Coptica 15, 2016

74 Carolyn Schneider Emmel suggests that this act might have been inspired by Bishop Theophilus’s destruction of the Serapeum in Alexandria in 392. Then, perhaps emboldened by increasingly harsh imperial legislation against pagan worship, around the year 400 Shenoute and a few accomplices broke into the home of a wealthy pagan from Panopolis, stole his cultic images, and publicly destroyed them. 11 Shenoute reports on this activity in his discourse Let Our Eyes . 12 The editor of the Arabic Life of Shenoute steps cautiously around the fact that Athanasius himself took a different approach toward pagans, aiming at their conversion and seeking to persuade them by force of rhetoric, not fire, to abandon false images and turn to Christ. Thus, in the Life of Shenoute , it is the Archangel Michael and not Athanasius who sets fire to the temple in Akhmim. Athanasius watches with his arms in the form of the cross, which in Athanasius’s own writings is the real cause of the downfall of paganism. For example, Athanasius writes in On the Incarnation that the ones whom the pagans call gods “are routed by the sign of the Cross… .” 13 The Arabic Life of Shenoute takes a theological assertion from Athanasius and turns it into a dramatic action involving the divine authority of the militant Archangel Michael. It is as if the Arabic Life of Shenoute is putting Athanasius’s posthumous stamp of approval on polemical actions taken by Shenoute. This reflects Shenoute’s own appropriation of Athanasius in his writings. Like the Arabic Life of Shenoute , Shenoute himself refers to Athanasius as “our father.” 14 During Shenoute’s lifetime, the library of his monastic federation collected works by Athanasius, 15 and Shenoute appeals to these writings explicitly in at least six of his own writings: I Am Amazed , God Is Blessed , Who Speaks through the Prophet , I Have Been Reading the Holy Gospels , 16 an acephalous work addressing virginity (A17), 17 and Since It U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 238-239 and 252. See also Stephen Emmel, “Shenoute of Atripe and the Christian Destruction of Temples in Egypt: Rhetoric and Reality,” in From Temple to Church: Destruction and Renewal of Local Cultic Topography in Late Antiquity , ed. Johannes Hahn, Stephen Emmel, and Ulrich Gotter, Religions in the Greco-Roman World 163 (Boston: Brill, 2015), 162-164; and David Frankfurter, “Iconoclasm and Christianization in Late Antique Egypt: Christian Treatments of Space and Image,” in From Temple to Church , 142-143. 11 Emmel, “Shenoute of Atripe and the Christian Destruction of Temples in Egypt,” in From Temple to Church , 162 and 166-181. 12 Shenoute, Let Our Eyes , in Selected Discourses of Shenoute the Great , 206-211. 13 Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word , 8.53. 14 Bentley Layton, “Some Observations on Shenoute’s Sources: Who Are Our Fathers,” Journal of Coptic Studies 11 (2009): 48. 15 Stephen Emmel, Shenoute’s Literary Corpus , vol. 2, CSCO 600, Subsidia 112, pages 607-608. 16 In I Have Been Reading the Holy Gospels , Shenoute attributes to Athanasius, “the richest of men in Christ,” a warning to virgins against forsaking their monastic vows for marital vows. See Mark Moussa, “ I Have Been Reading the Holy Gospels , by Shenoute of Atripe (Discourses 8, Work 1): Coptic Text, Translation, and Commentary” (PhD diss., The Catholic