Listening to this (i.e., Shenoute’s criticisms) together with those who were with him, he (i.e., the governor) said: “Nobody says this as clearly as you show us and teach us.”
(To which Shenoute replied:) “What I am telling you is clear to you because I speak with you about your duties and those of the people who are here with us.”113
Shenoute’s “opposition” to these governors, therefore, was a very “loyal opposition,” that is, precisely the kind of opposition that the emperors were interested in fostering in the provinces. We have seen that the central authorities of the Roman state, structurally weak and therefore jealous of local powers and even of their own provincial representatives, promoted centralization through a policy of divide and rule that encouraged both local criticism of the powerful and a constant appeal to the imperial court itself as the ultimate judge.114 Shenoute’s words and deeds fit nicely into this role of the emperor’s man in the province. He never questions imperial law directly nor does he ever claim—as it has been argued—that godly zeal overrides secular law.115 When accused by governors, he is easily offended at any hint that he might have broken the laws. “Will you make me a companion of thieves?!” “Will you judge me in absence?” “We thank God and the laws and do not flee from them nor are we provoking disturbances.”116 Anomia, that is, lawlessness, is what defines his enemies in Panopolis.117 He is very much concerned, for example, to show that his actions against paganism did not involve any disturbances in accordance with imperial laws, which forbid any unrest or turbulence on account of religious intolerance.
The reason Shenoute loved to dwell on the accusations made against his person by both enemies and “friends” was not to show that his holy courage was beyond earthly laws. All those accusations and, of course, his replies were simply the best possible evidence for his parrhēsia, which his hypocritical enemies deliberately misrepresented as a blatant disregard for the law. His controversial actions and criticism on behalf of the poor and against paganism may have been holy, but—this is always stressed by him—they were also legal. Far from representing a challenge to Roman power, they were carried out in the name of the emperor and his laws:
For the Christian emperors are worthy of all honor. But among those who are entrusted with offices or magistracies, there are many, not to say everyone, who pervert justice for money. The majority of those who obtain magistracies are Christian, and still they do not care for the affairs of God, that is, justice, mercy, and all his commands.118
To care for the poor, to extirpate paganism, to criticize the unjust, to scold the ignorant or corrupt governor: this is not wrongdoing—Shenoute argued—but the true spirit of the law, what the emperor really wants but incompetent governors, too cowardly or involved in local interests, will not dare do themselves.119 An overzealous application of the laws was Shenoute’s only “crime,” and he was very proud of it.
A LANGUAGE OF CLAIMS: POVERTY AND POLITICS
Shenoute’s single-minded, relentless, and, for moments, crude campaign of self-definition—his “ego of epic proportions,” in other words—cannot be explained by appealing solely to psychological factors or biblical role models. Its raison d’être lies rather in the structurally unclear position he occupied in contemporary society. The reason so many of his works answer the questions “Who am I?” “Who are my enemies?” “What gives me the right to do and say what I do?” is that his ill-defined position did not grant him any clear-cut legitimacy to intervene in society at large as he aspired to do. “Friends,” enemies, and his own monks—whose interaction with the world was strictly controlled—had to be constantly reassured. Above all, he embodied a new kind of leadership whose success—in the late fourth and fifth centuries—we cannot take for granted. This was a man who, as far as we know, had inherited neither the wealth nor the education traditionally necessary to be a member of the provincial elite. Here as elsewhere, the power of a self-made man who had acquired and not inherited his status was inherently suspect.
This was particularly true in this case, since Shenoute was a monk, and monks, it could be and was often argued, belonged to the “desert,” not to the “world.” An impious governor was imagined to have said, after reading Shenoutes’s demands in a letter: “Let Shenoute talk in his church and among the monks. He has no jurisdiction over me as far as administrative affairs goes.” “He has nothing to do with me.”120 Indeed, who was Shenoute to tell anyone else what to do? No other Egyptian abbot, before or after him, is known to have been so active outside his monastery. His involvement in politics was beset with dilemmas and ambiguities. His very involvement in the world, which contributed to his public status, could also undermine it by compromising the withdrawal and segregation from society on which his spiritual prestige depended.121 This is why when accused by provincial governors, Shenoute’s answer to them is to stress that he is a monk, that he stays inside his monastery, that only God’s tribunal has anything to do with him, that the “things of this world” are not his concern. His answer, in other words, is to stress the otherworldliness that underlay his spiritual prestige but was threatened by his passion to be actively involved in the world at large.
It is interesting to compare Shenoute from this point of view with his better-known contemporary Theodoret. Theodoret was a wealthy Antiochene who had been sent as bishop to the small nearby town of Cyrrhus. His enemies, however, repeatedly accused him of spending more time in Antioch than in Cyrrhus: he supposedly preached, gathered synods, and even kept an apartment there. His answer was a flood of letters to every important authority in the empire. Although it is hard to imagine somebody more different from Shenoute than Theodoret, these letters show that he had to deal with comparable dilemmas. While Shenoute replied to his critics that he was indeed a monk and always stayed at his monastery, Theodoret felt the need to state, time and again, that he liked “a peaceful life free from cares” and that he was completely dedicated to the small town of Cyrrhus. He claimed to have built public bridges, baths, porticoes, and even an aqueduct for this “little ugly town … whose ugliness I have dissimulated with multiple and magnificent buildings.” He had even distributed his inheritance there. Yet the paradox, here again, is that the very letters that he wrote to make this point show how involved he was in imperial politics. He clearly felt that he was too big a man for such a small town.122
The only way for Shenoute to validate his anomalous involvement in politics while preserving his externality was to stress the oppositional aspects of this involvement. We have seen how he cultivated the status of persona non grata in Panopolis and claimed to be the sworn enemy of its elite, the “violent.” We have also seen that when he does admit to having “friends” among the powerful, all these “friends” happen to be imperial magistrates. They are foreign, and their appointments are brief. They are not a threat to his outsider status. They are Shenoute’s friends, in any case, only if and when they are willing to accept his courageous criticism. We have seen, above all, that he always presented himself as the spokesman of “the poor,” who suffered unremitting “violence” at the hands of the powerful of this world. His legitimacy to challenge Panopolis and the “violent” stemmed neither from divine inspiration—to which he was reluctant to appeal123—nor from extraordinary asceticism, whose intrinsic value he questioned because he took it for granted.124 It stemmed, rather, from his representativeness, that is, his claim to stand for “the silent majority.” In contrast to his enemies, who spoke only for themselves and their own individual interests, all of Shenoute’s interventions in the “world” were presented as actions on behalf of the helpless and needy “poor.”