The evidence which disappoints this claim narrows also our choice of others. The personal transactions to which we have referred took place at Rome, while Zephyrinus and his successor, Callistus, presided over the Christian community there, that is, during the first twenty years of the third century. We must, therefore, look for our author among the metropolitan clergymen of that period. Still closer is the circle drawn by the fact, that the writer largely borrows from the treatise of Irenæus on the same subject; and, though vastly improving on that foolish production, and copiously contributing fresh materials, betrays the general affinity of thought which unites the stronger disciple with the feebler master.
The problem then being to find a pupil of the Bishop of Lyons among the ecclesiastics of Rome, at the beginning of the third century, two names are given in as answering the conditions,—those of Hippolytus, a suburban clergyman, and of Caius, whose charge lay within the city itself. In order to vindicate the claim of the first, it has been necessary for M. Bunsen to prove that his locality is right; and that the "Portus Romæ," of which he was bishop, was not, as Le Moyne and Cave had groundlessly supposed, the Arabian "Portus Romanus" of the district of Aden, but the new harbor made, or at least enlarged, by Trajan, on the northern bank of the Tiber, immediately opposite to Ostia. That he suffered martyrdom there, and was buried in a cemetery on the Tiburtine road, is generally admitted, on the evidence of Prudentius, who has left a poem describing his memorial chapel on that spot, and of a statue of him, seated in a cathedra, which was dug up there three hundred years ago, and now stands in the library of the Vatican. It is certainly perplexing to find Jerome avowing ignorance of the see over which he presided, if, for a quarter of a century, he was active at the centre of the Christian world; and not less so to discover in Rome itself, nay, in a Pope, or his transcriber, at the end of the fifth century, the impression that his scene of labor had been in Arabia; and under the influence of these facts it has been supposed that though, coming to Italy, he had fallen among the martyrs of the West, he ought to be reckoned among the bishops of the East. On the whole, however, the reasons preponderate in favor of his residence, as "Episcopus Portuensis," within the presbytery of Rome. The title itself is an old one, still always assigned to some dignitary of the curia, and, no doubt, deriving its origin from the time when the Northern Harbor of the Tiber—of which in the ninth century, scarce a trace was left—was a flourishing emporium. The name of Hippolytus is associated by tradition with the spot; it is given, our author assures us, to a certain tower, near Fiumicino; and in the eighth and ninth centuries, a basilica of St. Hippolytus was restored at Portus by Leo III. and IV. An episcopal palace still remains. By acute and skilful combinations, effected with evidence scanty as a whole, and suspicious in every part, M. Bunsen has endeavored to reproduce the historical image of Hippolytus. His office of "bishop" implied simply the charge of the single congregation at Portus; the members of that congregation were the "plebs" committed to his supervision; the city or village in which they lived was his diocese. His vicinity to the great capital drew him, however, into a wider circle of duties. For while Rome itself was divided into several ecclesiastical districts, each of which had its own clergyman and lay deacons, the suburban bishops were associated with these officers to form a committee of management, or presbytery, presided over by the metropolitan. By his seat at this board, he was kept in living contact with all the most stirring interests of Christendom, which, wherever their origin might be, found their way to the imperial city, and more and more sought their equilibrium there. At a commercial seaport, his own congregation would largely consist of temporary settlers and mercantile agents, Greek brokers, Jewish bankers, African importers, to whom Italy was a lodging-house rather than a home; and by the continual influx of foreigners he would hear tidings of the remotest churches, and carry to the clerical meetings in the city the newest gossip of all the heresies. Possibly this position, with its opportunities of various intercourse, may have contributed to form in him the agreeable address, and faculty of eloquent speech, which tradition ascribes to him; and induced him to commence the practice of writing with studious care the homilies which were to be delivered in the congregation. At all events he is the first of whom we distinctly hear as a great preacher. His period extends, it is supposed, from the reign of Commodus (180-193) to the first year of Maximin (235-6); and so brought him into the same presbytery-room with five