Philosophumena; or, The refutation of all heresies, Volume I

by Antipope Hippolytus

4. The Composition of the Work

In these circumstances, and in view of the manifest discrepancies between statements in the earlier part of the text and what purports to be their repetition in the later, the question has naturally arisen as to whether the document before us was written for publication in its present form. It is never referred to or quoted by name by any later author, and although the argument from silence has generally proved a broken reed in such cases, there are here some circumstances which seem to give it unusual strength. It was certainly no reluctance to call in evidence the work of a schismatic or heretical writer which led to the work being ignored, for Epiphanius, a century and a half later, classes Hippolytus with Irenæus and Clement of Alexandria as one from whose writings he has obtained information,[33] and Theodoret, while making use still later of certain passages which coincide with great closeness with some in Book X of our text,[34] admits, as has been said, Hippolytus’ claim to both episcopacy and martyrdom. But the passages in Theodoret which seem to show borrowing from Hippolytus, although possibly, are not necessarily from the work before us. The author of this tells us in Book I that he has “aforetime”[35] expounded the tenets of the heretics “within measure,” and without revealing all their mysteries, and it might, therefore, be from some such earlier work that both Epiphanius and Theodoret have borrowed. Some writers, including Salmon,[36] have thought that this earlier work of our author is to be found in the anonymous tractate Adversus Omnes Hæreses usually appended to Tertullian’s works.[37] Yet this tractate, which is extremely short, contains nothing that can be twisted into the words common to our text and to Theodoret, and we might, therefore, assert with confidence that it was from our text that Theodoret copied them but for the fact that he nowhere indicates their origin. This might be only another case of the unacknowledged borrowing much in fashion in his time, were it not that Theodoret has already spoken of Hippolytus in the eulogistic terms quoted above, and would therefore, one would think, have been glad to give as his informant such respectable authority. As he did not do so, we may perhaps accept the conclusion drawn by Cruice with much skill in a study published shortly after the appearance of Miller’s text,[38] and say with him that Theodoret did not know that the passages in question were to be found in any work of Hippolytus. In this case, as the statements in Book IX forbid us to suppose that our text was published anonymously or pseudonymously, the natural inference is that both Hippolytus and Theodoret drew from a common source.

What this source was likely to have been there can be little doubt. Our author speaks more than once of “the blessed elder Irenæus,” who has, he says, refuted the heretic Marcus with much vigour, and he implies that the energy and power displayed by Irenæus in such matters have shortened his own work with regard to the Valentinian school generally.[39] Photius, also, writing as has been said in the ninth century, mentions a work of Hippolytus against heresies admittedly owing much to Irenæus’ instruction. The passage runs thus:—

“A booklet of Hippolytus has been read. Now Hippolytus was a disciple of Irenæus. But it (i. e. the booklet) was the compilation against 32 heresies making (the) Dositheans the beginning (of them) and comprising (those) up to Noetus and the Noetians. And he says that these heresies were subjected to refutations by Irenæus in conversation[40] (or in lectures). Of which refutations making also a synopsis, he says he compiled this book. The phrasing however is clear, reverent and unaffected, although he does not observe the Attic style. But he says some other things lacking in accuracy, and that the Epistle to the Hebrews was not by the Apostle Paul.”

These words have been held by Salmon and others to describe the tractate Adversus Omnes Hæreses. Yet this tractate contains not thirty-two heresies, but twenty-seven, and begins with Simon Magus to end with the Praxeas against whom Tertullian wrote. It also notices another heretic named Blastus, who, like Praxeas, is mentioned neither by Irenæus nor by our author, nor does it say anything about Noetus or the Apostle Paul. It does indeed mention at the outset “Dositheus the Samaritan,” but only to say that the author proposes to keep silence concerning both him and the Jews, and “to turn to those who have wished to make heresy from the Gospel,” the very first of whom, he says, is Simon Magus.[41] As for refutations, the tractate contains nothing resembling one, which has forced the supporters of the theory to assume that they were omitted for brevity’s sake. Nor does it in the least agree with our text in its description of the tenets and practices of heresies which the two documents treat of in common, such as Simon, Basilides, the Sethiani and others, and the differences are too great to be accounted for by supposing that the author of the later text was merely incorporating in it newer information.[42]

