Chapter 4

Laws for Murdering Men’s Souls

Between 1738 and 1741, William Warburton, then Lord Bishop of the city of Gloucester, published a wide-ranging theological work entitled The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated; he continued to revise and expand the text through the fourth edition of 1765. Intended as a vindication of revealed religion in the face of an increasingly prominent and vocal community of deists or “Free-thinkers,” to whom Warburton pointedly dedicated the second edition, The Divine Legation draws on the full breadth of Enlightenment historical and philological scholarship to prove the truth of the Mosaic dispensation. Egypt, not unexpectedly, plays a central role in Warburton’s exposition; what is somewhat surprising, however, is the amount of space the author devotes to an extended discussion of the origins, nature, and development, as he understood them, of the ancient Egyptian writing system. One of the most striking claims that Warburton puts forth in The Divine Legation is that hieroglyphs were the ultimate source of Egyptian idolatry. The use of animal hieroglyphs to designate the various Egyptian gods, he argues, led initially to the worship of the hieroglyphic signs themselves; this “symbolic worship” once established, it was no great leap to the worship of actual animals. It was for this reason, he claims, that “all Hieroglyphic Writing was absolutely forbidden by the Second Commandment.”¹

In this extraordinary argument, Warburton echoes, all unknowingly, the longest and most detailed discussion of Egyptian hieroglyphs to survive in the Coptic language. The text in question is preserved among the writings of the fourth/fifth-century abbot Shenoute of Atripe (ca. 347–465), whose monastic federation was situated on the west bank of the Nile across from the city of Panopolis (ancient Shmin, modern Akhmim) and who is known for his adversarial relationship with certain polytheistic residents of the town he punningly referred to as “Sin City” (ⲡⲁⲛⲟⲙⲟⲥ ⲡⲟⲗⲓⲥ).² The Panopolite nome was the birthplace of several prominent members of the late antique Egyptian intelligentsia, including that master of hieroglyphic speculation Horapollo, and the city of Panopolis itself has long been viewed as one of the last redoubts of a particularly “intellectual” strain of traditional polytheism, where the traditions of classical paideia seem to have flourished in some form well into the fifth century.³

A major theme of Shenoute’s written work is his effort—perhaps more rhetorical than real, as Stephen Emmel has recently shown—to extirpate all vestiges of traditional religion in the region of Panopolis.⁴ This larger agenda underlies the sermon dealing with hieroglyphs, in which Shenoute applies a reductionist and confrontational mode of interpretation to the inscriptions on the walls of a local temple. He identifies the hieroglyphs as foolish and misleading images and denies any possibility that they could be “read” in a Christian light, calling rather for their wholesale replacement with Christian images and scriptural quotations. By emphasizing the many animal hieroglyphs used in the temple inscriptions, Shenoute situates hieroglyphic writing within the broader Judeo-Christian discourse on Egyptian idolatry, which condemns the worship of cult images and the veneration of sacred animals, both key features of traditional Egyptian religious practice. This link between hieroglyphs and idolatry provides Shenoute with a strong theological justification for his ultimate goal of transforming the temple into a Christian church, and his reluctance to try and “read” meaning into the hieroglyphs serves as a clear refutation of the allegorical mode of interpretation promoted by his Neoplatonist contemporaries.

Shenoute in Context

Within the historiography of late antique Egypt, and more particularly that of the relationship between Christianity and traditional Egyptian religion, the figure of Shenoute of Atripe looms larger than life. In fact, he appears to have cultivated that stature during his lifetime; recent scholarship indicates that Shenoute carefully constructed his public persona and curated the extensive corpus of his own writings so as to shape his postmortem legacy as well.⁵ Despite the survival of numerous volumes of his written work, the precise details of Shenoute’s life, and especially his chronology, remain a matter of some debate; the problem is only exacerbated by the lack of external attestations for his life and activities. Traditionally credited with a preternaturally long lifespan of some one hundred and eighteen years, Shenoute is said to have been born in the Panopolite village of Shenalolet in the mid-fourth century, circa 347. His uncle, Pcol, served as the founding head of a monastery located a few kilometers north of the village of Atripe (modern Sohag), across the Nile from Panopolis, and Shenoute entered the monastery as a young man, by the year 372. By around 386, Shenoute had risen to the leadership of the monastic community, a position he enjoyed until his death in the mid-fifth century, likely around 465.⁶

During Shenoute’s time as archimandrite, the monastery consisted of a federation comprising three communities: the main (male) community, referred to today as the Monastery of Father Shenoute (Deir Anba Shinuda) or the White Monastery (Deir el-Abiad), a smaller male community located a short distance away at the site now known as the Red Monastery (Deir el-Ahmar), and a female community housed in the village of Atripe, in and around the repurposed temple of the goddess Repit/Triphis. Estimates of the total size of the White Monastery federation vary—the Arabic Life of Shenoute proposes a total population of twenty-two hundred monks and eighteen hundred nuns, although this has been challenged as an unrealistically high number—but in any case it is clear that through his leadership of the federation, Shenoute occupied a position of considerable local power.⁷ As a “rural patron,” to borrow a term used by Ariel López in his recent study of Shenoute’s social activism, Shenoute maintained close ties to both the patriarch in Alexandria and to the Roman provincial authorities active in the Thebaid, and he was in a position to exert his influence in the immediate environs of the White Monastery, including nearby Atripe and the larger city of Panopolis on the east bank of the Nile.⁸

Early twentieth-century scholarship on Shenoute presented him as the leader of a populist and nationalist Egyptian Christian movement that was said to have grown up in the fourth and fifth centuries in opposition to both the “intellectual paganism” espoused by certain members of the local elite and (later) the Chalcedonian orthodoxy of the Byzantine leadership. To be a Copt, according to this model, meant to be poor, rural, Egyptian speaking, uneducated in the traditions of classical paideia, and staunchly miaphysite in theological orientation. This indigenous Egyptian identity was thought to exist in polar opposition to that of the era’s wealthy, urban, Greek-speaking, classically educated, and pro-Chalcedonian elite.⁹

Both the dichotomy between “pagan elite” and “Christian peasantry” and the existence of any sort of late antique Egyptian “nationalism” have been called into question by more recent scholarship, however, and over the past few decades the focus of attention has shifted to Shenoute’s pastoral leadership, his social activism, and, most relevant to the concerns of the present study, his belligerent attitude toward traditional cult practices and beliefs.¹⁰ Shenoute’s uncompromising stance vis-à-vis traditional Egyptian religion and the fiery rhetoric he leveled at its local practitioners have made him an emblem of monastic antipagan violence, a living caricature of the type of fanaticism described in Libanius of Antioch’s oration Pro templis. His name has been associated with zealotry, religious hatred, and terrorism; a statement he made when defending himself against allegations of misconduct, “there is no crime for those who have Christ,” even serves as the title of a recent book on religious violence in late antiquity.¹¹ As Ariel López has argued, this reputation for extremism—specifically, extremism in support of a Christian cause—is not simply an artifact of scholarship but something that Shenoute himself actively cultivated through his sermons and written works.¹²

But how much faith can we put in Shenoute’s propagandistic representation of the local religious landscape and his own actions there? To take Shenoute at his word would be to see Panopolis as the site of unusually tenacious and long-lived temple cults (notably those of the local patron deity Min/Pan and his consort Repit/Triphis) and the home of committed pagan intellectuals who, in the words of Roger Rémondon, “recruited from among the aristocracy of Panopolis … the leisured classes who could study and learn Greek.” In his influential article on resistance to Christianization in late antique Egypt, Rémondon posited that fifth-century Panopolis was “a pagan center where the temples still drew crowds.”¹³ More recently, Panopolis appears as a case study in the work of David Frankfurter, who uses the writings of Shenoute and his successor, Besa, to argue for the existence of a “resilient and well-supported native religiosity” in the city and its immediate environs. Set against this backdrop of recusant polytheism, Shenoute himself appears in high relief as the defender of the Christian faith, a heroic figure cast self-consciously in the mold of Old Testament prophets like Elijah. He advocated on behalf of Christians who had destroyed a temple in a nearby village, claimed to have burned a temple in the village of Atripe himself, and carried out nocturnal raids to remove “idols” from the home of a prominent local landowner.¹⁴

