EXCERPT FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL DISSERTATIONS OF DIONYSIUS PETAVIUS. BOOK II, CHAPTER III.
ADe Epiphanii loco falsa trapezitæ (Salmasii, qui de trapezitico fenore tres libros anno 1640 emiserat) conjectura refellitur: idemque declaratur: Negotiatores haud recte dici ab eodem damnatos ab Ecclesia. Bíos matrimonium interdum significat; contra quam trapezita credidit.
To the rite of penance in the ancient Church are to be referred certain errors of our money-changer (Salmasius). In the preface to the reader prefixed to his books *De trapezitico fenore* [On Money-lending], p. 57, he touches upon a certain passage of Epiphanius, and while he strives to be too acute, he has interpreted it very poorly. At the end of the great work which Epiphanius wrote on heresies, he has comprised in a brief disputation the sum of the Catholic faith, and the morals and institutions of the Church, so that by these marks, as it were, he might distinguish the true bride of Christ from the heretical conventicles, which it considers in the place of concubines. And toward the end he collects certain main headings of crimes which are condemned by the customs and usage of the same Catholic Church. "It refrains from communion," he says, "with all heresies [perhaps 'heretics'], it publicly renounces fornication, adultery, licentiousness, idolatry, murder, and every transgression," etc. Shortly after: "And covetousness, and the taking of usury; it does not receive those who are traders, but considers them lower than all others. It receives offerings from those who do wrong to no one, nor perpetrate any crime, but live justly." Here Epiphanius recounts the principal, as I have said, crimes and flagrant acts from which the Church shrinks and which it condemns by its own authority. Where the word ἀποκηρύττει does not precisely signify to excommunicate, or to restrain and segregate from communion: as if it rejected from ecclesiastical communion all who should fall into those things which he enumerates in the same place, as the money-changer thinks. From which he also collects that Epiphanius writes that not only those who receive usury are punished by abdication from the Church, but also all traders, πραγματευτάς. But he is by no means to be listened to. For ἀποκηρύττειν signifies not so much the abdication and condemnation of those who have perpetrated such crimes, as the abdication and condemnation of the crimes themselves. Otherwise, there would be no one who would not have to be excommunicated and proscribed from the Church. For who is there who does not sometimes fall into slander, detraction, contention, or avarice? B To these he condemns theaters, horse races, hunts, musical spectacles. *Ἀποκηρύττει θέατρα, καὶ ἱππικούς, καὶ κυνήγια, μουσικούς τε καὶ πᾶσαν κακολογίαν καὶ καταλαλιὰν, καὶ πᾶσαν μάχην καὶ βλασφημίαν.* He condemns, he says, theaters, equestrian contests, hunts, musical spectacles, and every act of slander and detraction, and every struggle and blasphemy. Was he who had been present at theatrical spectacles or circus games, or hunts, forthwith liable to excommunication? If this had been the custom, then surely no Christian in most cities would have been admitted to the church and to the use of the sacraments, or very few indeed. Complaints are frequent in John Chrysostom, when he was still a presbyter at Antioch, teaching the people concerning the paucity of those coming to the church and the sacred C synaxes of those attending; on which days, most especially, games and spectacles were presented. How often, when the people were intemperately poured out into these things, did he strive both to deter them from those things and to allure them to the church and to celebrate the gatherings of the faithful? When he even exhorts his hearers that they should bring with them to the church as many as they could from those spectacles. It is not therefore likely that the faithful were deprived of the communion of the Church on account of those things—especially when those solemn arrangements and games were presented to the people by Christian emperors and magistrates as if by official duty. Furthermore, on account of light and venial sins, no one was punished with the loss of communion. But among those things which Epiphanius has reviewed, some can be light, such as some slander uttered rashly and easily. For Augustine, in Sermon 41 *De sanctis*, where he distinguishes grave sins from light ones, numbers among light ones the occasions when we slander with all facility and temerity. Other things of this kind can be commemorated, which Tertullian calls "sins of daily incursion," which yet are contained among those things which have been named by Epiphanius. For he does not comprehend in that class only those things which are lethal and atrocious, but also light ones, when, for example, he said that *πᾶσαν κακολογίαν καὶ καταλαλιὰν, πᾶσαν μάχην καὶ πλεονεξίαν* are "publicly renounced" [ἀποκηρύττεσθαι] by the Church. Whence, if *ἀποκηρύττεσθαι* were to be excommunicated, as it pleases the money-changer, and not merely to be condemned and disapproved, as the matter itself teaches, it would be necessary that they be excommunicated—that is, from the communion of the Church—on account of every light crime.
