COPTIC CULTURE IN THE BYZANTINE WORLD: NATIONALISM AND RELIGIOUS INDEPENDENCE
DOWNEY, GLANVILLE Greek and Byzantine Studies; Oct 1, 1958; 1, 2; ProQuest pg. 119

Coptic Culture in 
The Byzantine World: 
Nationalislll and 
Religious Independence 

GLANVILLE DOWNEY 

Dumbarton Oaks} Washington} D. C. 

COPTIC CULTURE, ESPECIALLY AS IT IS KNOWN to most of us, 
through its art and its surviving literature, seems so re­

mote, and so limited in its significance for the present time, 
that to many modern students it does not appear to have a very 
real place in either the history of Christianity or the history 
of the Byzantine Empire.1 The Coptic language is not widely 

1 In the preparation of a general study such as this I have necessarily made 
use of the work of others, and I am indebted to the researches of a number of 
scholars, though I believe that the point of view adopted in this paper, and the 
conclusions, are my own. The best guide to the subject is the study of E. R. 
Hardy, Christian Egypt: Church and People: Christianity and Nationalism in 
the Patriarchate of Alexandria (New York, 1952), and I am greatly indebted to 
this book. Other valuable works are H. I. Bell, Cults and Creeds in Graeco­
Roman Egypt (Liverpool, 1953), W. H. Worrell, A Short Account of the Copts 
(Ann Arbor, 1945), and Coptic Egypt, containing the papers read at a symposium 
under the auspices of New York University and the Brooklyn Museum held at 
the Brooklyn Museum in 1941 and published by the Museum in 1944. With books 
such as these available, it has not seemed necessary to give full bibliographic 
references for all the statements made in the present study, especially when so 
many of them are matters of common knowledge. References are given for direct 
quotations and points which are of special interest for the argument. 



120 GLANVILLE DOWNEY [CBS 1 

studied, and the literature, so far as it is available in trans­
lation, has had only a limited circulation. To some students 
the Coptic ,vorld seems to have its natural connections with 
Ethiopia rather than with Byzantium. Nevertheless, an exam­
ination of the antecedents of Coptic culture, and an effort to 
trace the development of the characteristics which distin­
guished it in the world of its day, will show us how the Copts 
and their religion and art and literature constitute a natural 
phenomenon, in the environment in which they developed, 
and will suggest the lessons which we may draw from the 
observation of the influences which went to build up the 
Coptic world. The development is, like all such evolutions, 
a unique one, but the principles which it illustrates are basic 
both to Christianity and to the political and intellectual 
heritage of the Graeco-Roman world and its continuation, 
the Byzantine state; and an analysis of the factors involved 
(which so far as the present writer knows has not hitherto 
been undertaken along the lines followed in this study) will 
give us a new view both of the Copts and of the Empire in 
which they lived. 

The Byzantine Empire, as the continuation and natural 
development of the Roman Empire in the eastern Mediter­
ranean area, shows us how a centralized imperial government, 
based upon an ancient tradition of power, and of success, can 
hold together a wide-spread territory containing a variety of 
quite distinct nationalities, differing in ethnic origin, language 
and religion-and this was a very large empire, if we compare 
the relatively slow and difficult means of travel and communi­
cation of those times with the methods of communication em­
ployed in the present day. 

A considerable part of the value and interest of Byzan­
tine history lies in the way in which we can see what the 
elements were which kept this empire together and gave it its 
strength-elements such as the Roman experience in adminis­
tration, the Gr<eco-Roman intellectual tradition as a unifying 
force in society and politics, and the new and powerful action 
of Christianity in transforming personal and social life and 
binding together the whole state. We can observe the inter­
action of all these elements in the various sections of the Em-



1958] COPTIC CULTURE IN THE BYZANTINE WORLD 121 

pire-in Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa-and 
we can study the differing relationships of the government 
and the church with what some Byzantine historians actually 
did call "the natives." There were, of course, failures as well 
as successes, though the people in responsible positions in 
those days would not always view their shortcomings in the 
same way that we see them. 

