SSCN Voumes 1-10, 1994-2004

St. Shenouda Coptic Newsletter

book on top of the display case, momentarily watch the dust rise and settle, then turn to leave. So little survives about female monks in late antiquity. In Shenoute and the Women of the White Monastery, a revised doctoral dissertation, Rebecca Krawiec wishes to provide "an account of a group of women who lived in a monastic community in Egypt in the fourth and fifth centuries." Her intention is admirable but, as indicated above, given the surviving evidence it is just not possible to give an account unless one hedges it about with qualifiers, and disclaimers, such as "incomplete," "fragmentary," "hypothetical," which Krawiec does not do. (Thus the subtitle of the volume, "Egyptian Monasticism in Late Antiquity," is too broad.) Krawiec's account is partial, in both senses of that word: she is dealing with parts, not wholes, and she is partial to the women she is studying. Shenoute, Krawiec states early in her study, was "a man of extremes" and she speaks of Shenoute's "aggressive tactics," how he "manipulates" the women, and their "subjugation" beneath his authority. Krawiec thus joins a long line of western scholars beginning with Johannes Leipoldt early in the twentieth century who, quite frankly, do not like Shenoute. Leipoldt and others have based their dislike on Shenoute's Christology and (perceived) cruelty; for Krawiec, it is Shenoute's abuse of power and subjugation of women that simultaneously interest and repel her. In chapter one, "Daily Life in the White Monastery under Shenoute," Krawiec accurately sees that for late antique monks the monastery was "a salfivic community that was meant to live human life in a new way, 'like God and his angels who live in heaven.'" But it soon becomes clear that soteriology is important for Krawiec only as it is highjacked by Shenoute for his authoritarian purposes. What interests Krawiec is not salvation but rather gender, power, and authority, and in this volume all spiritual and theological issues must bend the knee to these modern secular and academic concerns. Gender, power, and authority are

indeed important, but in much contemporary academic writing about the early Church that's all there is. Early monks, male and female, become a palimpsest: over the "text" of early monasticism scholars overwrite modern secular and academic concerns; as a result, the original monastic "writing" is largely or entirely effaced and what we are left with is the overwriting. Krawiec intriguingly asserts that "Shenoute defined the proper monastic life as one based not in contemplation but on redemptiv suffering rooted in labor." This is a spiritual/theological theme that certainly deserves exploring, but Krawiec does not explore it. What did Shenoute practice and teach about "contemplation" (a term that I doubt he used), that is, prayer? Given the fragmentary sources, can we even know? I don't believe that Krawiec understands Shenoute, at least apart from his use, and abuse, of power, gender, and authority. In speaking of Shenoute's "rhetoric," she mentions "[t]his metaphor of the monastery as God's holy place." But for Shenoute and other monks of late antiquity the monastery was a holy place; it was not a metaphor. The problem is that one closes Shenoute and the Women of the White Monastery knowing very little more about Shenoute's spiritual and theological beliefs apart from the way those beliefs are refracted through the lens(es) of gender, power, and authority. The singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell has a striking song entitled "Sex Kills." For many modern scholars, gender kills--or at least it impairs. Krawiec believes that women in general had "deviant status" in late antiquity and around this working supposition she frames the two central chapters of her book: chapter five, "'They too are Our Brethren': Gender in the White Monastery," and chapter six, "Gender Role in the Monastic Family: The Intersection of Power and Gender." Krawiec believes that "reading for gender" allows the modern reader to see the complexity of male and female relationships at the White Monastery and in this volume she certainly pushes and prods us to see things differently. Positively put,

St. Shenouda Coptic Newsletter

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