Online Encyclopedia

DENYS PETAU (1583-1652)

Online Encyclopedia
Originally appearing in Volume V21, Page 285 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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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
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Scaliger, who directed his attention towards the obscurer fathers of the Church . In 1603 he was appointed to a lectureship at the university of
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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
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chronological labours of Scaliger, he published in 1627 an Opus de doctrina lemporum, which has been often reprinted . An abridgment of this
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work, Rationarium tern porum, was translated into French and
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English, and has been brought down in a
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modern reprint to the
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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
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doctrine from the
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historical point of view .

End of Article: DENYS PETAU (1583-1652)
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