Circular to the Bishops of Egypt and Libya
For For historians and students of the creeds of the 350s; a pastoral warning letter.
Length About 11,000 words, under an hour.
In February of 356, imperial troops broke into the church of Theonas in Alexandria during a vigil, and Athanasius was driven from his see for the third time, taking refuge among the monks of the Egyptian desert. From this hiding he wrote to the bishops of Egypt and Libya, the provinces most directly under threat as the Homoian party, backed by the emperor Constantius II, moved to install its own candidates in orthodox sees and to press new creedal formulas on wavering clergy. The letter is a circular meant to steady an episcopate under immediate political and physical pressure.
Athanasius's argument is essentially historical rather than speculative: he insists that nothing doctrinally new is on offer. What his opponents present as reasonable, moderate language is, he argues, the same teaching of Arius already examined and condemned at Nicaea in 325, merely repackaged to pass unnoticed. He walks through the earlier verdicts against Arius, recalls the judgments of bishops and councils that had already settled the question, and treats the current crisis as a recurrence rather than a genuine new controversy. The rhetorical burden of the letter falls on continuity — showing that to accept the new formulas is to reopen a case already closed, and that resistance is not innovation but fidelity to a settled judgment. He urges the bishops not to be maneuvered into subscription by appeals to unity or by the apparent plausibility of compromise language, and frames steadfastness itself as the orthodox position, since the alternative has already been named and rejected by the universal church.
The letter belongs to the body of occasional writing Athanasius produced across his repeated exiles, documents written not to develop trinitarian doctrine systematically but to hold a scattered and endangered church together through a specific emergency. Its lasting interest lies less in theological innovation than in method: it shows how fourth-century bishops fought doctrinal battles through correspondence, appeals to prior conciliar authority, and the deliberate collapsing of present controversy into past condemnation — a tactic that shaped how Nicene orthodoxy was defended and remembered.
Who should read this: historians of the Arian controversy and students of Athanasius's career will find it a sharp primary witness to the pressures of 356 and to his polemical technique. Readers wanting a constructive account of Nicene trinitarian theology should turn instead to the Orations against the Arians; this letter is occasional, partisan, and written for survival, not a treatise in doctrine.
Editions
External off-site sources
Free downloads
- OTHER Ad Episcopos Aegypti et Libyae (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 and students of the creeds.
- OTHER Ad Episcopos Aegypti et Libyae (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 of the 350s.
- OTHER Ad Episcopos Aegypti et Libyae (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 of the 350s.
- PDF Ad Episcopos Aegypti et Libyae (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 Episcopos Aegypti et Libyae (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 creeds of the 350s.
- PDF Ad Episcopos Aegypti et Libyae (Documenta Catholica Omnia (Greek, PG 25)) PD Greek and Latin1857The Greek text with its Latin translation, cut from volume 25 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 Episcopos Aegypti et Libyae (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