Vituperative himself and the cause of vituperation in others, Epiphanius has fewer admirers today, fewer even than his admirer Jerome, who had at least the gift of style. We accuse them both of calumniating Origen, but only Epiphanius incurs our ridicule for manufacturing heresies (including a second brand of Origen's) to make up his predetermined count of eighty; and even if we subscribed to his sacred arithmetic, what credence can he given to a witness who confuses the Epicureans with the Orphics? His story of an unwary encounter with the Borborites in his youth (Panarion 26) is treated as fiction by the doctrinaire scepticism of our time, which assumes, without historical warrant, that propaganda is never true. Yet his efforts to construct precise genealogies for his heresies give every show of diligence, and if the texts that he cites are inconsistent with his lacerating commentaries, that is reason at least to believe that they have been accurately transcribed. We are bound to make use of him even when we doubt him, and this Sources Chrétiennes edition, providing not only an up-dated text but commentary, translation and an extensive introduction, will be read with pleasure and profit by students of doctrinal history or the arts of ecclesiastical coercion. This volume, encompassing the first twenty-five heresies, is all the more to be welcomed because its editor, Aline Pourkier, is the author of our most important study of the itinerant theocrat in her monograph L'Hérésiologie chez Epiphane de Salamine (Paris 1992).
The introduction to this volume necessarily recapitulates much that has already been said in the earlier book. It begins with a skeletal history of the career and peregrinations of Epiphanius, whose appointment in 367, in circumstances now obscure, to the see of Salamis in Cyprus is surmised to have been acceptable to the bishops of the island because of his fame as an ascetic (p. 17). It was in this prelatical character that he composed his most celebrated works, the Ancoratus of 374 and the Panarion of 375–8 (p. 18). Supporting the claim of Paulinus to the see of Antioch, he seems not to have been present at the Council of Constantinople in 381 which endorsed the rival candidacy of Meletius; in 382 he joined other partisans of the defeated bishop at a Roman synod under Damasus, where he made the acquaintance of Jerome (p. 20). In 392 he displayed more than the customary indifference of the Cypriots to external claims of authority when he publicly denounced the Origenism of John of Jerusalem in John's own diocese (pp. 21–2); unable to refute either his opponent's sermon against the Anthropomorphites or his confession of faith, he ordained Jerome's brother Paulinian without the assent of John, who forbade recognition of the new priest (p. 22). In 400 he joined forces with Theophilus of Antioch to issue a new denunciation of Origenism (p. 23). Pourkier's decision to record the known facts without speculation leaves us with a narrative whose lacunae are of more academic interest than its contents. When did the Epiphanius first conceive an animosity to John, the chief bishop of his native Palestine? Why does he show such enmity to Origen in the Panarion when he speaks of him far more temperately in the Ancoratus and with almost unbroken praise in the treatise On weights and measures, which is dated on p. 21 to 392? Was he or Jerome the principal mover of their campaign against the great Alexandrian, whom both commended even as they denounced him? How does his notorious iconoclasm (which Pourkier does not call into question on p. 21) sit with his readiness to excuse the Anthropomorphites, and how do his fanciful readings of the six days of creation or the stones on the High Priest's breastplate escape the strictures that he passes on Origen's figurative interpretation of Scripture?
These questions are not addressed in Pourkier's copious summary of the eighty sections of the Panarion, though some of them may be taken up in her annotations to the discussions of Origen and the Audiani (or Anthropomorphites) in subsequent volumes. In her appraisal of the method and content of the Panarion, she finds it for the most part reliable in its use of sources (p. 34); at the same time she remarks on the author's propensity to infer heresy in opinion from deviation in liturgy (as in the case of the Quartodecimans; p. 36) and to assimilate different phases of the same heresy, thus allowing himself to hold certain authors guilty by association of tenets that they never made their own (p. 38). Some Anglophone scholars might feel that this notion of evolving schools is as much a heresiological fiction as the construction of diadochai or successions of heresiarchs, which Pourkier herself treats with suspicion, tracing the trope to Justin Martyr (p. 37). She has less to say than might have been expected on the usage of the term hairesis itself, which, as her own comments in the first twenty sections demonstrate, is treated as though it always connoted doctrinal error even when applied, in the classical manner, to the schools of Greek philosophy, or with Josephus to lawful sects within Judaism, or even, in the author's own innovation on the taxonomy of Colossians iii.11, to the collective Weltanschauungen of barbarians, Scythians, Greeks and Jews. There is some originality here, whatever Epiphanius may have owed to the Apology of Aristides of Athens, both surviving versions of which construct an inventory of false religions by setting the Jew against the Greek and the Greek against one or more species of barbarian.
I do not suggest that either the Greek or the Syriac text of Aristides represents a prototype of the Panarion; in their present form, indeed, they are late enough to have made some use of its contents. On the other hand, we would surely expect the Elenchus or Refutation of all heresies, which is commonly attributed to Hippolytus of Rome or his school, to have been as rich a quarry for Epiphanius as the Refutation of knowledge falsely so called by Irenaeus. The absence of any allusion to it becomes, if anything, harder to explain if, as Pourkier states in her monograph, and seems still to hold, he did avail himself of a lost Syntagma by Hippolytus, of which Photius has preserved a short synopsis (p. 34; cf. L'Hérésiologie, 72–6). For my part, however, I cannot see how the patriarch's exiguous summary justifies her conjecture that this Syntagma was the lost prototype of two Latin texts, the pseudo-Tertullianic Against all heresies and a whimsical compilation by Philastrius which is alleged to concur with this in both content and order. In fact there is no more than a partial concurrence, and neither of these treatises ends with Noetus, as the Syntagma did according to Photius at Bibliotheca 121. Noetus is, however, the final antagonist of the Elenchus, not only in book ix, which appears to be the peroration of the main text, but in the tenth, which is widely believed to be an appendix by the author or his redactor. This is evidence that the Syntagma and the Elenchus (or its appendix) were the same work, but not for any knowledge of it on the part of Epiphanius, whose Panarion betrays no clear dependence on the Elenchus even when they attack the same heresies. Pourkier seems to think otherwise, for she writes that he borrowed from Hippolytus the ‘plan bipartite’ of quoting the heretic first and then refuting him (p. 34); she must be assuming either that he was acquainted with the Elenchus or else that the structure of this work affords a clue to that of the lost Syntagma. Both theses imply that Hippolytus is the author of the Elenchus, which is no longer the favoured position in Anglophone scholarship; if Pourkier (who says nothing of recent debates) believes that he wrote both the extant Elenchus and a lost Syntagma, we might also expect her to advance some theory to explain this duplication of labour.
Whatever we make of these riddles, we must be grateful to Pourkier for a clear and accurate edition of the Greek text of the Panarion, prefaced by a list of readings that differ from those if the standard edition of Holl, sedulously annotated with parallels from Justin, Irenaeus and Clement, and faced on the right-hand side by a French translation which is perhaps less ‘maladroit’ (p. 29) than the original at its worst but equally capable of the colour and spontaneity which Pourkier reckons among its occasional charms.
