Refutation of All Heresies 4.10.3

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: Only Archimedes' distance of the moon is trustworthy; the rest can be derived by Plato's ratios.

Greek text · Duncker–Schneidewin, 68

οὐ γὰρ πιθανὸν οὐδὲ δυνατὸν ἄλογά τε καὶ ἔξω συμφωνιῶν καὶ ἐναρμονίων λόγων εἶναι αὐτῶν τὰ ἀποστήματα, πλὴν ἴσως σελήνης μόνης ἐκ τῶν λείψεων καὶ τῆς σκιᾶς τῆς γῆς, περὶ ἧς μόνης καὶ πιστεύσαι τις ἂν Ἀρχιμήδῃ ἀποστάσεως, τουτέστι τῆς σεληνιακῆς ἀπὸ γῆς· ταύτην δὲ λαβοῦσι ῥᾴδιον ἔσται κατὰ τὸ Πλατωνικὸν αὐτὸ τὰ κατὰ τὸ διπλάσιον καὶ τριπλάσιον, ὡς ἀξιοῖ Πλάτων, καὶ τὰ λοιπὰ ἀποστήματα ἀριθμῷ περιλαβεῖν.

English · Claude translation

for it is neither plausible nor possible that their distances should be irrational and outside the concords and harmonic ratios, except perhaps for the moon alone, from the eclipses and the shadow of the earth, concerning which alone one might trust Archimedes about the distance, that is, of the moon from the earth. Once this is taken, it will be easy, according to the Platonic principle itself, to comprehend the other distances by number in the double and triple ratios, as Plato requires.

About this passage

Source

Duncker–Schneidewin, 68 · 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. 4.10.3 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/4/10/3/).

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

Plain text

Hippolytus, Haer. 4.10.3 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/4/10/3/).