This picture of an embattled pagan stronghold deep in the Upper Egyptian countryside is not without its detractors, however, and the notion that traditional cults were thriving in the city into the fifth century has received significant criticism in recent years. Alan Cameron, whose classic article on the “wandering poets” from fifth-century Upper Egypt presented those individuals as “unrepentant and militant adherents of the old gods,” has since returned to the subject with a significantly altered viewpoint. Cameron now argues that the poets’ work represents not a pious attachment to the old ways but rather a kind of cultural Hellenism, completely disconnected from polytheistic cult practice and espoused by the classically educated Christian elites of late antique Egypt.¹⁵ The 2002 volume Perspectives on Panopolis likewise deals with the issue of religious and cultural continuity in that region, and several of the contributors caution against reading too much into Shenoute’s antipagan rhetoric. This theme emerges clearly in Peter van Minnen’s chapter on the archive of the fourth-century scholastikos Ammon, where the author notes that “Shenute unmasked a single pagan in Panopolis, Gessios, a big landowner, and the quarrel with him was over social and economic matters.… If it had not been for Gessios, there might not have been another pagan at Panopolis for Shenoute to unmask, and even in this case there was no pagan cult left to fight over.”¹⁶ In a similar vein, Mark Smith’s contribution highlights the fact that Shenoute’s descriptions of the cult practices that he claimed were being maintained by certain Panopolites are often generic, reflecting little actual knowledge of traditional religion (whether Egyptian or Greek) as it had been practiced in Panopolis during the Hellenistic and Roman periods.¹⁷ This issue of Shenoute’s knowledge (or lack thereof) of the particulars of local cultic practice will be addressed further below insofar as it relates to his portrayal of hieroglyphs; for the moment, suffice it to say that the purported vitality of traditional cults in fourth- and fifth-century Panopolis must be treated with some caution, and Shenoute’s claims about those cults (and his own actions in regard to them) must be considered in light of their rhetorical function within his own literary oeuvre.

Just as the conventional understanding of Panopolis and its “pagan resistance” has been challenged of late, so too has Shenoute’s portrayal of his own actions in the region. As the aforementioned remarks of van Minnen suggest, the scope and scale of Shenoute’s antipagan activities may have been somewhat more restricted in scope than the man himself would have us believe. This has been highlighted in recent work on Shenoute’s interactions with his archnemesis, a wealthy local landowner named Gesios, who is probably to be identified with Flavius Aelius Gessius, governor of the Thebaid in the late 370s who subsequently retired to Panopolis. Gesios has long been seen as the leader of local resistance to Christianity, against whom many of Shenoute’s attacks were directed.¹⁸ However, on the basis of a newly published work of Shenoute’s, the “open letter” Let Our Eyes, Stephen Emmel has persuasively argued that Gesios was more likely a “crypto-pagan” who had publicly agreed to accept Christian baptism but privately maintained his adherence to traditional cults.¹⁹ If Shenoute’s ultimate enemy—the figure whose actions in support of traditional cult practice were deemed so heinous that his name was not even to be spoken publicly—can be reduced to the status of a quondam Christian with a questionable art collection, how much more might we doubt the strength of the “pagan resistance” in the fifth-century Panopolite?²⁰ In fact, it has been suggested that Shenoute’s actions, particularly his midnight invasion of Gesios’ home, were likely met with disapproval even by the Christian residents of the city, who valued law and order over militant Christianization: “religious intolerance was a luxury that most Christians could simply not afford, and a lesser priority in comparison to issues like taxation or the maintenance of public order. When pursued beyond the control of the local elites and beyond the realm of temple desecration, it was downright intolerable.”²¹

Panopolis in the Hellenistic and Roman periods was a multicultural city, with a religious landscape shared between exponents of traditional Egyptian religion, cultural Hellenism, and, by the time of Shenoute, a particularly militant and uncompromising brand of monastic Christianity. In the fourth and fifth centuries, all these groups seem to have been looking back and considering what role the past should play in their changing world. Cameron’s wandering poets offer one possible answer: continued reverence for ancient (classical) mythology, divorced from any cultic context and accommodated within an elite Christian culture founded on classical paideia. Depending on how one chooses to characterize his religiosity, Gesios may offer a second answer: either cultural Hellenism in the tradition of the poets, or limited continuity with earlier cultic practices, now carried out under much reduced and distinctly private circumstances. Shenoute, for his part, represents a third way: the total rejection of earlier traditions, whether Hellenic or Egyptian, and an outright refusal to see any value in the cultural output of the pre-Christian past. As we shall see in the following pages, this attitude underlies Shenoute’s discussion of hieroglyphic temple inscriptions and shapes his argument for their erasure.

The “Monastic Invective Against Egyptian Hieroglyphs”

A substantial corpus of Shenoute’s written work has survived to the present day; this material includes nine volumes of Canons, comprising letters from Shenoute to the monastic communities under his leadership, rules for the monks, and sermons or treatises; eight volumes of Discourses, primarily public sermons; and assorted Letters.²² At least some of these texts were apparently collected and edited by Shenoute himself, and many of the surviving manuscripts come from the library of the White Monastery, albeit from a period several centuries after Shenoute’s own lifetime. These manuscripts did not survive unscathed, however; many of the codices containing Shenoute’s works were dismembered in modern times and the resulting fragments scattered throughout library and museum collections worldwide. Thus it is unsurprising that the text that concerns us here is incomplete; as the incipit is lacking, the work is designated Acephalous work A6 (hereafter A6) in Stephen Emmel’s codicological reconstruction of Shenoute’s literary corpus. The text is attested by fragments in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the University of Michigan Papyrology Collection, and the British Library. The Michigan fragments, the first of which contains the description of hieroglyphs, were published in 1981 by Dwight Young under the title “A Monastic Invective Against Egyptian Hieroglyphs,” and this portion of the text is commonly used to identify the work overall as “a sermon preached on an occasion when a pagan temple was converted into a Christian church.”²³ The other extant portions of the text do not treat either hieroglyphs or the conversion of the temple directly, although the possible thematic links between those sections and the discussion of hieroglyphs will be addressed in more detail below.

The text of Michigan MS 158.13a/b picks up in the midst of a description of the process by which a temple, surely dedicated to an Egyptian deity given the subsequent description of its décor, is to be transformed into a Christian church. Shenoute states: “Thus, then, at the place of a shrine of an unclean spirit (ⲡⲙⲁ ⲛ̅ⲧⲟⲡⲟⲥ ⲙ̅ⲡ͞ⲛ͞ⲁ ⲛ̅ⲁⲕⲁⲑⲁⲣⲧⲟⲛ), it shall be a shrine of the Holy Spirit (ⲧⲟⲡⲟⲥ ⲙ̅ⲡ͞ⲛ͞ⲁ ⲉϥⲟⲩⲁⲁⲃ) from this day forth. And at the place of making sacrifice to Satan (ⲡⲙⲁ ⲛⲣ̅ⲑⲩⲥⲓⲁ ⲙ̅ⲡⲥⲁⲧⲁⲛⲁⲥ) and worshipping and fearing him, Christ shall henceforth be served therein, and he will be worshipped and bowed down to and feared. And at the place of blasphemies (ⲡⲙⲁⲛ̅ϩⲉⲛⲙ͞ⲛ͞ⲧⲣⲉϥϫⲓⲟ), it is blessings which will be in it henceforth, together with hymns.”²⁴ Mark Smith has argued that Shenoute’s comments on local polytheistic practices often leave “no trace … of the very distinctive features of Egyptian cult and worship which characterised Akhmim and the surrounding area in earlier periods.” The same would appear to hold true in this instance as well; the deity to which the temple was dedicated is not named, beyond the rather generic references to a “shrine of an unclean spirit” and “the place of making sacrifice to Satan,” nor is any indication given of the temple’s geographic location, although such information might have been provided in a portion of the sermon now lost.²⁵ Moreover, Ariel López has noted the existence of a very close parallel to this passage in an inscription from the martyrium of St. George in Zorava, Syria, dating to the year 515. In that text, the process of temple conversion is described in the following terms: “The abode of demons has become the house of God (θεοῦ γέγονεν οἶκος τὸ τῶν δαιμόνων καταγώγιον). The light of salvation shines where darkness caused concealment (φῶς σωτήριον ἔλαμψεν ὅπου σκότος ἐκάλυπτεν). Where sacrifices to idols occurred, now there are choirs of angels (ὅπου θυσίαι εἰδώλων, νῦν χοροὶ ἀγγέλων). Where God was provoked, now he is propitiated (ὅπου θεὸς παρωργίζετο, νῦν θεὸς ἐξευμενίζεται).”²⁶ The strong similarities between the two texts suggests that there existed something of a stock repertoire of images and phrases used to speak about the phenomenon of temple conversion, regardless of the particular local circumstances. Indeed, recent research has shown that temple conversion was as much a rhetorical construct as an archaeologically attested historical phenomenon, so the notion that Shenoute was recycling standard motifs and imagery in his sermon is not altogether surprising.²⁷