popes,—Victor (187-198); Zephyrinus (201-218); Callistus (219-222); Urbanus (223-230); and Pontianus (230-235); with the last of whom he shared, in the last year of his life, a cruel exile to Sardinia, and returned only to fall a victim to fresh informations, and suffer martyrdom by drowning in a canal. It cannot be denied that, in order to recover this picture of Hippolytus, and still more in order to fix his literary position, the materials of evidence have to be dealt with in somewhat arbitrary fashion, and their lacunæ to be filled by conjecture. Prudentius, for instance, is called as an historical witness, yet convicted of fable in much of what he says. His poem declares that at one time Hippolytus had supported Novatus in his attempt to close the gates of repentance against the Lapsi, but had been reconciled to the catholic doctrine before he died. He must in this case have joined in the opposition raised by Novatianus (in 251) to the election of Cornelius to the papacy, and have died in the Decian persecution, which continued till the year 257. Moreover, the painting seen by the Spanish versifier on the walls of the memorial chapel introduces us to so ridiculous a story, as only to show how completely the martyrological legends had already escaped all the restraints of history. In this fresco the mythical fate of Hippolytus, the son of Theseus, is transferred to the Roman presbyter: he is represented as torn to pieces by horses; while the faithful follow to pick up his limbs and hair, and sponge away the blood upon the ground. If the sanctuary exhibiting this scene received the martyr's remains from their original resting-place as early as the time of Constantine,—and such is our author's opinion,—into what a state of degradation had the history of Hippolytus sunk in three quarters of a century! And if already memorial painting could thus impudently lie, how can we better trust the statue, admitted to be later still? Yet this statue, on whose side is a list of the writings of Hippolytus, is appealed to in determining the martyr's written productions, as the painted chapel in evidence of facts in his personal career. We fully admit the success of M. Bunsen in eliciting a possible result from a mass of intricate and tangled conditions, and presenting us with a highly interesting personage. But perhaps, as the venerable image of the good bishop has grown in clearness before his eye, and attracted his affection more and more, the very vividness of the conception may have rendered him insensible to the precariousness of the proof. Ecclesiastical fancy, in its unrestrained career, has torn his personality to pieces, and left the disjecta membra so rudely scattered on the strand of history, that we almost doubt the power of any critical Æsculapius to restore him to the world again.
At the same board of church councillors with Hippolytus sat another λογιωτατος ανηρ,[27] the presbyter Caius; and as an urban clergyman, he would be more constantly there than his suburban brother, separated by a distance of eighteen miles. To form any living image of him from the scanty notices of him which begin with Eusebius and end with Photius, is quite impossible. In one respect only do the personal characteristics attributed to him distinguish him from the bishop of Portus. He was a strenuous opponent of the peculiarities favored by the Christians of Lesser Asia, and especially of the claims to prophetic gifts, and the appeal to clairvoyant skill, by Montanus and his followers. With one of these, by name Proclus, he held a disputation; from which Eusebius has preserved a passage or two, showing, in conjunction with the title, not very intelligibly assigned to him, of "Bishop of the Gentiles," that he belonged to the most advanced anti-Jewish party in the Church, lamented the grossness of the popular millenarian dreams, vindicated the apostolic dignity of the Roman against the pretensions of the Eastern Christianity, and disowned the Epistle to the Hebrews. This feature in the figure of Caius, though constituting the distinction, does not, however, necessarily oppose him to Hippolytus, whose attitude towards the Montanists may not have been very different, but only less positively marked. Still the suspicions directed against the two men are of an opposite kind: with Hippolytus, the difficulty is to set him clear of sympathy with Montanism;[28] with Caius, to prevent his being classed with its unmeasured opponents, the Alogi.[29] And a report even reaches us, that among the Chaldean Christians there exists, or did exist in the fourteenth century, a controversial treatise of Hippolytus against Caius.[30]
