Refutation of All Heresies 4.43.5

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: The Egyptians held that God is a self-begotten unity from which all numbers and things come.

Greek text · Duncker–Schneidewin, 108

ψηφίσαντες τάδε διαστήματα τῶν μοιρῶν ἐξ ἐπιπνοίας θειοτάτης ἔφασαν τὸν θεὸν εἶναι μονάδα ἀδιαίρετον καὶ αὐτὴν ἑαυτὴν γεννῶσαν καὶ ἐξ αὐτῆς τὰ πάντα κατεσκευάσθαι· αὕτη γάρ, φησιν, ἀγέννητος οὖσα τοὺς ἑξῆς ἀριθμοὺς γεννᾷ, οἷον ἐφʼ ἑαυτὴν ἡ μονὰς ἐπιπροστεθεῖσα γεννᾷ τὴν δυάδα καὶ ὁμοίως ἐπιπροστιθεμένη γεννᾷ τὴν τριάδα καὶ τετράδα μέχρι τῆς δεκάδος, ἥτις ἀρχὴ καὶ τὸ τέλος τῶν ἀριθμῶν, ἵνα γένηται πρώτη καὶ δεκάτη ἡ μονὰς διὰ τὸ καὶ τὴν δεκάδα ἰσοδυναμεῖν καὶ ἀριθμεῖσθαι εἰς μονάδα,

English · Claude translation

reckoning these intervals of the degrees by a most divine inspiration, said that God is an indivisible monad, begetting itself, and that from it all things were constructed. For this, he says, being unbegotten, begets the numbers that follow; for example, the monad added to itself begets the dyad, and likewise, added on, begets the triad and the tetrad, up to the decad, which is the beginning and end of the numbers, so that the monad becomes first and tenth, because the decad also has equal value and is counted as a monad;

About this passage

Source

Duncker–Schneidewin, 108 · 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. 4.43.5 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/4/43/5/).

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

Plain text

Hippolytus, Haer. 4.43.5 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/4/43/5/).