5 “My father,” Besa continues, “arranged for the workmen and craftsmen, the stonemasons and the carpenters. They worked on the church and with the Lord helping them in all that they did with everything that they needed, they completed it.”6
The great church was only the most prominent part of a larger building program. Shenoute also mentions, besides his “great house,” the “other buildings that we have built along with it, and also this lavatory (niptērion).”7 When confronted with sinful monks, he is worried that they will defile “this house or the houses and buildings that we have built in His (i.e., God’s) name with great toil and plenty of gold and money and every [other] thing.”8
For, it is fitting that in buildings (topos) whose proportions, design, and entire appearance are [so] beautiful, [only those] men [should] dwell whose hearts have beautiful proportions, whose souls have a beautiful design, and whose uprightness is beautiful. The buildings of Christ are a house within which another house (i.e., a good Christian) is to be built. Just as it is good to decorate what is external, it is even better to decorate what is internal. I am talking about the church: the bricks, the stones, and the wood with which they work on it are the external; the people who go into it or who stay inside it are the internal.
I said another time that every adornment that is in the house of God in wood, in stone, in walls, in every place in it, and everything that is of any sort or any color, they are good, and it is possible for us to bring them to the spiritual, since they are fleshly things, like the water that became wine in Cana of Galilee.9
Even the construction of the monastery’s well was deemed important and miraculous enough to deserve an account in Shenoute’s Life.10 As we shall see, it was later credited with the extraordinary power to quench the thirst of twenty thousand refugees for three months, thanks to God’s blessings.
The archaeological evidence shows that Shenoute’s words cannot be dismissed as empty rhetoric. The monastery’s well, for example, was not simply a hole in the ground. It was an elaborate hydraulic installation built of fired bricks and ashlars, with two waterwheels installed on top of it. “A large number of pipes extend from the well, transporting water in several different directions across the site, often interrupted by small rectangular boxes for subsidiary lines.”11 Rather than a simple cistern (which the monastery also has), we are dealing with a small “aqueduct.”12 Moreover, Shenoute’s church is one of the most impressive remains of late antique Egypt and deserves the attention of every scholar of early monasticism. Together with the contemporary church of the Pachomian congregation at Phbow, it is probably the biggest monastic church built in the Mediterranean world during the late antique period, and both these churches are far bigger than any urban church known in Egypt south of Hermopolis. The church is so much out of proportion with everything else around it that for a long time it was held to be the whole monastery in itself. A simple comparison makes the enormous size of this building evident: the church of Euthymius’s monastery, near Jerusalem, would fit in Shenoute’s church almost seven times; the church of the nearby monastery of Martyrius more than sixteen times; the church at Deir Turmanin, in northern Syria, more than four times. Let us keep in mind that these last two monasteries have been upheld as good examples of the enrichment of monastic establishments in late antiquity.13 Even an imperially funded monastery, that of St. Catherine near Mt. Sinai, has a church that would fit at least four times inside Shenoute’s.
This was true wealth. And it is all the more striking since monastic churches in Egypt are generally characterized by their modesty and small size.14 Only the cathedrals of larger Egyptian cities—and Egypt is known to have had the largest churches of the Near East15—are comparable or superior in size to this building. One only needs to think of the enormous expenses that must have been involved in covering the church with a huge timber roof, made of a wood that is unlikely to have come from Egypt, to realize why Shenoute was so proud of his accomplishments.16 The sober church exterior, which, in the apposite words of Robert Curzon, “resembles a dismantled man-of-war anchored in a sea of burning sand,”17 contrasts with the magnificent interior design. In this respect, the equally large Pachomian basilica at Phbow seems to lag far behind Shenoute’s sophisticated church.18 With decorated niches, columns taken from classical Roman buildings, mezzanines above the aisles, a regular narthex that has been described as “an imperial little room,”19 a huge lateral narthex, and above all a magnificent and richly decorated triconch apse, this church boasted all the stylistic refinements of contemporary Roman architecture.20 Although its cubic exterior crowned by a cornice is usually compared to Egyptian temples,21 its general design is in fact reminiscent of the fourth-century imperial baths at Alexandria, with their triconch caldarium.22 This was a truly imperial church, both in scale and style, and it would be imitated—although at a much smaller scale—more than once in Upper Egypt.23
We do not know how many monks lived at Shenoute’s monastery. The Arabic Life claims that his entire congregation was made up of 2,200 monks and 1,800 nuns, but this sounds suspicious with regard to the number of monks, and absurd as an estimate of the number of nuns that could have inhabited the small community located in the village of Atripe.24 What is clear, in any case, is that Shenoute’s church was far too big for the immediate needs of his monastery. This was meant to be a public, not a monastic, church. Shenoute’s frequent and proud reference to the “crowds” and authorities that visited the monastery and listened to his sermons makes this fact all too clear.25 The huge lateral narthex and the multiple entrances of the church (and the galleries above the lateral naves?) can be explained by the need to distribute this very diverse audience in an organized space.26
On feast days, the monastic church would become a public stage. “Crowds” would stream to the monastery, and Shenoute would descend from his desert cave to preach and celebrate the liturgy. This was the moment for Shenoute to seize the limelight and showcase his endless generosity and devotion to the care of the “poor,” as if in a huge banquet hall—and let us remember that triconch-shaped dining halls were a hallmark of wealthy villas in this period:
Every Saturday, many of the poor came to my father to receive communion from his pure hands. … A table was set for the crowd, everybody ate, and after they had slept, the community of the monks would wake them up, saying: “Stand up and go to the house of the Lord to be blessed.” For every Saturday night a vigil was kept to pray and sing, and the whole church was illuminated on that night and the following day. Lamps and candles were lighted, and the whole church shone as the offering was made. And [my father] gave them (i.e., the poor) communion,
