noted, Shenoute also preached regularly to nonmonastic audiences. Finally, both holy men constantly interacted with the authorities, provincial in Shenoute’s case, imperial in Hypatius’s case, and derived important material benefits from this interaction.
One crucial obstacle in any attempt to set Shenoute’s “career” against a specific historical background can unfortunately not be definitely solved: the chronology of his life and activities. We know for certain that, in general terms, his activities have to be located in what has been called the “classical period” of preaching on poverty, that is, the years 370–450.64 Given our circumstantial evidence, more precision can be achieved only tentatively. This issue requires a long and technical discussion, and I have therefore relegated it to an appendix. What is important here is that, regardless of when Shenoute was born or died, the few unambiguous pieces of evidence we have point to the years 420–460 as his floruit as a prominent abbot. It was in this period that Shenoute communicated with the archbishops of Alexandria, that he attended the council(s) of Ephesus, that he received the frequent visits of imperial governors, that he built a grandiose monastic church, and that he attacked a pagan village nearby.
It has been suggested, on the other hand, that the beginning of Shenoute’s public life should be pushed much further back in time. The claim in his biography that he lived for no less than 118 years; his own statements that he had spent, at some point in his life, “more than a hundred years in the desert” and that he had been “reading the Gospels for more than sixty years” when attending a council at Ephesus (but which one?); the possible identity of his enemy Gesios with an imperial governor of southern Egypt who ruled in the years 376–378, that is, more than forty years before the floruit I propose: all this has made scholars seriously consider the possibility that Shenoute had a preternatural life span, that he accomplished some of his greatest deeds—like the building of his church—when he was in his hundreds.
Though not impossible, this claim seems improbable to me.65 As long as we have no clear evidence to the contrary, I think we should stick to the few certainties we have and see in Shenoute essentially a fifth-century character, an inhabitant of the “Greek Roman Empire” of Theodosius II recently described by Fergus Millar.66 Shenoute’s contemporaries are, therefore, men such as Rabbula of Edessa, Symeon the Stylite, and Theodoret of Cyrrhus, not the Cappadocian Fathers. This is important, among other things, because the fifth century is a poorly documented period but one in which critical transformations are thought to have taken place in the Near Eastern countryside. The importance of Shenoute’s writings as a historical source lies not least in their capacity to illuminate the social and economic history of this dark but crucial period.
1
Loyal Opposition
“SIN CITY”: SHENOUTE, PANOPOLIS, AND THE POOR
One of the basic difficulties any study of Shenoute must face is the lack of context. Even for the fifth century, a particularly ill-documented period, his is an unusual case. He is not mentioned in any contemporary sources, from Egypt or anywhere else. Although he has a relatively important place in later Coptic tradition, Greek hagiographers and historians of the church pass him over in silence. With few exceptions, his works cannot be dated and do not name people known otherwise. The only datable “event” in his life would be his much-vaunted participation at the council(s) in Ephesus, yet council acts do not mention him either. To make things even more interesting, his writings come almost exclusively from medieval manuscripts found at his own monastery.1
An “incomparable” character, indeed, living in an apparently self-contained world. Everything we know about Shenoute comes, inevitably, from his own writings and a biography that is heavily dependent on them, when not biased by an all-too-obvious hagiographic intention.2 It is not an accident, therefore, that his own self-presentation has shaped our modern perception of him. What we know about Shenoute is what he has decided to let us know about himself. And self-presentation was, for this very egocentric holy man, no light matter.
His literary corpus, as we have it today, is not simply a random group of works that have happened to survive by chance. Even in its present fragmentary state, we can discern, behind its structure, Shenoute’s hand administering his literary legacy as carefully as he administered his own reputation. No text seems to be entirely out of place. His Letters and Discourses, in particular, should be read as a whole and not just individually.3 For seemingly disparate texts, discourses dealing with topics as varied as the devil, the martyr cult, or the plight of the poor, letters both hostile—quoted to be refuted—and friendly, add up to a consistent self-portrait of his persona in action. A hint that this was in fact Shenoute’s original intention—and not simply the modern reader’s illusion—is provided by his own introduction to the last volume of Canons. Looking back at the end of his life, he makes plain with what spirit he engaged in this last compilation of his writings:
These words and commands were in my heart, and I was concerned to establish them before I depart. I had written them on tablets (pinakis), so when I came to the monasteries [from my desert cave], we copied them onto papyrus sheets during those distressful days before Lent. Thus the great disturbances and all the tearful distress that this miserable man has suffered at the hands of pagans, the violent, and he who goads them against us, Satan, have not been able to keep us from doing everything we want.4
This final declaration of victory reads, in a way, like a programmatic statement about Shenoute’s life and work. Self-assertion in the face of the world and its powers had always been one of his central preoccupations. One of the most striking aspects of his works is, in fact, the extent to which so many of them can be described as “ego-documents.” Everything revolves around his public status, his exploits, the reactions he provokes, and the admiration he evokes. His writings are “full of himself.” He is the kind of public character who will often refer to himself in the third person. Against the evil rich who do not listen to him, he declares, with a threatening voice, that “this one has torn his garments and others have torn theirs with him [on behalf of the poor]. But not in vain: he knows what he is doing!” Vis-à-vis provincial governors, he claims that “the good fame of he who tramples upon the love of authority (i.e., my fame) has quickly spread” to Alexandria, Ephesus, and the imperial court. Teaching his own monks, he does not hesitate to exalt his own exemplary courage:
Don’t you know all the evil that they (the evil tax collectors) have tried to do to your brother (i.e., to me, Shenoute) because he says [to them]: “You are evil because you oppress the poor”? Above all, they have tried to do evil to the poor because of your brother, but God has hindered them in their impious plan.
One gets the feeling that, for moments, his public self was too massive a burden for his ego to bear.5
It certainly was too massive a burden for many of his contemporaries. That is, at least, the impression conveyed throughout his works. One of the most interesting aspects of his strategy of self-presentation is his insistence on the widespread negative reactions provoked, in local society, by his actions on behalf of the poor and against paganism. Shenoute’s enemies seem to be everywhere, and he claims, with ill-concealed pride, to be the victim of their constant accusations. What other abbot or bishop has ever talked so much about his own alleged crimes? Who preserves so many hostile documents only to refute them? Harboring thieves, “gathering men to fight each other on account of the villages” and distributing bread to them, destroying temples, causing trouble and tumults, being violent, maltreating the poor, making demands of other landowners’ tenants, beating up his own monks, helping murderers because they owe money to his monastery, slaughtering cows and pigs in the houses of pagans during Easter, “turning the heart of the poor away” from their pagan masters, breaking into his enemies’ houses to destroy their pagan idols, stealing books from “the godless man,” using an antipagan raid as a pretext to plunder a village—these are only some of the “crimes” Shenoute was, according to himself, accused of.6
