Pope Dionysius

When Dionysius was elected bishop of Rome in July 259, the chair had been empty for nearly a year. Valerian's persecution had killed his predecessor Sixtus II in the catacombs along with four deacons, and Lawrence three days later, and it had been too dangerous to hold an election.

Then the situation reversed. Valerian marched east, was defeated by the Persians at Edessa in 260, and was captured alive, the only Roman emperor ever taken prisoner by a foreign enemy. His son Gallienus issued an edict of toleration, the first in Roman history to recognize Christianity as a permitted religion, and ordered church property and cemeteries restored.

Dionysius spent his nine years rebuilding what the persecution had wrecked. He reorganized the Roman parishes and the cemeteries, and assigned clergy to them, putting a working structure back over a church that had been decapitated.

He also looked outward. Raiders had swept through Cappadocia and carried off Christians into slavery. Dionysius sent money and men to buy them back, and a hundred years later Basil the Great was still writing to Rome about it, telling the Romans what their bishop had once done for his province.

His hardest work was done with a pen. Some Christians in Egypt were teaching Sabellianism, that Father, Son, and Spirit are not three but one person wearing three masks. Dionysius of Alexandria, fighting that error, had overcorrected, using language that separated the Son too far from the Father and even called him a created thing. Alexandrians who objected appealed to Rome.

Dionysius of Rome answered with a letter that has survived, quoted by Athanasius seventy years later. He condemned Sabellius for merging the persons and condemned the opposite error for dividing them, insisted that the Son is not made but begotten, and held that the divine unity and the three must both be confessed without either one being sacrificed to the other. He did it without deposing anyone. He wrote to his namesake privately, and the Alexandrian answered with a book, and the matter closed.

The language of that exchange is the language the Council of Nicaea would use in 325. Two bishops sorted out the most dangerous question in Christian theology by correspondence, sixty years before the empire had to hold a council about it.

Dionysius died on 26 December 268, in his bed. In that century, for a bishop of Rome, that was itself unusual.

Sources: Athanasius, On the Decrees of the Nicene Council 26 and On the Opinion of Dionysius; Basil, Letter 70; Eusebius, Church History VII.5, VII.7, VII.27–30; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, article Pope St. Dionysius.