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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.
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