As one would expect, each of the major divisions of the 
Empire had its own special characteristics, and Egypt had an 
individuality which was in some ways more marked than those 
of Anatolia, Syria or Palestine, for example. Not the least 
important peculiarity was the dry climate which has meant 
that written material and other archaeological remains have 
been preserved in Egypt in larger quantity and in better 
condition than in other parts of the ancient world. This gives 
us a singularly favorable opportunity to observe how the dif­
fusion of Greek culture and of Christianity affected one of 
the most individual of the more ancient cultures, that is, the 
old Egyptian civilization, which continued to carryon its own 
existence, on its own terms, within the Roman and Byzan­
tine Empires, almost as far away from the Byzantine capital, 
Constantinople, as it was possible to get and still be in the 
Empire. 

Egypt had been an ancient and powerful land with a 
highly developed civilization when Greece and Rome were 
in their infancy. There were many factors which tended to 
make this civilization conservative, such as the regularity and 
dependability of the weather-exemplified by the annual flood­
ing of the Nile, on which all Egypt depended-the comparative 
ease with which one could make a bare living, the uniformity 
of the landscape and of living conditions, the comparative 
isolation from the rest of the world. These conditions may 
have fitted in naturally with what seems to have been a con­
servatism innate in the temperament of the Egyptians. 

This nation achieved advances in government, art and 
science which gave it a commanding position in the ancient 
world; but after a long period of leadership and prosperity, 
Egypt was finally conquered by the Persians under Cam­
byses, in 525 B.C., and from that date to modern times, the 



122 GLANVILLE DOWNEY [GBS 1 

native Egyptians were the subjects of foreign conquerors or 
of foreign dynasties which had come to be more or less 
Egyptianized, such as the Ptolemies. These Egyptians were 
"the natives" and they kept up as much as they could of 
their language and their religion, all the while conscious that 
the land was theirs and that it was being ruled by outsiders. 

The outsiders who concern us in this study were, first, 
the Greeks. and then the Romans. Greek civilization was 
planted in Egypt by Alexander the Great and his successors, 
the Ptolemies, in the latter part of the fourth century B.C. 

The new rulers produced a magnificent Greek capital, Alex­
andria, but this was a fa<;ade, not characteristic of the rest of 
Egypt. Greek naturally began to be used everywhere for 
administration and business, and Greek education spread 
through the country, but it was for the benefit of the Greeks, 
and 'i,,'as organized in forms which set them apart from the 
Egyptians. 2 The natives were by no means completely Hel­
lenized. They continued to use their own language, even if 
they learned Greek, and the ancient religion was kept up so 
far as possible. For the lowest classes of the country people, 
the change in regime doubtless meant very little. Their 
lives were spent in an endless round of labor. The children 
could not be sent to school but had to be put to work as soon 
as possible. Most or all of these people were illiterate and 
this was a nat ural state of affairs in the Greek and Roman 
world at that time. The mind of a person in servile circum­
stances was regarded as being stunted and warped by the 
circumstances in which this person was fated to live, and so 
education was not considered either appropriate or feasible 
for the people who were born to be ruled by the people who 
were born to rule. 3 

• H. 1. Marrou, A History 0/ Education in Antiquity, transl. by George Lamb 
(New York, 1956), 109. 

S On the educational problems and points of view of the times, see the studies 
by the present writer, "Education and Public Problems as Seen by Themistius," 
Transactions 0/ the American Philological Association, 86 (1955), 291-307; "Edu­
cation in the Christian Roman Empire: Christian and Pagan Theories under Con­
stantine and his Successors," Speculum, 32 (1957), 48-61; "Ancient Education," 
Classical Journal, 52 (1957),337-345. 



1958] COPTIC CULTURE IN THE BYZANTINE WORLD 123 

When the Emperor Augustus annexed Egypt in 30 B.C.} 

the land was transformed into a Roman dependency different 
in status and function from the other Roman colonies. Egypt 
was looked upon as suited only to provide food and taxes for 
the use of the Roman state. Intellectually and spiritually 
Rome had no appreciable influence on Egypt, though Egypt 
exported its own religion to a certain extent, not always to 
the liking of the Roman authorities. As we might expect, 
the peasants continued to live in their daily grind. 

