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C O P | N E T
AMONG THE COPTS
A long walk or short ride from the center of modern Cairo lies that
city's old Coptic Quarter, strangely combining monumental grandeur and
contemporary squalor, where a wonderful museum and majestic ancient churches,
Greek as well as Coptic, various mosques, and a once dilapidated but currently
redecorated synagogue bestride narrow alleys, several meters below the level
of major streets. It is often flooded and in places awash with tides of
sewage. For a summer visitor, the cool and the quiet partly compensate for the
unwelcome odors.
Although this subterranean neighborhood is starkly poor and other
foreigners had told me it was sinister, I experienced only cordial responses
to my garbled Arabic greetings and eagerness to help with my even more garbled
seekings of directions. I never met a beggar there, and when I offered my sole
stick of candy to a tattered and skinny child he promptly broke it into three
pieces, consuming one, giving another to a very old woman and the third to a
very young puppy. That these people were not Coptic Arabs became clear with
their response to the prayer call from a neighboring minaret.
The Coptic population of the Coptic Quarter has grown small and continues
to diminish. In the midst of this rather labyrinthine urban habitat is a
walled courtyard through whose open gate appears the open doorway of a large
stone building inscribed, in Arabic and French, Coptic Convent. Entering with
some diffidence, I was immediately greeted in fluent French, and then, when my
accent was noted, in equally fluent English, by one of two habited nuns seated
at a small table in the center of a large, otherwise unfurnished room. As I
talked, at considerable length, with this highly articulate, witty,
well-informed, widely-traveled modern woman, costumed like a figure in a
medieval painting, it happened again and again that small groups, each
comprising a man, woman and one or more children, crossed the room,
disappeared into a sort of tunnel, and later reappeared and exited.
Noticing my obvious curiosity about these silently recurring visits, my
hostess asked me if I should like to see what they were doing. She took me
into the stone corridor, just inside of which was a shrine, whose central
decoration was a massive iron chain hung over spikes in the wall. These were,
I was told, according to legend, the shackles of St. George, now a cherished
relic associated with a local ritual. When a family entered the little chapel,
the father took the chain and laid it first across his own shoulders and then
across those of his wife and of each child. Feeling the weight of the chain,
they prayed for the saint to protect them and sustain their courage and faith
in time of persecution. When I asked the nun if the rite was much used, she
replied, with a sad smile, that she could not remember a time when it was so
much used as now. Only then did she ask me if I was a Christian, then if I
should like her to lay the chains on me and if, while she prayed for me and my
family, I would offer a prayer for her people "in this terrible time."
I knew, of course, what she meant, and had already visited towns in Upper
Egypt where Muslim attackers had driven Coptic residents from ancestral homes
and left others in constant dread of renewed harassment. I had also learned
how crudely and cruelly our easy references to "Islamic fundamentalism" tar
with a single brush various groups of religiously motivated reformers, many of
whom deplore violence and most of whom exert themselves in tasks of
compassionate social improvement. But the terrorists are there, apparently in
increasing numbers and with decreasing restraint.
Assaults on tourists, politicians and intellectuals tend to monopolize
the headlines, even in Egypt, but conversations with Muslims as well as Copts
leave no doubt of the extent to which epidemic violence has shattered the
interreligious harmony that was for so long a basis of pride in Egyptian
civilization. Among thoughtful Egyptians everywhere one finds both shame at
these sad developments and fear that measures will be taken to deal with them
that will only compound the atrocity.
Somehow, it was that hidden ritual of martyrdom in the little Cairo
chapel of St. George that impressed upon me more than anything else how
profoundly one of the oldest Christian communities on earth is pervaded by a
sense of ever-present and ever-growing menace. Copts are extraordinarily
conscious of their antiquity, and their pride in peaceful coexistence with
Muslims is partly pride in the solid spiritual strength that was theirs for so
many centuries before Muhammad was born.
It is interesting to linger in the entryway of a Coptic church in Cairo
and look over the array of pamphlets and books set up for sale along with
devotional objects. Prominent among them, in Arabic and European bilingual
texts, but in formats clearly intended for popular consumption, are detailed
historical, philological and theological analyses of the great Christological
controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries that led, after the Council of
Chalcedon, to the separation of Egyptian Monophysite Christianity from the
Roman communion. Leaflets are on sale containing extracts from the "Father of
Church History," Eusebius, testifying to the Egyptian church's founding by
St. Mark the Evangelist. There are countless pamphlets, some designed for
very young children, about ancient saints of the Egyptian church and their
worthy successors in recent times, and an abundance of material, writings,
photographs and maps devoted to the revered establishments in the desert,
southwest of Alexandria and the Nile delta, where Christian monasticism was
born, thrived and reached maturity so many hundreds of years before St.
Benedict.
