Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia 21 March 2022
shenoute: update
Heike Behlmer Keywords: Shenute, Saint, approximately 348-466; Besa, Abbot of Athripe, active 5th century; Coptic Christian Saints; Saints; Monks; Monasteries; Dayr Anba Shinudah (Suhaj, Egypt: Province); Abbots; Akhmim (Egypt); Authors; Manichaeism; Manuscripts; Coptic language; Coptic literature.
Shenoute (lived late 4th to mid-5th cent.) was the abbot of a monastic federation in Upper Egypt and arguably the most important Coptic author of the late fourth and fifth centuries. Shenoute was the third leader of an ascetic community founded by his uncle Pgol around the middle of the 4th century. This community was using a set of rules adapted from the Pachomian rule, and at Pgol’s death hosted about 30 monks and nuns (Layton 2014: 27-34). Under Shenoute’s leadership, the community developed into a center of monastic life and culture, consisting of three interconnected communities (Yale Monastic Archaeology Project South (Sohag); Davis forthcoming): two monasteries for men, the Monastery of Apa Shenoute (dayr anba shinudah) or White Monastery (Dayr al-Abyad), and the Red Monastery (dayr anba bishoi or Dayr al-Ahmar; Bolman 2016); and a monastery for women located in an Egyptian temple in the village of Atripe near modern Sohag, as well as individual cells for (male) hermits.
In the 30 years since the appearance of the Coptic Encyclopedia entry shenute, saint written by Karl Heinz Kuhn, huge progress has been made in all areas of Shenoutean studies, in particular the reconstruction of the manuscript tradition of Shenoute’s works (Emmel 2004a) and later traditions about this monastic leader, his theology, and the linguistic and literary characteristics of his writing, as well as the built environment and material culture of his monastic federation (Blanke 2019; Davis forthcoming). It is difficult to do justice to this flood of new research, but its progress has been charted and made accessible by numerous overviews (Timbie 2005, 2010, 2015a, 2015b, and 2019; Crislip 2016; Behlmer 2019 [the basis for this update]). Career Stephen Emmel has reconstructed Shenoute’s career mostly from his literary tradition (Emmel 2004a: 6-14; 2004b), as witnesses for the abbot’s activities from outside the monastery are scarce. According to Emmel, Shenoute was born in 347CE, possibly on 23 June, entered Pgol’s monastery in 371/2, and became its third abbot about 385. Shenoute’s date of death and commemoration is 7 Epep (14 July Gregorian = 1 July Julian), while various dates (451, 452, 465, and 466) have been proposed for the year of his death. Due mainly to the improbability of a lifespan of 118 years as given by some sources, Ariel López has suggested moving forward the date of Shenoute’s birth as far as the 380s (López 2013: 131-133).
These debates have seen Emmel defending his reconstruction of Shenoute dying in 465 (Emmel 2016), while another recent study (Delhez 2021) argues for a date of 450.
Under a second leader, Ebonh (discovered by Emmel, 2004a: 558-570), who fell prey to a damnatio memoriae, the monastery may have witnessed serious violations of its rules. Shenoute’s © Claremont Graduate University 1 Heike Behlmer, Shenoute: Update 21 March 2022 works written during this crisis were required to be read to all community members four times a year (Emmel 2008a: 38) and served as a founding legend for his tenure. This crisis, which forms, according to Emmel, the first of six identifiable biographical stations for Shenoute (Emmel 2004b; Emmel 2008a: 34f), is chronologically followed by the development of his leadership style in confrontation with the female monastic community (Krawiec 2002). The approximately two decades around 400 were characterized by anti-pagan activities, including the theft of pagan cult objects from private houses in Panopolis and elsewhere (Emmel 2002, 2008b, and 2017). Shenoute’s relationship with the patriarch cyril I is marked by the first council of ephesus in 431 and Shenoute’s support for the Alexandrian orthodoxy (Moawad 2008; Davis 2008).