These were the terms on which the Egyptians lived 
during the years of the Roman Empire, while Christianity 
was beginning to spread through the Greek and Roman world. 
At the beginning of the fourth century of our era, that is, at 
the time when we start to see the development of the Roman 
Empire into the Byzantine Empire, we can observe different 
kinds of changes taking place. Christianity had been, first, 
officially recognized, and then officially approved. The au­
thoritarian state was established by the Emperors Diocletian 
and Constantine the Great, between the years 284 and 337, 
as a means of saving the Empire from the political and military 
dangers which had threatened to destroy it during the third 
century. The new capital, Constantinople, was to be the seat 
of the now strongly centralized and militarized government 
of the Christian Roman Empire. 

It is at this point that we can begin to observe the various 
factors 'which give Coptic culture its significance in history. 
The Later Roman Empire, as has been mentioned, was made 
up to a considerable extent of a number of originally sep­
arate nationalities whose land had been occupied either by 
Alexander the Great, or later by the Romans. These nation­
alities, in Anatolia, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Gaul, Spain, 
Britain, were held together by Roman administration and 
law and by the use of the official languages, Latin and Greek, 
but of course the culture and the languages only penetrated 
to a limited depth. There was no universal free education, 
with state supported schools and universities, such as we are 
accustomed to today, and there were many regions where the 
old languages, cultures and religions were still very much 
alive. Sometimes the natives learned Latin or Greek, more 



124 GLANVILLE DOWNEY [GBS 1 

or less, often they did not. Even in a great capital like Antioch 
in Syria many of the working people spoke only Syriac, and 
in many parts of the country districts of Syria, Greek was 
little known. It was the same in Egypt. A man might know 
Greek if he were engaged in business, but his natural speech, 
at home and among his fellows, and in church, was the native 
Egyptian tongue. 

In broad terms, this is the background of the ethnic 
composition of the Byzantine Empire, and these are the 
ingredients of many of the religious, social, political and 
economic problems that we find in the history of the world 
at that time. The national regions, taken all together, con­
tributed a very characteristic stamp, and the Byzantine Em­
pire was at this time an ecumenical state, absorbing and 
transforming various traditions, though the roots of these 
traditions continued their separate existence, and were quite 
visible, as roots. At the same time, as one might expect, each 
region, with its own history and its own geography, presented 
individual aspects. A few comparisons will show what was 
involved. Egypt resembled Syria in that each had a native 
stock which continued to speak its own language, but the 
two regions differed in their more ancient history. Save for 
a brief period under the Hittites, Syria had never been the 
seat of an indigenous and highly sophisticated and successful 
civilization, as Egypt had been. Instead, Syria had been a 
major highway for both commerce and conquest originating 
outside its borders. Egypt had never been a highway or melt­
ing pot like Syria; but it still possessed and kept up, so far as it 
could, its own original and ancient civilization, including the 
language, although it was under foreign domination. Pales­
tine, again, differed from both Syria and Egypt, for the ancient 
Hebrew nation had left Palestine, and for a long time it had 
been only one of the poorer and more backward Roman 
provInces. 

So, just as there were two kinds of people in Egypt, 
Greeks and natives, there were inevitably two forms of Chris­
tianity. According to legend, the church at Alexandria had 
been founded by St. Mark. The evidence for this is not good, 
but we can be reasonably sure that a city such as Alexandria 



1958J COPTIC CULTURE IN THE BYZANTINE WORLD 125 

would have received a Greek-speaking Christian mission fairly 
early, just as there was a Greek-speaking mission at Antioch 
in early times. An eminent scholar4 has written that" ... no 
city has affected the development of the Christian religion 
more profoundly than has Alexandria .... " There is much to 
justify this statement. The Alexandrian scholars, Clement 
and Origen, made a contribution of the first importance 
toward the absorption of the Greek intellectual tradition into 
Christian theology, and when Arianism, early in the fourth 
century, raised the question of how the true nature of Christ 
was to be defined in terms of humanity and divinity, and co­
existence with the Father, it was Athanasius of Alexandria 
who led the defense of the orthodox faith. Continuing the 
ancient learned tradition of the great Museum or library 
established at Alexandria in the Ptolemaic period, and also 
the tradition of Hellenistic Jewish scholarship represented by 
Philo J udaeus, the Alexandrian theological school was one 
of the two best known centers of Greek Christian scholar­
ship, the other being the school of Antioch. Between them, 
these two centers represented the two types of exegesis, the 
allegorical method and the literal method, which at that time 
represented the two points of view in scientific theology. 

