IV—
The Culture of Dioscorus
that the Mediterranean interpretation of the humanist disciplines shall prevail
Dumbarton Oaks inscription
To understand the world of Dioscorus of Aphrodito, we must make an effort to identify just what was the coherence—the co-inherence—of all the aspects of his culture. We must for a moment seek to socialize ourselves into the expectations of the culture, in order to try to categorize and describe what it was that makes for the uniqueness of the Coptic world of Late Antiquity, the strength of its genius loci from landscape to specific forms of Christianity. To understand Dioscorus's world, one must become, if only for a moment, that old-fashioned creature, an unabashed believer in the Zeitgeist —something you can see in the carved wooden furniture ornament from Aphrodito, in Dioscorus's handwriting (that same hand writing Greek, Coptic, Latin), in a carved ivory comb and an inscription on stone from Antinoë, in a niche from Bahnasa, in the way a contract from Dioscorus's archive looks in its layout and feel. There is a definite consonance among major happenings in the culture.[1] One must also be prepared to subscribe to the perhaps somewhat old-fashioned methodology of presenting an individual figure as "a microcosm of his world"—if only because of the accident of physical preservation that has given us his papers. Starting from this one figure, we must look at the condition of learning and the law
[1] The phrase is from E. R. Miner, H. Odagiri, and R. E. Morrell, The Princeton companion to classical Japanese literature (Princeton 1985) 17.
in post-Chalcedonian Egypt; at the social function of classical learning in Coptic culture; and at the characteristic concepts, the cognitive style, that informed the world of that time and place.
The world into which Dioscorus was born lay at the point of intersection of many worlds: the world of Justinian and Constantinople, the sphere of Syria and Palestine, the rough society of Merovingian Gaul, and the troubled world of Byzantino-Gothic Italy. It was a world in which the old Roman structured territory of metropoleis and chora had largely shifted into a pattern of large landholdings, those of great noble families and of monasteries and churches. It was a world in which the two old cohabiting strains, Egyptian and Greek, which had variously interacted since Ptolemaic times,[2] had evolved an equilibrium—really a blend—that gave rise to brilliantly original art forms, in which the inherited Mediterranean education was used by every social group, with exuberant results; in which the old separatism and status seeking had enlarged their scope toward a productive fusion. It was a world beginning to be polarized between Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian[3] ways of mapping unseen reality; and it was a way of realizing human possibilities that was to perish forever.
Every fiber of Dioscorus's life belonged to and in the world of Egyptian Christianity, which informed every aspect of late Roman society with its own special flavor. The church of Alexandria was dominant, while the churches of the nome capitals and villages, the urban and rural monasteries, stood out in the physical landscape and forged powerful economic and emotional ties with the people. The landscape of the Antaeopolite nome was a friendly patchwork of hospices and holy men. Nestorius had died in Egyptian exile, and so too would Severus of Antioch (while Patriarch Dioscorus I had spun out the sad end of his life in Gangra, out of sight of the Nile and the sea). Even the neighborhood stylite was not unknown in the local scenery.[4] Egyptian Christianity, having at once resolutely set its face against what was left of Pharaonic religion and made its own kind of accommodation with classical-pagan cultural furniture, had given its own new texture to every aspect and detail of learning and letters. A whole new Greek language continued to be created in Egypt, salted with Christian
[2] For the earlier period, see R. S. Bagnall, "Egypt, the Ptolemies and the Greek world," BES 3 (1981) 5–21.
[3] D. W. Johnson, "The 'monophysitization' of the Copts," paper at the American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature, December 1984; cf. idem, "Anti-Chalcedonian polemics in Coptic texts, 451–641," in The Roots of Egyptian Christianity, ed. B. Pearson and J. Goehring (Philadelphia 1986) 216–234.