The 440s witnessed the construction of the new main church at Dayr Anba Shinudah (Grossmann 2008), whose limestone walls gave it its modern name of “White Monastery,” and the community’s involvement in caring for the poor as well as refugees from nomadic invasions. The building of the new church was important to Shenoute for various reasons: it seems to have become necessary due to the community’s expansion and success, which may have grown to more than 1,000 members (Brakke and Crislip 2015: 5). On a spiritual level, it constituted, for Shenoute, the embodiment in stone of his monastic community. Both the church and the community could be polluted by individual monks and nuns through their sins (Schroeder 2007: Ch. 3). Finally, Emmel’s sixth and final phase in Shenoute’s biography, the aftermath of the council of chalcedon (Emmel 2002: 96-98), is dependent on the abbot having lived past this event. For two other themes playing a major role in Shenoute’s works, no precise chronology can be assigned: monastic life under his direction, which provides a continuous thread through all his works (Layton 2002, 2007, and 2014); and an illness, which is a recurrent theme especially in Canons 8 and 6, both possibly – and in this order – to be situated before the construction of the new White Monastery church (Emmel 2004a: 555, 576-579, 593ff).
Shenoute’s works and Vita Shenoute’s works, of which more than 4,000 pages from more than 100 codices (none of which are complete) have survived, have long been recognized as a unique source for life in Upper Egypt in the 4th and 5th centuries CE as well as the largest corpus of original coptic literature by a single author (Orlandi 1991, Buzi 2021). Only now, after the basis of Emmel’s painstaking reconstruction of the manuscript tradition (Emmel 2004a), is it possible to engage in any depth with the abbot’s works: this basis has been laid by an international project led by Emmel to create a complete edition (see Emmel 2018 for extensive stock-taking of the state of research on Shenoute’s works as well as the edition project).
Recent publications have benefited from Emmel’s reconstruction, especially in an edition of the main witnesses of Canon 8 (Boud’hors 2013) and translations of selected Discourses (Brakke and Crislip 2015). Advances in digital editing will continue to add new value to these sources, as sample full-text searchable editions and corpus-linguistic analyses in the Internet-based project Coptic scriptorium illustrate, as do the documentation and virtual reconstruction of the entire Coptic literary tradition via the Internet project paths, Tracking Papyrus and Parchment Paths. An Archaeological Atlas of Coptic Literature – itself based on earlier reconstruction efforts in the Corpus dei Manoscritti Copti Letterari. A recent overview of Coptic scriptorium’s design and © Claremont Graduate University 2 Heike Behlmer, Shenoute: Update 21 March 2022 a case study using two of Shenoute’s works shows the enormous potential of a digital approach in, for example, examining rhetorical techniques or uses of loanwords (Krawiec and Schroeder 2021). Shenoute’s works were already during his lifetime systematically divided into two main groups (Emmel 2004a: 3f): the Canons, works on monastic life and monastic discipline; and the Discourses (or literary letters) created for a mixed monastic/non-monastic audience on topics that go beyond the monastic life strictly speaking.
The fact that Shenoute himself “canonized” his works (Emmel 2008a: 38) and provided instructions for their reception is remarkable. Rebecca Krawiec has recently revisited the interesting question of redactional changes to Shenoute’s works both during his lifetime and after his death (Krawiec 2017). The nine volumes of the Canons were probably arranged roughly chronologically. Canons 1 and 2 date from the time before and during Shenoute’s assumption of office. Canon 7 has the building of the church in the 440s as its theme, while Canon 9 is situated around the end of Shenoute’s life. The topics of Canon 8 are Shenoute’s illness and the refugee crisis, while Canon 6 may have been written shortly before these events occurred (Emmel 2008a: 39). In addition to the Canons and Discourses, letters by Shenoute to clerics and laymen and varia are preserved.