There in the western desert, connected by roads to Alexandria and Cairo,
the monasteries still stand, some on original foundations, many on ancient
ones and some expanding with new construction. A vast new ecclesiastical
structure, designed for pilgrims, rises on the supposed burial place of the
revered third-century martyr, St. Menas, loved and popularized by the last
pope of the Coptic church. Ironically, a few miles away, archaeologists have
identified and excavated the real ancient site of Abu Mina (Menas), where
legends of an oasis, fed by a miraculous spring that rose up when the saint's
body was laid to rest at a place indicated by two camels, have been amazingly
reinforced by discovery that a well- watered settlement did indeed exist
beneath the present surface of utter aridity.
Over the well-maintained roads that lead beyond Wadi Natrun to these
revered strongholds of Coptic spirituality, the worshipers and pilgrims do
indeed come, in crowded buses, private cars and on the backs of camels and
donkeys. I found crowds of great diversity at Sunday services - the ancient
liturgy of St. Basil, surrounded by icons of the illustrious Egyptian fathers
of the church - and the monks eager to escort even persons as foreign as
myself into the very thick of their worshiping throng. After the liturgy,
laypeople sit or stroll in the monastery gardens and guest quarters, all of
them in earnest conversation with one or more of the monks.
Strangers like myself, if they show an interest that seems to go beyond
picturesque snapshots, are entrusted to linguistically appropriate novices. On
commending my escorts on their colloquial mastery of my native tongue, I was
told that all the novices were competent at that sort of thing, because the
monasteries accepted only college graduates, and many novices held graduate
and professional degrees. My evident surprise and my further question whether
many candidates could be found possessing such qualifications provoked a
polite smile and the assurance that over the past decade vocations had
increased enormously, more than tenfold in some of the most thriving
monasteries, despite the new demanding academic qualifications for
admission. Yes, they had heard that clerical vocations were sharply declining
in the Roman church, although they had not known the decline also affected
monasticism. To my questions about what had occasioned the burgeoning of
monastic vocations among them, they replied only in terms of an atmosphere of
intensifying spirituality, a kind of religious awakening, combined with an
immemorial conviction that monasticism lies at the very heart of Christian
religion.
It was only among older monks and educated laypeople that I heard a
further attempt to explain this reinvigorated monasticism. They associated it
with the intensification of Muslim religious concerns, and also with that
aspect of Islamic renewal which had erupted in violence against their own
community. There was among religious Egyptian Christians, they felt, no less
than among Muslims, a growing revulsion from secularity, a growing suspicion
of Western culture as having discarded its spirituality, and a growing need
for immersion in an unambiguously religious milieu. Political Islam, Sufi
revivalism and Coptic monastic flourishing seemed to them different ways of
responding to an essentially common fear and a common hope, a fear of that
"death of faith" which seemed to pervade the West, and a hope for "spiritual
life" in an environment that nourished such life. That was why the pilgrims
and worshipers came. That was why the novices stayed.
And that was even, it was suggested, why some Muslims terrorized their
people in a tragically perverse way. It was a craving for concentrated,
purified religious community, and a corresponding resentment of diversity and
dilution, that were blamed for so many social and spiritual ills. The
persecution was wicked and wrong-headed, and yet it was perceived even by some
of its victims as the distortion and perversion of motives and insights
originally sound.
But here, too, I was more than once reminded, there is a paradox that
Coptic Christians must not forget. Did I know from what point in history the
Coptic church dated its birth? No, it was not 451, when the Council of
Chalcedon drove them into separation to preserve their orthodoxy. And no, it
was not some first-century date associated with St. Mark the Evangelist's
establishment of the church in Egypt. No, the Coptic era is understood to have
begun in the year 284. The significance of the year escaped me, and I was only
more puzzled at being reminded that that was the year of accession of the
Emperor Diocletian. Yes, it was Diocletian who brought to birth the spiritual
community of the Copts, and he did so by unleashing upon them the Great
Persecution. Out of that cruel and bloody time arose a real church, one that
could call the cross its standard without hypocrisy, one that had learned how
much one can afford to lose if one finds and keeps Christ. It was out of that
lesson of martyrdom that they had learned the importance of monasticism for
keeping the lesson alive. A terrible time, yes, unquestionably. But also, I
was several times reminded, a fruitful time.
It was a classics professor at Alexandria - himself a Muslim, with whom I
shared these observations - who recalled the appropriate text: Sanguis
martyrum semen Christianorum ("the blood of martyrs is the seed of
Christians"). "Is not that what Christians say?" he asked.
Yes, that is what they say. There are, among the Copts, many who appear
to mean it.
Gaffney, James.
Among the Copts. (Egyptian Christianity)
America v169, n10 (Oct 9, 1993):15.
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_|_ This article is one of many more articles about the Coptic Orthodox
| Church, the Christian Apostolic Church of Egypt. These articles can be
| obtained electronically from Copt-Net Repository, using anonymous FTP
COP|NET from pharos.bu.edu:CN. Please mail inquiries to CN-request@cs.bu.edu.
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