The Coptic Christian tradition in the early period we 
know less about, but its history is still characteristic. No 
specific indication has been preserved of how early the Church 
began its work among the native, non-Greek-speaking Egyp­
tians. All that we know is that the Church was using the 
Coptic language by the latter part of the third century, and 
that the Scriptures had been translated into the two chief 
dialects, Sahidic and Bohairic, which represented what is 
rather loosely called the Coptic language. In reality, of course, 
Coptic was simply the old Egyptian vernacular written in 
Greek letters, with some Egyptian characters added to rep­
resent sounds not present in Greek. Coptic was still a develop­
ing language, being in somewhat the same relation to ancient 
Egyptian as Middle English is to Anglo-Saxon. The use of 

• J. M. Creed in The Legacy of Egypt, ed. by S. R. K. Glanville (Oxford, 
1942), 300. 



126 GLANVILLE DOWNEY [GBS 1 

Coptic for Christian writings had an important effect on the 
language-as it did in the case of other languages outside the 
Roman Empire-in enlarging and improving both the vocab­
ulary and the means for the expression of ideas; and as was 
natural, a good bit of the new vocabulary was taken over 
from Greek. 

Thanks to the preservation of the papyri and other docu­
ments, we are well informed as to the special characteristics 
of Coptic Christianity. The Copts were a deeply religious 
people in a very straightforward and simple fashion. Theolog­
ical speculation in the Greek manner was not a prime in­
terest of country people who were often illiterate or poorly 
educated and had to work hard for a living, nor could phil­
osophical theology be a leading concern of priests who them­
selves came from the same origin. It is characteristic that 
the commonest personal names were taken from the Old 
Testament-Abraham, Jacob, Aaron, Samuel and so on. We 
get a very strong impression of the popular religion from a 
number of sources. One of the recent very interesting dis­
coveries is the Prayer-Book of Bishop Serapion, a collection 
of prayers dating about 350.5 As the editors point out,6 the 
prayers are extremely pious and scriptural in both language 
and contents. They do not show a very wide circle of ideas, 
but they are natural and direct. 

The same impression, on wider terms, comes from the 
biography of St. Antony, the great ascetic leader, written in 
Greek by St. Athanasius of Alexandria, who had known Antony 
and other fathers who had retired to the desert to live lives 
of holiness, devoting themselves to prayer, fasting and manual 
labor.7 But Antony and the others kept in touch with the 
world, and they were looked upon by their lay brethren with 
admiration, pride and affection, and throngs of people, know­
ing Antony's piety and good sense, visited him to seek his 

"Bishop Serapion's Prayer Book, ed. by John Wordsworth (London, 1899). 
6 Gp. cit., 25. 
7 Athanasius' Life of St. Antony is now available in a translation by Robert T. 

Meyer, with excellent introduction and commentary, in the series lIAncient Chris­
tian Writers," 10 (Westminster, Maryland, 1950). The quotations from the bio­
graphy given here are taken, with grateful acknowledgement, from Professor 
Meyer's version. 



