The Festal Letters
Athanasius, the Festal (Easter) Letters, A.D. 329–373
Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria
Forty-five years of telling Egypt when Easter is, and what to believe while they wait for it.
- Catch rate
- Not found in the wild
- Base research
- 214
- Stat total
- 312
Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
Forty-five Easters. About twenty survive, and most of those only because someone translated them into Syriac.
Church government conducted by post, over forty-five years, by a man who was exiled five times and kept writing.
Cited for this book
The Greek of the series is largely lost. What there is came back in 1842, when a Syriac manuscript of the letters was found in the Nitrian desert and brought to the British Museum, with Coptic fragments filling in around it. Athanasius wrote at least five of them from hiding, and the dating clauses at the head of each one are how much of the chronology of his life is fixed at all.
Development
A book develops as it is read — the fragment becomes the work, the work becomes the corpus.
Moves learned
By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.
| Lv | Move | Type | Cat. | Pwr | Acc | PP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25 | The Annual Letter | Ecclesiology | Argument | 84 | 100% | 10 |
| 28 | Fountains of Salvation | Bible | Argument | 92 | 100% | 5 |
| 32 | Appointed to Be Read | Ecclesiology | Argument | 80 | 100% | 10 |