reality could be more prosaic is shown by Shenoute’s own writings, such as a sermon entitled “A brief instruction on Sunday morning, after the Psalter had been read, on a feast day, when the crowd wanted to go home soon.”28 In any case, Shenoute’s imposing church monumentalized his piety and hard work and instantly made him a public figure. Illuminated with candles for the Saturday vigil, it must have been an impressive sight and the envy of any bishop. It is among contemporary bishops, in fact, that the best parallels for these building activities can be found. I am thinking above all of Porphyry of Gaza, who celebrated the completion of his monumental church with a civic banquet in the best tradition of Graeco-Roman euergetism.29
How did Shenoute pay for this church and his other buildings? Besa’s biography has a very simple answer. God himself sent Shenoute a small amphora full of gold for this specific purpose, which the holy man found near his cave in the desert.30 Only a miracle could explain such a miraculous church. Shenoute’s own writings insist on the same idea. He never praises the church as a work of art. For him, rather, such a grandiose building was an “argument in stone”: it spoke of the endless wealth brought by God’s blessing to his faithful servants. For Shenoute’s point when discussing the construction of the church (“not to examine how straight or beautiful it is, but to examine ourselves in it”) was that despite all his enormous expenditures in “wages,” “gold,” “money” and “other things,” the wealth of the monastery “does not diminish.” God’s blessing was working miracles for the monastery’s economy:
Otherwise, how would we have been able to build this great house in this way, and these other buildings that we have built along with it, and also this lavatory?31
Hence it is important to distinguish carefully Shenoute’s discourse on building from that of his better-known contemporary Paulinus of Nola. Paulinus had also built, in southern Italy, an imposing basilica with a triconch apse. Like Shenoute, he had “hoped that these material renovations would spur on his own spiritual improvements. He asked rhetorically, ‘How, therefore, can this construction present me with a model by which I can cultivate, build and renew myself inwardly, and make myself a suitable lodging for Christ?’”32 Yet this common appeal to the parallel between material and spiritual edification masks a profound difference. For Paulinus, a wealthy aristocrat, building was above all an aesthetic experience. His discourse takes human labor for granted. Its key concepts are light, color, space, and harmony. For Shenoute, on the other hand, the greatness of his church was an economic feat that had been possible only because the ascetic discipline of his monastery had earned the blessings of God. As Caroline Schroeder has shown, the church was at the same time a symbol of success and a warning for his monks, a symptom of and a model for communal purity. The key concepts of Shenoute’s discourse are size, discipline, work, poverty, and purity.33
Shenoute’s enthusiasm for building would be curious enough in any monk associated with the Upper Egyptian tradition of Pachomian monasticism. It had been none other than Pachomius, after all, who had deliberately “spoiled” the oratory he had just built at his monastery, in order to avoid pride and the misguided praise of art.34 But it is all the more surprising as Shenoute himself had, as a younger monk alienated from his community, denounced the use of the monastery’s wealth to engage in building projects, instead of spending it on the care of the poor:
Stop, congregation, taking all that is left over to you due to the blessing of God and spending it on buildings and demolitions, the wages of architects and craftsmen, the luxuries and other things for the workers, so that they knead and bring clay and carry bricks to build beautiful and fair houses! Unless you had a surplus of wealth, you would not take care of all these things that are useless in the moment of your need (i.e., the final judgment). Why have you not spent your wealth on your bread and clothing and everything that relates to them for yourself, oh miserable wretch? Stop taking the leisure of God’s blessing and the strength of your youth, your elders, and all your children to give it away on things that are not suitable for you, instead of spending all that is left over to you due to the Lord’s blessing on alms (mntna) for the poor, the strangers, the widows, the orphans, the invalid, and the needy, and on numerous philanthropies!35
The monastic community then led by Ebonh had become, in the mind of young Shenoute, a victim of its own success. It had fallen into lithomania, the unrestrained eagerness to build typically associated with wealthy bishops such as Theophilus of Alexandria and Porphyry of Gaza—whose church was criticized for being far too large for the immediate needs of his small congregation (one wonders what Shenoute’s enemies thought of his church).36
Shenoute’s early monastic career presents some interesting parallels to that of Theodore of Tabennesi, the main character of the Pachomian corpus. Both of them claimed a special, privileged relationship to the monastery’s founder: Theodore was supposed to be Pachomius’s favorite disciple; Shenoute was Pgol’s nephew. Neither of them, however, was named superior after the death of their spiritual fathers. Instead, both of them became alienated from their communities and retired provisionally from them. Both of them also grew exceptionally sensitive to the issue of accumulation of wealth by their monasteries. Theodore, it is said, became distressed when the monasteries started to gather “numerous fields, animals, and boats,” and he even refused to use the monastery’s boat, preferring instead to walk.37 For him, as for young Shenoute, it was not enough for the monks to be individually poor. The monasteries had to be poor, too.
How do we explain then Shenoute’s drastic change of mind? Where did he get the idea that building a huge church was a way to glorify God, and not a misuse of the wealth of the poor? When did God’s “blessings” grow large enough that such a careless liberality was no longer out of place at a monastery?
BREAD FOR THE MULTITUDE
The same emphasis on a miraculous prosperity generated by divine “blessings” and spent endlessly by the monastery can be found in a set of five stories about grain, bread supply, and famine relief reported in Shenoute’s Life. They all display the monastery’s capacity to generate an overwhelming surplus of bread precisely when it was most dearly needed. “Just like in the gospel,”38 God’s “blessing” (smu)—a word used in the sense of both divine aid and miraculous abundance of bread—multiplied the monastery’s loaves of bread in quantities large enough to feed multitudes:
It happened once that there was a great drought, and the inhabitants of the district of Panopolis and those of Ptolemais came in a crowd to my father to be fed by him. My father gave them bread until the loaves ran out, and the brother who was in charge of the bread-store came to my father Apa Shenoute and said: “That was a blessing (i.e., a great amount) of bread, my father (apismu šōpi henniōik)! What will you do [now] for the multitudes who have gathered to us and for the brothers?” In reply, my father said to me and to the one who distributed the loaves: “Go and gather up the remaining loaves together with [all] the little fragments, moisten them, and give them to the crowds to eat.” We then went off in accordance with his word and gathered them up, and we left nothing behind. We went back to him and told him: “We have left nothing behind,” and he said to us: “Pray to God that he will bring about such a blessing (smu) that you can feed them all.” We did not wish to disobey him, but instead went away, and when the time came, we went to open the door of the bread-store, and the abundance (smu) poured forth upon us while we were still outside the door of the bread-store. In this way, the multitudes ate, and when they were full they glorified God and our father.39
Indeed, the abundance of grain was so great that the bakers complained about the amount of ashes they had to carry away from the ovens.40 Similarly, when Shenoute brought home a magic grain that he had found at the imperial palace in Constantinople—quite an interesting place to “find” the source of endless wealth—he threw it under the millstone, and “the Lord sent so great an abundance (smu) from the mill-stone that they were quite unable to gather it all up.” Only Shenoute, with his palm branch,