Between these two men, so similar in position, and not, perhaps, unused to sharp argument face to face, springs up, at the end of all these ages, a rival claim to property in the "Refutation of all the Heresies." The chief counsel for Hippolytus, besides our author, are the eminent Professors Jacobi, Duncker, and Schneidewin,—all, we believe, belonging to the Neander school of theology; and as the last two are about to edit the work anew, and probably to give it its final form, their opinion of its authorship may be expected to prevail. The other side, however, advocated by Dr. Fessler, is sustained by perhaps the greatest of living historical critics, F. C. Baur, representative of the much-abused Tübingen school. Into so intricate a question we might be excused for inviting our readers, had we anything fresh to offer towards its solution; but the chief impression we have brought from its study is one of astonishment at the extreme positiveness with which the learned men on either side affirm their own conclusion. A more equal balance of evidence we never remember to have met with in any similar research; and the faint and slender preponderance which alone the scale can ever exhibit, amusingly contrasts with the triumphant assertion, of both sets of disputants, that not a reasonable doubt remains. The leading points of M. Bunsen's case are these. A work "On all Heresies" is attributed to Hippolytus, and in no instance to Caius, by Eusebius, Jerome, Epiphanius, and Peter of Alexandria, at the beginning of the fourth century. Such a book was still extant in the ninth century; for Photius, the celebrated patriarch of Constantinople, has given us an account of its contents in the journal and epitome of his studies which he has left us. On comparing his report with the newly discovered book, the identity of the two works is established in some important respects: the number and concluding term of the series of heresies are the same; they both of them include materials taken from Irenæus, while reversing his order of treatment. Further, in the newly found treatise reference is made by the author to other works of his, in which he has discussed certain points of early Hebrew chronology in proving the antiquity of the Abrahamic race. Now, Eusebius was acquainted with a certain "Chronicle" of Hippolytus, brought down to the first year of Alexander Severus; and such a chronicle, in a Latin translation, is found in Fabricius's edition of Hippolytus, only that its list of Roman emperors terminates, not with the beginning, but with the end, of Severus's reign. It has, however, in common with our work, a peculiar number of tribes,—viz. seventy-two, derived from Noah. Thus, the author of the "Heresies" and of the "Chronicle" would appear to be the same, and, according to Eusebius, to be Hippolytus. Lastly, both in our new work, and also in a book called the "Labyrinth," written against some Unitarians of the second century, reference is made to a treatise "On the Universe," which the author mentions as his own production. By printing a fragment of this last in his edition of "Hippolytus," Fabricius has shown to what name all three should, in his judgment, be set down; and that they cannot be given to Caius is rendered evident by the occurrence, in the fragment, of certain Apocalyptic fictions inconsistent with his rejection of the Book of Revelations. Moreover, the list of works on the statue of Hippolytus includes a disquisition "Against the Greeks and against Plato, or Respecting the Universe."
What can be said to weaken so strong a case? Two doubts at once arise upon it, which we find it by no means easy to set aside. Granted, Hippolytus wrote a book "On all Heresies"; is it the same which is now delivered into our hands? One medium of comparison we possess, enabling us to place the original and the present book, for a short space, side by side. The very Peter of Alexandria who is one of the early witnesses called on Hippolytus's behalf has handed down to us a passage or two (preserved in the Paschal Chronicle) from the book which he attests, with a distinct reference to the place where they are to be found. We turn to the right chapter, and the passages are not there. Nor is it a mere want of verbal agreement which we have to regret; the same topic—the controversy about the time of Easter—is treated; the same side—that of the Western Church—is taken, in both instances; but the arguments are different, and so far irreconcilable, that no one who had command of that which Peter gives would ever resort to the feebler one which our work contains. With the dauntless ingenuity of German criticism M. Bunsen makes a virtue of necessity, and endeavors to convert this unfortunate discrepancy into a fresh proof of identity. He thinks that, in this and some other parts, our work is but a clumsy abstract of Hippolytus's original, which the citations of Peter enable us to recover and complete. This, however, is a plea which, it strikes us, damages his case as much by success as it could by failure. For if the book presented to us by the Clarendon Press reflects the original no better than would appear from this only sample which