EPIPHANIUS, bishop of Salamis, in the island of Cyprus, and one of the most zealous champions of orthodox faith and monastic piety, was born at Besanduke, a village near Eleutheropolis in Palestine.
The year of his birth is unknown, but seeing that in A.D. 392, twelve years before his death, he was already an aged man, we may conjecturally set the date of his nativity in some year of the decade between A.D. 310 and A.D. 320.
Much of his early lifetime was spent among the monks of Egypt, among whom he not only acquired a burning zeal for ecclesiastical orthodoxy and the new forms of ascetic life then coming into favour, but also came for the first time into contact with various kinds of heretics. It is probably a reminiscence of his life in Egypt, when he tells us that in his early youth, Gnostic ladies of seductive beauty had endeavoured to obtain his adhesion to their sect and given him some of their books to read.
But the youthful anchorite, successfully resisting all temptations, revealed the matter to the bishops of the neighbourhood, and caused an investigation to be set on foot, which resulted in the banishment of eighty persons (Haer. xxvi. 17). At twenty years of age he returned home and built a monastery near Besanduke, of which he himself undertook the direction. It appears that he was ordained presbyter by Eutychius, then bishop 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, 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 A.D. 367 he was elected bishop of Constantia in Cyprus, the ancient Salamis, where, for six and thirty years, he discharged the episcopal office with the like zeal to that with which he had presided over his monastery in Palestine. Under his influence the whole island was soon covered with monastic institutions.
With the monks of Palestine, and especially those of his own monastery at Eleutheropolis, he continued as bishop to hold uninterrupted communication; and these last were unwearied in their efforts to extend his renown for piety, orthodoxy, and learning.
It soon came to pass that people consulted him on all important questions of doctrine and discipline, and Epiphanius found no difficulty in convincing himself that a watchman of the church must reckon it among his duties to let his voice be heard in all the controversies of the time. 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, which was afterwards incorporated, almost without alteration in his great work, Against all Heresies. {Haer. lxxviii.)
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