Besa The Copt

Besa was a Coptic monk of the White Monastery, the great walled community near Sohag in Upper Egypt, and the disciple of its formidable abbot Shenoute. When Shenoute died, by the traditional reckoning in 465, at an extreme old age, Besa succeeded him as head of the federation, which by then governed thousands of monks and nuns in several houses.

He wrote in Coptic, the last stage of the Egyptian language, and he wrote a great deal: letters, sermons, and rules of discipline addressed to the men and women under his charge. They are practical documents. He deals with monks who steal, with nuns who quarrel, with those who leave and want to come back, with the temptation to think the rule applies to someone else. He is firm and he is not cruel. Reading them is the closest thing available to standing inside a fifth-century Egyptian monastery and listening to the abbot talk.

His most consequential work is the Life of Shenoute. Shenoute had been the towering figure of Coptic Christianity, a monastic legislator, a preacher of terrifying force, a demolisher of pagan temples, a defender of the poor against local landowners, and the man who did more than anyone to make Coptic a literary language. Besa wrote his life so that the memory would not be lost, and it was translated out of Coptic into Arabic, Syriac and Ethiopic, carrying Shenoute across the Christian East.

The Life is not modern biography. It is a saint's life, full of miracles and visions, arranged to teach rather than to document, and historians read it with care. It is also the principal reason Shenoute is known at all.

Besa's own leadership fell in hard years. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 had split Egyptian Christianity from the imperial church, and the White Monastery stood with the Egyptian side, the tradition that continues as the Coptic Orthodox Church. Besa held a large monastic federation together across that break.

He died after 474. His works were scattered in fragments across the manuscript collections of Europe and Egypt and had to be reassembled by modern scholars.

Sources: Besa, The Life of Shenoute, translated by David N. Bell; Besa, Letters and Sermons (Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium); The Coptic Encyclopedia, ed. Aziz S. Atiya.