Letter to Epictetus

The Epistula ad Epictetum is a letter Athanasius of Alexandria sent to Epictetus, bishop of Corinth, in the last years of his life, after Epictetus had forwarded to him written records of disputes that had broken out in his church. The Arian controversy over the Son's relation to the Father had largely been fought to a conclusion, but the Corinthian quarrels concerned something else: how the Word is related to the flesh he took. Athanasius opens by expressing dismay that people who confess the faith of Nicaea should be raising such questions at all, and he describes some of the proposals as ones he is ashamed even to set down in writing. He writes briefly, by design, and asks Epictetus to use the letter to bring the contending parties to agreement.

The letter answers two opposite errors with a single rule. On one side were those who said the body of Christ was consubstantial with the Godhead, or that the Word had changed himself into flesh, or that the body came from heaven and was derived from the Word's own substance rather than from Mary; some drew the conclusion that the Trinity had become a Tetrad. On the other side were those who held that the Word came upon a man as he came upon the prophets, so that the one born of Mary was a man separately joined to the Word. Against the first, Athanasius insists on Luke, John, Galatians and Hebrews: the Word became flesh, born of a woman, sharing our flesh and blood, taking a body of Adam's stock from Mary, truly human and not of the divine essence. The Word did not become something other than himself, and the Trinity remains a Trinity after the incarnation as before it, because the body is not a fourth divine person but the Word's own instrument. Against the second, he insists that the body was the Word's own body, not a man he adopted, so that what the body suffered on the cross can properly be said of the Word who made it his, even though the Word in his own nature is impassible. The whole argument rests on the conviction that salvation depends on both halves: unless the body is genuinely ours it cannot heal us, and unless it is genuinely the Word's the healing has no power.

The letter became one of the most widely cited Christological texts of the patristic period. Epiphanius copied it in full into his Panarion against the Apollinarians, Cyril of Alexandria appealed to it against Nestorius and complained that a tampered version was in circulation, and it was read into the acts of the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon as a test of orthodoxy. Its compact formulation of the Word's own body, suffering in the flesh while impassible in nature, supplied later definitions with much of their vocabulary.

Who should read this: those who want to see the Chalcedonian settlement in its earliest and briefest form, and pastors facing confusion about the humanity of Christ. It is not for readers looking for an introduction to Athanasius; it assumes the Nicene faith and argues from it rather than for it.