St. Dionysius of Alexandria: Letters and Treatises

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Saint Dionysius of Alexandria. St. Dionysius of Alexandria: Letters and Treatises

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

His Family and Earlier Life

His Conversion

Was He Married or Not?

He becomes Head of the Catechetical School

He becomes Bishop of Alexandria

Under the Persecution of Decius

His Action about Heretical Baptism

Under the Persecution of Valerian

Restoration of Peace

His Return to Alexandria

The Troubles Connected with his Protest against Sabellianism

Dionysius’s Last Days

Dionysius as Author

As Christian Philosopher

General Characteristics of his Writings

Dionysius as Interpreter of Scripture

His Place in the Church Kalendar

Concluding Remarks

Bibliography

LETTERS

To Fabian, Bishop of Antioch

To Germanus a Bishop

(To Novatian)

To Cornelius, Bishop of Rome, in Reply to a Letter from him about Novatian (circ. 253)

To Stephanus, Bishop of Rome

To Xystus (or Sixtus) II80

To Philemon

To Dionysius of Rome

To Xystus (Sixtus) II, Bishop of Rome

To Conon106

From the Writings about Repentance

To Domitius and Didymus

To Hermammon

To the Brethren in Alexandria

To Hierax an Egyptian Bishop

To Basilides, Bishop of the Churches in the Pentapolis (Cyrenaica)

TREATISES

“On the Promises”

“On Nature”

“Refutation and Defence”

Additional Note to p. 12

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1. None of the many influential occupants of the see of Alexandria and of the many distinguished heads of the Catechetical School in that city seem to have been held in higher respect by the ancients than Dionysius. By common consent he is styled “the Great,” while Athanasius, one of his most famous-successors as Bishop, calls him “Teacher of the Church universal,” and Basil (of Cæsarea) refers to him as “a person of canonical authority” (κανονικός). He took a prominent and important part in all the leading movements and controversies of the day, and his opinions always carried great weight, especially in Eastern Christendom. His writings are freely referred to and quoted, not only by Eusebius the historian,1 but also by Athanasius, Basil and John of Damascus amongst others. And what we gather of his personal story from his letters and various fragments embodied in the works of others – and very little, if anything else, for certain has come down to us – undoubtedly leaves the impression that the verdict of the ancient world is correct.

2. The references to his family and early years are extremely scanty and vague. In the Chronicon Orientale, p. 94, he is stated to have been a Sabaita and sprung from “the chiefs and nobles of that race”: and several writers speak as if he had been a rhetorician before his conversion (as Cyprian of Carthage had been). The exact meaning of the term “Sabaita” above is doubtful. Strictly used, it should mean a member of the Sabaite convent near Jerusalem, and the Chronicon may be claiming Dionysius as that, though, of course, without any ground for the claim. If it is equivalent, however, to “Sabæan” here, it implies an Arab descent for him, which is hardly probable, as he seems always to consider himself connected by education and residence, if not by birth, with the city-folk of Alexandria, whom he distinguishes from the Coptic inhabitants of Egypt (Αἰγύπτιοι); so that it would be rather surprising to find that his family came from the remoter parts of Arabia, where the Sabæans dwelt. The other tradition of his having been a rhetorician may be due to some confusion between our Dionysius and a much later Alexandrian writer of the same name, who edited the works of the Areopagite with notes and wrote other treatises. On the other hand, Dionysius’s literary style is such that it might very well have been formed by the study and practice of rhetoric, while he has been thought himself to corroborate the statement of the Chronicon Orientale, as to the high position of his family, in his reply to Germanus (p. 49), where he refers to the “losses of dignities” which he has suffered for the Faith.

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The extracts given by Eusebius appear to be fairly continuous throughout: they deal (1) with the atomistic portion of the Epicurean philosophy, and (2) with the more strictly “theological” portion of it, the references to the hedonistic doctrine being only slight and passing.

Dionysius begins by remarking that of the various hypotheses which have been started as to the origin of the universe, one of the least satisfactory is that of Epicurus, viz. that it is the result of a chance concourse of an infinite number of atoms, as they rush through space.

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