[4] P.Turner 54, from Antinoë; cf. A. Leroy-Molinghen, 'Mention d'un stylite dans un papyrus grec," Byzantion 51 (1981) 635.
theological and Roman bureaucratic technical terms, even with the odd borrowing from Coptic (
Dioscorus belonged by origin and formation to the late Roman world of the Mediterranean koine. One may infer that his great-grandfather Psimanobet (fl. ca. 460+?), even if a monoglot Copt, at least moved on an educational and cultural level consistent with society's expectations; he had named his own son Dioscorus (a calque of
It was to a capital city alive with administrative intricacy and urgent theological controversy that the young squire traveled. The city and court were, in 551, two years away from hosting the great pageant of an ecumenical council,[6] an effort to keep Egypt (and Syria) sweet. Dioscorus came bearing the burdens and problems of his hometown,[7] a town that had long looked directly to the imperial court and had present ties of patronage to
[5] See now M. Roberts, Biblical epic and rhetorical paraphrase in late antiquity (Liverpool 1985), mostly on Latin material, but see pp. 198–223 on the stylistic combination of aesthetics and devotion.
[6] Cf. Averil Cameron, "Cassiodorus deflated," JRS 71 (1981) 184–185.
[7] G. Geraci, Dioskoros e l'autopragia di Aphrodito," Actes XV congr.intl.papyrol. 4 (Brussels 1979) 195–204; G. Poethke, "Metrocomiae und Autopragie in Ägypten," Graeco-Coptica, ed. P. Nagel (Halle 1984) 37–44.
Theodora herself. Impelled by the changing nature of autopragia, drawn perhaps by the pervasive presence of the great Fl. Strategius of Oxyrhynchus, he would have found the atmosphere charged with energy. We can only speculate about what impression the domes and sights of Justinian's city made on Dioscorus's mind and senses.[8] But the traces of his journey are reflected in his documentary style and in his poetry: echoes of the chancery language he shared with John Lydus, of the theological correspondence of his old teacher, Philoponus, with the emperor; the gracious commemorations made permanent in diptychs, and the grave ubiquity of the glittering imperial image. At Antinoë in his law practice and writing, at Aphrodito administering his father's foundation, one may be sure the influence of his travels lived on in his consciousness.
Dioscorus worked as an encomiastic poet, a panegyrist. When he is mentioned in literary histories at all, it is as a Gelegenheitsdichter, a sort of producer of greeting-card verses, with apologies for what a past critical mentality thought of as exaggerated flattery. In the present climate of research, such judgments are seen through and set aside. Dioscorus lived in a praise culture, a world of high visibility where the praise of local officials and dynasts answered to a deep need of the society. The scribe incarnated learning; good government brought a good harvest; the palazzo of the great family, hung with tapestry and bright with color and carving, was the stage on which was publicly enacted the ceremonial that gave meaning to everyday life. In this Mediterranean world where all of life was lived outdoors in the courtyard and face to face, where the person had to be seen and proclaimed to possess his special attributes, the springs of Dioscorus's poems are easy to find.[9] They tell us, as artifacts of Byzantine-Coptic culture, much about both the recipients and the writer. They shared that exuberantly extroverted mentality in which relationships from friendship to tax paying[10] are externalized in gesture, color, shape. (We can sense a little of its quality in the academic procession or the law court.)
The poems also are a unique lens through which we can watch the process of poetic composition at work, in the high style. As Dioscorus substitutes words, juggles formulas, borrows from himself, there is visible
[8] Cf. J. G. Keenan, "Aurelius Apollos and the Aphrodite village elite," Atti XVII congr.intl.papirol. (Naples 1984) 957–963.
[9] L. S. B. MacCoull, "Dioscorus and the dukes: an aspect of Coptic Hellenism in the sixth century," BS/EB (1988).
[10] Is it significant that he wrote more poems to lay officials than to ecclesiastics? Compare later discussion.
on the very surface of the papyrus—in that hand with the instantly recognizable scalene alpha—the same transforming operation being done on the classics that brought the inherited civilized paraphernalia to their latest high polish.
