Joanna Wegner the Bawit Monastery of Apa Apollo in the Hermopolite Nome and Its Relations with the ’World Outside’
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Joanna Wegner The Bawit monastery of Apa Apollo in the Hermopolite nome and its relations with the ’world outside’ The Journal of Juristic Papyrology 46, 147-274 2016 The Journal of Juristic Papyrology vol. xlvi (2016), pp. 147–274 Joanna Wegner THE BAWIT MONASTERY OF APA APOLLO IN THE HERMOPOLITE NOME AND ITS RELATIONS WITH THE ‘WORLD OUTSIDE’* he renunciation of worldly cares is a pivotal theme in the literary Tnarratives depicting the Egyptian monastic movement in Late Antiq- uity. Monastic literature served many purposes, among which the preserva- tion of tradition, construing and legitimising identities, and, last but not least, edification, were the most prominent. Rooted as they were in spiri- tuality and imagination, these texts rarely ventured into the sphere of the daily lives of their heroes, and if they did, it was not to provide exhaustive and realistic accounts thereof. Interactions with the ‘outside world’, how- ever, were an inevitable element of the monastic existence, especially since monastic communities began to amass wealth and became an element of * The present text is a revised version of the fourth chapter of my doctoral dissertation Monastic Communities in Context: Social and Economic Interrelations of Monastic Institutions in Middle Egypt (6th–8th century) prepared under the supervision of Professor Tomasz Derda in the Department of Papyrology, Institute of Archaeology, University of Warsaw (manu- script submitted in January 2017). I am greatly indebted to Ewa Wipszycka, Tomasz Derda, and Todd M. Hickey for their remarks on the manuscript. Greek and Coptic sources are cited after their respective editions. All translations of Greek texts are mine, unless indicated otherwise; all translations from Coptic are given after the texts’ editions and left in the original languages of the editions, unless indicated otherwise. 148 JOANNA WEGNER the economic and social networks of the Egyptian chora – a fact noticed and appreciated by James E. Goehring in his essay on the social and economic 1 aspects of early monasticism in Egypt. A monastic community was, first and foremost, a religious institution centred on a specific form of devotion and service to God. Through processes partially traceable in our sources, the communities established their presence in the Egyptian landscape not only in the spiritual, but also in the practical domain. These practical work- ings were connected mainly with the acquisition and use of wordly posse- sions and the ensuing fiscal and managerial responsibilities. It is only through the insight into the everyday functioning of monastic communi- ties gained from documentary papyri and ostraca that the scale and impor- tance of this engagement can be fully appreciated. Thanks to documents, scholars are able to explore a vital aspect of Late Antique monasticism which would largely escape them had they been confined to the literary record (this does not mean that one group of the sources contradicts the other, or that the documents render null and void the ideal expounded in the literary narratives; the question is one of focus and perspective, not of the value of the two groups of sources). Taxpaying and various activities related to land acquisition and manage- ment, as well as circulation of goods within the communities and between the communities and ‘the world’ are predominant themes in documentary 2 evidence from monastic centres. All these activities were impracticable 1 J. E. Goehring, ‘The world engaged: the social and economic world of early Egyptian monasticism’, [in:] idem, Ascetics, Society, and the Desert. Studies in Early Egyptian Monasti- cism, Harrisburg 1999, pp. 39–52, esp. p. 41. Goehring builds his argument mainly on literary sources (the Pachomian and Shenoutean writings, the Apophthegms) but adduces also the testimony of early documentary texts related to monastic ownership of property (P. Lips. 28; P. O x y. XLIV 3203). He emphasises the role of the oikonomoi of the Pachomian koinonia in property managment and deployment of monastic workforce (p. 48). Goehring presents the social and economic position of the monasteries in terms of growing domi- nation over local peasant populations which caused the monasteries to play a role analo- gous to that of the great estates (p. 49); this last statement is an exaggeration which does not find confirmation in papyrological sources. 