1958] COPTIC CULTURE IN THE BYZANTINE 'WORLD 127 

blessing or to be cured of ailments, physical or mental, or 
to get his advice in their personal difficulties (including busi­
ness disputes). Antony, Athanasius writes, was illiterate and 
knew only Coptic, though he came of a well-to-do family which 
owned a large farm and lived in comfortable circumstances. 
Athanasius writes that Antony preached a very simple form of 
faith, based on an intimate knowledge of the Bible, and that 
he taught a steady belief in the teaching of the Gospels. 
Athanasius (~ 16) quotes Antony as saying that "the Scrip­
tures are really sufficient for our instruction." Greek-speak­
ing priests and monks came from Alexandria to visit Antony 
and to discuss theology with him-and perhaps to impress him 
with their learning-but he silenced them, Athanasius says, by 
declaring that he thought that the main thing was to follow 
the teachings of Christ. Antony stood out as the representa­
tive of the simple faith of the uneducated Copts as contrasted 
with what these Copts would have thought of as the sophis­
ticated religion of the Platonizing scholars of Alexandria. 
Athanasius, himself a highly educated scholar in the Greek 
tradition, makes Antony say to his visitors from Alexandria 
(~ 78), "We Christians [i.e., we Coptic Christians] ... possess 
religious truth, not on the basis of Greek philosophical reason­
ing, but founded on the power of a faith vouchsafed us by 
God through Jesus Christ." Writing this in 357, after many 
years of struggle against Arianism, Athanasius must have really 
admired what he found in Antony and the other desert fathers, 
even though he knew that this type of faith would not answer 
the needs of people outside the Coptic area who had been 
accustomed to think in terms of Greek philosophy. 

At the same time Antony, as we have seen him in Ath­
anasius' biography, exemplified another characteristic aspect 
of Coptic Christianity, the lively belief in demons and the 
supernatural. We are told that on occasion Antony found it 
necessary to fight off whole swarms of demons and evil spirits 
who contrived the most ingenious and alluring forms of temp­
tation. The saint was always successful, and his triumphs, re­
corded gravely by the great theologian Athanasius, gave 
courage and confidence to all Coptic Egypt. For these people, 
demons really existed and they attacked not only Antony hut 



128 GLANVILLE DOWNEY [GBS I 

everybody else, lay and clerical. The struggle against them­
the very need to struggle against them-would among other 
things tend to develop, as a regular part of the Coptic char­
acter, a certain toughness and independence, and a concen­
tration of purpose, which some other peoples perhaps would 
not have occasion to acquire. 

It seems, indeed, to have been this awareness of the need 
for the individual to exercise himself against the active forces 
of evil, coupled with a willingness and even eagerness to lead 
a hard life, which was responsible for the early appearance of 
asceticism in Egypt. The Copts took the lead in this form of 
Christian living, and provided examples of both solitary with­
drawal and life in ascetic communities which were copied 
throughout the Christian world. As a race inured to hard­
ship, the Copts looked upon ascetic discipline as a natural 
means of achieving a special degree of holiness, and in some 
cases at least the regime was healthy; St. Antony lived to be a 
hundred and five. The form of devotion is a little difficult 
for some people to understand now, and it was one of the fea­
tures of Christianity which was most ridiculed by the pagans. 
But the plain people admired and revered these athletes of 
Christ, as they were called, and looked upon their achieve­
ment as bringing blessing and strength to the whole body of 
Christians. This is a characteristic and instructive example of 
the sense of community, of membership in the body of Christ, 
and the sharing with others, which was characteristic of the 
early church. 

There was another element in the Coptic world which 
has not been given as much prominence by scholars as it 
should have, namely the high degree of illiteracy. This is a 
factor in ancient history which all students are aware of, 
though we sometimes take it for granted and do not stop to 
think of all the consequences which it brought with it. Per­
haps, also, we do not always think what the causes of illiteracy 
were, and what they tell us about a world in which it was 
taken for granted that a sometimes substantial portion of the 
population was unlettered.8 

8 See my paper in the Classical Journal, cited above, n. 3. 



1958] COPTIC CULTURE IN THE BYZANTINE WORLD 129 

In the case of Egypt in the Roman and Christian era, we 
have ample evidence, in the papyri and ostraka, of the wide­
spread lack of education. The Coptic clergy and monks came 
from the common people, and to begin with, at least, we 
would expect the clergy to be not much more literate than 
their neighbors. The original ascetic groups and monasteries 
were in fact made up of laymen. The illiteracy of St. Antony 
has already been mentioned. Other evidence is characteristic. 
The church historian Socrates9 describes an argument over a 
typical Christological point between the Patriarch Theophilus 
of Alexandria, who held office from 385 to 412, and the monks 
of the desert. Socrates remarks quite casually that most of the 
monks were illiterate, and points out the effect of this upon 
the way in which the Patriarch was able to conduct his side 
of the controversy. There is no need to go into detail about 
the advantage which the literate Patriarch would have over 
the ignorant monks, though the monks had their own special 
weapon in the form of a mass invasion of Alexandria, in which 
they put their side of the controversy into the form of mob 
action.10 

