Shenoute’s answer to the question “Who are you to tell me what to do?” was, therefore, “I am the poor.” We should not take such an answer for granted. It is true that, by the fifth century, the Christian “care of the poor” was already an imperially sanctioned practice, a public service provided by the church that the government could be expected to recognize and reward in very concrete terms. “Since it is part of our duty to provide for the needy,” the emperors Marcian and Valentinian declared in 451, “and to take care that nourishment is not lacking for the poor, we order that the payments of diverse kinds that have been assigned so far to the holy churches from the public treasury shall remain as heretofore and shall be furnished undiminished by anyone, and we assign to this most ready bounty perpetual endurance.”126 The care of the poor defined and delimited the public role of the Christian church in late Roman society. Yet it had been bishops, not monks, who had been at the forefront of this development. It was only in the fifth century that large monasteries—such as Shenoute’s—began to take over this public service and to develop it on a large scale in the countryside, where it was “unevenly distributed and erratically maintained.”127 The wholehearted appropriation of this institution and discourse by certain monks had important consequences for the relationship between monasticism and society. It encouraged and legitimized a stronger and more active involvement in public life. Together with the defense of orthodoxy, the care of the “poor” became the primary argument for a Christian monk to justify his actions in the “world.”
But for a social historian such rhetoric is not self-explanatory. It raises a basic question: Who were the “poor”? What kind of people made up the “crowds” that followed Shenoute? These are questions that will come up again in every other chapter of this book, but it is important to understand why our answers can never be completely clear. In the first place, Shenoute’s notion of the “poor” could refer to the voluntary poor, that is, the poor who lived in the desert as monks. When Shenoute complains about the violence the “poor” are suffering at the hands of the “violent,” he may be simply referring to the taxes or rents that his monastery has to pay. Or he may be defending the “poverty”—that is, the wealth—of his monasteries from criticism by his rich and wicked enemies, as in the following example:
Who again are those whose houses have been laid waste, so that they [have to] beg and sell themselves to their creditors or give themselves as pledges to the moneylenders—[men] just like this lawless governor who forgot the oppression of a crowd of the poor? Is it your (pl.) people or is it the communities of God (i.e., my monasteries)? Would that you (pl.) had to endure poverty, oh you who are quick to blaspheme because of the shortage! As for us (i.e., the monks), we are tried in everything, [but] even if we are naked, even if we are in need of bread, we thank Jesus.128
However rich Shenoute’s monasteries may have been—and we shall see that they had a formidable economic power—their “poor” monks could be spoken of as naked beggars who had sold themselves to their creditors and lacked bread. This ambiguity of the notion of the “poor” was particularly useful for a holy man who was attempting to legitimize his notorious involvement in the world. The defense of the (involuntary) “poor” in the world at large came naturally to an abbot who presided over a large monastery full of (voluntary) poor monks. The care of the “poor” set Shenoute free from the narrow bounds of his monastery.
When referring explicitly to the involuntary “poor” of the “world,” on the other hand, Shenoute’s descriptions seem to indicate that we are dealing above all with rural workers, small landowners, and the tenants of large landowners. Yet here again his biblically inspired language is very vague and drastically simplifies a very complex economic reality. As is so common in the Christian discourse on poverty in late antiquity, it blurs the traditional Greek distinction penēs–ptōchos, that is, between the man who has to work to earn his daily bread and the beggar.129 This basic distinction is, in any case, ignored in Coptic, which usually subsumes both kinds of “poverty” under the all-embracing category of hēke, originally meaning the “hungry.” As a whole, the “poor”—whether voluntary or not—are defined by Shenoute only in a negative way: they are those who suffer “violence” at the hands of his enemies, and on whose behalf he fights and speaks.130
The reason for this is quite simple. The language of poverty was above all a language of claims. Rather than a category with intrinsic meanings, the “poor” was a relational category often used with a polemical intent. Most of the time, it simply meant the “oppressed.” One can see this clearly in the petitions of Dioscorus of Aphrodito against the authorities of Antaeopolis. Although Aphrodito is known to have been a prosperous village, Dioscorus’s descriptions of its misery could well have been written by Shenoute:
[We are] all miserable orphans leading the existence of young children—as evident from our naked aspect—who cannot find our necessary nourishment without danger. We call upon the Lord God as witness to this, namely, that we eat raw vegetables and emmer in winter; in the summer, we eat in our hearths (?) the refuse left over after sifting our grain and grains dropped during the transport of our grain-taxes, since after this nothing at all remains to us.131
When in need of an imperial favor, everybody at Aphrodito was an orphan, naked and hungry. In the same way, Shenoute’s attempt to define his ambivalent position in the “world” by referring to a vague and ill-defined notion made perfect political sense. Like “middle class” or “proletariat,” the “poor” was a “social concept with variable geometry.”132 Much of its political usefulness lay precisely in the fact that it defined and legitimized one’s position in reference to an ill-defined group that could—if necessary—be identified with society as a whole. Claiming to stand for the “poor” thus allowed Shenoute to universalize his own interests and to identify his own foes as public enemies of society. Any attempt to use his writings as a source for social history must take this political context into account.
On the other hand, for a self-made politician such as Shenoute, who needed to mobilize “crowds” in city and countryside, the language of poverty could be a political discourse with a very real symbolic power and concrete social consequences. Language, in particular authorized language produced by an authority such as a preacher, has structuring power. It can prescribe while seeming to describe. By producing and imposing representations of the social world that rendered a group—the “poor”—visible to itself and to others, Shenoute was in fact promoting the existence of this group as a group. For there may have been many poor people in late antique Egypt, but the “poor” did not exist as an actual group waiting for Shenoute to act as its spokesman. They had to be created as such, given a common identity and mobilized in defense of their own interests. “Le representant”—Pierre Bourdieu has said—“fait le group qui le fait.” Shenoute, we could say, promoted the existence of a group that promoted his existence as a public man.133
It is important not to confuse this circular relationship—characteristic of much political representation—with cynical manipulation. Shenoute was not a hypocrite politician who used the “poor” to further his own interests. He believed in his own mission more than anyone else. But much of his success surely stems from the fact that his own interests and those of the “poor” he defended tended to coincide. Helping the “poor” was the best way for him to help himself. Moreover, although the “poor” had to be created as a group and mobilized—both in action and language—they were far more than passive spectators or a rhetorical concoction. As innumerable late antique petitions show, they actively took over