Shenoute does pass from the generic to the particular as the sermon goes on, however. The passage that follows clearly reflects the décor of an Egyptian-style temple, its walls covered with relief carvings and hieroglyphic inscriptions:

And if before today it was laws for murdering men’s souls (ϩⲉⲛⲛⲟⲙⲟⲥ ⲙ̅ⲙ͞ⲛ͞ⲧⲣⲉϥϩⲉⲧ͞ⲃⲯⲩⲭⲏ ⲛ̅ⲣⲱⲙⲉ) which were in it, written in blood and not in black ink alone (ⲉⲩⲥⲏϩ ϩ͞ⲛⲟⲩⲥⲛⲟϥ ⲁⲩⲱ ϩⲛ̅ⲟⲩⲙⲉⲗⲁ ⲁⲛ ⲙⲁⲩⲁⲁϥ), there is nothing else written with respect to them except the likeness (ⲡⲓⲛⲉ) of the snakes and the scorpions, and the dogs and the cats, and the crocodiles and the frogs, the foxes, the other reptiles, the wild beasts and the birds and the domestic animals and the rest; moreover, (there is) also the likeness (ⲡⲓⲛⲉ) of the sun and the moon and all the rest, all of their works (ⲛⲉⲩϩⲃⲏⲩⲉ ⲧⲏⲣⲟⲩ) being laughable and false things (ϩⲉⲛϩⲱⲃ ⲛ̅ⲥⲱⲃⲉ ϩⲓϭⲟⲗ).²⁸

The continuation of the sermon makes it clear that Shenoute envisions nothing less than the wholesale renovation of the temple, including the concealment or erasure of the hieroglyphic signs and their replacement with scriptural quotations: “And in the place of these (things) (ⲉⲡⲙⲁ ⲛ̅ⲛⲁⲓ), it is the soul-saving Scriptures of life (ⲛⲉⲅⲣⲁⲫⲏ ⲛ̅ⲱⲛϩ ⲛ̅ⲣⲉϥⲧⲁⲛϩⲉⲯⲩⲭⲏ) which will henceforth be in it, fulfilling the word of God, his name being written for them, together with his son Jesus Christ and all of his angels and righteous men and saints. And in every place (ⲉ ⲙⲁ ⲛⲓⲙ), the things which are therein teach concerning every good work, especially purity. And how will it [i.e., the temple] not become pure (ⲛ̅ ⲁϣ ⲛ̅ϩⲉ ⲛ͞ϥⲛⲁϣⲱⲡⲉ ⲁⲛ ⲉϥⲟⲩⲁⲁⲃ)?”²⁹ The remainder of the first Michigan fragment is structured around an extended metaphor in which the fate of the temple is compared with that of a man or woman who converts to Christianity. The fragment breaks off midsentence, and a lacuna of some nine pages separates it from the second fragment (Michigan MS 158.13c/d), which deals with the spiritual rewards of charity toward the church. Pious women who make donations to the name of God are favorably contrasted with “defiled women” who adorn themselves instead of ransoming their souls with their possessions.³⁰ The thematic link between this section of the sermon and the first is nowhere made explicit in the text; it is possible that in the second portion of the sermon Shenoute was appealing for funds to carry out the program of conversion he had already described so vividly, but this is purely conjectural.

Laws for Murdering Men’s Souls

In some respects, A6 offers a fairly realistic representation of the types of signs that make up the hieroglyphic writing system. Although it is extremely unlikely that anyone in Shenoute’s audience as he delivered this sermon would have been able to read hieroglyphs, monumental inscriptions of the type he describes would still have been visually familiar, if illegible, to the members of his congregation. However, the apparent realism of Shenoute’s description is sharply undercut by his characterization of the inscriptions as “laws for murdering men’s souls” and his assertion that they are “written in blood and not in black ink alone.” With this short passage, Shenoute establishes the notion that the temple is a locus of spiritual danger, an idea already suggested by earlier references to the “shrine to an unclean spirit” and the “place of making sacrifice to Satan,” and he emphasizes that the inscriptions carved on the walls represent a particular threat to those who view them.

The striking phrase “laws (ϩⲉⲛⲛⲟⲙⲟⲥ) for murdering men’s souls” makes Shenoute’s rhetorical agenda clear from the outset. The terminology is reminiscent of Paul’s reference to the “law (νόμος) of sin and death,” which is said in Romans 8:2 to have been supplanted by the Christian message; such a subtext would be in keeping with Shenoute’s overall assertion that these soulkilling inscriptions are to be supplanted by the “soul-saving Scriptures of life.” Elsewhere in Shenoute’s corpus, the phrase ⲣⲉϥϩⲉⲧ͞ⲃⲯⲩⲭⲏ ⲛ̅ⲣⲱⲙⲉ is used in reference to those who would mislead Christians into neglecting the precepts laid down for them in the Scriptures.³¹ It may be that Shenoute is here highlighting the potential of the hieroglyphic texts to mislead viewers into the error of idolatry, a common late antique concern about the use of religious images in general, as we shall see below. Insofar as Egyptian temples, particularly of the later periods, may be seen as “vessel[s] of cultural memory,” where inscriptions and reliefs were intended to codify and preserve the Egyptians’ corpus of religious texts and ritual knowledge, this fear of Shenoute’s may be seen as having some legitimate foundation, even if his allegation that the texts are “murderous” cannot be taken literally.³²

The claim that the inscriptions on the temple walls are “written in blood” reflects the widespread pharaonic practice of accentuating the carved figures of temple reliefs and inscriptions with paint of various colors, including red. Paint is still visible on some of the inscribed pharaonic spolia used in the construction of the White Monastery church, and there is every reason to assume that Shenoute was familiar with this long-standing decorative convention.³³ By intimating that the inscriptions owed their hue to blood rather than paint, however, Shenoute was likely also making an oblique reference to the allegations of blood sacrifice that played a large role in what has been called a “standard vocabulary of denigration”—stock charges of atrocity bandied about by religious groups attempting to discredit one another.³⁴ Accusations of human sacrifice were a key component of both antipagan and anti-Christian polemic in late antiquity; David Frankfurter has argued that such stories were circulated in an effort to construct an image of the barbaric Other, and perhaps also to justify the persecution of that Other. A classic example from Upper Egypt comes from the sixth- or seventh-century Panegyric on Macarius of Tkôw, in which the worshippers of a local deity called “Kothos” are charged with sacrificing Christian children in order to make harp strings with their guts. Shenoute’s sermon fits neatly within this broader pattern; not only are the temple inscriptions hazardous to the souls of those who view them, he tells his listeners, but in their very coloring they bear witness to the atrocious practices carried out within the temple. All the more reason, then, to erase them by any means necessary.³⁵

In addition to establishing that the temple is a dangerous locale, the opening phrase of the passage on hieroglyphs also echoes the language of 2 Corinthians 3:3, where the Christian community is likened to “a letter (ἐπιστολή) of Christ … written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God (ἐγγεγραμμένη οὐ μέλανι ἀλλὰ πνεύματι θεοῦ ζῶντος / ⲉⲥⲥⲏϩ ⲙ̅ⲙⲉⲗⲁ ⲁⲛ ⲁⲗⲗⲁ ϩⲙ̅ⲡⲉⲡ͞ⲛ͞ⲁ ⲙ̅ⲡⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ ⲉⲧⲟⲛϩ), not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.”³⁶ Shenoute inverts this Pauline imagery in his sermon, emphasizing the total contrast between the temple and the church that will replace it. This motif is developed throughout the first fragment of the sermon, where Shenoute uses the language of substitution and replacement to speak of the temple’s transformation.

