| #### 9. DENIS OF ALEXANDRIA -- PAUL OF SAMOSATA |

| #### #### The century which follows the Adversus Haereses of St. Irenaeus ends, as it begins, with a Trinitarian controversy and an intervention of the Roman Church. Curiously enough it is a controversy that concerns the very points which had then engaged the attention of the pope St. Victor I. It reveals to us yet another sympathetic figure of the Alexandrian school of theology-St. Denis, Bishop of Alexandria -- and a Bishop of Antioch whose life bears out to the letter Origen's anticipatory warnings on the temptations which beset prelates in the empire's greatest cities-Paul of Samosata. #### Denis of Alexandria was Origen's own pupil. After a period as head of the Catechetical School he was elected bishop in 247, and he ruled the Church of the great metropolis for as long as seventeen years. It was an eventful episcopate. To begin with, there was the persecution of Decius in which the bishop was arrested. From the trial which awaited him he was, to his embarrassment, rescued by some of his flock and forcibly hurried into safety. The persecution over, he had to face the problem of the reconciliation of the repentant apostates. His solution of the question was that adopted at Rome, and he took the Roman side again when, three or four years later, St. Cyprian raised the question of the validity of heretical baptism. In the persecution which crowned St. Cyprian's life with martyrdom, Denis was again arrested, tried and exiled. How he escaped death it is hard to understand. He returned to Alexandria when the persecution ended, to find the city given over to a civil war in which it was almost destroyed. To add to the troubles the plague came to devastate the surviving population. #### The years of St. Denis' episcopate were then hardly the most suitable for the exercise of the talents which had given him his place in the succession to Origen. But interest in religion was inseparable from the intellectual life of the time; the elaboration of new theories and their passionate discussion, endemic. The occasion which would call forth all the bishop's talents was bound to come. #### It presented itself in a revival of the Monarchist theories of Sabellius, of which the five cities of Cyrenaica were the scene. Once more, in their zealous attempts to defend the truth that there is only one God, Christian thinkers were sacrificing the other truth that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are realities really distinct. For these neo-Sabellians the Trinity was a mere matter of names; God is one and according as He is successively Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier, He is Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The controversy reached Alexandria in an appeal to the bishop from the contending parties. There could be little doubt where so faithful a disciple of Origen would range himself, and St. Denis wrote strongly to Cyrenaica defending the reality of the Trinity. He also wrote to the pope, Sixtus II. It was, however, the misfortune of the Bishop of Alexandria that he did not content himself with a repetition of the tradition in face of the new theory, but criticised that theory in the light of his own, Origenist theology. This, for whatever anti-Origenists there were at Alexandria, was an opportunity not to be neglected. They denounced the bishop to Rome. The pope -- it was no longer Sixtus II but a successor, also named Denis -- had the matter formally examined. He objected to several details of the Bishop of Alexandria's refutation of the Sabellians - - his use of the word "creature" to describe God the Son, for example, and his reluctance to use the word homoousios (consubstantial) to describe the relation of the Son to the Father; and he objected also that his defence of the reality of the distinction between Father, Son, and Holy Ghost by a theory of three distinct hypostases was so expressed that it might be taken as a theory that there were three Gods. #### This was communicated to St. Denis in a private letter which invited him to explain the difficulties. With that letter there went a new public condemnation of the Sabellian theories, and also, no names being mentioned, of whoever taught that the Son was a creature, or that the three of the Divine Trinity were separate hypostases. St. Denis gave his explanations -- four books of a "Refutation and Explanations" -- and satisfied Rome of the perfect orthodoxy of his thought. Once more, in a vital controversy involving the traditional faith, Rome has declined to philosophise. There are in presence the innovators and the Catholic who uses against them the weapon of theological theory. Rome stands by the tradition, condemns the innovation by reference to the tradition, and as dispassionately criticises -- again by reference to the tradition -- the theory which the Catholic has constructed to defend the tradition. The procedure is already traditional, and it throws a great of deal light on the practical working of the potentior principalitas of the Roman Church. #### The date of this correspondence between Denis of Alexandria and Denis of Rome is somewhere about 262. About the same time the Bishop of Alexandria was drawn into a second controversy which brought him into relation with the greatest centre of Christianity in the East -- Antioch. The Bishop of Antioch at the moment was Paul, a native