Encyclical Letter
For For historians of the Arian years; a short protest letter.
Length About 4,000 words, under an hour.
In 339 Athanasius was driven from Alexandria a second time. With imperial favor shifting against him, a rival faction installed Gregory of Cappadocia as bishop of the city, backed by civil force. Athanasius, in flight, addressed this letter to the bishops of Egypt and Libya, his own ecclesiastical province, to report what had happened and to summon their support before the wider church learned a different version of events.
The letter is a document of grievance before it is a theological argument. Athanasius describes the installation of Gregory as an act of violence rather than canonical process: soldiers occupying churches, clergy assaulted, consecrated virgins abused, the Eucharist profaned by intruders who had no standing to celebrate it. He frames these events not as a local dispute over a see but as an assault on the Nicene faith itself, carried out by Arian sympathizers who could not win the argument in council and so resorted to the magistrate and the mob. The rhetorical strategy is deliberate: Athanasius positions himself as the victim of lawless aggression and his opponents as men who abandon doctrine for power, inviting his fellow bishops to recognize their own vulnerability in his.
The letter matters less as spiritual instruction than as primary evidence for how the Arian controversy was actually fought — through exile, imperial rescript, and contested succession to major sees, as much as through creeds and councils. It shows Athanasius constructing, early and deliberately, the narrative of persecuted orthodoxy that would shape his later apologetic writings and his lasting reputation. Historians of the fourth-century church rely on it for detail unavailable elsewhere about the events of 339 in Alexandria.
This is a document for those studying the mechanics of the Arian controversy, the politics of fourth-century episcopal succession, or Athanasius's self-presentation as a persecuted bishop — not a text of contemplative or devotional instruction, and not the place to begin for readers wanting Athanasius's theology rather than his politics.
Editions
External off-site sources
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- OTHER Epistola Encyclica (New Advent) PDTrans. Archibald Robertson · 1892Archibald Robertson's NPNF translation (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. 4, 1892), revised from Newman's Oxford version, on New Advent with the NPNF headings and some notes. For historians.
- OTHER Epistola Encyclica (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 Arian years.
- OTHER Epistola Encyclica (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 Arian years.
- PDF Epistola Encyclica (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 Epistola Encyclica (Internet Archive (Library of the Fathers, 1843)) PDTrans. Miles Atkinson · Ed. John Henry Newman · 1843A scan of the Oxford Library of the Fathers volume of 1843, Historical Tracts of S. Athanasius, translated by Miles Atkinson and edited by John Henry Newman with his notes; this work is one of the eight tracts in it. Page images of the first English version; for historians of the Arian years.
- PDF Epistola Encyclica (Internet Archive (Migne PG 25)) PD Greek and Latin1857The Greek text with Migne's Latin translation in parallel columns, in volume 25 of the Patrologia Graeca, volume 25 (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