DENYS

PETAU (1583-1652)  , Jesuit scholar, better known as DIOxYSIUS PETAVIUS, was born at Orleans on the 21st of August 1583 . Educated at Paris University, he came under the influence of Isaac Scaliger, who directed his attention towards the obscurer fathers of the Church . In 1603 he was appointed to a lectureship at the university of Bourges, but resigned his place two years later, in order to enter the Society of Jesus . For many years he was professor of divinity at the College de Clermont, the chief Jesuit establishment in Paris; there he died on the 11th of December 1652 . He was one of the most brilliant scholars in a learned age . Carrying on and improving the chronological labours of Scaliger, he published in 1627 an Opus de doctrina lemporum, which has been often reprinted . An abridgment of this work, Rationarium tern porum, was translated into French and English, and has been brought down in a modern reprint to the year 1849 . But Petau's eminence chiefly rests on . his vast, but unfinished, De theologicis dogmalibus, the first systematic attempt ever made to treat the development of Christian doctrine from the historical point of view .