‘Legal representation’ of monastic communities in late antique papyri

While focusing on the issues such as spirituality, faith, prayer, and discipline, the late antique literary discourse pays little attention to the engagement of monks in the mundane realities of daily life. The symbolic significance of the total withdrawal from the earthly matters have paved its way into common imagination of the monastic existence. One must, however, remain cautious while attempting to translate monastic writings into the reality of day-to-day life of a monk in Egypt. As shown by numerous papyri, social and economic relations between monks and the surrounding world were not sporadic, but an inevitable element of the monastic movement. The picture of Egyptian monasticism depicts a web of contacts with the ‘outside world’ and an entanglement of religious landscape in the local economy. In this article, I discuss only one aspect of the much broader issue, that is the existence of ‘legal capacity’ of monastic communities in late antique Egypt. I address the problem of ‘legal representation’ of monasteries as outlined in the sources of legal practice. For a lawyer, these observations are all the more stimulating as there has been an ongoing debate whether ‘legal persons’ as such existed at all in Roman law, and whether we could talk about anything approaching our current understanding of ‘legal personality’.