Shenoute and Theophilus’s Festal Letters. The Use of Episcopal Documents in Defense of the Role of the Body within Prayer and Ascetic Practice

The contribution discusses the quotation of Theophilus' Festal letter 16 at the end of Shenute's treatise Contra Origenistas, showing the theological and ecclesiological motivations of this quotation. At the end, the author is able to offer some methodological suggestions for the future study of Shenute and the theological debates that have been preserved in Coptic: 1) the multiplicity of ideas and theories that are refuted by Shenute must not lead the scholar to imagine an Egyptian landscape populated by a huge number of dissenting groups: Shenute uses the sources to construct a heresiological discourse whose fundamental purpose is the defense of a Christian and monastic identity; the search for a historical reality behind each element of the heresiological catalog is doomed to failure, precisely because some of these ideas are used by contrast to support opposing values; 2) this identity is inspired by a multiplicity of traditions: there exists the patriarchal one, with which Shenute agrees although with his own peculiar accents, but alongside this other traditions emerge caracterized by a non-Platonic vision of God and man and an unitary anthropology, as attested by the Coptic version of Melito’s De anima et corpore (corrected in its too materialistic expressions), Epiphanius’s Ancoratus, and all those materials which were later reworked by the author of The Life of Aphu.