Refutation of All Heresies 10.11.10

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.

Greek text · Duncker–Schneidewin, 510

Πᾶσα οὖν ἡ φροντὶς τοῦ ἄνω φωτός ἐστιν, ὅπως ῥύσηται τὸν κάτω σπινθῆρα ἀπὸ τοῦ κάτω πατρός, ἀνέμου ἐπεγείροντος βρασμὸν καὶ τάραχον καὶ ἑαυτῷ νοῦν υἱοποιήσαντος οὐκ ὄντα αὐτοῦ, φάσκουσιν, [ἴδιον, ὃν] ἰδόντα τὸν τέλειον λόγον τοῦ ἄνωθεν φωτὸς αὐτὸν ἀπομορφώσαντα εἴδει ὄφεως κεχωρηκέναι ἐν μήτρᾳ, ἵνα τὸν νοῦν ἐκεῖνον, τὸν ἐκ τοῦ φωτὸς σπινθῆρα, ἀναλαβεῖν δυνηθῇ.

English · Claude translation

All the care of the light above, then, is how it may rescue the spark below from the father below, the wind that stirs up seething and turmoil and made for himself as son a mind not his own, they say; [which], seeing the perfect Word of the light from above, having transformed himself into the form of a serpent, entered into the womb, so that he might be able to take back that mind, the spark from the light.

About this passage

Source

Duncker–Schneidewin, 510 · 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.

Topics

Heresy, Christology

Notes

Translation notes

The bracketed words are editorial supplements; the syntax is confused.

Notes on the original text

Digital text corrected (wrong accent: οὖν): Πᾶσα οὗν → Πᾶσα οὖν.

Cite this passage

Hippolytus, Haer. 10.11.10 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/10/11/10/).

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

Plain text

Hippolytus, Haer. 10.11.10 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/10/11/10/).