ABSTRACT

In the previous chapter, I explored how some early Christian writers used Egyptians/Egypt, Ethiopians/Ethiopia, and Blacks/blackness to symbolize the perceived vices and sins that threatened their Christian communities during the second and third centuries CE. In this chapter, I examine several monastic stories from the fourth and fifth centuries CE that exemplify how Ethiopians and Blacks became symbolic tropes in narratives about sexual immorality (porneia).1 These tropes were apart of ethno-political rhetorics that emphasized the importance of early Christian asceticism.2 They also served to shape the theological, cultural, and ideological understandings of monastic Christianity of late antique Egypt.