Dioscorus's Fachprosa in both languages opens yet another window onto the originality and depth of his culture. You turn the pages of P.Cair.Masp. or P.Lond. expecting vistas of boring legal gabble, of empty servility, and the luminous phrase, the rasping or melting or glittering epithet, the compound abstract noun with a surprise lurking in its heart come singing off the page: the healing hand of the imperial power—and the plague and blight brought on by endemic corruption; the departed souls that long and faint for Christ's appearing to harrow hell; the old singing toper of a Greek school text; the hosts of Midian and the ramping lion, familiar as figures in a tapestry; above all, the landscape, overspread with grain and vines and white churches. Even the lawyer's device of paired near-synonyms takes wing in Dioscorus's hands and becomes a kind of mathematical-logic game, a template for constructing more and more well-formed definitions. To watch a lawyer at work, in an Egyptian provincial capital of the sixth century, is to put a finger on the very pulse of that culture; settling disputes, watching over the transfer of land and its products, smoothing over possible incipient cracks in the fabric of society, he deploys his prose in the patterns needed by his society. His immediacy and the authenticity of feeling shine like Egyptian sunlight through the lattices of the institutionalized requirements of documentary form. Dioscorus saw causality in more than just the reduction of the world to specific relationships. At the same time, his prose writing reflects how in touch he was with even small happenings in his environment. Dioscorus predicated his work on justice—where it mattered, he did not compromise.
Not all the loose ends had by any means been tied up in sixth-century religious culture. It is indicative of something—of the nature of our evidence, if little else—that it is hard for the scholar to reconstruct Dioscorus's personal piety. One cannot even say with the hard-and-fast certainty of labeling by hindsight which side of the confessional fence, Chalcedonian or non-Chalcedonian, he came down on. (Cyrillian seems the best label.) There is no easy classification rule that equates "Greek-speaking" and "classically educated" with "upper class and Chalcedonian." (One of the Apions went to the capital and accepted communion with the "imperial party"; did the rest of his family remain on speaking terms with him? Was there tension on his return visits to Oxyrhynchus? And yet much of the
phenomenon of "Coptic hatred of the Byzantines"—Byzantines per se, not Chalcedonians, who were hated at the grass roots—is the creation of later historians.)
But neither is it possible glibly to put Dioscorus down as "just a Copt" and thence to extract Monophysite doctrine from his writings, when it simply is not explicitly there. We cannot even find out from the sources whether Aphrodito had a patron saint; whether it stood in a special relation to one holy figure like the patronal figure of S. Colluthus at Antinoë.[11] To whom did Aphroditans, of varying social levels, turn at moments of crisis? Not even the list of dedications of churches and monasteries[12] gives us a ready answer. But we can see that Dioscorus had an immediate and fruitful relationship with local piety, especially monastic piety and the veneration of holy men—his poems on the
We have seen how all of his language is imbued with the Bible and the liturgy. If vocabulary borrowings and rhetorical echoes are any indication, he was well acquainted with the works of Cyril—probably also in Coptic, mostly lost to us. The happy unity of classical and Christian imagery in his documentary phraseology and in his poetry testifies to the high level of civilization attained by the Coptic leisured class during its period of optimum development.
This Coptic leisured class was at home simultaneously in the worlds of what we divisively label as classical and as Coptic culture; it is not at all certain that they perceived them as contrasting sharply with one another. In fact, what comes out of the texts and the visual art is the compatibility, not the contrast. The fifth century, marked by the domination of Shenoute and his line of succession as prolific Coptic writers and highly visible ecclesiastical leaders, had been a period of high achievement in Coptic culture; the late sixth, late in Dioscorus's lifetime, was to see another such period of flowering.[13]
Dioscorus's family and clients had ties with the White Monastery, and
[11] Cf. L. Papini, "Due biglietti oracolari cristiani," Trenta testi greci, ed. M. Manfredi (Florence 1983) 68–70; and "Biglietti oracolari in copto dalla Necropoli Nord di Antinoe," in II intl.congr.copt.stud. (Rome 1985) 245–256. Perhaps the Virgin comes closest to being Aphrodito's patron.
[12] See now S. Timm, Das christlich-koptische Ägypten in arabischer Zeit III (Wiesbaden 1985) 1438–1461.
