14. For another five years Dionysius was spared to administer his charge
and to benefit the Church at large with his prudent counsels. But, though
attacks upon himself never seem to have troubled him very much, he had
still to endure one such attack which probably grieved him more than all
the rest, and the after results of which lingered on till the days of
Athanasius and Basil in the next century. This was in connexion with the
Sabellian controversy, especially that phase of it which had recently
arisen in the Libyan Pentapolis (on the north-west coast of Cyrenaica).
Sabellius was a native of the district, and his heresy consisted in
laying too much stress on the unity of the Godhead and in so hopelessly
confounding the Three Persons in the Trinity as to imply that the Person
of the Father was incarnate in Christ. It is in 257 that we first find
Dionysius, in a letter to Xystus II (see p. 55), calling the attention of
the Bishop of Rome to these views, by which time Sabellius was himself
probably already dead. From what he says there, it appears as if
Dionysius was unaware that these views were not of quite recent origin
and were already rather prevalent in both East and West, whilst his words
seem also to imply that this later phase of Sabellianism endangered the
dignity of the Third Person as well as of the First and Second. In Libya
the heresy gained such a hold upon the Church that it even infected
certain of the Bishops, and the Son of God was no longer preached.
Dionysius, therefore, feeling his responsibility for the churches under
his care, became active in trying to eradicate the evil. Among a number
of letters which he wrote on the subject, there was one (about the year
260) in which he made use of certain expressions and illustrations with
regard to the Son of God, which were seized hold of by some members of
the Church either at Alexandria or in the Pentapolis as heretical. This
letter was apparently one of the later letters of the series, when his
earlier overtures had failed to produce the effect he desired.
15. Dionysius's critics laid a formal complaint against him before his
namesake (Dionysius), who had by now succeeded the martyred Xystus II as
Bishop of Rome; they accused him of having fallen into five errors
himself, while correcting the false views of the Sabellians.