have apparently nothing better to do than to talk and worry about Shenoute’s latest exploits. Imperial magistrates are rendered powerless by his courage; local society is at his mercy.31
It is essential to avoid this mistake. Given our sources, the question “Who is Shenoute?” can only be answered with another question: “Who did Shenoute say he was?” And his answer—“I am the enemy of Panopolis because the rulers of the city oppress the poor”—is clearly one-sided and by no means innocent. To start with, it should be made clear that Shenoute’s exploits may have been less spectacular, his enemies less numerous and powerful, than he maintains. They may have been less worried about him than he was about them. It is true that the monks’ irruption into the late fourth-century world of politics was deeply disturbing for many traditional civic notables.32 Many of Shenoute’s enemies were certainly only too real. His attempt to become the moral and religious leader of his region threatened the status quo, that is, the monopoly over the economic, cultural, and religious life held by the elite of Panopolis. His provocations cannot have failed to arouse resistance there, though probably more often a passive resistance—simply ignoring him—rather than the active opposition of a Gesios. Yet Shenoute feeds on this opposition and exalts it to a degree out of proportion with reality.
The reasons for this go beyond his self-understanding as a biblical prophet, or his remarkable personality. They have to do with his problematic position in society. In the first place, we cannot take Shenoute’s influence outside his monastery for granted. This was a position that had to be established and earned. What an abbot like Shenoute needed, therefore, was above all to have an impact, to provoke a response. He could take, in fact he needed, the opposition and the “persecution.” What he could not afford was indifference and to be ignored. “The only thing worse than being talked about,” Oscar Wilde has said, “is not being talked about.” In the second place, Shenoute’s pose as the courageous and persecuted prophet who defends the “poor” allowed him to be deeply involved in the life of Panopolis—as he undoubtedly was—while remaining the “supreme stranger” to its corrupt way of life. But his critical statements about the city do not need to be taken literally any more than do similar disapproving statements about his own community.33 The irony, in fact, is that the success of Shenoute’s “counterculture” may have owed much to Panopolis’s own success during late antiquity. That is, his criticisms, however shocking, may have been unwittingly functional to a society that was successful but felt uncomfortable with its sudden prosperity.
Even if answering accusations was a pressing need for his political survival, Shenoute clearly made a virtue out of this necessity. His insistent claim to be a controversial character, both hated and feared by the “violent” of Panopolis, was not simply an inevitable reaction to the inevitable hostility of the powerful. It was, rather, an essential aspect of the role that he had to act out to define and legitimize his problematic involvement in politics, that of the fearless spokesman of the “poor.” To understand this role’s rationale and implications, we need to set Shenoute’s discourse of self-presentation in the context in which it belongs: the political structures, traditions, and ideologies of the later Roman Empire. Faced with such an idiosyncratic character, we need to focus, more than ever, on the fundamental needs and values of the society that admired but also scorned or ignored him. In the apposite words of Clifford Geertz,
No matter how peripheral, ephemeral or free-floating the charismatic figure we might be concerned with—the wildest prophet, the most deviant revolutionary—we must begin with the center and with the symbols and conceptions that prevail there if we are to understand him and what he means.34
“VERTICAL SOLIDARITY”: THE ROMAN STATE AND THE POOR
Let us look now, therefore, at the “center” of Late Roman society: the Roman state. Too much emphasis on Shenoute’s violent rhetoric or on his self-understanding as a prophet has made us overlook something so obvious that it is seldom observed: that he lived in the Roman Empire. Shenoute’s relationship to the representatives of the Roman state and, in particular, to the provincial governors seems to have been for the most part the exact reverse of his hostility toward the local powerful at Panopolis. Far from displaying any separatist tendencies or any Egyptian nationalism, he identifies completely with the Roman order and relies on it to fight off his local enemies. He never criticizes a Roman emperor or the Roman state as such. Quite the opposite. As Shenoute sees it, the duty to care for the “poor” and to ensure social justice belongs, above all, to the state. The ideal of social justice that so many of his sermons and writings advocate can be described in two words: “vertical solidarity.”35 A vertical chain links God, the emperor, his magistrates, provincial governors, and the local “poor,” as represented in the person of Shenoute himself. The members of this chain are, ideally, linked with each other by ties of hierarchical reciprocity. Loyalty and obedience are owed to one’s superior—and above all to the emperor—in exchange for protection. Justice and mercy are owed to one’s inferior—always pictured as the “poor”—in exchange for loyalty. This vertical chain of protection and loyalty should bypass and neutralize the corporate interests of the local elites. But an effective advocate of the “poor” will occasionally have to travel “up” all the way to the imperial capital and skip missing links. For it is the “righteous emperors” who are, in Shenoute’s opinion, the last resort of the “poor.” They have been established by God to bring justice to the land and to punish all those unjust landowners who oppress the weak.36 “In their love for God,” they have also put an end to the public practice of paganism and have offered financial support to his monastery. Shenoute only has words of praise for them.
If not for the modern belief that Shenoute somehow represented a “national” Egyptian Christianity, this should have been expected. The identification of the imperial court as a model of heaven on earth and as the “exemplary center” of society is one of the dominant themes of late antique Christianity in the Eastern Empire. The faithful, it has been said, came to “see the realization of God’s kingdom in the miracle of the sumptuous imperial court, which had converted to the new faith.”37 Christopher Kelly has documented the grip of the imperial court on the Christian imagination of the time. When Pachomius’s successor Theodore saw an angel in a vision, what he saw looked like an imperial bureaucrat. When Porphyry of Gaza witnessed the procession for the baptism of the child-emperor in Constantinople, the splendor of the imperial ceremonial and its hierarchical perfection suggested to him the splendors of heaven. When theologians argued about the true nature of Christ, their arguments replicated debates on the nature of imperial power as expressed in the courtly ceremonial at Constantinople.38
Shenoute always made sure that both friends and enemies knew about his positive relationship to this numinous center. He once declared to a visiting governor that he was “amazed” that someone who despised ambition and worldly honors as much as he himself did had still managed to become famous among the powerful, “not only in Alexandria or Ephesus, but also at the imperial comitatus and at the court of the emperors, just like light carrying off the darkness and scattering the gloom.”39 He also claimed to have been offered money by the pious emperor Theodosius II himself, only to refuse it of course.40 And his biography illustrates the same aspiration in its usual, over-the-top way. According to a story contained therein, the emperor once “thirsted” for Shenoute’s presence in Constantinople. The military governor of the Thebaid was therefore commanded to bring him over to the imperial capital where the “entire senate” was looking forward to his visit. Shenoute was unfortunately too busy praying for his own sins. The solution: he mounted a shining cloud, flew over to the royal palace in Constantinople, blessed the emperor, and came back the same night!41
Stories like this, also reported about other holy men famed for their familiarity with the powerful (John of Lycopolis; Victor of Tabennesi, said to be the “secret son” of Theodosius II),42 show the value placed by such holy men and their admirers on an “immediate,” almost miraculous contact with the emperor. A privileged access to the emperor was considered crucial for any success in local politics. Visiting the imperial capital and approaching the imperial court was expensive and dangerous, but no miraculous clouds were needed. In the fifth and sixth centuries, Constantinople was invaded every year by thousands of petitions