Refutation of All Heresies 7.24.5

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.

Greek text · Duncker–Schneidewin, 368

Τὸ δὲ ἐν τῷ διαστήματι τούτῳ ὁ σωρὸς αὐτὸς ἐστί, φησί, καὶ ἡ πανσπερμία, καὶ γίνεται κατὰ φύσιν τὰ γινόμενα ὡς φθάσαν τεχθῆναι ὑπὸ τοῦ τὰ μέλλοντα λέγεσθαι, ὅτε δεῖ καὶ οἷα δεῖ καὶ ὡς δεῖ λελογισμένῳ. Καὶ τούτων ἔστιν ἐπιστάτης ἢ φροντιστὴς ἢ δημιουργὸς οὐδείς· ἀρκεῖ γὰρ αὐτοῖς ὁ λογισμὸς ἐκεῖνος, ὃν ὁ οὐκ ὢν ὅτε ἐποίει ἐλογίζετο.

English · Claude translation

And what is in this interval, he says, is the heap itself and the seed-mass, and the things that come to be come to be by nature, as they were born beforehand from the one who had reckoned what was to be said, when it must be, of what kind, and how. And of these there is no overseer, guardian, or Demiurge; for that reckoning suffices them which the non-existent one reckoned when he was making.

About this passage

Source

Duncker–Schneidewin, 368 · 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

Notes

Translation notes

The phrase ὡς φθάσαν τεχθῆναι ὑπὸ τοῦ τὰ μέλλοντα λέγεσθαι is obscure; the rendering is tentative.

Cite this passage

Hippolytus, Haer. 7.24.5 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/7/24/5/).

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

Plain text

Hippolytus, Haer. 7.24.5 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/7/24/5/).