Synodal Letter to the Bishops of Africa
For For historians of the creeds after Ariminum; a short synodal letter.
Length About 4,500 words, under an hour.
This synodal letter was issued late in Athanasius's career, between 368 and 372, written in Greek in the name of a synod of Egyptian and Libyan bishops gathered around him and addressed to the bishops of the African provinces. It responds to a specific agitation: parties sympathetic to Homoian or Arian positions were pressing African bishops to treat the Nicene Creed as still open to debate and to convene a fresh council that might revisit or soften its terms, above all the word homoousios. Athanasius writes to stop this proposal before it gains ground.
The letter's argument is structural rather than merely polemical. Athanasius insists that the very call for a new synod to reconsider Nicaea is itself the danger, since it concedes that a matter settled by the whole Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit remains uncertain. He rehearses the history of the Council of Nicaea in 325, defends the precision of homoousios against charges of ambiguity or innovation, and argues that the bishops who framed it did so with full deliberation, not under duress or confusion. Running beneath the specific vocabulary dispute is a claim about conciliar authority itself: a council that has rightly confessed the apostolic faith does not require periodic re-litigation, and the demand for endless reconsideration is a tactic for destabilizing the truth rather than a genuine search for it.
This letter belongs to a small cluster of synodal writings from Athanasius's final years, alongside the Tomus ad Antiochenos and his letter to Jovian, in which he works to consolidate the Nicene settlement after decades of imperial pressure and shifting creeds. It shows him acting less as a combatant defining new terms and more as an elder statesman securing what had already been won, and it became an important witness for how the ancient Church began to think about ecumenical councils as closed and authoritative rather than perpetually revisable. Later writers on conciliar theology and the reception of Nicaea drew on precisely this claim.
Who should read this: students of the fourth-century Trinitarian controversy and of the early development of conciliar authority will find it a compact, sharply argued primary source. It is not devotional reading and assumes familiarity with the Arian controversy and the Nicene Creed; readers wanting an introduction to Athanasius's theology should start elsewhere, such as On the Incarnation, before coming to this late and highly occasional piece.
Editions
External off-site sources
Free downloads
- OTHER Ad Afros Epistola Synodica (New Advent) PDTrans. Archibald Robertson · 1892Archibald Robertson's NPNF translation (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. 4, 1892), on New Advent with the NPNF headings and some notes. For historians of the creeds.
- OTHER Ad Afros Epistola Synodica (CCEL) PDTrans. Archibald Robertson · 1892Archibald Robertson's 1892 translation on the Christian Classics Ethereal Library's reading pages for volume 4 of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, with the text under their headings and the NPNF footnotes kept. The same text as New Advent's, free of its revisions; for historians of the creeds after Ariminum.
- OTHER Ad Afros Epistola Synodica (Wikisource) PDTrans. Archibald Robertson · 1892Archibald Robertson's 1892 translation in Wikisource's transcription of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 4: one page per section, footnotes kept, plain text that reads well on a phone. For historians of the creeds after Ariminum.
- PDF Ad Afros Epistola Synodica (Internet Archive (NPNF2-04 scan)) PDTrans. Archibald Robertson · 1892A scan of the 1892 volume of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers devoted to Athanasius (University of Toronto copy), with Robertson's translations, his long prolegomena and the notes as printed. Page images of the whole book; this work is in it, for readers who want the text as published.
- PDF Ad Afros Epistola Synodica (Internet Archive (Library of the Fathers, 1881)) PDTrans. William Bright · 1881A scan of William Bright's Later Treatises of S. Athanasius (Oxford Library of the Fathers, 1881), his translation with notes and an appendix on Cyril and Theodoret; this work is one of the eight treatises in it. A second English version beside Robertson's; for historians of the creeds after Ariminum.
- 🎧 AUDIO Ad Afros Epistola Synodica (LibriVox — Later Treatises (Bright))Trans. William Bright · 2022A free LibriVox reading of William Bright's 1881 translation, one section of a six-hour recording of his Later Treatises; this work's section plays from the project page. Complete.
- PDF Ad Afros Epistola Synodica (Documenta Catholica Omnia (Greek, PG 26)) PD Greek and Latin1857The Greek text with its Latin translation, cut from volume 26 of Migne's Patrologia Graeca into a single PDF by Documenta Catholica Omnia. Just this work; for readers of Greek or Latin.Much harder than the work: Greek and Latin only, no English translation
- PDF Ad Afros Epistola Synodica (Internet Archive (Migne PG 26)) PD Greek and Latin1857The Greek text with Migne's Latin translation in parallel columns, in volume 26 of the Patrologia Graeca, volume 26 (1857), scanned whole on the Internet Archive; this work is in it. For readers of Greek or Latin.Much harder than the work: Greek and Latin only, no English translation