On the other hand, Photius’ description agrees fairly well with our text, which contains thirty-one heresies all told, or thirty-two if we include, as the author asks us to do, that imputed by him to Callistus. Of these, that of Noetus is the twenty-eighth, and is followed by those of the Elchesaites, Essenes, Pharisees and Sadducees only. These four last are all much earlier in date than any mentioned in the rest of the work, and three of them appeared to the author of the tractate last quoted as not heresies at all, while the fourth is not described by him, and there is no reason immediately apparent why in any case they should be put after and not before the post-Christian ones. The early part of the summary of Jewish beliefs in Book X is torn away, and may have contained a notice of Dositheus, whose name occurs in Eusebius and other writers,[43] as a predecessor of Simon Magus and one who did not believe in the inspiration of the Jewish Prophets. The natural place in chronological order for these Jewish and Samaritan sects would, therefore, be at the head rather than at the tail of the list, and if we may venture to put them there and to restore to the catalogue the name of Dositheus, we should have our thirty-two heresies, beginning with Dositheus and ending with Noetus. We will return later to the reason why Photius should call our text a Biblidarion or “booklet.”

Are there now any reasons for thinking that our text is founded on such a synopsis of lectures as Photius says Hippolytus made? A fairly cogent one is the inconvenient and awkward division of the books, which often seem as if they had been arranged to occupy equal periods of time in delivery. Another is the unnecessary and tedious introductions and recapitulations with which the descriptions of particular philosophies, charlatanic practices, and heresies begin and end, and which seem as if they were only put in for the sake of arresting or holding the attention of an audience addressed verbally. Thus, in the account of Simon Magus’ heresy, our author begins with a long-winded story of a Libyan who taught parrots to proclaim his own divinity, the only bearing of which upon the story of Simon is that Hippolytus asserts, like Justin Martyr, that Simon wished his followers to take him for the Supreme Being.[44] So, too, he begins the succeeding book with the age-worn tale of Ulysses and the Sirens[45] by way of introduction to the tenets of Basilides, with which it has no connection whatever. This was evidently intended to attract the attention of an audience so as to induce them to give more heed to the somewhat intricate details which follow. In other cases, he puts at the beginning or end of a book a more or less detailed summary of those which preceded it, lest, as he states in one instance, his hearers should have forgotten what he has before said.[46] These are the usual artifices of a lecturer, but a more salient example is perhaps those ends of chapters giving indications of what is to follow immediately, which can hardly be anything else than announcements in advance of the subject of the next lecture. Thus, at the end of Book I, he promises to explain the mystic rites[47]—a promise which is for us unfulfilled in the absence of Books II and III; at the end of Book IV, he tells us that he will deal with the disciples of Simon and Valentinus[48]; at that of Book VII, that he will do the same with the Docetæ[49]; and at that of Book VIII that he will “pass on” to the heresy of Noetus.[50] In none of these cases does he more than mention the first of the heresies to be treated of in the succeeding book, which the reader could find out for himself by turning over the page, or rather by casting his eye a little further down the roll.

Again, there are repetitions in our text excusable in a lecturer who does not, if he is wise, expect his hearers to have at their fingers’ ends all that he has said in former lectures, and who may even find that he can best root things in their memory by saying them over and over again; but quite unpardonable in a writer who can refer his readers more profitably to his former statements. Yet, we find our author in Book I giving us the supposed teaching of Pythagoras as to the monad being a male member, the dyad a female and so on up to the decad, which is supposed to be perfect.[51] This is gone through all over again in Book IV with reference to the art of arithmetic[52] and again in Book VI where it is made a sort of shoeing-horn to the Valentinian heresy[53]. The same may be said of the “Categories” or accidents of substance which Hippolytus in one place attributes to Pythagoras, but which are identical with those set out by Aristotle in the Organon. He gives them rightly to Aristotle in Book I, but makes them the invention of the Pythagoreans in Book VI only to return them to Aristotle in Book VII.[54] Here again is a mistake such as a lecturer might make by a slip of the tongue, but not a writer with any pretensions to care or seriousness.

