Dionysius, Pope, Saint

DIONYSIUS, Pope. - The anonymous author of the Liber Pontificalis, who reflects the historical mentality of the 6th century, asserts that he came from the monastic order; perhaps he meant to allude to D.'s quality as an ascetic. He reigned as pontiff (by conventional chronology) from the consulate of Aemilianus and Bassus (259) to that of Claudius and Paternus (265). In any case, it is certain that he must be a pope of the 3rd century. He was buried in the cemetery of Callistus on the Appian Way. His epitaph has not come down to us.

But the Itineraries of the pilgrims of the 7th and 8th centuries call him: «pope and martyr». The Liber Pontificalis attributes to him a reorganization of the urban ecclesiastical districts: «Hic presbiteris ecclesias dedit et cymiteria et paroecias decessis instituit». But far more important is his intervention in the Trinitarian controversy, provoked by a letter of Dionysius of Alexandria who opposed the excesses of the Sabellian and modalist doctrines, falling in turn into the error of an accentuated distinction of the three Divine Persons and of a clear subordination of the Son to the Father. The letter was submitted by D. to the examination of a council, and he then replied condemning modalism and also those who admitted three separate hypostases and made the Word a creature. In a separate letter D. invited his namesake, the bishop of Alexandria, to give explanations. And the latter did so by sending a defense that seems to have satisfied the Church of Rome (cf. Eusebius, Historia eccl., VII, 26; Athanasius, De decretis Nic. syn., chaps. 25 and 26, and De sent. Dion., passim).

Carlo Cecchelli