Likeness and Representation: Shenoute’s Theory of Images

As Shenoute moves into a more detailed description of the hieroglyphic inscriptions in the temple, he uses the word “likeness” (Coptic ⲉⲓⲛⲉ, commonly used to translate the Greek ὁμοίωμα) to describe the individual signs. This is almost certainly a deliberate echo of the phrasing of the second commandment: “you shall not make for yourself an idol whether in the form of anything (εἴδωλον οὐδὲ παντὸς ὁμοίωμα / ⲟⲩⲉⲓⲇⲱⲗⲟⲛ ⲟⲩⲇⲉ ⲡⲉⲓⲛⲉ ⲛ̅ⲗⲁⲁⲩ) that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth below, or that is in the waters under the earth,” and the proscription of graven images in Exodus 20:4 is a likely subtext for this passage in the sermon.³⁷ Given the emphasis on the depictions of animals, especially reptiles, among the hieroglyphic signs, it is tempting to also see in Shenoute’s phrasing a veiled reference to Ezekiel 8:10, where the décor of a temple is described in similar terms: “there, portrayed on the wall all around, were all kinds of creeping things, and loathsome animals, and all the idols of the house of Israel.” The worshippers in the temple that Ezekiel describes are slated for imminent destruction, so this ominous subtext could have helped to heighten the sense of spiritual danger represented by the temple and to provide a biblical precedent for its cleansing at Shenoute’s hands. However, the Septuagint omits the reference to animals altogether, as does the Bohairic translation of Ezekiel, so Shenoute is unlikely to have been consciously echoing this passage in his sermon.³⁸

The text of Romans 1:23 offers a clearer parallel to support Shenoute’s rhetorical agenda. In that passage, Paul describes the ungodly as those who have “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles (ἐν ὁμοίωματι εἰκόνος φθαρτοῦ ἀνθρώπου καὶ πετεινῶν καὶ τετραπόδων καὶ ἑρπετῶν / ϩⲛ̅ⲟⲩⲉⲓⲛⲉ ⲛ̅ϩⲓⲕⲱⲛ ⲛ̅ⲣⲱⲙⲉ ⲉϣⲁϥⲧⲁⲕⲟ ϩⲓϩⲁⲗⲏⲧ ϩⲓⲧⲃ̅ⲛⲏ ϩⲓϫⲁⲧϥⲉ).”³⁹ This semantic and conceptual link between the hieroglyphic signs and the graven images condemned in both Old and New Testaments provides Shenoute with a clear theological justification for the rejection of the temple’s traditional decorative program.

By highlighting the representational quality of the hieroglyphic inscriptions in the temple, Shenoute was inserting himself into a discussion about the value of religious images that was already hundreds of years old by the fourth century. Greek philosophical arguments against religious imagery, which go back to Plato’s condemnation of the artist on the grounds that “what he makes isn’t the real thing,” tended to revolve around three major points: the impossibility of representing the divine, the material quality of man-made images, and the potential danger of such images to turn mankind away from the pure contemplation of the divine and toward the worship of the image as a divinity in its own right.⁴⁰ Similar concerns figure prominently in the biblical discussions of graven images and artistic representation more generally. As noted above, an absolute prohibition of images is expressed in the Pentateuch, first in Exodus 20:4 and then, with minor variations, in Leviticus 26:1 and Deuteronomy 4:15–18.

The biblical prohibition of images rests on two key points: the idea that the divine is without form and therefore cannot be represented, and the notion that the existence of images inevitably conduces to idolatry. “Since you saw no form when the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire,” says Moses, “take care and watch yourselves closely, so that you do not act corruptingly by making an idol for yourselves, in the form of any figure.”⁴¹ Elsewhere in the Old Testament, prophets and psalmists take this argumentation a step further, highlighting the fact that images are made of insensate, inanimate matter that could just as easily be used for mundane purposes; as Jeremiah says, they are “like scarecrows in a cucumber field, and they cannot speak; they have to be carried, for they cannot walk.”⁴² This discourse reaches a climax in the deuterocanonical text known as the Wisdom of Solomon, whose author condemns “those who give the name ‘gods’ to the works of human hands, gold and silver fashioned with skill, and likenesses of animals, or a useless stone, the work of an ancient hand.”⁴³

The Christian polemicists in whose lineage Shenoute positions himself drew heavily on this traditional Jewish line of argumentation in their efforts to stamp out what they saw as idolatrous ritual practices centered around the veneration of cult images.⁴⁴ Shenoute does the same, quite explicitly, in the opening passages of Let Our Eyes, where he quotes the proscription of idolatry in Deuteronomy 4 as a justification for his clandestine entry into Gesios’ home and the removal of the images he found there:

Not only does the great prophet Moses command, “Be not lawless,” and “Make no graven images for yourselves in the likeness of any image (ⲙ̅ⲡ͞ⲣⲧⲁⲙⲓⲉⲕⲗⲩⲡⲧⲟⲛ ⲛⲏⲧⲛ ⲙ̅ⲡⲓⲛⲉ ⲛ̅ϩⲓⲕⲱⲛ ⲛⲓⲙ), the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies under heaven, the likeness of any reptile that creeps on the earth, the likeness of any fish that moves in the waters under the earth,” and “Lift not your eyes up to heaven and see the sun and the moon and the stars and all the order of heaven and go astray and worship them and serve them,” but he also ordered, “If they set them up, they shall be killed.”

And yet, now someone has made for himself the image of Kronos and the images of the other demons, not having contented himself with images of effeminate men and lewd and licentious women, whose activities are shameful to speak of, just as you saw them all, each according to its type, even the images of priests with shaven heads and altars in their hands, everything that was in the temples back when he whose memory is of good repute, Theodosios the righteous emperor, had not yet given orders that they should be laid waste.⁴⁵

Later in the same text, Shenoute also draws on the biblical trope of the materiality of cult images, speaking disparagingly of “foolish matter shaped into a lot of idols (ϩⲩⲗⲏ ⲉⲧ̅ϣⲟⲩⲉⲓⲧ ⲉⲩⲉⲓⲣⲉ ⲛⲟⲩⲁϣⲏ ⲛ̅ⲉⲓⲇⲱⲗⲟⲛ) for whom many lamps had been lit.”⁴⁶ Although Shenoute is speaking in Let Our Eyes specifically about three-dimensional sculptural representations, we shall see shortly that the same line of scriptural argumentation informs his rhetorical approach in the discussion of hieroglyphs as well.