it is in our power to test, it may indeed be a degenerate descendant from the pen of Hippolytus; but all reliable identity is lost, and the traces of his hand are no longer recoverable. The second doubt is this:—Is the work which Photius read the same that has now been rescued? Of the few descriptive marks supplied by the patriarch, there are as many absent from our work as present in it. The treatise which he read was a "little book" or "tract," as Lardner calls it (βιβλιδαριον), a word which can scarcely apply to a volume extending (as ours would, if complete) to four hundred and twenty octavo pages. M. Bunsen cuts down this number to two hundred and fifty, by supposing Photius to have only the last six books, containing the historical survey, without the groundwork of the philosophical deduction, of the heresies. The curtailment, if conceded, seems scarcely adequate to its purpose, and appears to us a very questionable conjecture. The manuscript, stripped of the first four books, would want the very basis of the whole argument; and, if such a mutilation were conceivable, it is impossible that Photius should fail to observe and mention it; for the fifth book opens, not like an independent treatise, but with a summary statement of what has been accomplished "in the four books preceding this." Again, Photius mentions the Dositheans as the first set of heretics discussed; whereas their name does not occur at all, if we remember right, in our work, and their place is occupied by the "Ophites." M. Bunsen treats this as a mere inaccuracy of expression on the part of Photius, who meant, by the name "Dositheans," to indicate the same "earliest Judaizing schools" that are better described as "Ophites." The name, however, is so unsuitable to this purpose, that it would be a strange wilfulness in the learned patriarch to substitute it for the language of the author he describes. He could not be ignorant that Dositheus, Simon, Menander, were the three founders of the Samaritan sect, exponents of the same doctrine, if not even reputed avatars of the same divine essence;[31] and if he had applied the name Dositheans to any of the heretics enumerated in our work, it would assuredly have been to the followers of Simon, who stand fourth in the series of thirty-two, and not to Phrygian serpent-worshippers, who commence the list. Further, the author whom Photius read stated that his book was a synopsis of the Lectures of Irenæus. In our work no such statement occurs; and the use made of Irenæus does not agree, either in quantity or character, with the substance of the assertion. And, lastly, the patriarch's Hippolytus said "some things which are not quite correct; for instance, that the Epistle to the Hebrews is not by the Apostle Paul." In our work there is no such assertion; and when M. Bunsen suggests that perhaps its place might be in the lost books, he forgets that, according to his own conjecture, these books were no more in Photius's hands than in ours, and that he cannot first cut them off in order to make a βιβλιδαριον, and then restore them, to provide a locus for a missing criticism on the Epistle to the Hebrews. The identity of our "Philosophumena" with the treatise which Photius read and Hippolytus wrote, appears, therefore, to be extremely problematical.
One fixed point, however, is gained in the course of the argument, and gives an acknowledged position from which the opposite opinions are willing to set out. Whoever wrote the disquisition "On the Universe" wrote also our work. This fact rests on the assertion of the author himself; yet, if the author be Hippolytus, and our "Philosophumena" be his "Refutation of all Heresies," it is strange that no list of his writings mentions both books: the catalogues of Eusebius and Jerome naming the "Heresies" without the essay "On the Universe"; and the engraving on the statue giving the essay "On the Universe" without the "Heresies." How can we explain it, that these ecclesiastical writers, in knowing our work, did not know what is contained in it about the authorship of the other book; and that this book should have wandered anonymously about down to the ninth century, side by side with an acknowledged writing of Hippolytus, which all the while was proclaiming the solution of the question? We should certainly expect that the book of avowed authorship would convey the name of Hippolytus to the companion production for which it claims the same paternity; but, instead of this, it not only leaves its associate anonymous for six hundred years, but afterward assumes the modest fit, and becomes anonymous itself. Even if no previous reader had sense enough to put the two things together, and pick out the testimony of the one book to the origin of the other, are we to charge the same stupidity on the erudite Photius, who had both books in his hand, and has given his report of both? In his account of Hippolytus's