[13] See the remarks of T. Orlandi on the period of Patriarch Damian (after 578) in "Coptic literature," in Egyptian Christianity, ed. Pearson and Goehring, pp. 75–77; and nowC. D. G. Müller, "Damian, Papst und Patriarch von Alexandrien," Oriens Christianus 70 (1986) 118–142 (based on narrative sources, not papyri).
he most probably would have been acquainted with Shenoute's manysided philosophical and expository output. (The theme of the obligations of the dynatoi would have been close to Dioscorus's heart.) We know that Coptic hagiography was part of the furnishings of his mind. Very likely Coptic homiletic was as well. (Were Pachomians and Shenouteans famous as guest preachers in the leading churches of the river cities?) In the last decade or two of Dioscorus's life, the reign of Patriarch Damian, himself a theologian,[14] gave rise to a fresh outburst of Coptic literary activity in the cities of the cultural heartland not far from Aphrodito (Hermopolis/Ashmunein, Lycopolis/Assiut, Hypselis/Shotep). The way these writers make use of classical Greek rhetoric[15] has much in common with the way Dioscorus constructed a legal document, or composed as a doctus poeta.
Creative activity in Coptic in the later sixth century also took place in Middle Egypt, in the Heracleopolite nome (north of Oxyrhynchus), and in the Delta itself. Next to the panegyrics of Constantine of Lycopolis[16] and John of Hermopolis, we have the work of Stephen of Heracleopolis, whose panegyric on the Monophysite archimandrite Apollo, who fled from the Pachomian headquarters of Pbow owing to an attempted Chalcedonian takeover, is a good witness to ecclesiastical propaganda at mid-century.[17] And John of Parallos, who in the late sixth century inveighed against the popularity of heretical texts,[18] transmits the names of five of those "blasphemous books," of which four (the Preaching of John, the Laughter of the Apostles, the Teachings of Adam, and the Counsels of the Savior ) sound like nothing so much as "Nag Hammadi" Gnostic tractates. We already know
[14] The Coptic text of his synodal letter is given in W. E. Crum and H. G. Evelyn White, The monastery of Epiphanius 2 (New York 1926) 148–152 (English translation, pp. 332–337).
[15] See the forthcoming dissertation of M. Blanchard of Catholic University on Shenoute as a classical rhetorician.
[17] Published by K. H. Kuhn in CSCO 394–395 (Scr.copt. 39–40; Louvain 1978).
[18] See A. van Lantschoot, "Fragments coptes d'une homélie de Jean de Parallos contre les livres héretiques," Miscellanea Mercati 1 (Vatican City 1946) 296–326. We can identify the "Investiture of Michael" as the text published by C. D. G. Muller in CSCO 225–226 (Scr.copt. 31–32; Louvain 1960).
that Dioscorus was acquainted with Gnostic material, possibly transmitted through the Pbow-Atripe/Panopolis-Aphrodito connection.[19] Texts of this type seem to have maintained an underground life in Dioscorus's own time and place. Elements of both the mainstream and the covert Coptic culture can thus be seen to have contributed to his formation.
The culture carried on in the Coptic language was, of course, not exclusively religious. Coptic was the vehicle of everyday letters, taxation, and lawsuits as much as of sermons and saints' lives. It is an accident of preservation that most extant Coptic documentary papyri are from the seventh century and later. But what little of the Coptic material from sixth-century Aphrodito[20] has been permitted to survive, such as scraps of Dioscorus's correspondence with the Apa Apollos monastic community of which he was overseer, brings into view the realia of this world with even greater clarity. Even a contract or a letter composed in Coptic could not help being filled with classical content.