In addition, we possess special evidence as to the type of 
education, or lack of it, among some of the clergy. This comes 
from a number of ostraka, or bits of broken pottery, which 
were used as writing material by the poorest people, those who 
were so poor that they could not afford papyrus. A collection 
of ostraka written in Coptic have been recovered which once 
belonged to the correspondence files of Bishop Abraham of 
Hermonthis, who lived in the latter part of the sixth century.ll 
Bishop Abraham was accustomed to receive, from candidates 
for holy orders, written statements of the amount of prepara­
tion which the candidates undertook to offer for examination 
before being ordained. One reason why the bishop had to be 

9 Eccl. hist., 6, 7. 

10 Charles Kingsley's historical novel Hypatia, which follows the ancient 
sources faithfully, gives an excellent picture of the life of the Christian com­
munity at Alexandria in this period. 

11 On the ostraka discussed here, and on the ancient accomplishments in 
memorizing the Bible or parts of it, see A. Deissmann, Light from the Ancient 
East, English translation (London, 1911), 210-215. 



130 GLANVILLE DOWNEY [CBS 1 

sure of this, apparently, was that the candidates might very 
well be illiterate. Some could perhaps read a little, but num­
bers of the ordinands mentioned in these humble memoranda 
could not write, and had to get someone to write for them. 
One ostrakon is addressed to the bishop by three candidates, 
Samuel, Jacob and Aaron, who have requested ordination 
as deacons. They state they are ready to observe the com­
mands and the canons and to be obedient, and to learn the 
Gospel of John by the end of Pentecost. If they do not learn 
it by heart, they agree that they will not be ordained. Each 
candidate is vouched for by two or three guarantors, and one 
of these, the priest Patermute, states that it was he who wrote 
the ostrakon, on request of the candidates. 

Other ostraka in the bishop's files show that he had set 
other candidates to learn by heart the Gospel of Matthew, 
or that of Mark, or other gospels, while one literate candidate 
was required to write out the Gospel of John, the theory 
being, evidently, that if he did this he would become fairly 
familiar with it. It looks as though the bishop set different 
tasks to different candidates in order to spread out the 
knowledge of the Scriptures among his clergy. 

Bishop Aphu of Oxyrhyncus once required a candidate 
for deacon's orders to learn twenty-five Psalms, two Epistles 
of St. Paul, and a portion of a gospel, actually not a heavy 
task if we remember that it was not uncommon for monks to 
know all the Psalms by heart, and that there is credible 
evidence that some people learned the whole Bible by heart 
and would recite it. All this, of course, was at a time when 
memorizing was much more practised than it is now. Naturally 
this illiteracy of the clergy would have been greater in the 
outlying districts and the little villages than in the large 
centers, but it is quite characteristic of the state of the people 
as a whole, and it gives us a rather striking picture of the 
Coptic Church. 

One more element in Coptic history needs to be taken 
into account. This concerns the situation which developed 
in Egypt as the monophysite controversy grew into a major 
political problem. Here we leave the Coptic part of the 
country and return to the world of imperial politics and 



