Love in Deed: Christian Care in Third-Century Alexandria

Dionysius remembered the people who stayed.

Disease had struck Alexandria, and the bishop’s Easter letter carried news of a city in grief. Among the dead were Christians who had tended others through illness. They visited the sick, served them, and sometimes caught the disease themselves. Some died after the people they cared for had recovered. 1

The account is painful to read. It is also full of love. Dionysius wanted the Church to remember people whose devotion to Christ had taken the form of caring for a suffering body.

Our design Love in Deed begins there, with the Christian conviction that another person’s need calls for an answer we can give with our hands.

Alexandria in a season of loss

Alexandria was one of the great cities of the Roman Mediterranean, on the coast of Egypt. Dionysius served as its bishop during the third century. His account comes to us through Eusebius, who preserved part of the letter in Book VII, chapter 22 of Church History. 1

Eusebius places the epidemic amid the city’s wider troubles. The exact chronology of the disease discussed in connection with Dionysius remains debated, so “Alexandria, third century” is the sounder setting for this story than a confidently assigned day or year. Sabine Huebner’s study examines those dating problems in detail. 2

The human situation is clear enough in the letter. People were dying, households were suffering, and care could bring danger to the caregiver. The community had to decide what love required under those conditions.

Dionysius tells us how many of his fellow Christians answered.

Close enough to bear the cost

His description is physical. Christians visited the sick, attended to their needs, and took responsibility for the bodies of those who died. Dionysius speaks of their love, their service in Christ, and the cheerful readiness with which they offered themselves to the work. He remembers clergy among them as well as laypeople. 1

There was grief in that service. Some who nursed others became sick themselves. Dionysius describes people who drew the illness upon themselves while caring for neighbors, then died after those neighbors had recovered.

The bishop regards their deaths as an offering of Christian devotion, comparing the cost of such service with martyrdom. Here were believers who had remained near suffering because they belonged to Christ.

We do not need an invented name or a reconstructed conversation to feel the weight of that. A sick person needed care. Someone came close enough to give it. For some, the cost was their life.

Why the Church kept this letter

Eusebius wrote later, in the early fourth century. By preserving Dionysius’s words, he gave the Church a witness to Christian life in a terrible season. 1

It is a bishop’s pastoral testimony, written to fellow Christians. Its purpose helps us understand why the details matter to him. The suffering had not extinguished the love of Christ among his people. The letter asks the Church to see and remember that grace.

Dionysius also contrasts their care with people he describes fleeing the sick and abandoning the dying. That is his account of the crisis, rather than a census of every Alexandrian’s conduct. It gives us reason to honor the Christians he remembers without inventing a claim about every other person in the city.

His strongest testimony is already enough: Christians stayed with the sick, and some gave their lives in doing so.

Care belonged to the life of worship

The letter from Alexandria did not appear in a Church unfamiliar with practical generosity.

Earlier, Justin Martyr described voluntary contributions collected with Christian worship. They supported orphans, widows, strangers, prisoners, and people in need because of sickness or other circumstances. In First Apology 67, the reading of Scripture, prayer, and care for the vulnerable belong to the same account of Christian life. 3

Tertullian’s Apology, chapter 39, describes another voluntary fund. Contributions helped feed and bury the poor, supported children without parents and older people in need, and aided believers suffering for their confession. 4

These writers speak from different places and moments. Together they show how seriously Christians understood their obligations to one another. Gifts were to become food, help, and burial. Compassion had work to do.

The Alexandrian Christians stood within that tradition of care. Their crisis made its demands unusually costly.

Love with something in its hands

First John gives the calling its sharpest expression. After recalling Christ’s gift of his life, the passage asks what it means to see a brother in need and close one’s heart. It calls believers to love in deed and truth. 5

That passage gives Love in Deed its name. It also helps us read Dionysius’s testimony as Christians. The love Christ has shown us makes a claim on the way we respond to another person.

Usually, our circumstances are less dramatic than an ancient epidemic. Someone needs a meal. A grieving household needs help with the ordinary tasks that continue after a funeral. An older neighbor needs a ride. A friend is ill, and the first offer of assistance has to become an actual visit, delivery, or arrangement for care.

Knowledge and sensible precautions belong to responsible help. The calling is to serve the person in front of us with the care their situation requires.

That can mean surrendering time we had already assigned to ourselves. It can mean doing something dull, repeated, and largely unseen. The person receiving it may remember the help long after the giver has forgotten the inconvenience.

A basin, a vessel, a cloth

The garment uses a vessel, basin, cloth, and olive branches. These are modern symbols of service and peace, chosen to give the story a quiet visual form. Dionysius did not leave us a list of the objects his caregivers used.

We wanted the design to keep the practical character of their love in view. A basin is a useful thing. So is a cloth. Neither does much for a person in need until someone picks it up.

The historical reference leads back to the bishop’s letter. The scriptural title brings its question into our own lives: will the love we confess become something we do?

The people who stayed

There is a kind of courage that looks like remaining available.

Dionysius’s Christians were remembered for the costly work of attending to others. Their faith brought them toward people who were sick, frightened, or dying. The bishop wanted that service remembered because he saw the love of Christ at work in it.

The names of most of those caregivers are lost to us. Their example is still close enough to follow.

Someone needs care. We can begin there.

Sources and further reading

1. Eusebius, Church History, VII.22, especially sections 7–10. Preserves Dionysius’s account of Christian care during the Alexandrian epidemic.
2. Sabine R. Huebner, “The ‘Plague of Cyprian’: A revised view of the origin and spread of a 3rd-c. CE pandemic”, Journal of Roman Archaeology (2021). Historical assessment of the epidemic’s chronology.
3. Justin Martyr, First Apology, chapter 67. Worship and support for people in need.
4. Tertullian, Apology, chapter 39. Voluntary contributions and their charitable uses.
5. 1 John 3:16–18, World English Bible. Christ’s self-giving love and the call to love in deed and truth.

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