for help to holy men such as Shenoute, who claimed to defend the “poor,” and took them at their word:
I often go to bed with my children without having eaten, since I work for this place. Do a great deed, for they have put me in chains and locked me up. They have freed me [only] upon surety. Do a great deed. Look with God for whatever [money] you can find. You do it not for a man but for God. You are our man.134
The “poor,” therefore, were not always voiceless creatures. In the making of Shenoute’s public career, their active contribution should not be forgotten.
2
A Miraculous Economy
“Everything that God did with Moses on the mountain of Sinai, God has granted it to me on the mountain of Atripe.”1 These are the proud words attributed to Shenoute by the Arabic version of his biography. Whatever else one may say about his character, understatement was never his style. Reading his biography and his own writings, one is indeed struck by his recurring claim to have performed economic miracles at his monastery. Whether it is repeatedly feeding crowds during times of famine or scarcity, caring for twenty thousand refugees for three months, building magnificent churches, or ransoming prisoners of war for large sums of money, nothing was beyond the monastery’s economic power as long as it enjoyed God’s blessing. What’s more, he advertises these accomplishments, in writing and preaching, with remarkable enthusiasm. His descriptions of his monastery’s expenses during a refugee crisis, for example, display extraordinary levels of circumstantiality. What other abbot tells us how much his monastery spends on doctors and boiled vegetables? Or how much bread he bakes on a daily basis?
This proud exaltation of wealthy generosity and large-scale building is not common in early monastic literature. Whereas the Pachomian corpus displays a painful realism in describing the monastic economy, and a marked suspicion toward any show of wealth, with Shenoute wealth and its circulation come to bear a far greater symbolic weight. No longer simply an economic problem of subsistence or an issue of ascetic renunciation, they come to stand for the power of God and for God’s endless capacity for gift giving. It is this discourse on generosity and abundance, and its concrete economic implications, that I want to analyze in the present chapter.
A “GREAT HOUSE”
It is not easy to perform a reality check on this rhetoric. Our 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