Épiphane de Salamine

Saint Épiphane de Salamine ( Sanctus Epiphanius Constantiensis ) or Épiphane of Cyprus (vers  315  -   403) was a Père of the Church. He is especially known for his defense of the orthodoxe Church and his tracking of the heretics at the time of the disturbed period which followed the I {{er}} council of Nicée. He is a Saint of the orthodoxe Église and Roman Catholic church, and is celebrated the May 12th.

The faith of Épiphane at the time of its youth is still prone to debate: according to certain sources, it would have been Jewish and hellenistic, and Christian according to others. Become monk in Egypt, it founds in Judaea a monastery of which it takes the head, before becoming bishop of Constantia-Salamine (Cyprus) in 365. It was in Rome in 382 with Paulin d' Antioche for a séminiare on the Christians of the East, bringing holy Jerome with him.

At the time of a pilgrimage in Jerusalem, he showed the Jean bishop of origenism. This bishop had ordered Rufin d' Aquilée.

Épiphane dies at sea at the time of a voyage which brought back it from Constantinople to Cyprus in 403.

The name of its episcopal see

The town of Salamine of Cyprus was founded towards 1100 before Jesus-Christ by a citizen of the island of Salamine in the gulf of Saronique. At the beginning of the 4th century, it is devastated by an earthquake and the rebuilt city takes that of Constantia in the honor of its restorer, the emperor Constance II, little time before the episcopate of Épiphane. In 648, the city is again destroyed, this time by the Arabs. The population takes refuge in the peninsula of Cyzique, in the Marmara Sea, in a place which receives the name of Justinianopolis News in the honor of Justinien II. Returned in Cyprus, the episcopal see was established in Nicosie but it kept until our days for its holder the title of archbishop of the Justiniane News and any Cyprus.

Its works

Épiphane is known for its heresiologic work and polemic, its texts refute 80 different heresies:

He is also the author of:

  • spiritual Speech on the life as a Christ

Some other texts reached us in fragments:

  • the treaty of the weights and measurements;
  • the treaty of the twelve gems;
  • the Letters (of which it remains little of fragments);

He wrote many comments of the Holy Scriptures:

  • life of the prophets;
  • the comment of Hexameron;
  • the comment on the psalms;
  • the Physiologist;
  • the comment on the Gospel according to Luc saint;

He also left liturgical works:

  • the liturgy of présanctifiée;
  • the Ethiopian anaphora of the Holy Week;
  • Another anaphora.

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