Refutation of All Heresies 5.19.16

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, 204

.. ᾀσμα ἄνωθεν ἀ..... νος δίκην ἐν τὸ... λυσυγκρίτοις πολλῶν, ὡς, φησίν, ἐν τῷ ψαλμῷ λέγει. Πᾶσα οὖν φροντὶς καὶ ἐπιμέλεια τοῦ φωτὸς ἄνωθεν ἐστί, πῶς καὶ τίνα τρόπον ἀπὸ τοῦ θανάτου τοῦ πονηροῦ καὶ σκοτεινοῦ σώματος ἀπολυθείη ὁ νοῦς ἀπὸ τοῦ πατρὸς τοῦ κάτωθεν, ὅ ἐστιν ὁ ἄνεμος ἐν βρασμῷ καὶ ταράχῳ ἐπεγείρας κύματα καὶ γεννήσας νοῦν τέλειον υἱὸν ἑαυτοῦ, οὐκ ὄντα ἴδιον ἑαυτοῦ κατʼ οὐσίαν.

English · Claude translation

… song from above … as,” he says, “it says in the psalm. All the thought and care of the light above, then, is how and in what way the mind may be released from the death of the wicked and dark body, from the father below, who is the wind that in seething and turmoil raised waves and begot a perfect mind as his son, which is not his own by substance.

About this passage

Source

Duncker–Schneidewin, 204 · 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 beginning is badly damaged; the psalm referred to cannot be identified with certainty.

Notes on the original text

Digital text corrected (wrong accent in the digital text): Πᾶσα οὗν → Πