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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 above all a magnificent and richly decorated triconch apse, this church boasted all the stylistic refinements of contemporary Roman architecture.²⁰ Although its cubic exterior crowned by a cornice is usually compared to Egyptian temples,²¹ its general design is in fact reminiscent of the fourth-century imperial baths at Alexandria, with their triconch caldarium.²² This was a truly imperial church, both in scale and style, and it would be imitated—although at a much smaller scale—more than once in Upper Egypt.²³

We do not know how many monks lived at Shenoute’s monastery. The Arabic Life claims that his entire congregation was made up of 2,200 monks and 1,800 nuns, but this sounds suspicious with regard to the number of monks, and absurd as an estimate of the number of nuns that could have inhabited the small community located in the village of Atripe.²⁴ What is clear, in any case, is that Shenoute’s church was far too big for the immediate needs of his monastery. This was meant to be a public, not a monastic, church. Shenoute’s frequent and proud reference to the “crowds” and authorities that visited the monastery and listened to his sermons makes this fact all too clear.²⁵ The huge lateral narthex and the multiple entrances of the church (and the galleries above the lateral naves?) can be explained by the need to distribute this very diverse audience in an organized space.²⁶

On feast days, the monastic church would become a public stage. “Crowds” would stream to the monastery, and Shenoute would descend from his desert cave to preach and celebrate the liturgy. This was the moment for Shenoute to seize the limelight and showcase his endless generosity and devotion to the care of the “poor,” as if in a huge banquet hall—and let us remember that triconch-shaped dining halls were a hallmark of wealthy villas in this period:

Every Saturday, many of the poor came to my father to receive communion from his pure hands. … A table was set for the crowd, everybody ate, and after they had slept, the community of the monks would wake them up, saying: “Stand up and go to the house of the Lord to be blessed.” For every Saturday night a vigil was kept to pray and sing, and the whole church was illuminated on that night and the following day. Lamps and candles were lighted, and the whole church shone as the offering was made. And [my father] gave them (i.e., the poor) communion, a table covered with dishes was set for them, they ate, and my father made them whole again.²⁷

That reality could be more prosaic is shown by Shenoute’s own writings, such as a sermon entitled “A brief instruction on Sunday morning, after the Psalter had been read, on a feast day, when the crowd wanted to go home soon.”²⁸ In any case, Shenoute’s imposing church monumentalized his piety and hard work and instantly made him a public figure. Illuminated with candles for the Saturday vigil, it must have been an impressive sight and the envy of any bishop. It is among contemporary bishops, in fact, that the best parallels for these building activities can be found. I am thinking above all of Porphyry of Gaza, who celebrated the completion of his monumental church with a civic banquet in the best tradition of Graeco-Roman euergetism.²⁹

How did Shenoute pay for this church and his other buildings? Besa’s biography has a very simple answer. God himself sent Shenoute a small amphora full of gold for this specific purpose, which the holy man found near his cave in the desert.³⁰ Only a miracle could explain such a miraculous church. Shenoute’s own writings insist on the same idea. He never praises the church as a work of art. For him, rather, such a grandiose building was an “argument in stone”: it spoke of the endless wealth brought by God’s blessing to his faithful servants. For Shenoute’s point when discussing the construction of the church (“not to examine how straight or beautiful it is, but to examine ourselves in it”) was that despite all his enormous expenditures in “wages,” “gold,” “money” and “other things,” the wealth of the monastery “does not diminish.” God’s blessing was working miracles for the monastery’s economy:

Otherwise, how would we have been able to build this great house in this way, and these other buildings that we have built along with it, and also this lavatory?³¹

Hence it is important to distinguish carefully Shenoute’s discourse on building from that of his better-known contemporary Paulinus of Nola. Paulinus had also built, in southern Italy, an imposing basilica with a triconch apse. Like Shenoute, he had “hoped that these material renovations would spur on his own spiritual improvements. He asked rhetorically, ‘How, therefore, can this construction present me with a model by which I can cultivate, build and renew myself inwardly, and make myself a suitable lodging for Christ?’”³² Yet this common appeal to the parallel between material and spiritual edification masks a profound difference. For Paulinus, a wealthy aristocrat, building was above all an aesthetic experience. His discourse takes human labor for granted. Its key concepts are light, color, space, and harmony. For Shenoute, on the other hand, the greatness of his church was an economic feat that had been possible only because the ascetic discipline of his monastery had earned the blessings of God. As Caroline Schroeder has shown, the church was at the same time a symbol of success and a warning for his monks, a symptom of and a model for communal purity. The key concepts of Shenoute’s discourse are size, discipline, work, poverty, and purity.³³