1958] COPTIC CULTURE IN THE BYZANTINE WORLD 131 

theological scholarship at Alexandria. We must summarize 
here very briefly a large and complex subject which is set out 
more fully in various modern studies.12 As is well known, the 
debates over the understanding and proper statement of the 
nature of Christ, as composed in some way, difficult for humans 
to understand, of both divine and human elements, had oc­
cupied theologians for a long time. The question, of course, 
was whether our salvation is effected by a truly divine Christ, 
or by a Christ who was in reality human, in which case, of 
course, the value of the salvation would be perhaps open to 
question. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 had undertaken 
to find a definition of the Savior's nature which would be 
true and universally acceptable, but in order to try to assure 
the greatest acceptability, the definition was put in such terms 
that many earnest people could not subscribe to it. As a 
reaction, there grew up in both Egypt and Syria a Mono­
physite party, as it was called, which believed that the Divine 
Nature and the human nature of Christ coalesced, at the In­
carnation, into one composite nature, instead of remaining 
in two natures, as the definition of Chalcedon had it, without 
confusion, without change, without division or separation. 
The controversy that followed Chalcedon stirred up the bitter­
est passions in Syria and Egypt, for the Monophysites felt that 
they were preserving and defending the belief in our Lord's 
true divinity. The imperial government, with the respon­
sibility for bringing all its subjects to the true faith, employed 
force to put down the Monophysites and thereby inevitably 
provoked a hostility which grew from religious dissension 
to political opposition and then to agitation which inflamed 
the nationalism always latent in these regions. In Egypt, 
orthodoxy came to be synonymous with persecution by the 
imperial government, carried out through the instrumentality 
of the patriarchs who were arbitrarily sent to Alexandria and 
backed up by imperial troops. Monophysitism came to be a 
national creed, and every celebration of the Eucharist pro­
vided a chance for a demonstration of national solidarity. The 
government continued to use force, and when the Moslems 

12 One of the best treatments is that of E. L. Woodward, Christianity and 
Nationalism in the Later Roman Empire (London, 1916). 



132 GLANVILLE DOWNEY [CBS 1 

began their expansion in the seventh century, the Mono­
physites in Egypt and Syria welcomed them as better masters 
than the hated Constantinople government. Here again was 
a development which would turn the Copts in upon them­
selves and make them conscious of another barrier dividing 
them from the Empire. After the Council of Chalcedon, it 
has been pointed out, the Coptic documents use noticeably 
fewer Greek loan words. 

With our wisdom as students of the past we can see the 
strength of national pride in the Greeks and Copts which by 
itself would have kept them apart linguistically, and we can 
also perceive the work of the Universal Church which over­
came the language barrier. This seems to have been as far 
as any solution of the problem could have been carried in 
those times, and very likely it was not even thought of as a 
problem. 

Our natural reaction, based on our own experience of 
the work of the Church and of the responsibilities of modern 
governments, would be to say that the imperial authorities 
at Constantinople, or their representatives at Alexandria, 
ought to have given top priority to a free universal educa­
tional system which would have brought to the Copts both 
the Greek language and cultural heritage, and the famous 
political tradition of the Roman state. It would seem to have 
been possible, in the light of our own experience, to add these 
traditions to the Coptic language and cultural tradition. We 
should also perhaps look for some effort by the Church itself 
in Egypt to raise the standard of education among the native 
Christians and to give them literacy in Coptic at least. 

It looks as though no one in those days ever thought of 
attempting such things. Whether it would have been finan­
cially possible, from the point of view of that era, we cannot 
be sure, though it seems safe to say that if either the imperial 
government or the Church had thought the problem impor­
tant enough, means would have been found. The situation as 
it actually developed suggests two conclusions, or perhaps one 
should say two questions. One point is that education, by 
itself, was not always thought of as a necessary instrument of 
social and political unification. Certainly there were in-



1958] COPTIC CULTURE IN THE BYZANTINE WORLD 133 

dividuals, such as Themistius, the pagan orator and philos­
opher of the fourth century after Christ, who saw clearly the 
need, and also the means, of turning the barbarians into 
useful citizens of the Roman Empire;13 and the Emperor 
Justinian also had a glimpse of this;14 but there is no indica­
tion in the sources (at least so far as the present writer knows) 
that this question was consciously formulated and consciously 
faced. 

The other question that concerns us here is that of the 
role of the Greek-speaking Orthodox Church, which took 
such great pride, and found such great strength in the fact 
that it was the Church of the Greek-speaking and Greek­
educated people, reading and teaching the New Testament 
in the language in which it had been written, and at the same 
time the heir of classical Greek literature and philosophy, 
as well as of the political tradition of Alexander the Great, 
for example, who had brought Greek culture to Egypt. The 
Church had attempted to bring Christianity to all the people 
of Egypt by giving them the Scriptures in Coptic as well as 
in Greek. To this extent the Copts had been given a bond 
with the Greek-speaking element in Egypt that they had not 
had before. But to go beyond that, and to train the Copts 
in the Greek language, and the Greek philosophical and 
literary heritage, was quite another thing. This would have 
brought the Copts to be partakers in the national pride which 
the Greek-speaking members of the Orthodox Church had 
in common. If the Egyptians had been forced, or induced, 
by Alexander the Great, or his successors, to accept the Greek 
language and culture, then, when the time came, they would 
have become Greek-speaking Christians, like the Cappado­
cians in Anatolia, for example, who gave the Church such 
great leaders in the fourth century. However, this sequence 
of events had not occurred, and the Church apparently did 
not visualize, in the terms in which we today see the situation, 
any need or desirability of Hellenizing the Copts. 

