Coptica 15, 2016

78 Carolyn Schneider Nubians. 29 In God Is Blessed Shenoute assures the refugees that God is using the situation to guide them into greater piety. He contrasts such piety with the impiety of rich pagans, and he gives the specific (although unnamed) example of the already deceased Flavius Aelius Gessius, a wealthy, prominent pagan from Panopolis with whom Shenoute had been at enmity for a long time. At various points in their running battle, Shenoute had accused Gessius of oppressing the poor, of denying that Jesus was God, and of pretending to be a Christian while continuing to worship images of pagan deities in his house. It was his house that Shenoute broke into more than once in search of cultic images to display and destroy, thereby exposing Gessius’s hypocrisy. 30 As Shenoute alludes to the death of Gessius, he also seems to point to some catastrophe that has fallen on others who have persisted in pagan worship. He says that the wrath of God came upon them “so that they might be slaughtered and their bones might be broken and they might be burned alive… .” 31 Could this perhaps be a reference to the destruction of a temple with worshipers or people seeking protection inside, not by the flaming sword of the Archangel Michael but by more conventional weapons of war in the hands of invading tribes? Shenoute contrasts the cursed death of the impious with the blessed death of the faithful by inserting a eulogy falsely ascribed to Liberius, Bishop of Rome, on the death of “the man of God, the truly righteous man, Athanasius the archbishop.” 32 Shenoute’s anti-pagan use of Athanasius is reflected in his community’s later portrayal of Athanasius as an awe-struck observer making the sign of the cross at the Archangel Michael’s destruction of a pagan temple in Akhmim, Gessius’s home town. The story from the Arabic Life of Shenoute takes on a further life as it re-appears in an altered form in 29 Emmel, Shenoute’s Literary Corpus , 2:625-626 and 820-824. 30 David Brakke and Andrew Crislip, “The Conflict with Gesios,” in Selected Discourses of Shenoute the Great , 193-199; and Emmel, “Shenoute of Atripe and the Christian Destruction of Temples in Egypt: Rhetoric and Reality,” in From Temple to Church , 161-201. 31 Shenoute, God Is Blessed , in Selected Discourses of Shenoute the Great , ed. Brakke and Crislip, 290. 32 Selected Discourses of Shenoute the Great , 294. Shenoute may have translated this eulogy himself from Greek to Coptic. See Emile Gaston Chassinat, Le Quatrième Livre des entretiens et épîtres de Shenouti , Mémoires publiés par les membres de la mission archéologique français au Caire 23 (Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1911), 199-209 (quotation from pages 199-200); Frederik Wisse, “Pseudo-Liberius, Oratio consolatoria de morte Athanasii,” Le Muséon 103, fasc.1 (1990):43-45; Emmel, Shenoute’s Literary Corpus , 2: 617-618; and David Brakke, “Shenute: On Cleaving to Profitable Things,” Orientalia lovaniensia periodica 20 (1989): 115-141. Wisse suggests that Pope Damasus, who was the Bishop of Rome at the time of Athanasius’s death, had a letter of condolence written and sent out simply under the title of the Bishop of Rome, which Egyptians took to be Liberius because of Liberius’s exceptional reputation in Egypt as a supporter of Athanasius, in spite of the fact that Liberius had died seven years earlier, in 366 (Wisse, “Pseudo-Liberius, Oratio consolatoria de morte Athanasii,” 46-47).