Saint Epiphanius of Salamis (315-403)

Besanduk, near Eleutheropolis

Epiphanius was born c. 310-320 — the sources hesitate, the Catholic Encyclopedia settling for "after 310"^[1] — in the village of Besanduk, in the region of Eleutheropolis, in Palestine (present-day Beit Guvrin, south-west of Jerusalem)^[2]. Ancient tradition and several biographers describe him as coming from a modest background; some late sources even credit him with Jewish ancestry, a tempting hypothesis given his mastery of Hebrew, but one which cautious historians regard as uncertain^[3].

What is certain is that Epiphanius grew up in a Palestine where nascent monasticism already shone brightly. Not far away, at Thabatha near Gaza, Saint Hilarion (c. 291-371) was born c. 291, the father of Palestinian monasticism, whose Life was written by Jerome. The young Epiphanius thus found himself from childhood in contact with an ardent, ascetic and missionary Christianity.

Formation among the monks of Egypt

Very young, Epiphanius left for Egypt to train there in the monastic life, in the deserts where the spirit of Saint Anthony and the Desert Fathers still shone^[4]. There, at the heart of the monastic communities, he forged both his ideal of austerity and his visceral hatred of heresy. For fourth-century Egypt was not only the land of holy ascetics: it also swarmed with Gnostic sects.

The ancient biographers relate that he there met Gnostics who tried to seduce him and win him over to their doctrines, putting their secret books into his hands. The young monk alerted the bishops of the place, which led, according to tradition, to the expulsion of some eighty persons^[5]. True or embellished, this anecdote says the essential: Epiphanius would leave Egypt with a first-hand knowledge of heresies and the conviction that a bishop's duty is to unmask them one by one.

The monk and friend of Saint Hilarion

Back in Palestine at about twenty years of age, Epiphanius founded a monastery at Besanduk, his native village, and became its hegumen (superior) for some thirty years^[6]. There he was ordained priest by Eutychius, bishop of Eleutheropolis. His reputation as an ascetic, a scholar and a director of souls spread rapidly.

He maintained close ties with Saint Hilarion, and one of the finest spiritual anecdotes of Christian antiquity brings the two men face to face. Epiphanius had the old hermit invited: "Come, that we may see each other before leaving this body." At table, a fowl was brought to them; Epiphanius offered it to Hilarion, who excused himself: since receiving the habit, he had eaten no flesh of a slain animal. Epiphanius answered him:

"As for me, since I took the habit, I have never let anyone fall asleep with a grievance against me, and I have never gone to bed myself with a grievance against anyone."^[7]

And Hilarion humbly acknowledged: "Forgive me: your way of life is better than mine."^[8] The exchange says everything about Epiphanius's temperament: a real austerity, but ordered to fraternal charity rather than to bodily feats.

An election carried by his reputation

In 367, Epiphanius's renown for asceticism and learning caused him to be appointed bishop of Constantia — ancient Salamis, metropolis of the island of Cyprus^[9]. He would occupy this see for nearly forty years, until his death. Under his government, it is said, the whole island was covered with monastic institutions: Epiphanius made Cyprus a land of monks in the image of the Egypt of his youth^[10].

Nearly forty years on the see of Cyprus

As bishop, Epiphanius distinguished himself by an extraordinary moral authority. His zeal for the monastic life, his ecclesiastical learning and his flawless orthodoxy earned him an influence far beyond the borders of his island^[11]. He was consulted from everywhere; he was called upon to arbitrate conflicts; his word carried weight in the affairs of the universal Church.

His charity towards the poor is legendary. When his own resources ran out, he distributed the goods of his Church without hesitation. One day, when everything was spent and his steward complained of this prodigality, an unknown benefactor is said to have suddenly appeared, a bag full of gold coins in his hand^[12]. The episode, reported by his biographers, illustrates Epiphanius's absolute trust in Providence — a bishop who gives without counting because he believes that God provides.

The arbiter of the Eastern Churches

Epiphanius's authority is measured by his interventions outside Cyprus. In 376, he travelled to Antioch to examine Apollinarianism — the heresy of Apollinarius of Laodicea, who denied that Christ had a human soul — and to intervene in the schism then tearing that Church apart. He pronounced in favour of Bishop Paulinus, supported by Rome, against Meletius, supported by the Eastern episcopate^[13]. In 382, he is found again at Rome, at the council, still alongside Paulinus^[14].