Shenoute’s works have been transmitted almost exclusively in the library of the White Monastery, whose codices, in the 18th and 19th centuries early modern period, were fragmented and scattered into museums and collections worldwide (Orlandi 2019; Orlandi and Suciu 2016; Louis 2008). Only a fraction of his œuvre was transmitted outside the monastery, for which the question of spurious attribution has recently been raised (Boud’hors 2017). For example, the acephalous work A26, a long sermon known by the modern title “De iudicio” (Behlmer 1996; Kosack 2013), also happens to be the only text attributed to Shenoute which is partly preserved in Greek. A fragmentary parallel for A26 from Naga ed-Dêr, across the Nile from its assumed provenance of This/Thinis, has recently been published (Zellmann-Rohrer 2018). The monastery library, which may have held 1,000 codices over the course of its existence, was still in use at the beginning of the 15th Century (Orlandi and Suciu 2016: 915). Marginal notes in the bilingual Sahidic Holy Week Lectionary sa 16L (Vatican Library, Borgia Copto 109, cass. 23, fasc. 99) have shown the terminus post quem for the production of this manuscript to be the year 1443 (Elhage-Mensching 2018). Numerous fragments from the monastery library show signs of intentional damage, the cause of which has yet to be determined (Orlandi and Suciu 2016: 906-913).
A recent find of more than 1,300 extremely small fragments (Davis et al. 2014) in a room of the monastery church raises new questions about the library’s late medieval fate.
A Vita of Shenoute, attributed mostly to his successor besa, has survived in several languages: both Sahidic and Bohairic Coptic, Arabic, Ethiopian, and Syriac. The Bohairic Vita is preserved entirely in a manuscript from the Monastery of St. Macarius, while the Sahidic text survives only fragmentarily in four codices scattered over five collections (Lubomierski 2008: 92). Nina Lubomierski’s division of the textual witnesses into a long (Boh., Arab., Eth.) and a short version (Syr.) and her reconstruction of Shenoute’s Vita as a compilation of commemorative speeches (given probably, among others, by Besa) as well as oral traditions concerning the abbot’s life has found wide acceptance (Lubomierski 2007).
© Claremont Graduate University 3 Heike Behlmer, Shenoute: Update 21 March 2022 Organization of monastic life under Shenoute’s direction Under Shenoute’s leadership, the three monasteries were structured into a network of “houses.” Individual communities were led by an abbot or abbess, who in turn answered to the “father of these communities” (Layton 2002: 26-29). The abbess’ limited autonomy over her own monastery has been described in detail (Krawiec 2002: 94-98, 211-221), with monks living permanently in the gate building and exercising some form of access control. The abbess also had to give account to emissaries of the abbot general. Shenoute himself lived mostly as a hermit near the main male monastery and led the federation through his letters and occasional visits. At least on the occasion of a quarterly general assembly, but probably more often, he gave public sermons, which also seem to have attracted a large non-monastic audience (Takla 2012).
Bentley Layton (Layton 2014; 2007: 47-58; and 2002) has studied in detail the living environment and set of rules which governed the everyday life of the monasteries’ monks and nuns, while Caroline T. Schroeder has focused on the socialization of children into monastic life (Schroeder 2020, esp. part iii). The federation’s original several hundred rules had at first been laid down in one or more books (Layton 2014: 3), but today we can only reconstruct them mainly from the nine volumes of Shenoute’s Canons. A control and punishment system (Schroeder 2007: Ch. 2) ensured compliance with monastic rules. The monastic system (according to Layton 2014, 2007 and 2002) provided for uniform daily routine and uniform treatment in rations, clothing, and cell equipment for all residents. The stations of daily routine were heralded by wooden gongs. Several daily in-house meetings for prayer and weaving were flanked by an early morning and evening meeting of the entire monastic community. The daily communal meal at noon was strictly vegetarian, while monks and nuns were allowed a second, small solitary meal in the evening. Excluded from regular strict eating regulations were the sick, who were also provided with professional medical care (for healthcare in the monastery see Crislip 2008).
