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Shenoute of Atripe, ranked second only to Pachomius for his contribution to the development of egyptian monasticism, is all but unknown outside the Coptic tradition. This first english translation of his Life, by his disciple and successor, casts new light on the austere monasticism of the fifth century.
Shenoute the Great (c.347–465) led one of the largest Christian monastic communities in late antique Egypt and was the greatest native writer of Coptic in history. For approximately eight decades, Shenoute led a federation of three monasteries and emerged as a Christian leader. His public sermons attracted crowds of clergy, monks, and lay people; he advised military and government officials; he worked to ensure that his followers would be faithful to orthodox Christian teaching; and he vigorously and violently opposed paganism and the oppressive treatment of the poor by the rich. This volume presents in translation a selection of his sermons and other orations. These works grant us access to the theology, rhetoric, moral teachings, spirituality, and social agenda of a powerful Christian leader during a period of great religious and social change in the later Roman Empire.
Shenoute of Atripe: stern abbot, loquacious preacher, patron of the poor and scourge of pagans in fifth-century Egypt. This book studies his numerous Coptic writings and finds them to be the most important literary source for the study of society, economy and religion in late antique Egypt. The issues and concerns Shenoute grappled with on a daily basis, Ariel Lopez argues, were not local problems, unique to one small corner of the ancient world. Rather, they are crucial to interpreting late antiquity as a historical period—rural patronage, religious intolerance, the Christian care of the poor and the local impact of the late Roman state. His little known writings provide us not only with a rare opportunity to see the life of a holy man as he himself saw it, but also with a privileged window into his world. Lopez brings Shenoute to prominence as witness of and participant in the major transformations of his time.
This book is the first publication of a very early set of Christian monastic rules from Roman Egypt, accompanied by four preliminary chapters discussing their historical and social context and their character as rules. These rules were found quoted in the writings of the great Egyptian monastic leader Shenoute. Designed for a federation of monks and nuns who banded together about 360 CE—forming the so-called "White Monastery Federation"—the rules date back to the fourth and fifth centuries. New historical evidence is presented for the founding of the Federation. Providing almost the earliest evidence for Christian communal (cenobitic) monasticism, the rules depict many intimate aspects of ascetic practice. Details of monastic daily life are mentioned in passing in the rules, and the author uses these details to describe their picture of monastic life under five general topics: the monastery as a physical plant, the human makeup of the community, ascetic observances, the hierarchy of authority, and the daily liturgy. The book includes a clear English translation of the rules accompanied by the original Coptic text, amounting to five hundred and ninety-five entries.
This is the first book-length study of children in one of the birthplaces of early Christian monasticism, Egypt. Although comprised of men and women who had renounced sex and family, the monasteries of late antiquity raised children, educated them, and expected them to carry on their monastic lineage and legacies into the future. Children within monasteries existed in a liminal space, simultaneously vulnerable to the whims and abuses of adults and also cherished as potential future monastic prodigies. Caroline T. Schroeder examines diverse sources - letters, rules, saints' lives, art, and documentary evidence - to probe these paradoxes. In doing so, she demonstrates how early Egyptian monasteries provided an intergenerational continuity of social, cultural, and economic capital while also contesting the traditional family's claims to these forms of social continuity.
Shenoute of Atripe led the White Monastery, a community of several thousand male and female Coptic monks in Upper Egypt, between approximately 395 and 465 C.E. Shenoute's letters, sermons, and treatises—one of the most detailed bodies of writing to survive from any early monastery—provide an unparalleled resource for the study of early Christian monasticism and asceticism. In Monastic Bodies, Caroline Schroeder offers an in-depth examination of the asceticism practiced at the White Monastery using diverse sources, including monastic rules, theological treatises, sermons, and material culture. Schroeder details Shenoute's arduous disciplinary code and philosophical structure, including the belief that individual sin corrupted not only the individual body but the entire "corporate body" of the community. Thus the purity of the community ultimately depended upon the integrity of each individual monk. Shenoute's ascetic discourse focused on purity of the body, but he categorized as impure not only activities such as sex but any disobedience and other more general transgressions. Shenoute emphasized the important practices of discipline, or askesis, in achieving this purity. Contextualizing Shenoute within the wider debates about asceticism, sexuality, and heresy that characterized late antiquity, Schroeder compares his views on bodily discipline, monastic punishments, the resurrection of the body, the incarnation of Christ, and monastic authority with those of figures such as Cyril of Alexandria, Paulinus of Nola, and Pachomius.
