Refutation of All Heresies 5.15.2

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: The Peratae hold that the world came about by outflow from above and that the visible stars cause its generation.

Greek text · Duncker–Schneidewin, 188

Πάντων γὰρ, ὡς ἔφην, τῶν γεννητῶν τῆς γενέσεως αἴτια νομίζουσιν εἶναι τὰ ἀγέννητα καὶ τὰ ὑπερκείμενα, καὶ γεγονέναι κατὰ ἀπόρροιαν τὸν κόσμον τὸν καθʼ ἡμᾶς, ὃν ἰδικὸν ἐκεῖνοι καλοῦσι, καὶ τούτους πάντας ὁμοῦ τοὺς ἀστέρας τοὺς θεωρουμένους ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ τῆς γενέσεως αἰτίους γεγονέναι τοῦδε τοῦ κόσμου, ἐναλλάξαντες αὐτῶν τὸ ὄνομα, ὡς ἀπὸ τῶν προαστείων ἔστι συγκρίναντας εὑρεῖν·

English · Claude translation

For, as I said, they think that the unbegotten and supercelestial things are the causes of the generation of all begotten things, and that the cosmos in which we live, which they call “particular,” came into being by effluence, and that all these stars seen together in heaven have become causes of the generation of this cosmos, though they have changed their names, as one may find by comparing with the “suburbans”;

About this passage

Source

Duncker–Schneidewin, 188 · 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

Cite this passage

Hippolytus, Haer. 5.15.2 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/5/15/2/).

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

Plain text

Hippolytus, Haer. 5.15.2 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/5/15/2/).