The Festal Letters as Spiritual Theology

Each year the Bishop of Alexandria announced to the churches of Egypt the date of Pascha and the beginning of the Lenten fast. Athanasius’ annual Festal (Paschal) Letters are the great neglected witness to him as pastor rather than only polemicist: in them the Paschal mystery is the center of the Christian year, fasting and almsgiving are bound together as the shape of repentance, and the whole ascetical life is ordered toward the feast. Long lost in Greek, the corpus was recovered in an ancient Syriac version in the nineteenth century, and remains a primary source for both his spirituality and the chronology of his episcopate.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

What the Festal Letters Are

After the Council of Nicaea (325) entrusted the computation of the date of Easter to the see of Alexandria — with its astronomical learning — the Alexandrian patriarch’s task each year was to calculate Pascha and to notify the bishops and faithful of Egypt, Libya, and beyond when to celebrate the Resurrection and when to begin the preparatory fast. The Festal Letters (also called Paschal or Encyclical Letters) are these annual circulars. Athanasius wrote them across his long and turbulent episcopate (328–373), and they double as a pastoral homily: each takes the approach of Pascha as the occasion for a sustained meditation on repentance, fasting, charity, and the meaning of the feast (NPNF II/4, introduction to the Festal Letters; Cureton, introduction to The Festal Letters of Athanasius, 1848).

The Paschal Feast as the Center

In Athanasius’ vision the entire spiritual year orbits Pascha. The feast is not merely the commemoration of a past event but the believer’s annual entry into the passage (“Pascha” he connects with the Passover crossing) from death to life, from bondage to freedom, from sin to communion with God. He repeatedly frames the Lenten season as a journey toward the feast, so that fasting is never an end in itself but a preparation for joy. “Let us keep the feast,” he urges his people, “not with the old leaven… but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (cf. 1 Corinthians 5:8) — the moral renewal that makes the celebration real (Athanasius, Festal Letters, e.g. Letter 1; Letter 5; trans. NPNF II/4). The feast is the horizon against which all asceticism is measured.

Fasting and Its Purpose

The Festal Letters are one of the richest early sources on the purpose of fasting in Christian spirituality. For Athanasius, the fast is therapeutic and preparatory, not punitive. Its aims are: to purify the soul and quiet the passions so the mind can attend to God; to express and enact repentance; to identify the faithful with Christ’s own forty days and with the saints who fasted; and to free resources and attention for prayer and for the poor. Fasting that is merely abstinence from food, without the corresponding turning of the heart, he regards as empty — the bodily discipline must be matched by purity of life, almsgiving, and the renunciation of vice (Athanasius, Festal Letters 1, 3, 6; trans. NPNF II/4). The fast announces the feast; it is ordered to Pascha and to the deifying communion that Pascha celebrates (cross-link Theosis in Athanasius).

Almsgiving

Athanasius consistently binds fasting to almsgiving (eleemosyne), in the tradition of Isaiah 58 — the “fast that God chooses” is to share bread with the hungry. The food and means spared by fasting are to be turned toward the poor; charity is the fast made visible and effective. To fast while neglecting the needy is, for Athanasius, to miss the point of the discipline entirely. The Paschal letters thus present a unified ascetical-charitable program: the believer disciplines the body, opens the hand to the poor, and so prepares to keep the feast in truth (Athanasius, Festal Letters, on the fast and care for the poor; trans. NPNF II/4).

Athanasius as Pastor, Not Only Polemicist

Read alongside the Orations against the Arians and the historical apologiae, the Festal Letters correct a one-sided picture of Athanasius as the embattled controversialist of “Athanasius contra mundum.” Here he is the shepherd of an actual flock — instructing, consoling, exhorting, calling to repentance, comforting the persecuted. The letters were composed across decades of exile and crisis (several were written from hiding, and the sequence reflects the disruptions of his banishments), yet their dominant register is pastoral rather than polemical: the care of souls preparing for the feast. They show that for Athanasius dogma and devotion were one fabric — the same Word who is consubstantial with the Father is the Pascha into whom the faithful are baptized and fed (Anatolios, Athanasius; NPNF II/4 introduction).

The Ascetical Teaching toward Virgins

Athanasius was also a patron and director of the ascetical and virginal life that was flowering in fourth-century Egypt. He esteemed consecrated virginity highly — in On the Incarnation he even points to the Church’s virgins as a fruit and proof of Christ’s victory — and a body of ascetical literature addressed to virgins circulated under his name. The authenticity of these works is, however, partly contested. Some letters and exhortations to virgins (preserved in Coptic and Syriac) are accepted by scholars such as David Brakke as genuinely Athanasian, while a longer treatise commonly cited as On Virginity (De virginitate), surviving in Syriac and drawing on Origen and John Chrysostom, is judged pseudonymous — a later composition wrongly attributed to him (Brakke, Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism, and Pseudo-Athanasius on Virginity, CSCO). The genuine ascetic Athanasiana confirm that the great Trinitarian theologian was also an architect of Egyptian monasticism and the spiritual father of its virgins — the same Athanasius who wrote the Life of Antony, the charter document of monastic literature.

The Readable Corpus: Discovery of the Syriac Version

The Greek originals of most of the Festal Letters were lost for centuries; only fragments survived in citations by later writers such as Severus of Antioch and the Byzantine canonists. The corpus became readable again through a remarkable manuscript recovery. In the nineteenth century, Syriac manuscripts from the monastery of St. Mary Deipara (Deir al-Surian) in the Nitrian Desert of Egypt reached the British Museum: an initial collection acquired by Henry Tattam in 1839, with further volumes — including the Athanasian material the monks had at first held back — obtained through Auguste Pacho in 1847. Among them William Cureton identified an ancient Syriac version of the Festal Letters, together with an invaluable Index (a chronological Historia acephala-type list) prefixed to the collection. Cureton published the Syriac text in 1848 for the Society for the Publication of Oriental Texts; it was soon translated into English for Pusey’s Library of the Fathers (the basis of the NPNF II/4 rendering) and into German (Cureton, The Festal Letters of Athanasius, 1848; NPNF II/4).

The recovery was doubly important. It restored a major body of Athanasius’ pastoral teaching, and its Index supplies a year-by-year chronological framework — consular dates, indictions, and Egyptian-calendar references across the patriarchate — that remains a primary anchor for dating the events of Athanasius’ life and exiles.

See Also

• Theosis in Athanasius — the deifying communion toward which the Paschal fast and feast are ordered
• Letters to Serapion — the late doctrinal letters, alongside which the pastoral letters round out the man
• Tomus ad Antiochenos — Athanasius the conciliar peacemaker, complementing Athanasius the pastor
• Orthodoxy: Theosis — the doctrinal goal of the ascetical life

References

• Athanasius of Alexandria. Festal Letters (Paschal Letters). Translated in NPNF II/4 (Schaff and Wace, eds.), from the Syriac via Pusey’s Library of the Fathers.
• Cureton, William, ed. The Festal Letters of Athanasius, Discovered in an Ancient Syriac Version. London: Society for the Publication of Oriental Texts, 1848. (Introduction on the Nitrian manuscripts and the discovery.)
• Brakke, David. Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. (Republished as Athanasius and Asceticism, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.)
• Brakke, David, ed. Pseudo-Athanasius on Virginity. Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 592–593. Leuven: Peeters, 2002.
• Anatolios, Khaled. Athanasius. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2004.
• Council of Nicaea (325). Decision on the Alexandrian computation of Pascha.