Although the text of A6 and the excerpts from Let Our Eyes quoted above might give the impression that Shenoute disapproved of all religious imagery, this does not seem to have been the case. The archaeological remains of the great basilica at the White Monastery, which was constructed under Shenoute’s supervision in the mid-fifth century, indicate that the church was extensively decorated in late antiquity with architectural sculpture and both figural and nonfigural wall paintings.⁴⁷ As Caroline Schroeder has noted, Shenoute’s attitude toward the adornment of the church was not uncomplicated; although he praises the construction, he also writes, “it is not the ornamentation of the house and the writings that are inscribed on its edifications and its beams that will reconcile us to Jesus,” and he urges the monks to pay greater attention to their ascetic practices than to the decoration of the church space.⁴⁸ Nevertheless, even such restrained admiration for the ornamentation of the church is a far cry from the blanket condemnation of religious imagery that we read, for example, in Tertullian’s assertion that it was the devil who created artists and that every representation is a potential idol.⁴⁹

Moreover, the triconch funerary chapel discovered at the White Monastery in 2002, identified by archaeologists as the probable tomb of Shenoute himself, is embellished with an extensive program of figural representations, including images of crosses, deer, peacocks, and angels.⁵⁰ Although the décor of the funerary monument is most likely a product of the monastic community and not Shenoute’s own design, it seems unlikely that the abbot’s followers would have chosen to commemorate their leader in such a fashion had he been a militant iconoclast, rejecting all types of religious imagery. This begs the question of how Shenoute distinguished “acceptable” images from “unacceptable” ones; in other words, what theory of images underlies his critique of the inscriptions and relief carvings on the temple walls, or the of statues removed from the house of Gesios?

In Let Our Eyes, Shenoute articulates three principal objections to the images found in Gesios’ home: their subject matter is offensive, representing as they do demons like Kronos and “effeminate men and lewd and licentious women”; they are made of “foolish matter”; and they have the potential to provoke idolatrous actions such as the lighting of lamps and the offering of incense.⁵¹ Similar concerns are expressed by Shenoute in an intriguing passage from the sermon A Beloved Asked Me Years Ago (D4.3) where he speaks of wall paintings and decorated tableware, suggesting that the images featured therein are all representations of the devil: “Rather, there is terror for those who worship his likeness which has been painted on images (ⲡⲉϥⲉⲓⲛⲉ ⲛⲧⲁⲩⲥⲁϩϥ ⲉϩⲉⲛϩⲓⲕⲱⲛ), and on the walls of their inner rooms, and on their eating and drinking utensils, and on many things and in many places. Or are they not all his images (ⲛⲉϥⲉⲓⲛⲉ) and the image of his teeth which instill fear in the foolish? It is on the idols (ⲉⲓⲇⲱⲗⲟⲛ) which we took from their houses!”⁵²

In this passage, as in the excerpt from Let Our Eyes quoted above, Shenoute echoes the views of several prominent theologians, including Clement of Alexandria, Jerome, and John Chrysostom, all of whom weighed in on the dangers of art and its potential to lead the unwary into idolatry. That this concern extended not only to what we might now consider “fine art,” but encompassed the decorative arts as well, is clearly articulated in the Protrepticus of Clement, who writes,

casting off shame and fear, they have their homes decorated with pictures representing the unnatural lust of the daemons. In the lewdness to which their thoughts are given, they adorn their chambers with painted tablets hung on high like votive offerings, regarding licentiousness as piety; and, when lying upon the bed, while still in the midst of their own embraces, they fix their gaze upon that naked Aphrodite, who lies bound in her adultery. Also, to show they approve the representation of effeminacy, they engrave in the hoops of their rings the amorous bird hovering over Leda, using a seal which reflects the licentiousness of Zeus.⁵³

Shenoute’s description of demonic images painted “on the walls of their inner rooms” clearly parallels Clement’s portrayal of bedchambers decorated with “painted tablets” depicting mythological motifs, and both authors condemn such imagery for its depiction of “licentiousness” and “effeminacy.”

The use of classical mythological motifs as decorative elements on household furnishings, textiles, and table silver is well documented for fifth-century Upper Egypt, and Alan Cameron has argued that such images were both common and unremarkable in the wealthy and cultured circles of the educated Christian elites in cities like Panopolis. It is probably just such mythologizing motifs that Shenoute is attacking in A Beloved Asked Me Long Ago, and Stephen Emmel has proposed that the reference to images of “effeminate men and lewd and licentious women” in Let Our Eyes similarly refers to sculptures of deities from classical mythology. That the condemnation extends to sculpture in the Egyptian style as well is evident from the description of “the images of priests with shaven heads and altars in their hands,” clearly a reference to the naophorous priestly statues that became popular in Late-Period Egypt.⁵⁴ For Shenoute, it seems that the act of representation is not objectionable in itself; rather, it is the subject of representation and the uses to which the resulting images are put that constitute the potential danger. Although Shenoute could not read the inscriptions he describes in A6, it is clear from his assertion that they are “laws for murdering men’s souls” that he considered their content to be just as damning as the representations of Kronos and Hecate—“through whom people are deceived at the oracles”—and just as liable to lead viewers into the sin of idolatry.⁵⁵

Although it might seem to modern, Western eyes, accustomed to distinguishing between writing and figural representation, that hieroglyphic signs, relief carvings, and three-dimensional cult images are functionally distinct, Shenoute condemns them all in the same terms, and in fact the boundaries between these different categories of representation may have been perceived fairly fluidly by the ancient Egyptians themselves. It has long been argued that in certain contexts (notably Old Kingdom funerary monuments), two-and three-dimensional representations of the human figure might serve as determinatives in the writing of an individual’s name, blurring the boundary between script and figural representation. Moreover, the selective mutilation of individual hieroglyphs in tomb and temple inscriptions suggests that the signs making up the writing system were seen as having their own potentially dangerous agency, just as statues and relief carvings were thought to have the potential to become animated or actualized through the power of Heka.⁵⁶ Belief in the power of images (of all sorts) persisted well into late antiquity, and although Shenoute could not have known how Egyptians of earlier periods understood the complex interplay of text, relief, and three-dimensional representation, his sense that the hieroglyphs on the temple walls held a power beyond the simple function of rendering speech visible is not out of keeping with earlier Egyptian ways of conceptualizing the hieroglyphic writing system and its relationship to other modes of visual representation.⁵⁷

In suggesting that hieroglyphic signs, as representations, function in a similar manner to relief carvings and sculpture in their potential to incite idolatry, Shenoute anticipates a line of argumentation that would reach its fullest expression more than a thousand years after his death. As described above, in his reconstruction of the development of Egyptian scripts William Warburton argued against the widespread belief that hieroglyphs were first developed to conceal esoteric priestly knowledge from the common man (a view founded on the ancient sources discussed in the previous chapter and notably expounded in the early modern period by Athanasius Kircher). Warburton claimed that the reverse was true, and that hieroglyphic writing shifted over time from being a means of communication to being a means of concealment.⁵⁸ An important corollary to this claim was that the Egyptians, as their writing system became more complex, developed a “symbolic” script (cryptography) in which signs no longer represented things, but depended on “metaphor or metonymy” to express complex and abstract concepts. For Warburton, these “symbolic” hieroglyphs stood at the origin of Egyptian animal worship, and as a consequence of this view, he proposed an exegesis of the second commandment reflecting specifically Egyptian concerns. “All Hieroglyphic Writing was absolutely forbidden by the second Commandment,” he writes, “and with a View worthy the Divine Wisdom, Hieroglyphics being … the great Source of the most abominable Idolatries and Superstitions.”⁵⁹ Shenoute’s objections to hieroglyphs are not spelled out at such great length as Warburton’s extended analysis, but in the end both writers articulate a remarkably similar understanding of the nature of hieroglyphs as images. According to such an understanding, the inscriptions on the temple walls can never be seen as “neutral.” Like the statues removed from the inner rooms of Gesios’ home, they are inherently problematic by virtue of their potential to incite idolatrous practices. Moreover, as we shall see, the fact that many of the hieroglyphs represent animals makes them all the more suspect in Shenoute’s eyes.

