Depicting Religious Combat in the Thirteenth-Century Program at the Monastery of St. Anthony at the Red Sea

Abstract

The nave paintings at the monastery of St. Anthony were executed by local artists in the early thirteenth century, during a period of mounting concerns over the Arabization and Islamization of the Coptic community. The cycle, which depicts thirty-one images of military martyrs and monastic saints, stands out from contemporary programs owing to its structure and its inclusion of rarely depicted hagiographic episodes. The program juxtaposes early Christian martyrs and the great Desert Fathers of Egypt, demonstrating a preoccupation with sacred ancestry and lineage. Within the martyr cycle, the preponderance of warrior saints shown violently slaying traditional enemies of the faith (pagans, heretics, and a Jew) is striking, as most of these refer to miracles that have no textual analogue. To some extent, the presence of warrior saints can be explained within a local devotional context, in which the paintings served as the liturgical backdrop for a monastic community that regarded itself as the heir to the community founded by St. Anthony, who engaged in spiritual combat at the site where the monastery was constructed. Lost in this interpretation is how the images might relate to broader religious debates in the Islamic period. This study engages with a little-known corpus of Arab Christian texts and recent scholarship on the religious history of Egypt. I argue that the unusually violent iconography reveals an awareness of Islamic historiographic narratives and should be understood in light of east Christian hagiographic and polemical texts then circulating in Egypt. Stories in these works are characteristically structured to draw out similarities between Christianity and Islam as a step toward staking out exclusive claims to religious truth and Christian preeminence. The unusual cycle provides evidence of how Coptic Christians employed paintings to fortify the faith.