Classical learning, its forms and substances and attributes, its textures and flavors and atmosphere, played a strongly positive social role in Egypt during the sixth and early seventh centuries. The period was, in spite of the "Melkite-Monophysite" tension at Alexandria and the protracted vacancy in the non-Chalcedonian patriarchate, a moment of equilibrium, a long summer. The land, ever the basis of life in Egypt, had been subject to variously evolving forms of tenure and of disposition of its products, from the older Roman organization to the late fifth-century world of the great estates.[21] Dioscorus was securely settled into a way of life that was naturally at home with the bits and pieces of classical cultural furniture—in clothing and the omnipresent architectural ornament, in polite modes of address and the figures of epithalamia. (The Coptic language itself, interwoven with one-third Greek loanwords like raisins in a pudding, has no trace of feeling them as foreign bodies. They are simply there.) And Chris-
[19] L. S. B. MacCoull, "P.Cair.Masp. II 67188 1–5: Dioscorus's 'gnostica'," Tyche 2 (Vienna 1987), 95–97.
[20] L. S. B. MacCoull, "The Coptic archive of Dioscorus of Aphrodito," Cd'E 56 (1981) 185–193, and eadem, "A Coptic cession of land by Dioscorus of Aphrodito," II intl.congr.copt.stud. (Rome 1985) 159–166; L. Papini, "Notes on the formulary of some Coptic documentary papyri from Middle Egypt," BSAC 25 (1983) 83–89, eadem, "Annotazioni sul formulario giuridico di documenti copti del VI secolo," Atti XVII congr.intl.papirol. (Naples 1984) 767–776. There is Coptic material among the lot numbered Egyptian Museum S.R. 3733, though the authorities take pains to conceal the existence of Coptic antiquities.
[21] J. Gascou, "Les grands domaines, la cité de l'Etat en Egypte byzantine (5 , 6 , et 7 s.)," Trav.etMém. 9 (Paris 1985) 1–90.
tianity, a distinctive and passionately held Christianity, was domiciled in the thoughts and hearts of a majority of Egyptians,[22] giving them another rich repertoire of cultural forms, and transfiguring the classics they had learned in school. Together these great traditions gave Coptic culture a whole kit of conceptual tools with which to map out and make sense of the world.
Yet we can see from hindsight that somehow one bonding ingredient in the whole colloid did not quite jell. What that was still defies explanation. A quest for the historical roots of a kind of anti-intellectualism,[23] a devaluing of learning in Coptic culture, is a matter of high priority. The Byzantine province of Egypt had everything: an infrastructure of schools, positions, human talent—a set of routes by which one could rise to the top. In the very career of Dioscorus we have a classic case of the high standing and rewards that accrued to the jurist/poet, the learned man par excellence. How then was it possible that learning never became a holy act in Coptic culture as it so definitely did in the other high cultures of the Christian Orient? The consequences of this unarticulated, almost unperceived, attitude deep under the surface of the culture were to prove disastrous.
[22] Earlier scholars, by a curiously inverted standard, suffered from a desire to defend at all costs whatever survivals of paganism they could find. This methodology has not proved useful. The question is still debated as to why Christianity struck such very deep and tenacious root in Egypt. The old facile "explanation," that the "native Copts," long despised by the Greek ruling class, "nationalistically" latched onto the new faith as a way of reasserting their identity, as a promise of radical hope for the hopeless, is a creation of romantic historians, and can in no way be extracted from the sources. Also unproductive is the old notion that "the Monophysite heresy" was an expression of "Egyptian nationalism"—disproved by A. H. M. Jones—and its corollary, that somehow "the Monophysite mind" was more congenial to Egypt and Syria, and helped facilitate the Moslem conquest. Serious work with the sources can dispel these tired and harmful clichés from our historiography.
What, then, is the cognitive style characteristic of Coptic culture in its classical phase? And how does that cognitive style manifest itself, reverberate, throughout the forms of institutions, art, thought, and life that flourished in Egypt between about 475 and (at the very latest) 750? What is the unity underlying all the productions of this culture that instantly leaps to the mind? Why would one never mistake a Coptic artifact for an object of any other place or time? What, indeed, are the special values implied by "being Coptic"? Through Dioscorus we can try to formulate answers to these questions.