of Samosata. The moment was one of political debacle throughout the East. The disasters of the Persian War were a recent memory, with the defeat and the shameful captivity of the Emperor himself. The flood of the Persian invasion had barely subsided, and Antioch was under the rule of one of the border States to which Rome's weakness promised a new opportunity of expansion, the Kingdom of Palmyra and its queen Zenobia. With the new ruler, Paul of Samosata was on the very best of terms, and he contrived to combine a high position in the State Treasury with his leadership of the Church of Antioch. Cultured, worldly, profligate even, this aspect of his career fills more space in the contemporary record than the more important, but less alluring, theme of his heresies. Nevertheless, it was his heresies which finally provoked the intervention of neighbouring bishops and his deposition. #### The heresies offered in sum, nothing very new. They were little more than a re-edition of the theories of Theodotus and of Artemas. #### Jesus Christ was not divine in the same way that the Father was divine, for the Logos dwelt in Jesus Christ simply as in a temple. Moreover, the Divine Logos was simply an attribute or faculty of God and not a divine Person. Jesus Christ could only be said to be divine in so far as the Divinity had adopted Him. The opposition to Paul’s novelties showed itself immediately, and between 263 and 268 at least three councils were held at Antioch to judge its bishop's orthodoxy. To these St. Denis was invited, but old age stood in the way of his personal intervention. The long thousand miles journey was more than he dared attempt. It was another pupil of Origen upon whom fell the role of defender of the tradition -- Firmilian, Bishop of Cesarea in Cappadocia, the ally, ten years before, of St. Cyprian. #### But Paul of Samosata was too subtle an adversary for the orthodox. Time and again he eluded the prosecution, and not until 268 was the case so handled that he was forced into an open declaration of his dissent. The hero of this was one of his priests, Malchion, the head of the school at Antioch, and its scene a council in which seventy or eighty bishops took part. Paul was deposed, Domnus elected in his place and letters sent to Alexandria and to Rome, communicating the decisions. But Paul was not at the end of his resources and, strong in the support of Zenobia, he held out for four years more, refusing to surrender either church or palace. The deadlock only ended with the new Emperor Aurelian's victory over Zenobia (272). Antioch was once more a Roman city and the suit for Paul’s dispossession came before the emperor. He decided that the Bishop of Antioch was the man whom thebishops of Italy and Rome acknowledged to be such. Paul was therefore ejected. #### One interesting point about this last controversy of the third century is that while the champions of orthodoxy were all onetime pupils of Origen, the heresiarch, too, made use of the master's terminology to defend himself and to baffle the prosecution. His use of one term in particular drew down upon it the censure of the bishops. This was the term homoousios. Rome, seeing in it the Greek equivalent of Tertullian's consubstantialis, by now the consecrated term in the West to describe how both Father and Son were divine, had, a few years before, overriden Denis of Alexandria's objections to its use. Denis, a Greek, with a philosopher's experience of the subtle possibilities of his native language, had then feared that homoousios might be taken to mean "identical in person" and therefore seem Sabellian. Now, in 268, Paul of Samosata had been able to exploit in the interests of his theory yet a third interpretation of the term. The Council of Antioch had thereupon condemned it. Sixty years afterwards and more that condemnation was to bear unlooked for fruit. For when the Council of Nicea used the word homoousios to defend the traditional faith against Arianism, the heretics retorted with the charge that the Catholics were the real heretics, alleging in proof the objections of Denis of Alexandria, while the old condemnation of the term, now become the touchstone of orthodoxy, was an embarrassment for many of the Catholics. There is, however, a more intimate connection still between this crisis of 263-268, of which unfortunately we know so little, and the Council of Nicea. With Paul of Samosata there disappeared from the clergy of Antioch one of his leading allies, the priest Lucian. The name should be noted for Lucian was the teacher of Arius and the real father of Arianism. #### With Aurelian's decision regarding the property of the Church of Antioch there begins a period of thirty years, of whose history we know nothing. Save for the general description -- a few sentences -- of Catholic life at this time in the great history of Eusebius, nothing has survived beyond names and dates in the lists of the bishops of the principal sees. When in 303 the veil lifts, it is to reveal all the horrors of the persecution of Diocletian, the Empire's last assault on the religion of the Church. That assault is the prelude to the Empire's conversion. With that conversion the setting of the Church's life is so different that we can speak of the period which follows as a new age. The formative period is now at an end. It is the history of an undeniable world force which lies before us. |