to play in society.58 The representation of social reality that they put forward was nothing less than revolutionary. A society used to glossing over or euphemizing stark disparities in wealth and power was confronted with a discourse that claimed to lay bare those very disparities with brutal honesty.
The vision was as simple as it was powerful: a society divided along purely economic lines into two opposite and complementary groups, the few rich and the many poor. The rich were pictured as if standing on a high peak of infinitely concentrated wealth, only to be urged to stare down at a vast ocean of poverty. This was of course a drastic simplification of social reality. As depicted by Christian preachers, the rich and the poor were simply stereotypes defined against each other. The poor and their poverty, above all, their overwhelming numbers and utter helplessness, were always the main emphasis. For their very existence was a call to action, to charity and condescension. The love of the poor had always been a duty inside the Christian community, but now it was pushed to the fore and advocated as a public virtue that the state was expected to recognize and reward. As such it was embodied above all in the person of the bishop, professional spokesman and protector of the poor and role model for the rich and powerful.
This Christian discourse on poverty should not be taken at face value. The ubiquitousness of poverty in the rhetoric of this period does not reflect the impoverishment of late Roman society but rather a specific political situation: the rise to prominence of the representatives of the Christian church. The reason for the quick success of this discourse was, in no small degree, that it lent to these new participants in late Roman politics the legitimacy to challenge the establishment and to make a name for themselves. By stressing their relationship with a group that had no place in the traditional model of urban society—the “poor”—the bishops projected a form of authority within the city that outflanked the traditional leadership of urban notables.59 Moreover, the fact that this discourse ignored the hierarchical distinction between city and countryside, so dear to the political ideology of the classical world, had important implications. It meant that even villagers or a rural abbot could now use this language to express their growing sense of entitlement.
Hence the significance of this development for Shenoute’s self-presentation. That what was true about Christian bishops was also true about him, that his discourse on the care of the poor explained and legitimized the prominent role he aspired to play in local society, will be shown in detail in the next four chapters. My conclusions can be summed up here in a few words. As analyzed in this book, Shenoute’s discourse on poverty is structured around three parallel antitheses—political, economic, and religious—which tend to be confused and ultimately overlap:
The first, friend/enemy antithesis, “the ultimate distinction to which all action with specifically political meaning can be traced,” will be at the center of the political analysis of the first chapter.60 I will argue that Shenoute’s universal application of the friend/enemy distinction to local and imperial elites betrays his aspiration to be part of these elites. The active political involvement of a Christian abbot was highly controversial and demanded a continuous effort of self-presentation. Shenoute’s uncompromising and critical attitude toward both “friends” and “enemies” legitimized his public role by marking him out as the emperor’s “loyal opposition.”
The second, economic antithesis will be analyzed in chapters 2 and 3, the center of this book. Shenoute’s own monastery was the ultimate example of the generous love of the poor. Its welfare activities and its miraculous wealth will be analyzed in chapter 2. It will be shown that his discourse of endless abundance and generosity legitimized—in terms reminiscent of a “Christian euergetism”—the receipt of unprecedented amounts of lay gifts. Furthermore, Shenoute’s tireless denunciation of the violence of the rich—who loved wealth more than their own souls and oppressed the poor without mercy—will be discussed in chapter 3. It will be shown there that Shenoute’s discourse of economic inequality betrays his active involvement in a conflict of rural patronage. The third and last antithesis, that between Christians and pagans, will be analyzed in the fourth chapter. My analysis will show that Shenoute’s discourse in favor of intolerance and his attempts to justify his controversial actions against paganism by deliberately confusing religious with economic issues reveal his powerlessness to put a definite end to the old religions.
This reading of Shenoute’s literary corpus, I would like to stress, is anything but straightforward. It demands a constant and often difficult distinction between representation and reality. Many of the fundamental issues addressed in this study can be identified, in the first place, only by comparing and contrasting Shenoute with his better-known contemporaries. It is crucial, therefore, to read these texts in the right context. But this has seldom been done. Modern scholarship has tended to confine Shenoute within the narrow boundaries of Coptic literature and has thus isolated him from the wider late antique world in which he truly belongs. The result has been an undue emphasis on his uniqueness. For it has to be admitted that, when confined to Egypt, Shenoute seems indeed incomparable and larger than life. After all, how do we explain the emergence of a public preacher who thrives on controversy and factionalism within a monastic tradition characterized by an inward-looking mentality, an emphasis on social peace and noninvolvement, stability, and humility? Even in the sixth century—when monasticism had become very much part of the fabric of daily life—it is hard to find any parallels for Shenoute’s public role among Egyptian monks. This may be simply due to the scarcity of monastic sources for the sixth century, yet even Shenoute’s own disciple Besa seems, in comparison, to have had a low profile in society. Among his surviving writings, we find no equivalent to Shenoute’s “discourses” aimed at society in general, nor any attacks on the corruption and sinfulness of the world at large.
In any case, to decide whether Shenoute was unique or exceptional we first need to look outside Egypt and set him in a wider context. We need to abandon, therefore, a “Coptological” perspective. I do not like the idea of Coptology. It encourages narrow-mindedness and ahistorical thinking. Shenoute may be the only really good example of the development of the care of the poor in Egypt,61 but he seems unique only when seen in isolation from his eastern Mediterranean background. A purely Egyptian perspective is not enough. Particularly so when a rich literary documentation originating in Syria, Palestine, and Asia Minor is available for comparison. There is, as a matter of fact, no better introduction to Shenoute’s world than the famous speeches of Libanius of Antioch—although from a point of view diametrically opposed to that of Shenoute. And there are no better historical parallels for his role in society than the archimandrites of fifth-century Syria and Constantinople, many of whom were his exact contemporaries. Like Shenoute, fifth-century holy men such as Hypatius, Alexander, and Marcellus the Sleepless or Symeon the Stylite—all of them Syrian—were very much involved in the world that they had given up. Far from rendering them indifferent to the concerns and controversies of their age, their asceticism had given them the capacity and the will to impinge upon society with unlimited self-confidence and determination. Their unavoidable and disturbing public prominence, their denunciations of social injustice, their advocacy on behalf of the poor, their criticisms of Christian hypocrisy, and their hostility toward paganism: all this shows that Shenoute was not an aberrant character but rather a faithful exponent of his age.62
Let us take the case of Hypatius, for example, one of the many holy men who pursued a career in the area around Constantinople. When Thrace was devastated by the Goths at the end of the fourth century, he protected the poor at his monastery and interceded on their behalf before the imperial authorities. Shenoute did exactly the same thing some time later when Upper Egypt was invaded by Nubian tribes. While Shenoute attacked private pagan shrines, village temples, and the secular traditions of the city (baths, theaters, poetry, etc.), Hypatius attacked the sacred trees of Bithynia and threatened violence when a prefect intended to celebrate the Olympic games at Chalcedon. Hypatius also became the head of a rapidly growing monastery outside this city, but that did not stop him from preaching in public. Every feast day, he would leave the monastery and go to a large church (originally built