The White Monastery in Upper Egypt and its two federated communities are among the largest, most prosperous and longest-lived loci of Coptic Christianity. Founded in the fourth century and best known for its zealous and prolific third abbot, Shenoute of Atripe, these monasteries have survived from their foundation in the golden age of Egyptian Christianity until today. At its peak in the fifth to the eighth centuries, the White Monastery federation was a hive of industry, densely populated and prosperous. It was a vibrant community that engaged with extra-mural communities by means of intellectual, spiritual and economic exchange. It was an important landowner and a powerhouse of the regional economy. It was a spiritual beacon imbued with the presence of some of Christendom's most famous saints, and it was home to a number of ordinary and extraordinary men and women, who lived, worked, prayed and died within its walls. This new study is an attempt to write the biography of the White Monastery federation, to reconstruct its longue duree - through archaeological and textual sources - and to assess its place within the world of Late Antiquity.
In this finely written study of demonology and Christian spirituality in fourth- and fifth-century Egypt, David Brakke examines how the conception of the monk as a holy and virtuous being was shaped by the combative encounter with demons. Drawing on biographies of exceptional monks, collections of monastic sayings and stories, letters from ascetic teachers to their disciples, sermons, and community rules, Brakke crafts a compelling picture of the embattled religious celibate.
Some evangelicals perceive monasticism as a relic from the past, a retreat from the world, or a shirking of the call to the Great Commission. At the same time, contemporary evangelical spirituality desires historical Christian manifestations of the faith. In this accessibly written book Greg Peters, an expert in monastic studies who is a Benedictine oblate and spiritual director, offers a historical survey of monasticism from its origins to current manifestations. Peters recovers the riches of the monastic tradition for contemporary spiritual formation and devotional practice, explaining why the monastic impulse is a valid and necessary manifestation of the Christian faith for today's church.
Four translations of major accounts of the life of the fourth-century Egyptian desert father St. Bishoi, in one volume Saint Bishoi of Scetis (d. ca. 417) enjoys tremendous popularity throughout the Christian east, particularly among the Copts. He lived during a remarkable era in which a litany of larger-than-life monastics lived and interacted with one another. Even then, Bishoi stood out as the founder of one of the four great monasteries of Scetis (Wadi al-Natrun): those of Macarius, John the Little, Bishoi, and the Baramus. Yet in spite of Bishoi’s prominence, the various recensions of his hagio-biography have received sporadic, scattered attention. The Life of Bishoi joins other Lives of eminent monastics of early-Egyptian monasticism: the Lives of Antony, Daniel, John the Little, Macarius, Paphnutius, Shenoute, and Syncletica. These Lives are vital for what they tell us about monastic politeia (way of life), spirituality, and theology, both of the early monastics and of those who later wrote, translated, and revised the Lives. They appeared first in Greek and Coptic, and later generations translated and revised them into Syriac, Arabic and Ge‘ez (Ethiopic). This definitive volume contains the first English translation of the Greek, Syriac, Arabic, and Ethiopic Lives of Bishoi, each translation accompanied by an introduction that focuses on certain aspects of the source text. It also has the first transcription and English translation of an important Greek text. The General Introduction provides rich context about the texts and textual traditions in the various languages, and thoroughly revises our knowledge about the Syriac tradition, the translation of the Syriac text here now consequently providing what is the best translation in any modern language. CONTRIBUTORS Tim Vivian, California State University, Bakersfield Maged S.A. Mikhail, California State University, Fullerton Rowan Allen Greer III (1935–2014), an Episcopal priest and Walter H. Gray Professor of Anglican Studies at Yale Divinity School, was author of Broken Lights and Mended Lives: Theology and Common Life in the Early Church and Anglican Approaches to Scripture: From the Reformation to the Present. Robert Kitchen is a retired minister of the United Church of Canada, living in Regina, Saskatchewan. He read for the D.Phil. (Oxford) in Syriac Language and Literature and has taught Syriac studies in Sweden and Austria. Apostolos N. Athanassakis was Argyropoulos Chair in Hellenic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.