Refutation of All Heresies 4.43.8

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, 110

Συγγενὴς δὲ ὁ ἀριθμός ἐστι τοῦ (??) καὶ (??). Ταῦτα δὲ ἐκ τῆς μονάδος ἀριθμὸν λαβόντα πρόνοιαν ἀρετῆς ἐχώρησε μέχρι τῶν (??) στοιχείων, λέγω δὴ τοῦ πνεύματος καὶ πυρὸς ὕδατός τε καὶ γῆς· καὶ ἐκ τούτων ποιήσας τὸν κόσμον ἀρρενόθηλυν αὐτὸν κατεσκεύασε, καὶ δύο μὲν στοιχεῖα εἰς τὸ ἄνω ἡμισφαίριον προσέταξε τό τε πνεῦμα καὶ τὸ πῦρ, καὶ καλεῖται τοῦτο τὸ ἡμισφαίριον τῆς μονάδος ἀγαθοποιόν τε καὶ ἀνωφερὲς καὶ ἀρσενικόν·

English · Claude translation

The number of … and … is akin. These, taking number from the monad, advanced in providence of virtue up to the … elements, I mean spirit and fire, water and earth; and making the world from these he constructed it male-female; and he assigned two elements to the upper hemisphere, spirit and fire, and this hemisphere of the monad is called beneficent, upward-tending, and masculine;

About this passage

Source

Duncker–Schneidewin, 110 · 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.

Notes

Translation notes

Numbers could not be read by the digitizers (marked (??) in the digital text); the missing number of elements is evidently four.

Notes on the original text

Digital text corrected (stray comma in the digital text): προσέταξε τό, τε πνεῦμα → προσέταξε τό τε πνεῦμα.

Cite this passage

Hippolytus, Haer. 4.43.8 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/4/43/8/).

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

Plain text

Hippolytus, Haer. 4.43.8 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/4/43/8/).