Snakes and Scorpions, Dogs and Cats

The core of Shenoute’s description of hieroglyphs in A6 consists of a list of animal signs, ranging from wild beasts and snakes to domesticated cattle, and these animal hieroglyphs play several key roles in Shenoute’s overall rhetorical project. On one level, they reflect fairly accurately the range of signs that make up the hieroglyphic script. One need look no further than Gardiner’s Sign List to confirm that a significant proportion of the hieroglyphic repertoire represents some form of Egyptian fauna; for an example of such animal hieroglyphs utilized in a monumental context, see Figure 8.⁶⁰ Beyond this basic realism, however, by placing such a heavy emphasis on the appearance of the various animal hieroglyphs, Shenoute is also participating in a mode of describing Egyptian monumental inscriptions that was standard among earlier Greek, Roman, and—as the Book of Thoth now demonstrates—Egyptian authors. Emphasizing the animal signs also allows Shenoute to associate the hieroglyphic inscriptions ever more closely with the notions of idolatry and animal worship so strongly condemned in his biblical and patristic proof texts.

A focus on animal hieroglyphs is absolutely characteristic of Greco-Roman speculation on the nature and meaning of the hieroglyphic script, seen in the works of authors from Diodorus to Ammianus and beyond. So, for example, Diodorus writes, “it is found that the forms of their letters take the shape of animals of every kind (Συμβέβηκε τοίνυν τοὺς μὲν τύπους ὑπάρχειν αὐτῶν ὁμοίους ζῴοις παντοδαποῖς).… For instance, they draw the picture of a hawk, a crocodile, a snake, and of the members of the human body.” Some four centuries later, Shenoute’s close contemporary Ammianus Marcellinus similarly describes the Egyptians “engraving many kinds of birds and beasts, even of another world, in order that the memory of their achievements might the more widely reach generations of a subsequent age.” Indeed, for Diodorus and his later colleagues, these animal hieroglyphs came to represent the very essence of the entire Egyptian writing system, a view clearly expressed in Tacitus’ pithy statement that “the Egyptians, in their animal-pictures (per figuras animalium), were the first people to represent thought by symbols.”⁶¹

Figure 8. Fragmentary hieroglyphic inscription, now in the Open-Air Museum at the temple of Karnak. Photo by author.

As discussed in the previous chapter, the most elaborate and influential explication of hieroglyphic writing to be produced for a Greco-Roman audience was penned by another contemporary of Shenoute’s, Horapollo. Animal hieroglyphs feature prominently in Horapollo’s system of allegorical interpretation, which frequently attributes the meaning of individual signs to the physical or behavioral characteristics of the objects represented by those signs. This mode of interpretation via observation of the natural world is echoed throughout the Hieroglyphica, and as many commentators on the text have noted, in this respect Horapollo’s work represents a kind of compendium of late antique natural-historical knowledge. In fact, Horapollo’s claims about the nature of animals often parallel the information found in the highly influential compilation of animal allegories known as Physiologus, itself probably a product of third- or fourth-century Alexandria.⁶² Insofar as the natural world was seen by the Neoplatonists as a reflection of divine archetypes, animal hieroglyphs could be understood as a sort of double encoding of those mysteries—the first in the “book of nature,” and the second in the “language of nature” that hieroglyphs were thought to represent.⁶³

Incorrect as Horapollo and his Greco-Roman colleagues undoubtedly were in their understanding of how the hieroglyphic script actually functioned, the focus on animal hieroglyphs that we see in the classical sources nonetheless rings true in light of the large number of animal signs present in the hieroglyphic repertoire. This way of talking about hieroglyphs also echoes the ways in which Egyptian priestly scribes of the Hellenistic and Roman periods described their own writing system. As discussed in Chapter 3, Egyptian scribes appear to have used the names of birds to identify the different consonant sounds in the Egyptian language, and it has been suggested that this practice may have been maintained even after the widespread adoption of the Coptic script in Egypt. The Book of Thoth is also replete with bird imagery, as in lines 242–44, where hieroglyphs are described as “the Ba-souls of Re” that fly up to Thoth and nest within documents; as Jasnow has noted, this imagery extends to the work of the scribe as well, with netting and trapping serving as an extended metaphor for the act of writing.⁶⁴ Nor are birds the only fauna to be cited by Egyptian scribes in conjunction with hieroglyphs. In the Book of Thoth, hieroglyphs are equated with various types of animals, including dogs and reptiles.⁶⁵ Read in this light, Tacitus’ characterization of hieroglyphs as “animal-pictures” seems less a declaration of ignorance than a genuine reflection of the way Egyptian scribes of his day were speaking about the ancient hieroglyphic script.

Having established that Shenoute’s focus on animal hieroglyphs shares certain common features with the broader contemporary discourse on hieroglyphic writing, it remains to be seen how he exploits that discourse to serve his own particular religious agenda. Unlike Horapollo and his classical forebears, Shenoute does not “read” supplemental (allegorical) meaning into the hieroglyphic signs, nor does he comment on the significance of the individual animals depicted in the hieroglyphs. The categories of living things represented in the list, which include reptiles (snakes, crocodiles), mammals (dogs, cats, foxes, wild beasts, and cattle), and birds, correspond broadly to the categorization of forbidden images in Deuteronomy 4:17–18, which prohibits “the likeness of any animal that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the air, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth.”⁶⁶ As we have already seen, the text of Romans 1:23 is a likely model as well, condemning as it does the worship of “likenesses resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.” What seems to be most significant for Shenoute’s understanding of the animal hieroglyphs is the close connection, outlined in these biblical texts, between animal imagery and animal worship—a form of devotion that many late antique commentators characterized as a particularly Egyptian (and particularly troubling) form of idolatry.⁶⁷

The Greek and Roman authors who discussed hieroglyphs with such great interest were no less fascinated by Egyptian animal cults, but their attitudes toward the latter were typically less than admiring. Roman visitors to Tebtunis may have enjoyed offering the customary “tidbits for Petesouchos and the crocodiles,” as a letter from 112 B.C.E. attests, but they could nonetheless see the humor in Juvenal’s vicious Satire 15, in which the poet famously asks his audience, “is there anyone who doesn’t know the kind of monsters crazy Egypt worships?”⁶⁸ Distaste for this quintessential aspect of Late-Period Egyptian religious practice was shared across religious and cultural divides, and it is even more marked within the Judeo-Christian tradition than in the context of Greek and Roman literature. A fine example of this attitude is found in De vita contemplativa, where Philo writes scathingly of the Egyptian cults that it is “hardly decent even to mention them. The Egyptians have promoted to divine honours irrational animals, not only of the tame sort but also beasts of the utmost savagery, drawn from each of the kinds found below the moon.”⁶⁹ The late antique church fathers, for their part, built on the Hellenistic Jewish discourse on idolatry and used Egyptian animal worship as a key example of the dangers of idolatry and, conversely, the power of Christianity to put an end to idolatrous practices. Thus Cyril of Jerusalem writes that it is “the cross that has given the Egyptians knowledge of God instead of (the worship of) cats, dogs, and the manifold error.”⁷⁰ It is precisely this type of project—replacing the likenesses of the cats and dogs with the sign of the cross, and the darkness of Egyptian idolatry with the new light of Christian teaching—that Shenoute advocates in his sermon dealing with hieroglyphs.

Laughing at Lies

Having enumerated the many animal and cosmological signs present in the hieroglyphic repertoire, Shenoute concludes with a disparaging circumstantial clause, “all of their works being laughable and false” (ⲉϩⲉⲛϩⲱⲃ ⲛ̅ⲥⲱⲃⲉ ⲛⲉ ⲛⲉⲩϩⲃⲏⲩⲉ ⲧⲏⲣⲟⲩ ϩⲓϭⲟⲗ). This is less of a throwaway comment than it might at first appear, for ridicule was a powerful tool of late antique rhetorical practice. As Susanna Elm has shown, derision could be used for political ends. It was also a valuable tool of religious polemicists of all varieties; in an era when religious leaders claimed exclusive access to universal truths, “truth emerged in trials where the enemy was publicly battled to the ground through derisive laughter, exposed to all as the twitching, stumbling object of mockery.”⁷¹ Far from idle laughter, by evoking derision in his sermon, Shenoute is seeking to expose the inherent weakness of the images he had previously identified as dangerous and threatening.