On the pontifical question, Epiphanius is, among the Greek theologians of his time, one of the most explicit in recognising the primacy of Saint Peter^[15]. His Trinitarian theology, for its part, is fully Nicene: he confesses that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, in the vocabulary of the three hypostases proper to the East^[16]. This doctrinal fidelity made him a pillar of the faith defined at Nicaea and confirmed at Constantinople.

Epiphanius is no stylist. His Greek is heavy, his composition disorderly, his polemic often credulous. But his work constitutes one of the most formidable documentary monuments of Christian antiquity: without him, whole stretches of the history of heresies would be lost for ever.

The Ancoratus (374) — "the well-anchored man"

His first known major work is the Ancoratus (374), whose title means "the well-anchored man" — the one who, by true faith, casts anchor and resists the storms of error^[17]. In a hundred and twenty-one chapters, Epiphanius sets out right faith on the Trinity, on the humanity of Christ and on the resurrection of the body, against the Arians and already against Origen. The work ends with a form of the Nicene Creed, a precious witness to the baptismal profession of faith in use at the end of the fourth century^[18].

The Panarion — the "medicine chest" against eighty heresies

His masterpiece is the Panarion (374-377), sometimes cited under its Latin title Adversus haereses. The Greek word panárion denotes a "medicine chest", a pharmacist's box: Epiphanius presents himself as a physician offering the reader antidotes against the bites of the serpents of heresy^[19].

The work lists eighty heresies, a symbolic number which Epiphanius connects with the eighty concubines of the Song of Songs (Song 6:8), set against the one dove which is the Church^[20]. It begins with the errors prior to Christ — "barbarism", "Scythianism", Hellenism, Judaism, Samaritanism — then unrolls the Christian sects, from the Simonians to the Massalians of his day, by way of the Gnostics, Arians, Semi-Arians, Macedonians, Apollinarians and Origenists^[21].

The value of the Panarion is immense for historians: Epiphanius quotes at length the heretical texts he combats, thus preserving fragments of works entirely lost. For many sects of the second and third centuries, he is our almost unique source^[22]. The reverse of the medal is well known: his credulity, his taste for lists and his lack of critical sense sometimes lead him to inflate, duplicate or misunderstand the doctrines he describes. The historian must therefore read him with gratitude and caution.

The scholar of languages and measures

Epiphanius is also a polyglot scholar. Saint Jerome reports that he knew Hebrew, Syriac, Egyptian (Coptic), Greek and a little Latin — hence the traditional nickname pentaglôssos, "the man of five tongues"^[23]. This rare competence nourishes his scholarly work.

His treatise De mensuris et ponderibus ("On weights and measures", c. 392) is a true introduction to the Bible: in it he deals with the Greek versions of the Old Testament (Septuagint, Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion), with biblical weights and measures, and with the holy geography. It is one of our best ancient sources on the history of the Old Testament text and on the canon of the Scriptures^[24]. His De gemmis ("On precious stones"), for its part, comments on the twelve stones of the high priest's breastplate of Israel (Ex 28), from the double perspective of natural science and spiritual allegory^[25].

The trial of Origen

The whole end of Epiphanius's life is dominated by his struggle against Origenism — the body of doctrines drawn (sometimes abusively) from the work of the great Alexandrian Origen (c. 185-253). Epiphanius sees in Origen the distant ancestor of Arianism: he reproaches him for having, by certain formulas, subordinated the Son to the Father, for having over-spiritualised the resurrection of the body, and for having bent Scripture to Greek philosophy by allegory^[26]. He attacks him violently in the Ancoratus as in the Panarion.

This combat is not without grandeur — posterity would condemn several Origenist theses at the Second Council of Constantinople (553) — but Epiphanius wages it with an intransigence that would make him commit imprudences. Rufinus of Aquileia, his adversary, would sneer: Epiphanius believed he had received, as for the preaching of the Gospel, the charge to "speak ill of Origen among every nation and in every tongue"^[27].