Shenoute’s enthusiasm for building would be curious enough in any monk associated with the Upper Egyptian tradition of Pachomian monasticism. It had been none other than Pachomius, after all, who had deliberately “spoiled” the oratory he had just built at his monastery, in order to avoid pride and the misguided praise of art.³⁴ But it is all the more surprising as Shenoute himself had, as a younger monk alienated from his community, denounced the use of the monastery’s wealth to engage in building projects, instead of spending it on the care of the poor:

Stop, congregation, taking all that is left over to you due to the blessing of God and spending it on buildings and demolitions, the wages of architects and craftsmen, the luxuries and other things for the workers, so that they knead and bring clay and carry bricks to build beautiful and fair houses! Unless you had a surplus of wealth, you would not take care of all these things that are useless in the moment of your need (i.e., the final judgment). Why have you not spent your wealth on your bread and clothing and everything that relates to them for yourself, oh miserable wretch? Stop taking the leisure of God’s blessing and the strength of your youth, your elders, and all your children to give it away on things that are not suitable for you, instead of spending all that is left over to you due to the Lord’s blessing on alms (mntna) for the poor, the strangers, the widows, the orphans, the invalid, and the needy, and on numerous philanthropies!³⁵

The monastic community then led by Ebonh had become, in the mind of young Shenoute, a victim of its own success. It had fallen into lithomania, the unrestrained eagerness to build typically associated with wealthy bishops such as Theophilus of Alexandria and Porphyry of Gaza—whose church was criticized for being far too large for the immediate needs of his small congregation (one wonders what Shenoute’s enemies thought of his church).³⁶

Shenoute’s early monastic career presents some interesting parallels to that of Theodore of Tabennesi, the main character of the Pachomian corpus. Both of them claimed a special, privileged relationship to the monastery’s founder: Theodore was supposed to be Pachomius’s favorite disciple; Shenoute was Pgol’s nephew. Neither of them, however, was named superior after the death of their spiritual fathers. Instead, both of them became alienated from their communities and retired provisionally from them. Both of them also grew exceptionally sensitive to the issue of accumulation of wealth by their monasteries. Theodore, it is said, became distressed when the monasteries started to gather “numerous fields, animals, and boats,” and he even refused to use the monastery’s boat, preferring instead to walk.³⁷ For him, as for young Shenoute, it was not enough for the monks to be individually poor. The monasteries had to be poor, too.

How do we explain then Shenoute’s drastic change of mind? Where did he get the idea that building a huge church was a way to glorify God, and not a misuse of the wealth of the poor? When did God’s “blessings” grow large enough that such a careless liberality was no longer out of place at a monastery?

BREAD FOR THE MULTITUDE

The same emphasis on a miraculous prosperity generated by divine “blessings” and spent endlessly by the monastery can be found in a set of five stories about grain, bread supply, and famine relief reported in Shenoute’s Life. They all display the monastery’s capacity to generate an overwhelming surplus of bread precisely when it was most dearly needed. “Just like in the gospel,”³⁸ God’s “blessing” (smu)—a word used in the sense of both divine aid and miraculous abundance of bread—multiplied the monastery’s loaves of bread in quantities large enough to feed multitudes:

It happened once that there was a great drought, and the inhabitants of the district of Panopolis and those of Ptolemais came in a crowd to my father to be fed by him. My father gave them bread until the loaves ran out, and the brother who was in charge of the bread-store came to my father Apa Shenoute and said: “That was a blessing (i.e., a great amount) of bread, my father (apismu šōpi henniōik)! What will you do [now] for the multitudes who have gathered to us and for the brothers?” In reply, my father said to me and to the one who distributed the loaves: “Go and gather up the remaining loaves together with [all] the little fragments, moisten them, and give them to the crowds to eat.” We then went off in accordance with his word and gathered them up, and we left nothing behind. We went back to him and told him: “We have left nothing behind,” and he said to us: “Pray to God that he will bring about such a blessing (smu) that you can feed them all.” We did not wish to disobey him, but instead went away, and when the time came, we went to open the door of the bread-store, and the abundance (smu) poured forth upon us while we were still outside the door of the bread-store. In this way, the multitudes ate, and when they were full they glorified God and our father.³⁹

