Atanasio di Alessandria: Lettere Festali Anonimo: Indice delle Lettere Festali (review)

Some ten years have passed since Camplani published his first lengthy study of the Festal Letters of Athanasius, and this latest publication on the material is quite extraordinary. The book under review features the first translation of the letters into a modern language that takes into account both the Coptic and the Syriac evidence (as well as the indirect Greek tradition); it also provides a translation of the Syriac Index to the Festal Letters. For the latter, Camplani bases his translation on Martin and Albert's Sources chrétiennes volume; for the former, the underlying basis for the translation is more complex. Camplani has assembled the various published versions and collated them. From oblique remarks in the text (e.g., 185 n. 4), it seems that the next stage of his research will be a published edition of the Coptic and Syriac versions. This will be a handy thing to have because at present the Coptic version in particular has been augmented by numerous finds published in several different journals and books since Lefort's publication in 1965 of the Lettres festales et pastorales en copte (CSCO 150-11). There is to my knowledge less work to be done on the Syriac version, where Cureton's text is after more than a century and a half still the standard. The new volume will be eagerly awaited since it will consolidate the recent discoveries, but more to the point it will also be eagerly awaited since Camplani's work is meticulous and of a very high standard.

To support the material translated here, Camplani provides an introduction that is in itself book-length and that is divided into three segments: 1) The Festal Letters: a literary genre of the Egyptian church, 2) Athanasius' church through the Festal Letters, and 3) Theology and the concept of man in the Festal Letters. There are also ten appendices, in which he provides detailed arguments and tabular information regarding the chronology of the letters and other relevant points as well as a threefold index for references to scripture, names (ancient and modern), and analytic themes. Throughout, Camplani is cognizant of contemporary research, especially that of David Brakke, Annick Martin and Ewa Wipszycka. The character of the introduction is dense and often technical, but it is well worth reading for its valuable insights into the history of the church in Egypt.

In all, the volume is an extremely important contribution to the study of Athanasius, and, considering the wide-ranging scope of Camplani's introductory chapters, it should be available to everyone engaged in research on Christianity in Egypt to ca. 400. The price of the book, which is quite reasonable (even modest), ought to facilitate this.

At the risk of being churlish, it is appropriate to make a few observations about minor aspects of the book that are not entirely satisfactory. First, since the introduction is generous in length, it is not obvious why the individual letters are given individual introductions that are in a few cases longer than the letters they introduce. The typical letter is prefaced with historical-biographical details, bibliographic notes on the source(s) translated, and an expanded outline of its contents. Had the introduction been published as a monograph in its own right, this expanded coverage would have been indispensable, but I am not certain that the added pages actually contribute information that is not otherwise available in the book. In rare cases the present arrangement creates a situation in which the "Scheda introduttiva" is far more interesting than the letter it introduces. Secondly, there is occasional evidence of the author's preoccupation with how Athanasius stands in relation to Origen, but that interest is not pursued systematically, and it very rarely leads to a conclusion. It is interesting to know how the two compare as regards, e.g., the fundamental difference between God and creatures (123) or the epinoiai (126, n. 15), but Camplani only gives this sort of exercise his sustained attention...