2 The largest collections of documentary material from monastic Egypt include the dossier of the monastery of Apa Apollo at Bawit (which is my subject here), the groups of seventh–eighth-century texts from the monasteries of Apa Thomas in Wadi Sarga (P. Sarga) THE BAWIT MONASTERY OF APA APOLLO 149 without frequent and close contacts with lay society, represented by the offi- cials of the State and the local village communities, tenants, workers, and business partners. The monasteries had to take their lay counterparties into account if they were to operate efficiently in the complex social and eco- nomic networks of the Egyptian countryside. The need to respond to the demands entailed in occupying a position among the economic units in the chora acted as a stimulant in the development of organisational structures in monasteries. If monastic spiritual profile was construed in sharp opposition to ‘worldly’ attitudes and concerns (as suggested by our literary sources), monastic institutions were a response to the necessity of collaboration with the ‘outside world’ on many different levels. Understanding the complexities of the institutional history of Late Antique Egyptian monasticism is impos- sible without considering how the communities and their members inter- acted with the surrounding world. From this point of view, the documentary dossier of the monastery of Apa Apollo in Bawit (Hermopolites) presents us with a good opportunity to observe and analyse the interactions with the various strata of lay soci- ety and the role these interactions played in the monastery’s functioning. and of Apa Apollo in Deir el-Bala’izah (P. Bal., vol. II), and the documents from the region of Western Thebes which can be associated with several communities and anchoritic settlements (see E. Wipszycka, Moines et communautés monastiques en Égypte (ive–viiie siècle) [= Journal of Juristic Papyrology Supplement 11], Warsaw 2009, pp. 91–99). Another important group of texts is the documentary dossier of the monastic settlement of Deir el-Naqlun (Fayum), dated to the sixth–seventh centuries. This collection, however, is different, as it consists mainly of private letters of the community members and focuses on what we would call the monks’ individual business affairs, see P. Naqlun I and II; T. Derda & J. Wegner, ‘New documentary papyri from the Polish excavations at Deir el-Naqlun (P. Naqlun 35–38)’, Journal of Juristic Papyrology 44 (2014), pp. 117–131; T. Derda & J. Wegner, ‘ατρε το γου εκονου. Functionaries of the Naqlun monastery in the first two cen- turies of its existence’, [in:] A. Łajtar, A. Obłuski & I. Zych (eds.), Aegyptus et Nubia Chris- tiana. The Włodzimierz Godlewski Jubilee Volume on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, War- saw 2016, pp. 73–87; T. Derda & J. Wegner, ‘Letter from Tebetny to the monks of Naqlun concerning fieldwork (P. Naqlun 39)’, [in:] Mélanges Gascou [= Travaux et mémoires 20], Paris 2016, pp. 133–150. An insight into the landowning-based business affairs of monasteries can be gained also through the sixth-century documents from the archive of Dioskoros of Aphrodite (the Aphrodite cadastre [SB XX 14669], and several leases and rent receipts which indicate the prominence of local and external monastic communities in the Aphro- ditan landowning structure). 150 JOANNA WEGNER The documents give us an insight into the contexts of these interactions and the strategies applied by the monastic administration in their deal- ings with officials and villagers. The necessity to run a fully operational enterprise dependent on a number of formal and informal links with the ‘outside world’ led to the development of channels of communication and unique structures whose traces are preserved in the documents produced in and for the monastery. Another advantage of the Bawit texts consists in the fact that they illustrate the relations with laypeople on two different levels: that of the monastery and that of individual monks. Private business contacts maintained by the monks belonged to a sphere independent from the communal dealings of the monastic institution. These individual relations recorded in the documents are our most telling testimony to the eco nomic independence of the monks. Their study is essential to our understanding of one of the key features of the Bawit community: the ability of the monks to keep and use their personal property. Among the dossiers of monastic Egypt, the Bawit one is probably the richest and most comprehensive, both in quantitative and qualitative terms, providing scholars with hundreds of texts representing an excep- tionally wide range of documentary types (for a presentation of the sources, see below, pp. 155–167). These features determine the perspective adopted in the present paper, which is based mostly on papyrological material. The contribution of other types of sources available for the Bawit monastery – literary accounts, archaeological data, and epigraphic material – to our understanding of the problems I intend to explore is less significant. I have already mentioned why monastic literature, with its ideological and reli- gious frame of reference, is of little help when it comes to reconstructing 3 the details of everyday life. Archaeological remains discovered at Bawit in 3 Additionally, as Ewa Wipszycka points out in her remarks on the Bawit monastery in Moines et communautés (cit. n. 2), pp. 149–150, the chronological gap between HM 8, reflect- ing the activity of the fourth-century Hermopolite Apa Apollo, and the material vestiges at the site in Bawit is particularly large. Wipszycka says also that due to the fact that more than one Middle-Egyptian monastic community bore the name of Apollo, the name of the hero of HM 8 does not suffice to establish a secure connection between him and the site at Bawit.