Encyclical Letter

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.