Beyond this, there is some little direct evidence of a lecture origin for our text. In his comments on the system of Justinus, which he connects with the Ophites, our author says: “Though I have met with many heresies, O beloved, I have met with none viler in evil than this.” The word “beloved” is here in the plural, and would be the phrase used by a Greek-speaking person in a lecture to a class or group of disciples or catechumens.[55] I do not think there is any instance of its use in a book. In another place he says that his “discourse” has proved useful, not only for refuting heretics, but for combating the prevalent belief in astrology;[56] and although the word might be employed by other authors with regard to writings, yet it is not likely to have been used in that sense by Hippolytus, who everywhere possible refers to his former “books.” There is, therefore, a good deal of reason for supposing that some part of this work first saw the light as spoken and not as written words.

What this part is may be difficult to define with great exactness; but there are abundant signs that the work as we have it was not written all at one time. In Book I, the author expresses his intention of assigning every heresy to the speculations of some particular philosopher or philosophic school.[57] So far from doing so, however, he only compares Valentinus with Pythagoras and Plato, Basilides with Aristotle, Cerdo and Marcion with Empedocles, Hermogenes with Socrates, and Noetus with Heraclitus, leaving all the Ophite teachers, Satornilus, Carpocrates, Cerinthus and other founders of schools without a single philosopher attached to them. At the end of Book IV, moreover, he draws attention more than once to certain supposed resemblances in the views linked with the name of Pythagoras, to those underlying the nomenclature of the Simonian and Valentinian heresies, and concludes with the words that he must proceed to the doctrines of these last.[58] Before he does so, however, Book V is interposed and is entirely taken up with the Ophites, or worshippers of the Serpent, to whom he does not attempt to assign a philosophic origin. In Book VI he carries out his promise in Book IV by going at length into the doctrines of Simon, Valentinus and the followers of this last, and in Book VII he takes us in like manner through those of Basilides, Menander, Marcion and his successors, Carpocrates, Cerinthus and many others of the less-known heresiarchs. Book VIII deals in the same way with a sect that he calls the Docetæ, Monoimus the Arabian, Tatian, Hermogenes and some others. In the case of the Ophite teachers, Simon, and Basilides, he gives us, as has been said, extracts from documents which are entirely new to us, and were certainly not used by Irenæus, while he adds to the list of heresies described by his predecessor, the sects of the Docetæ, Monoimus and the Quartodecimans. In all the other heresies so far, he follows Irenæus’ account almost word for word, and with such closeness as enables us to restore in great part the missing Greek text of that Father. With Book IX, however, there comes a change. Mindful of the intention expressed in Book I, he here begins with a summary of the teaching of Heraclitus the Obscure, which no one has yet professed to understand, and then sets to work to deduce from it the heresy of Noetus. This gives him the opportunity for the virulent attack on his rival Callistus, to whom he ascribes a modification of Noetus’ heresy, and he next, as has been said, plunges into a description of the sect of the Elchesaites, then only lately come to Rome, and quotes from Josephus without acknowledgment and with some garbling the account by this last of the division of the Jews into the three sects of Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes. Noetus’ heresy was what was known as Patripassian, from its involving the admission that the Father suffered upon the Cross, and although he manages to see Gnostic elements in that of the Elchesaites, there can be little doubt that these last-named “heretics,” whose main tenet was the prescription of frequent baptism for all sins and diseases, were connected with the pre-Christian sect of Hemerobaptists, Mogtasilah or “Washers” who are at once pre-Christian, and still to be found near the Tigris between Baghdad and Basra. Why he should have added to these the doctrines of the Jews is uncertain, as the obvious place for this would have been, as has been said, at the beginning of the volume:[59] but a possible explanation is that he was here resuming a course of instruction by lectures that he had before abandoned, and was therefore in some sort obliged to spin it out to a certain length.

Book X seems at first sight likely to solve many of the questions which every reader who has got so far is compelled to ask. It begins, in accordance with the habit just noted, with the statement that the author has now worked through “the Labyrinth of Heresies” and that the teachings of truth are to be found neither in the philosophies of the Greeks, the secret mysteries of the Egyptians, the formulas of the Chaldæans or astrologers, nor the ravings of Babylonian magic.[60] This links it with fair closeness to the reference in Book IV to the ideas of the Persians, Babylonians, Egyptians and Chaldæans, only the first-named nation being here omitted from the text. It then goes on to say that “having brought together the opinions[61] of all the wise men among the Greeks in four books and those of the heresiarchs in five,” he will make a summary of them. It will be noted that this is in complete contradiction to the supposition that the missing Books II and III contained the doctrines of the Babylonians, as he now says that they comprised those of the Greeks only. The summary which follows might have been expected to make this confusion clear, but unfortunately it does nothing of the kind. It does indeed give so good an abstract of what has been said in Books V to IX inclusive regarding the chief heresiarchs, that in one or two places it enables us to correct doubtful phrases and to fill in gaps left in earlier books. There is omitted from the summary, however, all mention of the heresies of Marcus, Satornilus, Menander, Carpocrates, the Nicolaitans, Docetæ, Quartodecimans, Encratites and the Jewish sects, and the list of omissions will probably be thought too long to be accounted for on the ground of mere carelessness. But when the summarizer deals with the earlier books, the discrepancy between the summary and the documents summarized is much more startling. Among the philosophers, he omits to summarize the opinions of Pythagoras, Empedocles, Ecphantus, Hippo, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Academics, Brachmans, or Druids, while he does mention those of Hippasus, Ocellus Lucanus, Heraclides of Pontus and Asclepiades, who were not named in any of the texts of Book I which have come down to us. As for the tenets and practices of the Persians, Egyptians and others, supposed on the strength of the statement at the beginning of Book V to have been narrated in Books II and III, nothing further is here said concerning them, and, by the little table of contents with which Book X like the others is prefaced, it will appear that nothing was intended to be said. For this last omission it might be possible to assign plausible reasons if it stood alone; but when it is coupled with the variations between summary and original as regards Book I, the only inference that meets all the facts is that the summarizer did not have the first four books under his eyes.

This has led some critics to conclude that the summary is by another hand. There is nothing in the literary manners of the age to compel us to reject this supposition, and similar cases have been quoted. The evidence of style is, however, against it, and it is unlikely that if the summarizer were any other person than Hippolytus, he would have taken up Hippolytus’ personal quarrel against Callistus. Yet in the text of Book X before us the charge of heresy against Callistus is repeated, although perhaps with less asperity than in Book IX, the accusations against his morals being omitted. Nor is it easy to dissociate from Hippolytus the really eloquent appeal to men of all nations to escape the terrors of Tartarus and gain an immortality of bliss by becoming converted to the Doctrine of Truth with which the Book ends, after an excursion into Hebrew Chronology, a subject which always had great fascination for Hippolytus. Although the matter is not beyond doubt, it would appear, therefore, that the summary, like the rest of the book, is by Hippolytus’ own hand.

In these circumstances there is but one theory that in the opinion of the present writer will reconcile all the conflicting facts. This is that the foundation of our text is the synopsis that Hippolytus made, as Photius tells us, after receiving instruction from Irenæus; that those notes were, as Hippolytus himself says, “set forth” by him possibly in the form of lectures, equally possibly in writing, but in any case a long time before our text was compiled; and that when his rivalry with Callistus became acute, he thought of republishing these discourses and bringing them up to date by adding to them the Noetian and other non-Gnostic heresies which were then making headway among the Christian community, together with the facts about the divinatory and magical tricks which had come to his knowledge during his long stay in Rome. We may next conjecture that, after the greater part of his book was written, chance threw in his way the documents belonging to the Naassene and other Ophite sects, which went back to the earliest days of Christianity and were probably in Hippolytus’ time on the verge of extinction.[62] He had before determined to omit these sects as of slight importance,[63] but now perceiving the interest of the new documents, he hastily incorporated them in his book immediately after his account of the magicians, so that they might appear as what he with some truth said they were, to wit, the fount and source of all later Gnosticism. To do this, he had to displace the account of the Jewish and Samaritan sects with which all the heresiologists of the time thought it necessary to begin their histories. He probably felt the less reluctance in doing so, because the usual mention of these sects as “heresies” in some sort contradicted his pet theory, which was that the Gnostic tenets were not a mere perversion of Christian teaching, but were derived from philosophic theories of the creation of things, and from the mystic rites.

