Circular to the Bishops of Egypt and Libya

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.