The conflict with John of Jerusalem

In 394, learning that Origenism was spreading in Palestine, the old bishop hastened there to "crush on the spot the odious heresy". At Jerusalem, in the basilica of the Resurrection, he preached vehemently against Origen — and therefore, implicitly, against the bishop of the place, John of Jerusalem, suspected of Origenist sympathies^[28]. Tension rose. Epiphanius then allied himself with Saint Jerome, settled not far away at Bethlehem, who shared his hostility to Origen.

The conflict burst into the open when Epiphanius ordained Paulinian, Jerome's own brother, priest, in a monastery in principle under John's jurisdiction — a breach of the canons. In a famous letter, translated into Latin by Jerome (his Letter 51), Epiphanius justifies his act by charity and the unity of the one priesthood:

"The priesthood of God is everywhere the same, and I have only provided for the needs of the Church."^[29]

The episode lastingly poisoned relations between Epiphanius, Jerome and John of Jerusalem, and gave the Origenist quarrel a personal dimension that would only ease with difficulty.

The John Chrysostom affair

The last act is the most painful. In 402, the archbishop of Alexandria, Theophilus, in his struggle against the Origenist monks (the "Tall Brothers") who had taken refuge at Constantinople with Saint John Chrysostom, manipulated the old Epiphanius and brought him to the imperial capital^[30].

Epiphanius arrived convinced that he need only appear to annihilate "the last remains of the Origenist poison". But, on meeting the persecuted monks, he had to acknowledge that he had condemned them on hearsay, without having heard them^[31]. Realising that he had been used, he decided to leave. The ecclesiastical historians report, with their own reservations, a prophetic and chilling exchange between the two bishops at the moment of departure. Epiphanius is said to have flung at Chrysostom:

"I hope you will not die a bishop."

And Chrysostom to answer: "I hope you will not return home."^[32]

Both words were fulfilled: John Chrysostom was deposed by the "Synod of the Oak" under Theophilus's influence, and Epiphanius died without seeing Cyprus again.

No question concerning Epiphanius has aroused more debate than his attitude towards religious images. The quarrel is all the livelier because the Church solemnly defined, at the Second Council of Nicaea (787), the legitimacy of the cult of veneration paid to holy images. Can Epiphanius have been, four centuries earlier, an adversary of images? Here one must carefully distinguish what is certain from what is disputed.

The episode of the curtain at Anablatha

One fact is solidly attested, since it figures in Epiphanius's own Letter 51, translated by Jerome. Passing through a village named Anablatha, Epiphanius noticed in a church a dyed and embroidered curtain bearing the image of Christ or of a saint. Indignant, he tore it down and relates:

"Seeing this, and not bearing that an image of a man should hang in the church of Christ, contrary to the teaching of the Scriptures, I tore it."^[33]

He at once adds that he promised to send another in its place — which he did^[34]. This text, whose authenticity is admitted by all since it comes to us from Jerome's own pen, shows an Epiphanius hostile to figurative images in places of worship, in the name of a rigorist reading of the Decalogue.

The disputed iconoclast corpus

Beside this reliable testimony, a whole dossier of explicitly iconoclast writings (a Treatise against images, a Letter to Theodosius, a Testament…) was long attributed to Epiphanius, which the Byzantine iconoclasts of the eighth and ninth centuries brandished as patristic backing for their cause. But the authenticity of this corpus is the object of a scholarly controversy that has remained famous.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the German Protestant Karl Holl defended the authenticity of these texts; the great Orthodox Byzantinist George Ostrogorsky, on the contrary, endeavoured in his Studien of 1929 to demonstrate that they were forgeries slipped under Epiphanius's name^[35]. More recent works, such as those of Father Steven Bigham (Epiphanius of Salamis, Doctor of Iconoclasm?), conclude that the "iconoclast Epiphanius" is largely a late construction: the Panarion itself nowhere ranks the cult of images among the eighty heresies it denounces^[36].

What the Church finally defined

The Catholic position is clear and in no way depends on this scholarly quarrel. Whatever Epiphanius may have thought personally — no doubt marked, like many Fathers, by an archaic mistrust of figurative art and of the risk of idolatry — the Church settled the question four centuries later. At Nicaea II, she defined that the veneration (and not the adoration, reserved to God alone) paid to images of Christ, of the Virgin and of the saints is legitimate, because "the honour paid to the image passes to its prototype"^[37]. The Anablatha episode is therefore not a norm, but a witness of its time: proof that the doctrine of the image was made precise by a long discernment of the Church, and not all at once. On this subject, see the quarrel over images and the theology of the icon.