Dioscorus was bilingual. The Coptic language is a transmuting prism through which to see the world; Coptophony gives one a new set of eyes and ears.[24] The language is rich in syntactic categories that are not at all familiar or naturally to be expected.[25] It is clear by now that we cannot impose Indo-European linguistic categories onto the Coptic language;[26] such a mediated understanding seriously distorts our grasp of how the language works. In Coptic our familiar notions of noun and verb, object and predicate, transitive and intransitive, do not apply. The Coptic world is one of a very exactly and subtly detailed directionality in three dimensions, in which direction and movement are signaled by an extremely rich "spatial relations network" of markers.[27] The language is well fitted to deploy clauses in delicate logical arrangement;[28] in documents the use of a Second Tense marks the "dispositive" function of the written instrument,[29] a function central to the activity of Dioscorus the jurist. The whole way thoughts are constructed in Coptic is done by operations of what is now understood as a "modifier," a concept that cuts across things we think of under labels like mood and attribution. Genders, their weight carried in the pronoun/article, are shuffled about in predication; tenses behave in all sorts of
[24] I am also an unashamed neo-Whorfian. See J. A. Fishman, "A systematization of the Whorfian hypothesis," in Culture and cognition, ed. J. W. Berry and P. R. Dasen (London 1974) 61–85.
[25] H. J. Polotsky, "Coptic," in Current trends in linguistics 6, ed. T. Sebeok (The Hague and Paris 1970) 563.
[26] My remarks here are based on the brilliant study of A. Shisha-Halevy, Coptic grammatical categories (Rome 1986): a fiendishly difficult but most illuminating work that will totally remake our thinking about the self-perception of the Coptic mentality and of how the workings of the language shape the Coptic mind.
[27] Ibid., p. 35.
[28] Ibid. p. 47; cf. p. 156, "a topic-prominent language."
[29] Ibid. pp. 79–80 with p. 80 n. 92.
ways and fulfill all sorts of functions; the notion of "taking an object" operates quite variously; emphasis is built right into the bones of sentences. The concretizing nature of the language goes deep, as half a century of etymological research has made plain. Concrete results are expected from imperatives in a kind of reverse do-ut-des syndrome.[30] The Coptic language should be seen as being inhabited not by words but by "syntagms"—patterns of ordered categories.[31]
These categories determine perception, classification,[32] and logic in ways subtly different from the classical. The very categories of self-awareness are individual. Coptic epistemology is rich in the two verbal concepts
A patterned language—a patterned visual art. All of the clichés applied in the description of Coptic art fall short of the underlying unity. (And now that so many works formerly accepted as type pieces are having their authenticity called into question,[34] we have a less firm database than was thought.) Abstract, linear, hard-edged; popular, impoverished, provincial;
[30] Polotsky, "Coptic," 568.
[31] Shisha-Halevy, Coptic grammatical categories, p. 164.
[32] Look at Dioscorus's Greek-Coptic glossary (cf. L. S. B. MacCoull, "Further notes on the Greek-Coptic glossary of Dioscorus of Aphrodito," Glotta 64 [1986] 253–257), and its Late Antique categories of classification. Profoundly rooted in its environment, this bare list comes across almost like a genre painting, with nature, wildlife, the Nile, irrigation, and the everyday craftsmen and workers of Egypt seen going about their business in their landscape—a landscape with the occasional Dionysiac figure or drunken poet thrown in. Dioscorus was very likely compiling this list of "all trades, their gear and tackle and trim" in order to work the Greek names of implements, if they would scan, into dedicatory epigrams. None has, alas, survived.
[33] R. Kasser and W. Vycichl, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue copte (Leuven 1983) 201–202, 62–63, 325.
