DIONYSIUS, POPE. — The anonymous author of the Liber Pontificalis, reflecting the historical mentality of the 6th century, asserts that he came from the monastic class; perhaps he wished to allude to the ascetic qualities of Pope D. (conventional chronology) from the consulship of Aemilianus and Bassus (239) to that of Claudius and Paternus (265). In any case, it is certain that he must have been a pope of the 3rd century. He was buried in the cemetery of Callistus on the Via Appia. His epitaph has not come down to us.
But the Itineraries of the pilgrims of the 7th and 8th centuries say of him: “pope and martyr.” The Liber Pontificalis attributes to him an organization of the urban ecclesiastical circumscriptions: “Hic presbiteris ecclesias dedit et cymiteria et paroecias dioecesis instituit.” Far more important, however, is his intervention in the Trinitarian controversy, provoked by a letter from Dionysius of Alexandria which attacked the excesses of the Sabellian and Modalist doctrines, only to fall into the error of accepting a distinction of the three Divine Persons and a clear subordination of the Son to the Father. The letter was examined by a council at the instance of D., and he then replied by condemning Modalism and also those who admitted three separate hypostases and made the Word a creature. In a separate letter D. invited the bishop of Alexandria, who bore the same name, to give explanations, and the latter did so by sending a defence which seems to have satisfied the Church of Rome (cf. Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica, VII, 26; Athanasius, De decretis Nic. syn., chaps. 25 and 26 and De sententia Dionysii, passim).