treatise, he nowhere tells us that it contains a reference to the essay "On the Universe," as being from the same pen; and that he found no such reference is certain; for he actually discusses the question, "Who wrote the essay on the Universe?" without ever mentioning Hippolytus at all. Just such a reference, however, as he did not find in Hippolytus, he did find in another work, of which he speaks under the title of "The Labyrinth"; and, strange to say, it was at the end of the work,[32] precisely where it stands in our "Philosophumena." Who can resist the suspicion, that the anonymous "Labyrinth" of Photius is no other than our anonymous "Philosophumena"? This conviction forced itself upon us on first weighing the evidence collected by M. Bunsen, in support of his different conclusion; and we observe that it is the opinion sustained by the great authority of Baur,[33] who even finds a trace in our work of the very title given by Photius; the writer observing, at the beginning of the tenth book, "The Labyrinth of Heresies we have not broken through by violence, but have resolved by refutation alone with the force of truth; and now we come to the positive exposition of the truth." At all events, the difference of title in the case of a work having probably more names than one, is of no weight in disproof of identity. With this new designation in our possession, we may return to search for our book in the records of ecclesiastical antiquity; and we have not far to go, before we alight on traces affording hopes of a result. No "Labyrinth," indeed, turns up in the literary history of earlier centuries than Photius; but a "Little Labyrinth" is mentioned by Theodoret,[34] as sometimes ascribed to Origen, but as evidently not his; and from his account of it, confirmed by the matter which he borrows from it, we learn that it was a controversial book, against a set of Unitarians in Rome, followers of Theodotus. It so happens that the very passage from this tract which Theodoret has used appears also, with others from the same source, in Eusebius, only quoted under another title,—the book being called a "Work against the Heresy of Artemon" (who was another teacher of the same school in the same age). The extracts thus preserved to us are not found in our work; which, therefore, if it be the "Labyrinth," is a distinct production from the "Little Labyrinth"; but they are so manifestly from the same pen, occupied in the same task, as to render it perfectly conceivable that the two books might receive the same name, with only a diminutive epithet to distinguish the lesser from the greater. Nor are we left, as Baur has shown, without a distinct assertion by our "great unknown," that he had already composed a smaller treatise on the same subject; for, in the introduction to the "Philosophumena," he says of the heretics, "We have before given a brief exposition of their opinions, refuting them in the gross, without presenting them in detail." This shorter work would naturally treat of the particular forms of error most immediately present and mischievous before the author's eyes; and if he dwelt especially on the doctrines of Theodotus and Artemon, it is just what we should expect from an orthodox Roman. This essay, on a limited range of heresy, would naturally be issued at first with the special title by which Eusebius refers to it. But if it led the author to execute afterwards a much enlarged design, to which, from its intricate extent, he gave, on its completion, the fanciful designation of "The Labyrinth," he might naturally carry the name back to the earlier production, and, to mark the relation between the two, issue this in future as "The Little Labyrinth." Photius speaks of the tract against the heresy of Artemon as a separate work from "The Labyrinth,"[35] and says the same thing of the latter[36] that Theodoret had remarked of the former, that by some it was ascribed to Origen. The result to which we are thus led is the following. Our newly found work is not Hippolytus's βιβλιδαριον "On all Heresies," but the book known to Photius as "The Labyrinth"; the author of which had previously produced two other works, viz. "The Little Labyrinth" mentioned by Theodoret, and quoted under another name by Eusebius, and the "Treatise on the Universe," whose contents Photius reports. Whatever, therefore, fixes the authorship of any of these, fixes the authorship of all.
Notwithstanding, however, our threefold chance, we have only a solitary evidence on this point. Attached to Photius's copy of the "Treatise on the Universe" was a note, to the effect that the book was not (as had been imagined) by Josephus, but by Caius, the Roman presbyter, who also composed the "Labyrinth."[37] In the absence of other external testimony, this judgment appears entitled to stand, unless the books themselves disclose some features at variance with the known character of Caius.