13 See my study of Themistius, cited above, n. 3. 

14 This subject was treated by me in an article, "Justinian's View of Christian­
ity and the Greek Classics," Anglican Theological Review, 40, No.1 (1958), 13-22. 



134 GLANVILLE DOWNEY [CBS 1 

But the Copts themselves might have had something to 
say . We cannot venture to say whether or not they would 
have been able or willing, if given the means, to become 
Hellenized. Some individuals very likely did, or at least 
they became bilingual in Coptic and Greek. As one looks at 
their very characteristic and individual art, which has a 
ruggedness and a concentrated strength and a special char­
acter all its own, one wonders whether the Copts may not 
really have preferred to keep to themselves.15 If they had had 
any interest in reviving ancient Egyptian art forms, or in copy­
ing the Graeco-Roman style, one would think that even 
mediocre artists, with any desire to experiment and practice, 
could have produced imitations which would be recognizable 
as such. And there are certainly real technical achievements, 
in such things as friezes and architectural decorations, which 
indicate a skill among the Coptic artists which suggests that 
they were capable of copying the finest Hellenistic work. 
Apparently this art is what the Copts developed for them­
selves, and we can see in it not only the bright colors and hard 
outlines which would be needed to make the art stand up 
in the powerful sunlight of Egypt, but the mental toughness 
of the Egyptians at all periods. 

If we try to think, finally, about the meaning of all these 
factors for Byzantine history-regardless, now, of how the 
Byzantines saw or did not see the questions-we can draw some 
characteristic lessons from Egypt. Given the conditions of the 
time and place, the arrival of Christianity had not been suf­
ficient, by itself, to absorb or re-direct the feelings of national 
solidarity which any people like the Copts would inevitably 
have. The gap, apparently, could not be wholly closed by 
religion alone. But what really caused the gap is the impor­
tant question, and here the lack of educational opportunity 
and effort may be the answer. It would seem that illiteracy 
must have been a major factor. Nationalism undoubtedly 
played a part, as many scholars have rightly insisted, and 

15 Convenient handbooks illustrating the art of the Copts are Pagan and 
Christian Egypt, ed. by J. D. Cooney, the catalogue of an exhibition held in the 
Brooklyn Museum in 1941; and Late Egyptian and Coptic Art, An Introduction 
to the Collections in the Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, 1943). 



1958] COPTIC CULTURE IN THE BYZANTINE WORLD 135 

nationalism embraces the ethnic and linguistic factors which 
make for divisiveness. But illiteracy represents the factors 
which keep nationalism alive. It is the implications behind 
this situation which concern us in our study of the larger 
history of the times. Here we can see one of the strengths, 
as well as one of the weaknesses, of the Byzantine tradition. 
The strength, throughout the Empire's territory, and through­
out its history, lay in the national pride based on the Greek 
culture and the Greek Church. The weakness stemmed from 
the ancient Greek view, still surviving, whether consciously 
or unconsciously, of the natural barrier between Greek and 
barbarian, which made it impossible to visualize the thorough 
Hellenisation of the Copts and other similar national groups 
which had always, in the Graeco-Roman view, been in inferior 
positions, sometimes almost in a state of serfdom. At the same 
time, there may be another source of strength, not always 
recognized today, in the presence of people such as the Copts 
within the Empire. It is true that their discontent, aggravated 
by the imperial government's policy in the Monophysite con­
troversy, facilitated the "Moslem occupation of Egypt, just as 
the similar tension in Syria operated in the same way. But the 
Copts did, for a very long time, make it possible to keep the 
agricultural economy of Egypt going, and so to keep up a food 
supply which was vitally necessary for the Empire as a whole.