Yet this word signifies those who are altogether of a lower order. For since, a little before, he had commemorated certain states and institutions of life among the faithful in the Church—all of which, being accepted by custom and approved, maintained their place in the Christian republic—he assigned the first rank of all to the priesthood, which is chosen from virgins or the continent; next to which the other clergy hold place; then virgins, then widows, and lastly those who live in matrimony, whom they call A *biōtikous*. Whence also *bios* signifies the same as *gamos*, which is marriage. *Bios*, I say, sometimes signifies marriage; and Epiphanius, in Heresy 59, number 4, page 496, said *biōsai* for that which is "living in matrimony." Concerning this, contrary to the banker—by whom we were undeservedly rebuked—we have demonstrated elsewhere. And so that he may learn to be less rash and precipitous in carping at others, we will add a luminous passage from a certain Greek writer, to prove the same thing, which I know not whether it has yet seen the light. He is Theophilus the philosopher, who wrote commentaries on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, which we have in our possession. Here, therefore, regarding those words of the first Aphorism, *ho bios brachys*, enumerating the various significations of *bios*, among others he brings forth this: *bios* is also the *zeuxis* [union] of marriage. It is, he says, *bios* and the society of marriage. But this by the way. Among the *biōtikous* and the "faithful of common life," Epiphanius numbers the *pragmateutai*—that is, merchants—in the lowest place: not because that state in the Church is forbidden and illicit, or entangled with sin, and marked with any punishment and censure; but because it is of all things the furthest removed from B evangelical perfection. This is the true and genuine mind of Epiphanius; that which indeed the banker (Salmasius) has invented is *adokimos* and to be repudiated. C
TO THE READER.
Many more excerpts could still be added, drawn from the writings published by Petavius under the fictitious name of Antonius Kerkoetius (or Cercoetius); but since it pleased the author himself to hide his true name in these, we shall not be solicitous about investigating those passages which serve to liberate his *Animadversiones* from the objections of Salmasius. Let him who has the good fortune to procure those booklets—which Petavius and Salmasius opposed to each other, prepared with satirical wit and gall, yet with exquisite erudition at the same time—search them out. But so that it may be clear to you, benevolent Reader, we shall provide an Index. Namely, after Claudius Salmasius had published Tertullian’s book *De Pallio* and his notes on it in the year 1622, Petavius published his *Animadversiones* on those same notes in the same year; which Salmasius, taking indignation, in the following year, 1623, issued a *Confutation* of them under the name of Franciscus Francus, printed at Paris, but bearing the title "Middelburg." To this, the *Mastigophori*—three *Elenchi*—were opposed by him who had assumed the name of Antonius Kerkoetius (or Cercoetius), Petavius, in the year 1624. To these, the masked Franciscus Francus objected with a *Refutation*: and this dispute was carried out with long and bitter, yet erudite, contentions, which Salmasius broke off, declaring to Grotius that he was unwilling to commit himself further to this ocean of quarreling. And death, overwhelming both in the same year, the fifty-second of this (the seventeenth) century, put an end to their lives and their litigations: and took Petavius from the living in Paris on the 11th of December, and Salmasius in Spa on the 3rd of September.