[34] Thanks to the important work of G. Vikan, e.g., his "The so-called 'Sheikh Ibada' group of early Coptic sculptures," Third BSC Abstracts (New York 1977) 15–16; and Questions of authenticity among the arts of Byzantium (Washington, D.C. 1981). It is possible that many fakes, later purchased by the unsuspecting, were perpetrated in the late 1950s and early 1960s, at the time of the great expropriations, with a view to discrediting the "Coptic heritage" that might have become a cultural movement. Vikan has shown that many sculptures the public thinks of as typically Coptic are not ancient, but modern reworkings of pieces of old stone.
light-and-shade contrast, flatness, "symbolist" deformation, the great staring eyes: all are clichés[35] that miss what the observer's eye seizes upon. Also misguided is the notion that Coptic art expresses some sort of age-of-anxiety syndrome and hence appeals to the "modern" sensibility.[36] This is a creation, or projection, of romantic dilettanti, and need not detain scholars. Look instead at a basket capital from the region of Antinoë and see, in its joyous transformation of classical forms, a parallel to the exuberance of rhetorical figure, the elaborately contrasted constructions, in Dioscorian prose. The underlying unity in the classic phase of this culture would seem to be a positive reëvaluation of classical form vivified by autochthonous content—as though the energy and the chemicals of the Nilotic sap have changed the very shapes of the leaves in that vine scroll seen on the Antinoë praetorium or Shenoute's monastery. But this too would seem a cliché. The flavor, the texture, the almost shattering visualness of the works produced by Coptic culture in its high phase are full of an awareness that the really enjoyable part of classics is not just what you learned in school; it is the piquancy of using just the right classical term in a context that makes the perceiver exclaim "So that is what it really means!" When Shenoute uses
The essence remains hard to seize and formulate. It can best be apprehended by turning over the leaves of the British Museum's or John Rylands's Coptic papyri, the legal documents from Jeme, or running the eye down plates of the sixth-century Coptic documents from Aphrodito. Practicality of mind, yes; a consciousness, helped by that Mediterranean awareness of the presence of the dead, of the transience of all things, the terrifying nearness of the boundaries ("zwischen Strom und Gestein") where everything can break down. A combination of toughness and delicacy; a sense of the nearby breathing of the unseen world. A sparkle of perennial,
[35] The same words are used in talking about Syrian or Visigothic or Merovingian artifacts that would never for a moment be confused with Coptic.
[36] E.g., BSAC 19 (1967/68) 227–290. Coptic art has too long been the province of amateurs. And the phenomenon of patronage has not yet been studied in the domain of Coptic art (of the classical period). This is because the field has been under the domination of those whose earlier-day equivalents were themselves patrons. One now speaks of a paradigm shift in the study of Byzantine art, from emphasis on style to emphasis on patronage. But unfortunately Coptic art has not caught up; in this field, still all too often a playground for those who cannot read the Coptic language, the writers of studies of objects still as often as not stand in the position of those who collect fashionable objects and jot down their impressions of them. Only recently has the field of Coptic art begun to be the object of serious study by qualified professionals.
ineradicable classicism, interwoven with a rough-textured, grainy astringency. In Coptic letters we see at work the mind of the society Dioscorus embodied. In the tones of feeling that pervade Coptic culture as it flourished from the mid-fourth to the mid-seventh century, and even a little after, we sense why it was a culture founded on and structured around praise. Before Heian Japan, before Romantic Vienna, Coptic Egypt—the first expressionist society—confronted transitoriness ("so leben wir und nehmen immer Abschied") with a heartfelt affirmation of the perceived details of life. Dioscorus's simile of the cicada was apt: he sang in the noonday, and did not ask questions.
To all this there is a chilling postscript: it is that there is no postscript. This was a culture that was to die without a Nachleben. Nothing could be more wrong than proleptically to cast a shadow over its bright colors and vibrant life; its happy connectivity; and its universe of strong, original forms. But the fact remains that it died, and it alone of all the flourishing cultures of the Christian Orient died out totally. The rich and multiform culture of Byzantine-Coptic Egypt found a mode of survival for another hundred years or so after the Moslem conquest. At first, administrative structures were (for purely practical reasons) preserved; some Greek was used, outside of the liturgy; the "inherited conglomerate" remained au fond intelligible. But after the ninth to tenth centuries, in wrenching contrast to what happened in Mesopotamia, Armenia, and other regions of the east Mediterranean, the Coptic language and all the values it carried began its irreversible dying. We do not know why; and we do not know, as historians and students, whether that way of being human can ever become viable again.