The repeated use of the noun ϩⲱⲃ (plural ϩⲃⲏⲩⲉ) in this context is no idle choice, echoing as it does the claim of Psalm 115:4, “The idols of the nations are silver and gold, the work of human hands” (τὰ εἴδωλα τῶν ἐθνῶν, ἀργύριον καὶ χρυσίον, ἔργα χειρῶν ἀνθρώπων / ⲛⲉⲓⲇⲱⲗⲟⲛ ⲛ̅ⲛ̅ϩⲉⲑⲛⲟⲥ ϩⲉⲛ ϩⲁⲧ ⲛⲉ ϩⲓⲛⲟⲩⲃ ϩⲉⲛϩⲃⲏⲩⲉ ⲛ̅ⲉⲛϭⲓϫ ⲛ̅ⲣⲱⲙⲉ).⁷² That text, together with Jeremiah 10:1–15 and Isaiah 44:9–20, was frequently cited by Christian polemicists in their refutation of polytheistic ritual practices directed toward cult images; in these biblical passages, the material quality of such cult images is derided, as is the fact that they have been produced by human artisans.⁷³ So, for example, Clement of Alexandria begins his extended criticism of cult images, and particularly representations of the gods of classical mythology, by urging the reader to inspect statues and thereby “find how truly silly is the custom in which you have been reared, of worshipping the senseless works of men’s hands (ἔργα χειρῶν ἀνθρώπων ἀναίσθητα).”⁷⁴ Similarly, Cyril of Alexandria speaks out condemning the worship of hybrid deities and suggesting that the latter are so ludicrous as to not be worth even discussing: “In the first place, they (i.e., pagans) attribute life to a crowd of deities who are unknown even to their worshipers, and for some of whom they do not reserve even this common form of humanity; combining it with part of a pig or dog, they present us with what amounts to an adulterous nature, and break apart the fairest image of the things upon earth with their spurious modifications of its features. But why should I extend my remarks about things which are so laughable?”⁷⁵ By characterizing the “works” in the temple as “laughable” (ϩⲱⲃ ⲛ̅ⲥⲱⲃⲉ) and “false” (ϭⲟⲗ), Shenoute further echoes these scriptural and patristic precedents, particularly the derisive tone of Jeremiah’s claim that “They (i.e., idols) are vain works, full of mockery (ϩⲁⲛϩⲃⲏⲟⲩⲓ ⲛⲉⲫⲗⲏⲟⲩ ⲛⲉ ⲉⲩⲙⲉϩ ⲛⲥⲱⲃⲓ); they shall perish on the day of their visitation.”⁷⁶ If they can be seen as works of human hands, worthy of ridicule, then the threat represented by the inscriptions formerly characterized as “laws for murdering men’s souls” can be effectively diminished.

The Christian mockery of cult images (and cult practices and temple personnel) at times moved beyond the realm of rhetoric and into that of action. As Béatrice Caseau has observed, the paradigm for such activity was established by Eusebius in his De vita Constantini, where the bronze cult statues publicly exhibited by the emperor are characterized as “toys for the laughter and amusement of the spectators,” the display of which was undertaken in an effort to confute “the superstitious error of the heathen in all their ways.” Caseau notes that although this may not have been the emperor’s true (or only) motive, “Eusebius would not have deliberately written something absurd. It must therefore be the case that the act of subjecting the pagan statues to derision could have seemed plausible to his Christian readers.”⁷⁷

Inspired, no doubt, by the Constantinian model, later accounts of confrontations between Christians and polytheists often highlighted the aspect of ritual humiliation that the pagans and their cult images faced. This can be seen, for example, in Sozomen’s report of the looting and public exposure of cult items from an abandoned Mithraeum in the vicinity of Alexandria. The historian writes, “while George [the archbishop of Alexandria] was clearing the ground, in order to erect a house of prayer, an adytum was discovered. In it were found idols and certain instruments of initiation or perfection which seemed ludicrous and strange to the beholders. The Christians caused them to be publicly exhibited, and made a procession in order to nettle the pagans.” In the parallel account of Socrates, the “abominations” are said to have been carried “throughout the city, in a kind of triumphal procession, for the inspection of the people.”⁷⁸ Shenoute’s own ambitions may have been more restricted in scope and scale than those of the archbishop, but his rhetoric suggests that he was well aware of the possibilities afforded by public shaming. After the clandestine raid on Gesios’ home recounted in Let Our Eyes, Shenoute reports that through the grace of God he and his brethren have “exposed them (the idols) openly so as for everyone to recognize his (Gesios’) contempt and his shame, for them to recognize that he is a liar for having said, ‘There are no idols in my house.’”⁷⁹ If Emmel is correct in proposing that Shenoute’s main objective in this affair was to unmask Gesios as a “crypto-pagan,” then the very public nature of the idols’ exposure would have been of critical importance.

No such mocking parade of cult images is indicated in the surviving text of A6 (and indeed, as we shall see below, the temple in question had probably long since been stripped of its cultic accoutrements before Shenoute ever took an interest in it). However, the language of derision that Shenoute employs in the sermon clearly resonates with the contemporary discourse on the public humiliation of idolaters and the objects of their devotion. As David Frankfurter has argued, rhetoric itself could be a potent weapon used to neutralize a potentially threatening idol, and denunciations of idols as mere images could function as “speech acts” whereby those same idols are stripped of their power: “the words themselves transform the objects.”⁸⁰ Reading Shenoute’s remarks in A6 as just this sort of performative speech, we can see the abbot actively working to strip the potentially dangerous hieroglyphs of their power to lead viewers astray into the sin of idolatry. By his claim that the signs on the walls are “ridiculous and false,” Shenoute has the power to actually make it so, thereby defusing the sense of threat and danger he had built up so carefully in the earlier part of the sermon.

Cleansing the Temple

Having described the temple’s hieroglyphic inscriptions in mocking detail, Shenoute continues to lay out his vision for the conversion of the space: “in the place of these (things),” he says, “it is the soul-saving Scriptures of life which will henceforth be in it.” The use of the phrase “in the place of” (ⲉⲡⲙⲁ ⲛ̅) at this juncture signals the continuation of the series of thought couplets that opens the first fragment of the sermon. In this carefully balanced composition, for each attribute of the temple, Shenoute provides a corresponding Christian replacement: the Holy Spirit for the unclean one, Christ for Satan, blessings and hymns for blasphemies, and the soul-saving Scriptures of life for the soul-murdering hieroglyphic inscriptions. Shenoute notes further that this wholesale transformation of the temple will fulfill the word of God, with the Scriptures and the names of Christ and the angels and saints “teaching about every good thing, especially purity.”

