Monastic Bodies: Discipline and Salvation in Shenoute of Atripe (review)

Research on Egyptian Christianity has experienced high growth in recent decades. In this area of research, the study of the works of the abbot Shenoute has enjoyed particular expansion. The literary legacy of this arguably most important of Coptic writers was transmitted almost exclusively in medieval parchment copies of earlier papyrus codices. These books were kept in the library of the monastery named after Shenoute in Upper Egypt and suffered neglect, loss, and finally dispersal into libraries and collections around the world. The seminal work of Stephen Emmel has now reconstructed and virtually reunified Shenoute's literary corpus with its basic structure of nine volumes of Canons and eight volumes of Discourses. Caroline Schroeder's study "Monastic Bodies" makes full use of Emmel's work by drawing on unpublished as well as published materials and assigning each quoted text to its rightful place in the original structure of Shenoute's œuvre.

In four interrelated chapters, Schroeder deals with a central aspect of Shenoute's religious thought, the body, and its manifestations: as the individual body of the monk or nun, the communal body of the congregation, the architectural body of the church constructed under Shenoute's leadership, and finally the resurrected body as central focus of Shenoute's Christology. Her discussion of the "problems and potentials of embodiment" (20) draws heavily on Michel Foucault's work, especially in her conceptualization of "power" and "discourse," which she defines with Foucault as "specifically linguistic expressions of systems of meaning" (10).

After an introduction, Chapter One discusses the use of sexual imagery in two fragmentary works from Shenoute's Canon 1, a collection of works ostensibly written before his rise to the abbotship. Schroeder outlines how Shenoute describes the relationship between God and the monastic community in the terms of the husband-wife imagery employed in the Old Testament to depict the relationship between God and the chosen people. Shenoute's presentation of sin and disobedience in the community as adultery allows him to criticize the current monastic leadership (the second abbot of the monastery) for failing to address these sins properly.

Chapter Two focuses on the communal body of monks and nuns and bases itself mainly on Canons 3, 5, and 9. It argues that for Shenoute, the individual member of this body who transgresses the rules has the power to pollute the entire community and consequently a transgressor needs to be excised from the community. It also argues that the language of pollution is much more widespread in Shenoute than in the Pachomian corpus of rules.

The physical representation of the communal monastic body in architecture is the subject of Chapter Three. The chapter analyzes Canon 7, the first works of which are concerned with the building of the new monastery church in the later part of Shenoute's career. Shenoute casts the architectural body of the church as a symbol of the collective body of the monastery, which in its turn is tied to the individual body of the monk or nun, who is able to pollute and possibly destroy the collective body through a choice to sin. In the same chapter Schroeder also discusses the reception into the monastery of laypeople fleeing from nomadic invasions. These refugees and their worldly concerns are embraced by Shenoute and are not presented as a possible source of pollution. Schroeder, without being quite satisfied with her own interpretation, explains this apparent lack of concern with the outsider status of the refugees.

Chapter Four draws on several sermons from Shenoute's Discourses. Shenoute's pervasive concern with purity and pollution is discussed in the framework of his theology of the resurrection body, which for him requires maintaining the earthly body free from pollution. In this last chapter Schroeder goes beyond her Foucauldian paradigm. While Foucault has been accused of dissociating the regime which shapes the monastic body from the beliefs behind different forms of monasticism, Schroeder fully integrates Shenoute's...