Page:Dictionary of Christian Biography and Literature (1911).djvu/318

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32), it is plain that Epiphanius has been following Irenaeus until, on coming to the words ἑπιφανὴς διδάσκαλος, he goes off to Clement of Alexandria, and puts in what he there found about Epiphanes. But Neander has made it almost certain that he person to whom Irenaeus really refers is Marcus (17). He points out that these four names for the members of the primary Tetrad, Monotes, Henotes, Monas, and Hen, which the "illustrious teacher" (c. 11) speaks of as names of his own giving, occur again with a καθ᾿ ἃ προείρηται in a passage cited from Marcus by name (Iren. i. 15, p. 74).

[G.S.]

Epiphanius (1), bp. of Salamis in Cyprus, zealous champion of orthodox faith and monastic piety, was born at Besanduke, a village near Eleutheropolis in Palestine. As in 392, twelve years before his death, he was an aged man, we may conjecturally date his birth between 310 and 320. Much of his early lifetime was spent with the monks of Egypt, among whom he not only acquired a burning zeal for ecclesiastical orthodoxy and the forms of ascetic life then coming into favour, but also first came in contact with various kinds of heretics. When twenty years old he returned home and built a monastery near Besanduke, of which he undertook the direction. He was ordained presbyter by Eutychius, then bp. of Eleutheropolis. With St. Hilarion, the founder of Palestinian monasticism, Epiphanius early stood in intimate relation, and at a time when the great majority of Oriental bishops favoured Arian or semi-Arian views, he adhered with unshaken fidelity to the Nicene faith, and its persecuted champions, Eusebius of Vercelli and Paulinus of Antioch, whom Constantius had banished from their sees. In 367 he was elected bp. of Constantia, the ancient Salamis, in Cyprus, where for 36 years he discharged the episcopal office with the zeal he had shewn in his monastery. The whole island was soon covered with monastic institutions. With the monks of Palestine, and especially of his own monastery at Eleutheropolis, he continued as bishop to hold uninterrupted communication. People consulted him on every important question. Some years after his elevation to the episcopate, he addressed a letter to the faithful in Arabia, in defence of the perpetual virginity of Mary, afterwards incorporated in his great work, Against all Heresies (Haer. lxxviii.). Soon after, several presbyters of Suedra in Pamphylia invoked his assistance in their controversy with Arians and Macedonians. Similar applications came from other quarters; e.g. by an Egyptian Christian named Hypatius, and by a presbyter, Conops, apparently a Pisidian, who, with his co-presbyters, sought instruction in a long series of disputed doctrines. This was the origin of his Αγκυρωτός (Ancoratus) in 374, an exposition of the faith, which, anchor-like, might fix the mind when tossed by the waves of heresy. A similar occasion produced his great heresiological work, written in the years 374-377, the so-called Πανάριον, on which his fame chiefly rests. He wrote this at the request of Acacius and Paulus, two presbyters and heads of monasteries in Coele-Syria, and in it attacks the Gnostic sects of the 2nd and 3rd cents., and the Arians, semi-Arians, Macedonians, Apollinarians, Origenists, of his own time. About 376 he was taking an active part in the Apollinarian controversies. Vitalis, a presbyter of Antioch, had been consecrated bishop by Apollinaris himself; whereupon Epiphanius undertook a journey to Antioch to recall Vitalis from his error and reconcile him to the orthodox bp. Paulinus. His efforts, however, proved unsuccessful. Though not himself present at the oecumenical council of Constantinople, 381, which ensured the triumph of the Nicene doctrine in the Oriental churches, his shorter confession of faith, which is found at the end of his Ancoratus (c. 120) and seems to have been the baptismal creed of the church of Salamis, agrees almost word for word with the Constantinopolitan formula. He took no part in the synod held at Constantinople in 382; but towards the end of that year we find him associated with St. Jerome, Paulinus of Antioch, and the three legates of that synod, at a council held under bp. Damasus at Rome, which appears to have dealt with the Meletian and Apollinarian controversies. At Rome he was domiciled in the house of the elder Paula, who, under the spiritual guidance of St. Jerome, had dedicated her ample fortune to the poor and sick, and Epiphanius seems to have strengthened her in a resolution to forsake home and children for an ascetic life at a great distance from Rome. Early in 383, when the bishops were returning to their sees, Paula went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. She stayed with Epiphanius in Salamis about 10 days. Somewhat later St. Jerome also visited Epiphanius, on his way to Bethlehem, bringing a train of monks to Cyprus, to salute "the father of almost the whole episcopate, the last relic of ancient piety." Thenceforward we find Epiphanius in almost unbroken intercourse with Jerome, in alliance with whom he began his Origenistic controversies. He had indeed already, in his Ancoratus (c. 54) and still more in his Panarion, attacked Origen as the ancestor of the Arian heresy.

On hearing that Origenism had appeared in Palestine, he hastened thither, in old age (a.d. 394) to crush it. His appearance sufficed to drive the ci-devant Origenist Jerome into the bitterest enmity with his former friends, who refused to repudiate their old attachment. Epiphanius, received with all honours by the bp. of Jerusalem, preached in the most violent manner in the church of the Resurrection. Bp. John, after expressing his disapproval by gestures only for a time, sent his archdeacon to beg him to abstain from speaking further on these topics. The sermon being over, Epiphanius, as he walked by the side of John to the church of the Holy Cross, was pressed upon by the people, as Jerome tells us, from all sides with tokens of veneration. Bp. John, irritated by the sermon, evidently preached against himself, took the next opportunity to preach against certain simple and uneducated persons who represented God to themselves in human form and corporeity. Whereupon Epiphanius rose, and expressing his full concurrence with this, declared that it was quite as necessary to repudiate the heresies of Origen as of the Anthropomorphists. He then