Purity is a critical concept in Shenoute’s works, encompassing not only the bodily practices of askesis but also obedience to the monastic rule and to the head of the monastery; its converse, impurity, could arise in the context of numerous different sins, including sexual transgressions, disobedience, theological heterodoxy, and idolatry.⁸¹ The connection between impurity and idolatry has deep biblical roots, expressed for example in Galatians 5:19–21, where the “works of the flesh” are identified as “fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these.” That Shenoute himself associated the two concepts is indicated in the opening lines of Let Our Eyes, where he writes, “Let our eyes—in accordance with the Scriptures—look at what is right, and let our eyelids gaze at just things, and we will recognize how great is the impurity of the soul of every pestilential person who is inimical toward the faith of the universal Church.”⁸² This injunction is immediately followed by the quotation from Deuteronomy 4:16–19 discussed above, allowing us to identify the “pestilential person(s)” inimical to the church with the creators and worshippers of graven images, notably Shenoute’s chief antagonist in the text, Gesios. If idolatry and impurity go hand in hand, then by cleansing the temple of the graven images conducive to idolatry, Shenoute sets out the necessary preconditions for the purification of that space. He closes this portion of the sermon with a rhetorical question: “how will it (i.e., the temple) not become pure?”; and indeed, his rhetoric leaves little room for an alternative outcome.⁸³

As noted above, it is widely believed that Shenoute was speaking in A6 about a real temple, likely in the vicinity of Panopolis, that he intended to transform into a church. This raises the question of whether or not his remarks can be correlated with any documented archaeological site in the area. There is considerable debate, as we have seen, concerning the scope and precise nature of Shenoute’s antipagan activities in Atripe and its environs, and this controversy extends to the question of precisely which cult place(s) may have been the focus of those activities. A principal locus of cultic activity in Atripe itself was the Greco-Roman temple of the goddess Repit/Triphis; Petrie worked briefly at the site in 1907 and concluded on the basis of his findings that the temple had been repurposed as a church. He went on to observe that “the figures of gods in relief on the inside were chopped away, and the whole whitewashed. Then it was attacked for stone; and as some inscribed stones, apparently from here, are in the Deir Amba Shenudeh, it is probable that this temple was quarried for this monastery.”⁸⁴ Subsequent discussions of the site have tended to uphold the connection between the fire damage observed in the temple of Triphis with Shenoute’s claim to have “burned the pagan temple in Atripe,” and David Klotz’s recent epigraphic survey of the inscribed spolia from the White Monastery church indicates that a group of roofing slabs used in the construction of the church came from a temple of Repit/Triphis, very likely the one in Atripe.⁸⁵ Whether or not Shenoute may be said to have “destroyed” the temple is far less certain, however. It has been argued that the “burning” of the temple should be seen as an act of purification rather than destruction and that it represents the “first step toward the transformation of the temple into a site that could be used by fifth-century Christians.”⁸⁶ Moreover, as Klotz acknowledges in his study of the spolia found at the White Monastery, “the destruction may have been largely symbolic.… The Atripe blocks derive almost exclusively from the ceiling of the Repyt temple, and the builders probably removed them specifically for reuse in the White Monastery staircase.”⁸⁷

Excavations at the temple of Repit/Triphis in Atripe are ongoing, but the findings published to date have the potential to shed some light on the various phases of the site’s reuse during the time of Shenoute. Although Petrie claimed rather broadly that the temple was turned into a church, recent discoveries—notably communal dining facilities located on the east side of the temple—suggest more specifically that the temple precinct came to house a monastic community in late antiquity. Further modifications to the site include a dyeing workshop installed in the naos and a triconch church constructed in the forecourt.⁸⁸ It is thought that this monastery should be identified with the women’s community that formed the third constituent part of the White Monastery federation According to el-Sayed’s reconstruction of the site’s chronology, the women’s monastery, which already existed in the time of Shenoute’s predecessor Pcol, was originally situated outside the temple temenos. The expansion of the community led Shenoute to appropriate space within the precinct, where there is evidence for continuous use and redevelopment from the early fifth century into at least the seventh.⁸⁹

If this interpretation of the temple’s later history is accurate, it is extremely tempting to associate Shenoute’s appropriation of the Repit/Triphis temple precinct with the program of purification and reuse outlined in the text of A6. Such an association has been proposed by Ariel López, who suggests that the reuse of the temple “would be an important step in Shenoute’s attempt to carve out a sphere of religious and economic influence around his monastery. Indeed, the temple’s conversion could have amounted to nothing less than making the town of Atripe his own.”⁹⁰ It is worth noting that the later modifications to the temple include the selective mutilation of wall reliefs, targeting in particular figures of the king and of anthropomorphic deities. There are also indications that subsequent to this damage, walls throughout the temple were plastered over and then whitewashed, and traces of Coptic dipinti are found in some areas.⁹¹ Such actions would be wholly consistent with Shenoute’s expressed desire to replace the temple’s original epigraphic program with Christian imagery and texts. It is to be hoped that continued work at the Triphis precinct will further elucidate the site’s complex development in the late antique period; until additional evidence is brought to light, any connection between that site and the unnamed temple of A6 must remain speculative.

Conclusion

In the text of A6, Shenoute offers a mode of interpreting Egyptian hieroglyphs starkly at odds with that of his Neoplatonist contemporaries, who advocated an allegorical mode of “reading” the ancient script. Ultimately, I would suggest that much of the rhetorical power of Shenoute’s remarks actually comes from his refusal to engage with the hieroglyphs as readable text. Having provided the inscriptions with a pithy caption in the phrase “laws for murdering men’s souls,” he makes no further attempt to ascribe meaning to them, referring to them not as words or texts but rather as “likenesses,” which stand in sharp contrast to the Christian “Scriptures” that will take their place. Although the Neoplatonists similarly emphasized the figural quality of the individual signs, Shenoute effectively turns their interpretive strategy on its head. Whereas Plotinus and his followers believed that the hieroglyphs were symbolic expressions of philosophical truths, which could be interpreted allegorically, by characterizing the signs as “likenesses,” Shenoute essentially denies them their proper linguistic function and any possibility of deeper meaning. As likenesses, the hieroglyphs are semantically linked with the graven images condemned in both Old and New Testaments; they are “works of human hands” which, in the words of the psalmist, “have mouths, but do not speak.”⁹² This negation of meaning (and thereby, of power to harm the Christian viewer), is drawn out further when Shenoute dismisses the images he has just described as “laughable and false” and thus subject to erasure and replacement with Christian texts.

By focusing attention on the fact that the hieroglyphs are graven images, especially images of animals, Shenoute is able to draw on an extensive Judeo-Christian discourse of Egyptian idolatry in order to drive his point home. In the Hebrew Bible, Egypt appears as the quintessential land of idolatry, a view echoed both by Hellenistic Jewish authors such as Philo and also by the early church fathers. For Shenoute, the hieroglyphic inscriptions on the temple walls are of a piece with the cult images he removed from the home of Gesios, described in similar terms and condemned by the same biblical proof texts. In the end, A6 offers not so much a mode of reading hieroglyphs as an unequivocally negative commentary on the value of pharaonic Egyptian culture. Like the statues he describes in Let Our Eyes, the hieroglyphic inscriptions in the unnamed temple are not—cannot ever be—ideologically neutral remnants of a bygone era. Nor are they to be read or even reinterpreted in a Christian context, as we will see Christian authors doing in the next chapter. In Shenoute’s uncompromising worldview, the temple and the history it enshrines have no place or value in the present, except perhaps as the dark pole marking the starting point of Egypt’s journey into the spiritual light of Christianity.⁹³

Shenoute’s rhetoric in A6 is so striking that it would be easy to overstate the importance of this text and to take it as representing a kind of “normative” Egyptian Christian view of the hieroglyphic script. Indeed, Shenoute fits neatly into the mold of John Ray’s “nervous monk,” anxiously covering up hieroglyphic inscriptions lest they steal away his soul.⁹⁴ However, it is important to stress that the text of A6 is, to the best of my knowledge, unique in the corpus of surviving Coptic literature; if other Coptic authors shared Shenoute’s stern views on hieroglyphs, their comments on the subject have not come down to us. In the material remains from late antique Egypt, it may be possible to see some echoes of Shenoute’s position—as, for example, in the erasure of the hieroglyphic inscription on the front face of the Ptolemaic altar that was reused in the church that was constructed inside the temple of Isis at Philae. Elsewhere, however, the record is more equivocal; at the temple of Dendera, for example, where the systematic mutilation of relief images has been widely documented and is typically attributed to Christian agency, the hieroglyphic inscriptions accompanying those reliefs have not suffered similar iconoclastic damage. At other sites, Christians dipinti peacefully share wall space with hieroglyphic inscriptions, and, as we shall see in the following chapter, Christian authors ultimately ventured to offer their own new readings of these already-ancient texts.⁹⁵