Denis Pétau

Pétau was born in Orléans, where he had his initial education; he then attended the University of Paris, where he successfully defended his theses for the degree of Master of Arts, not in Latin, but in Greek.

At Paris he formed a friendship with Isaac Casaubon, then librarian at the royal library, where he spent all his spare time studying the ancient Greek manuscripts.

Beginning in 1622, he taught positive theology for twenty-two years, and during this time he left France on only two occasions: first in 1629, to teach ecclesiastical history at Madrid at the invitation of Philip IV; second in 1639 to become a cardinal at Rome where Pope Urban VIII wanted him.

At sixty years of age he stopped teaching, but retained his office of librarian, in which he had succeeded Fronton du Duc (1623), and devoted the rest of his life to his great work, the Dogmata theologica.

His first edition of the works of Synesius appeared in 1612, undertaken ten years earlier at the advice of Casaubon (Synesii episcopi Cyrenensis opera, new ed., 1633); in 1613 and 1614 the discourses of Themistius and Julian (new ed., 1630); in 1616 the Breviarium historicum Nicephori; then, after some poetical and oratorical works, an edition of Epiphanius in two volumes (1622; new ed., 1632), which had been undertaken at the advice of Jacques Gretser, S.J., and was originally intended only as a revised translation of Janus Cornarius.

His letters, Epistolarum libri tres, were published after his death; though far from being complete, they give an idea of his close acquaintance with the most famous men in Europe of his time; they also furnish valuable information on the composition of his works and his method.

[1] Petau's claim to fame chiefly rests on his vast, but unfinished, De theologicis dogmatibus, the first systematic attempt ever made to treat the development of Christian doctrine from the historical point of view.

Pétau's work has been questioned; it may have been inspired, it is said, by a similar treatise of Oregius (Agostino Oreggi, Cardinal), as Zöckler maintains, or by the Confessio catholica of John Gerhard (d. 1627), as conjectured by Eckstein.

The memory of Pétau was celebrated the day after his death by Henri Valois, one of his pupils, and by Leo Allatius in a Greek poem composed at the request of Pope Urban VIII.