The ardent zeal of orthodoxy

Epiphanius's spiritual mainspring is a burning zeal for the truth of the faith. In his eyes, heresy is not a respectable opinion but a deadly venom for souls, and a pastor's duty is to root it out. This zeal, his biographers do not hide it, sometimes turned to vehemence and to scarcely canonical acts; he has been described as "an honest zealot, but credulous and narrow-minded"^[38]. But it would be to misunderstand him to see in this only a defect of character: Epiphanius belongs to a generation of confessors of the faith for whom purity of doctrine was worth risking one's rest, one's friendships and one's reputation.

The pastor's charity and the old ascetic's humility

This zeal was not cold. We have seen his lavish charity towards the poor, and his answer to Hilarion reveals a man careful to wound no one. Epiphanius thus unites two traits often set in opposition: doctrinal intransigence and fraternal gentleness. His life says that the combat for truth has Christian value only when borne by charity — a lesson made all the more moving by his own lapse in the Chrysostom affair, he who, at the end, humbly acknowledged having judged on hearsay.

"We believe the word of the Lord, and we know that the image of God abides in every man." — Saint Epiphanius of Salamis, Letter to John of Jerusalem^[39]

Death at sea (403)

In the spring of 403, having left Constantinople, Epiphanius died on the boat bringing him back to Cyprus, without seeing his island again^[40]. He was well past eighty. His death at sea, at the end of a controversy in which he had been manipulated, gives his end a tragic and humble tone: the great scourge of heresies dies far from home, having understood too late that he had been instrumentalised.

A Father venerated in East and West

Epiphanius died surrounded by immense veneration. Wherever he appeared, crowds waited for hours to hear him preach, and after his death healings and exorcisms were reported at his tomb^[50]. The Greek Church as well as the Latin Church honour him as a Father of the Church and keep his feast on 12 May^[51]. He did not receive the title of Doctor of the Church — reserved for masters whose doctrine has been authoritative in an eminent way, like the great Doctors — for his own theological influence remained limited: he is a compiler and a witness more than an original thinker.

What remains of Epiphanius today

Epiphanius's legacy is paradoxical. As a theologian, he left little mark; as a witness and preserver, he is irreplaceable. The Panarion remains a treasure for the history of early Christianity, and De mensuris et ponderibus a first-rate source on the text and canon of the Old Testament. Above all, his figure remains that of an intrepid guardian of the faith, recalling that orthodoxy is not a schoolroom abstraction but the combat of a whole life.

Sixteen centuries later, Epiphanius still speaks. He recalls first that the truth of the faith deserves one's whole self: in an age of relativism, his passion for orthodoxy has something invigorating about it. He teaches next, by his very excesses, that zeal without charity and prudence misses its target — his lapse against John Chrysostom is a permanent warning to all defenders of the truth. He shows finally that the Church advances by discernment: his mistrust of images, surpassed by Nicaea II, says that Tradition is not frozen but that it matures, under the Spirit's guidance, towards an ever truer understanding of the mystery.

"The well-anchored man fears no storm." — Such might be the motto of this old monk-bishop who gave one of his books the title Ancoratus: anchored in the faith of Nicaea, Epiphanius weathered all the storms of his century, down to the last, that of the sea which bore him away.

• The First Council of Nicaea (325) — the Nicene faith Epiphanius defended all his life against Arianism.
• The Second Council of Nicaea (787) — where the Church defined the veneration of images, long after the curtain episode at Anablatha.
• The quarrel over images — the Byzantine context which invoked, partly wrongly, Epiphanius's authority.
• Saint Jerome — his ally in the Origenist controversy, translator of his Letter 51.
• Saint Athanasius of Alexandria — the champion of Nicaea whose combat Epiphanius prolonged.
• The Desert Fathers — the monastic Egypt where he was formed.
• The Second Council of Constantinople (553) — which condemned several Origenist theses hunted down by Epiphanius.
• The Doctors of the Church in history — to situate the difference between a Father and a Doctor of the Church.