Next let us suppose that at the close of his life, when he was perhaps hiding from Maximin’s inquisitors, or even when he was at the Sardinian mines, he thought of preserving his work for posterity by re-writing it—such copies as he had left behind him in Rome having been doubtless seized by the Imperial authorities.[64] Not having the material that he had before used then at his disposal, he had to make the best summary that he could from memory, and in the course of this found that the contents of the Books I, II, and III—the material for which he had drawn in the first instance from Irenæus—had more or less escaped him. He was probably able to recall some part of Book I by the help of heathen works like those of Diogenes Laertius, Aetius, or perhaps that Alcinous whose summary of Plato’s doctrines seem to have been formerly used by him.[65] The Ophite and other Gnostic heresies he remembers sufficiently to make his summary of their doctrines more easy, although he omits from the list heresiarchs like Marcus, Satornilus and Menander, about whom he had never had any exclusive information, and he now puts Justinus after instead of before Basilides. Finally, he remembered the Jewish sects which he had once intended to include, and being perhaps able to command, even in the mines, the work of a Romanized but unconverted Jew like Josephus, took from it such facts as seemed useful for his purpose as an introduction to the chronological speculation which had once formed his favourite study. With this summary as his guide he continued, it may be, to warn the companions in adversity to whom he tells us he had “become an adviser,” against the perils of heresy, and to appeal to his unconverted listeners with what his former translator calls not unfitly “a noble specimen of patristic eloquence.” That he died in the mines is most probable, not only from his advanced age at the time of exile and the consequent unlikelihood that he would be able to withstand the pestilential climate, but also from the record of his body having been “deposited” in the Catacombs on the same day with that of his fellow-Pope and martyr Pontianus.[66] Yet the persecution of Maximin, though sharp, was short, and on the death of the tyrant after a reign of barely three years, there is no reason why the transcript of Book X should not have reached Rome, where there is some reason to think it was known from its opening words as “the Labyrinth.” Later it was probably appended to Books IV to IX of Hippolytus’ better known work, and the whole copied for the use of those officials who had to enquire into heresy. To them, Books II and III would be useless, and they probably thought it inexpedient to perpetuate any greater knowledge than was necessary for their better suppression, of the unclean mysteries of either pagan or Gnostic. As for Book I, besides being harmless, it had possibly by that time become too firmly connected with the name of Origen for its attribution to this other sufferer in the Maximinian persecution to be disturbed in later times.

It only remains to see how this theory fits in with the remarks of Photius given above. It is fairly evident that Photius is speaking from recollection only, and that the words do not suggest that he had Hippolytus’ actual work before him when writing, while he throughout speaks of it in the past tense as one might speak of a document which has long since perished, although some memory of its contents have been preserved. If this were so, we might be prepared to take Photius’ description as not necessarily accurate in every detail; yet, as we have it, it is almost a perfect description of our text. The 32 heresies, as we have shown above, appear in our text as in Photius’ document. Our text contains not only the large excerpts from Irenæus which we might expect from Photius’ account of its inception, but also the “refutations” which do not appear in the Adversus Omnes Hæreses. It extends “up to,” as Photius says, Noetus and the Noetians, and although it does not contain any mention of Dositheus or the Dositheans, this may have been given in the part which has been cut out of Book X.[67] If that were the case, or if Photius has made any mistake in the matter, as one might easily do when we consider that all the early heresiologies begin with Jewish and Samaritan sects, the only real discrepancy between our text and Photius’ description of Hippolytus’ work is in the matter of length. But it is by no means certain that Photius ever saw the whole work put together, and it is plain that he had never seen or had forgotten the first four books dealing with the philosophers, the mysteries and the charlatans. Without these, and without the summary, Books V to IX do not work out to more than 70,000 words in all, and this might well seem a mere “booklet” to a man then engaged in the compilation of his huge Bibliotheca. Whether, then, Hippolytus did or did not reduce to writing the exposition of heresies which he made in his youth, it seems probable that all certain trace of this exposition is lost. It is certainly not to be recognized in pseudo-Tertullian’s Adversus Omnes Hæreses, and the work of Hippolytus recorded by Photius was probably a copy of our text in a more or less complete form.