But, it is said, such variance we do actually find. For while our work expressly appeals to the Apocalypse as the production of John, we know from Eusebius that Caius ascribed it to Cerinthus, and, in opposing himself to Montanism, rejected the millenarian doctrine which is taught in the Revelations. This argument, we admit, would be decisive if its allegations were indisputable. It is curious, however, that the one locus classicus,[38] from which is inferred the presbyter's repudiation of the Apocalypse, is confessedly ambiguous; and the charge it prefers against Cerinthus may amount to either of these two propositions; that he had composed the Book of Revelations and palmed it on the world as the production of the Apostle John; or, that he had given himself the air of a great Apostle, and published accordingly some revelations affecting to be imparted, like those of John, by angels. According to this last interpretation, the work of Cerinthus would be a book distinct from our Apocalypse, written in imitation of it, and seeking to share its authority. The contents of the production are briefly described by Caius; but they present such a mixture of agreement and disagreement with our canonical book, as to leave the ambiguity unresolved. They affirm, that after the resurrection will follow an earthly kingdom of Christ, in which the lower nature of man will, in Jerusalem, be again in servitude to passion and pleasure; and that the number of a thousand years are to be spent in the indulgence of sense. So far as the place and the duration of the kingdom are concerned, our Apocalypse might here be referred to; but it has nothing answering to the description of a gross and luxurious millennium. Taking the passage in conjunction with the similar statement of Theodoret, that "Cerinthus invented certain revelations, pretending that they were given in vision to himself," we think it unlikely that our Apocalypse can be meant; and conceive the indictment to be, that Cerinthus had put forth a set of apocryphal visions, in which he abused the style and corrupted the teachings of a great Apostle to the purposes of a sensual fanaticism. This is a charge which Caius might bring, in consistency with the fullest acceptance of the Apocalypse as authentic and true. It was not the doctrine of a reign of Christ on earth, not the millenarian period assigned to it, to which he objected in Cerinthus; but the coarse and demoralizing picture given of its employments and delights. In proportion to his respect for the real Apocalypse and its teachings, would he be likely to resent such a miserable parody on its lofty theocratic visions. His opposition to the Montanists in no way pledged him to renounce the eschatological expectations which they were distinguished from other Christians not by entertaining, but by exaggerating. If our work, in its notice of their heresy, passes by in silence this particular element of the system, and treats their claim to special gifts of prophecy with less contemptuous emphasis than might be looked for in the antagonist of Proclus, there is nothing that ought really to surprise us in this. It does not follow that, because in our scanty knowledge we have only one idea about an historical personage, the man himself never had another. Caius did not live in a perpetual platform disputation with Proclus; and either before that controversy had waked him up, or after it was well got over, he might naturally enough dismiss the Montanists with very cursory notice; in the one case, because they had not yet adequately provoked his antipathy; in the other, because they had already had enough of it.[39]
Nothing therefore presents itself in our work which should deter us from attributing it to Caius; and the more we ponder the evidence, the more do we incline to believe it his. This result is to us an unwelcome one; both because we know how strong the presumption must be against a critical judgment condemned by the masterly genius of M. Bunsen, and because he has really made us in love with his ecclesiastical hero,—has put such an innocent and venerable life into that old effigy, that after wandering with him about the quays of Portus, and entering with listening fancy into the Basilica[40] where he preached, it is hard to return him into stone, and think of him only as a dead bishop who made a bad almanac. Should our readers have contracted no such ideal attachment, we fear that this discussion of authorship may appear as trivial as it is tedious. Somebody wrote the "Philosophumena," and whether we call him Hippolytus or Caius, whether we lodge him on the Tiber within sight of the Pharos, or of the Milliarium Aureum, may seem a thing indifferent, so long as the elements of the personal image do not materially change. This utilitarian impression is by no means just, and indeed is at variance with all true historical feeling. But it is time that we should give it its fair rights, and turn from the name upon our new book to its substances and significance.