A new comprehensive study on the monastery federation’s built and living environment (Blanke 2019) judges both the numbers for the monks and nuns given by later sources and the number of refugees housed by the White Monastery according to Shenoute’s own works to be implausible, even as it paints a picture of the federation as a “spiritual beacon” and a “powerhouse in the local economy” (Blanke 2019: 179).
Shenoute’s place in the socioreligious and literary landscape of Late Antique Egypt Shenoute’s life and work belong to a world of religious upheaval. In the discussion of his relationship to adherents of traditional Greco-Egyptian religion, a local landowner named Ges(s)ios has figured prominently (in summary Crislip 2016: 351-354). This figure is possibly to be identified as Flavius Aelius Gessius, a former governor of the Thebais who was accused by Shenoute of secretly following traditional cults despite a public commitment to Christianity (“crypto-pagan”: Emmel 2002) as well as exploiting his own tenants and farm workers as a large landowner. The scholarly treatment of Shenoute's accusations against Gesios traces the general lines of discussion of Late Antique Egyptian social history. This discussion has developed over time from casting Shenoute as the spiritual leader of an indigenous resistance against a Greek-speaking upper class (Barns 1964), through an investigation of religious change in Late Antiquity and the value of literary testimonies (Frankfurter 1998), to the question of whether Gesios was at © Claremont Graduate University 4 Heike Behlmer, Shenoute: Update 21 March 2022 all a “(crypto)pagan,” or rather could have been a Christian with Arian tendencies (Bagnall 2008: 30-32; Emmel 2008b: 173-174; differently López 2013).
The same evolution holds true for the discussion of Shenoute’s theological positions: Alois Grillmeier (Grillmeier and Hainthaler 1990: 170-234) convincingly argues against Johannes Leipoldt’s negative judgment on Shenoute’s “Christless piety” (Leipoldt 1903: 81ff), judging his theology, on the contrary, to be “Christocentric.” This position has been supported by Dietmar Winkler (Winkler 1997: 91-109, esp. p. 109) and Stephen J. Davis (Davis 2008: 59-85), who examines Shenoute’s theology of the incarnation on the basis of three works: I Am Amazed (Cristea 2011), And It Happened One Day, and When the Word Says (Davis 2008: App. A.3). For Shenoute, in harmony with the theology of the Alexandrian Fathers and particularly Cyril, it is the incarnate Logos who saves mankind from death and gives eternal life. Elaborating on the close connection between Shenoute’s Christology and monastic practices, Davis points out that the angelic life of monks (constant prayer, asceticism, participation in the Eucharist with the real presence of Christ in the sacrament) constitutes their sharing in the incarnation (Davis 2008: 85). A recent article has argued that there is no evidence for Miaphysite convictions in Shenoute’s writings, which would reflect instead “a broadly Alexandrian Christology” (Knecht 2018: 191) rather than a particular closeness to Cyril’s positions.
A more nuanced approach has likewise been brought to judging the literary qualities of an author who, in the past (like Coptic monasticism in general), could be seen as illiterate and anti-intellectual (Leipoldt 1903). It has been affirmed that in Shenoute’s lifetime, translations from Greek were made in his monastery, and work took place on the text of the Coptic Bible. The question of Shenoute’s own proficiency in Greek (cf. Timbie 2010: 108) and his literary education is also usually answered in the affirmative (discussion of the state of research at Crislip 2016: 349f). Shenoute has even been seen as part of the educational elite of the nome of Panopolis (Brakke and Crislip 2015: 10). Tito Orlandi (e.g., Orlandi 1986 and 1991) has no doubt that Shenoute’s sermons and catechesis are influenced by the Greek rhetoric of the so-called Second Sophistic, and recent studies also see in Shenoute’s works a familiarity with classical rhetorical techniques (Becker 2008) and a surprising theological versatility (Lundhaug 2011). Narratological studies (Shisha-Halevy 2011 and 2020) underline that Shenoute consciously structured textual units in order to achieve maximum rhetorical effect; or argue that, in addition to the Hellenistic and the Christian-Patristic rhetorical tradition (Lundhaug 2012: 268f), his works build on an Egyptian-Demotic tradition (Aufrère 2006; differently Delhez 2021).
