The Desert Years: The Third Exile Among the Monks

The third and longest exile (356–362) sent Athanasius into the Egyptian desert, where a network of monks hid him from imperial agents for six years. Far from silencing him, the exile made him prolific: the History of the Arians, the Apology to Constantius, the Apology for His Flight, On the Councils, and — with a dating note — the Life of Antony belong to these years. This file examines the desert network that protected him, the works written in hiding, his deep bond with Egyptian monasticism including the Pachomian testimony, and the lasting alliance between bishop and desert that the exile forged.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Into the Desert

On the night of 8–9 February 356, soldiers under the general Syrianus broke into the church of Theonas in Alexandria during a night vigil, intending to seize Athanasius. According to his own account in the Apology for His Flight, he refused to leave until the congregation was safe and slipped away in the confusion. With a homoian (semi-Arian) intruder, George of Cappadocia, soon installed in his see by the Emperor Constantius II, and with imperial agents searching for him, Athanasius did what an Alexandrian bishop in his position could do: he disappeared into the vast monastic hinterland of Egypt, the desert of Nitria, Kellia, the Thebaid, and the Pachomian houses of the south.

He was, in David Brakke’s phrase, protected by “an absolutely faithful” network of monks. The desert was the one place in Egypt where the imperial administration could not easily reach, and where a bishop who had spent decades cultivating the monastic movement could count on shelter and silence. For roughly six years (February 356 – February 362) the most wanted churchman in the empire lived under the protection of men who would not betray him (Brakke, Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism, Oxford: Clarendon, 1995).

The Works Written in Hiding

The desert exile was Athanasius’s most productive literary period. Hidden and at leisure to write, and with the homoian triumph at Rimini and Seleucia (359) demanding an answer, he composed a remarkable sequence of works:

The History of the Arians (Historia Arianorum) — a polemical narrative of the Arian party’s machinations and the imperial persecution of Nicene bishops, written for the monks and notable for its sharp attack on Constantius’s interference in the Church.
The Apology to Constantius (Apologia ad Constantium) — a defense addressed to the emperor against the charges that had been used to justify the assault on his see.
The Apology for His Flight (Apologia de Fuga) — a justification of his decision to flee rather than court martyrdom, arguing from scriptural precedent that flight in persecution is legitimate.
On the Councils (De Synodis) — his analysis of the councils of Ariminum (Rimini) and Seleucia of 359, defending the Nicene homoousios against the homoian formula.
The Letters to Serapion — in which he defended the full divinity of the Holy Spirit against those (“Tropici”) who would make the Spirit a creature.

The dates of several of these are bunched tightly in 357–358, and the older handbooks sometimes compress them into a single year of intense output (the works of the third exile are catalogued in NPNF II/4 and in fourthcentury.com).

The Life of Antony — a dating note. The Vita Antonii, Athanasius’s biography of the desert father Antony the Great, is traditionally associated with this period and is usually dated to c. 357 (shortly after Antony’s death in 356), which would place its composition during or immediately around the third exile. [Disputed: most scholars date the Life of Antony to c. 356–362, i.e., the years of the third exile, consistent with Antony’s death in 356; some place it slightly later, c. 357–360, and the precise year is not fixed by an internal date. The association with the desert exile is secure even where the exact year is not.] The treatment of the Life of Antony as a work in its own right belongs to Section 05; here it matters as a fruit of the desert years and as the literary expression of the alliance the exile cemented.

The Bond With Egyptian Monasticism

Athanasius’s relationship with the monks was not the improvisation of a fugitive but the deepening of a policy he had pursued throughout his episcopate. From early in his tenure he had courted the desert, visiting monastic settlements, corresponding with monks, and drawing them into the orbit of the Alexandrian see. David Brakke’s study argues that Athanasius worked deliberately to make monasticism Athanasian — to bind the prestige of the ascetics to the Nicene cause and to the authority of the bishop (Brakke, Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism).

This involved a definite ecclesiology. Athanasius pressed the view that the monks, however holy, should be subordinate to the clergy and integrated into the structure of the Church rather than standing as an independent charismatic movement; he appointed monks to clerical office and intervened in monastic affairs to keep the desert aligned with the hierarchy. During his exile he also urged the monks to discriminate in their famous hospitality — to withhold communion and welcome from Arian visitors — turning the desert’s openness into a frontier of the Nicene cause (Brakke, Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism).

The Pachomian testimony. The Pachomian communities of Upper Egypt — the cenobitic federation founded by Pachomius — preserved their own memory of Athanasius, recorded in the Pachomian Lives and related sources. These tell of Athanasius’s visits to the Thebaid, of the Pachomian leaders’ loyalty to him, and of his involvement in the community’s affairs: he is remembered brokering peace between rival Pachomian leaders and effectively confirming the succession of leadership after the death of a superior. The Pachomian sources thus independently attest, from the monks’ own side, the bond that the Athanasian writings assert from the bishop’s side — a relationship of mutual recognition in which the great cenobitic federation regarded the exiled patriarch as its rightful bishop and ally (the Pachomian Lives and the First Greek Life of Pachomius; cf. Brakke, Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism).

What the Exile Did for the Alliance of Episcopate and Desert

The third exile was, in the long view, a decisive moment in the integration of the monastic movement into the institutional Church. A bishop hunted by the empire survived precisely because the desert sheltered him; in return, the desert gained, in Athanasius, an episcopal patron who lent its asceticism doctrinal weight and ecclesial standing. The Life of Antony, written out of these years, broadcast the desert ideal to the whole Mediterranean world and presented the model ascetic as a champion of Nicene orthodoxy and a friend of the bishop — fusing holiness and right doctrine in a single figure.

The consequence outlasted Athanasius. The pattern he established — the monk as ally of the Nicene bishop, the desert as a reservoir of orthodox prestige, the integration of charismatic asceticism under episcopal authority — became a template for the relationship between hierarchy and monasticism across the later Church, East and West. The years in hiding, which his enemies intended as his disappearance, instead produced both his most influential book and the consolidation of the alliance that would carry Nicene orthodoxy to victory after his death.

References

Athanasius of Alexandria. Apologia ad Constantium, Apologia de Fuga, Historia Arianorum, De Synodis, and Epistulae ad Serapionem [PG 25–26]. Translated in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 4 (NPNF II/4), ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace.
Athanasius. Vita Antonii (Life of Antony) [PG 26]. Translated in NPNF II/4; also The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus, trans. Robert C. Gregg, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1980).
Brakke, David. Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. (Published in paperback as Athanasius and Asceticism, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.)
Barnes, Timothy D. Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
The Lives of Pachomius (Bohairic and First Greek Lives) — the Pachomian testimony to Athanasius’s relations with the Upper Egyptian monasteries; used as the primary monastic attestation.
“Athanasius” chronological chart, Fourth Century Christianity (fourthcentury.com) — used to locate the documented dates of the third exile (February 356 – 21 February 362) and the works composed within it.