Refutation of All Heresies 1.22.2

Authorship disputed: The work names no author. Book 1 was long printed among Origen's works as the Philosophumena; after books 4–10 were found in a manuscript from Mount Athos (published 1851), it was assigned to Hippolytus, the usual view today, though some scholars ascribe it to another Roman writer of the same circle. Books 2 and 3 are lost, and book 4 lacks its beginning.

Summary: For Epicurus even God is made of atoms, the smallest indivisible bodies.

Greek text · Duncker–Schneidewin, 40–42

Ἐκ δὲ τῶν ἀτόμων συνελθόντων γενέσθαι καὶ τὸν θεόν, καὶ τὰ στοιχεῖα πάντα, καὶ τὰ ἐν αὐτοῖς πάντα καὶ ζῶα καὶ ἄλλα, ὡς μηδὲν γίνεσθαι μήτε συνεστάναι, εἰ μὴ ἐκ τῶν ἀτόμων εἴη. Τὰς δὲ ἀτόμους τὸ λεπτομερέστατον καὶ ἐφʼ οὗ οὐκ ἂν γένοιτο κέντρον οὐδὲ σημεῖον οὐδὲν οὐδὲ διαίρεσις οὐδεμία, ἔφη εἶναι, διὸ καὶ ἀτόμους αὐτὰς ὠνόμασε.

English · Claude translation

From the atoms coming together, God came to be, and all the elements, and all things in them, both animals and the rest, so that nothing comes to be or is composed except from the atoms. He said that the atoms are the finest of all things, in which there could be no center, no point, no division; which is why he named them atoms.

About this passage

Source

Duncker–Schneidewin, 40–42 · Ludwig Duncker and F. G. Schneidewin, eds., S. Hippolyti episcopi et martyris Refutationis omnium haeresium librorum decem quae supersunt (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1859); section divisions from Paul Wendland, ed., Hippolytus Werke 3: Refutatio omnium haeresium, GCS 26 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1916) · Greek text: L. Duncker and F. G. Schneidewin, Refutationis omnium haeresium (Göttingen, 1859), digitized by the Perseus Digital Library; section divisions from P. Wendland (GCS 26, 1916), digitized by the First Thousand Years of Greek project (Open Greek and Latin); both CC BY-SA 4.0

Text

As printed in Duncker–Schneidewin. Manuscript variants and the editor's apparatus are not reproduced; no textual problem is noted in this passage.

Translation

Claude translation (claude-opus-5-5), 2026-09-27 · Translated by Claude from the Greek text of Duncker–Schneidewin; made independently of existing English translations.

Compare

Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5 (1886) (an older public-domain English translation, whole volume at CCEL; checked against ours only after ours was made) · Its chapter numbers differ from the standard (Wendland) numbering used here.

Cite this passage

Hippolytus, Haer. 1.22.2 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/1/22/2/).

The SBL abbreviation for this work has not been checked yet.

Plain text

Hippolytus, Haer. 1.22.2 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/1/22/2/).