Indeed, the abundance of grain was so great that the bakers complained about the amount of ashes they had to carry away from the ovens.⁴⁰ Similarly, when Shenoute brought home a magic grain that he had found at the imperial palace in Constantinople—quite an interesting place to “find” the source of endless wealth—he threw it under the millstone, and “the Lord sent so great an abundance (smu) from the mill-stone that they were quite unable to gather it all up.” Only Shenoute, with his palm branch, was able to stop the mill from producing.⁴¹

These stories present us with a stark contrast between famine and overwhelming abundance. The generation of wealth at the monastery follows an explosive rhythm: just like the grandiose church, extraordinarily completed in “only four months or five in all,” scarcity is miraculously resolved at one stroke.⁴² What makes such abundance legitimate and acceptable—and what produces it in the first place—is that it is used in the right way: in the care of the poor. Material “blessings” are a divine reward for the piety and charitable work of Shenoute’s monastery. As the apostle Paul himself told Shenoute in a vision:

Because you love charity and give alms to anyone that asks you and keep all the commandments in all ways because of the love [of God], behold! The Lord has sent me to you to comfort you because of what you do for the poor and the destitute.⁴³

Paul gave Shenoute a loaf of bread blessed by Jesus himself, which he secretly deposited in one of the bread stores. What happened next follows the same rhythm as in the previous stories. Shenoute’s servants complain that the storeroom is empty and ask permission to open another one. Shenoute insists, but the steward cannot open the door. Then, the climax: at Shenoute’s commandment (“Arise and bring forth the Lord’s abundance (smu), and if it should not be enough, we will open another store-room and draw from that”),

the door then opened immediately, and from inside a great heap of bread poured forth, and there was such a mass of bread that it filled up the doorway. In this way, the multitudes and the brothers were supplied for six months by the abundance (smu) of bread which came forth from the door of the bread-store, and to this very day that bread-store is called the “Store-Room of the Blessing” (paho mpismu).⁴⁴

It is not surprising that the traditional hostility of late antique bishops toward granaries, the symbol of social injustice and selfish speculation by unscrupulous landowners,⁴⁵ is almost entirely absent from Shenoute’s rhetoric against the rich. As we shall see, he was far more concerned about what dishonest landowners did with their wine than about their accumulation of grain or bread. Nor is it surprising that Shenoute’s enemies found the availability of a large surplus of bread at the monastery alarming. Where Shenoute and his biographer saw “multitudes” of the “poor” being fed, his enemies saw rural patronage in action and an out-of-control abbot. In the words of his accusers, he was “gathering men to fight each other on account of the villages” and “giving them bread.”⁴⁶ One is reminded of the accusations usually leveled against the patriarchs of Alexandria and their use of grain to buy loyalty.⁴⁷

The recurring idea that God tended to reward those truly faithful to him with economic miracles was a new development of fifth-century Christianity and should not be taken for granted as inherently part of the Christian tradition. Jesus may have multiplied bread and fish, but fourth-century bishops and monks seldom, if ever, claimed to do so. Unlike Shenoute and his contemporaries, their economic life took place in a far more realistic framework, in which scarcity and economic struggle were facts of life. This can be seen very clearly in another story contained in Shenoute’s Life, very similar and yet so different from one contained in the Pachomian corpus.

During a time of drought and famine, we are told, Shenoute’s monastery was suffering from an unusual scarcity:

We suffered very much. When the people came to us, we thought, “Where will we find bread to feed those who come to us?” We thought hard.⁴⁸

Eventually, Shenoute decided to send his disciple Besa “into that worthless city,” that is, Panopolis, to buy as much wheat as possible with one hundred solidi—and we know in fact from Shenoute’s rules that his monastery regularly bought wheat.⁴⁹ One solidus usually bought ten artabas of wheat in normal conditions, but the landowners of Panopolis disrespectfully told Besa that his hundred solidi would not even fetch a hundred artabas:

Nobody agreed to sell or to give generously. My father sighed against Panopolis and cursed those who desire drought and famine.⁵⁰

But Shenoute did not despair. He knew exactly what to do:

We arose, we went into the church and prayed. When we had finished praying, we turned around and saw wheat rising up, shining brighter than the sun, and we did not know where it had come from. … When we had finished milling, we found one thousand artabae of flour. … Instead of one month’s baking, or two or three, we had six months.⁵¹