Characteristic of Shenoute’s work is a highly developed rhetoric based on the language of the Bible, which he uses to consolidate his authority as head of the monastic federation and to defend it in conflict situations (“Shenoute . . . a serious biblical exegete”: Timbie 2010: 91; Lundhaug 2012). There is consensus that Shenoute speaks to his monks and nuns in the voice of biblical figures whose authority as leaders on the road to salvation was universally recognized (Krawiec 2002: 55-66; Emmel 2004b: 171-173; Schroeder 2007): the Old Testament prophets (Brakke 2006: 97-124 and Brakke 2007), the suffering righteous servant of the Psalms, and the Apostle Paul. It is also agreed that Shenoute’s language is permeated with biblical allusions and quotations (Timbie 2010 and 2011; Behlmer 2008), which may be consciously and creatively adapted to a current situation, or, as in the case of rules which don’t use direct quotations, their biblical language makes them a continuation of the commandments and curses of the Pentateuch (Timbie 2013). Recently, © Claremont Graduate University 5 Heike Behlmer, Shenoute: Update 21 March 2022 Shenoute’s description of his own sufferings, as a monastic leader, has also found its place in the study of the history of emotions (Crislip 2017; Dilley 2017).
Shenoute’s reception Shenoute’s monastery was continuously populated at least until the 15th Century (Orlandi and Suciu 2016: 914-915) and has recently experienced a renaissance of monastic life. Shenoute was followed in the office by Besa (d. after 474), from whom a number of literary letters and catecheses are preserved (and were edited by Kuhn in 1956). Less is known about the other abbots of Shenoute’s monastic federation. A newer edition (The Canons of Apa John the Archimandrite) will shed light on the monastery leadership of one of Besa’s successors. Fueled by Shenoute’s reputation as a saint, the White Monastery became an attraction for visitors and pilgrims soon after his death (Blanke 2019: 143-189; Davis et al. 2020). Coptic Christians commemorate Shenoute together with Pachomius, whose koinonia served as a model for the monastery federation (Goehring 2008). In the early medieval period, Shenoute’s monastery, which never deviated from its anti-Chalcedonian position even under pro-Chalcedonian emperors such as Justinian, became a “place of holiness in Upper Egypt” (Swanson 2016: 195), surpassing the Pachomians in the traditions of the Coptic Orthodox Church (Goehring 2012: 50-67). This is shown by medieval veneration of the abbot in the monasteries of scetis (Davis 2015) as well as his importance to the monastic culture of the Red Sea monasteries (Agaiby 2019: particularly interesting on pp. 13ff an Arabic parallel to a fragmentary passage in Shenoute A26, cf.
Behlmer 1996: 173-176). Apart from new research topics and findings, there has also been revaluation of Shenoute’s spiritual legacy in the Coptic Church and community. Monasteries, churches, and initiatives have been named after him, and Shenoute’s changing portrayal in the synaxarion reflects the evolution of his reception (Swanson 2019). The new complete edition of Shenoute’s works, both analog and digital, will open the floodgates for more “Shenoute Studies” (Crislip 2016), which will have a flow-on effect in other areas of Coptic Studies – lexicography, linguistics, Coptic literature, the history of monasticism, and many more. Efforts to translate Shenoute’s works into Arabic (Moawad 2009 and other publications by same author), and community involvement in the archaeological activities centered around his federation, will continue to bring together all stakeholders in preserving the heritage of this important “Saint for the Ages” (Swanson 2019: 43ff, 56).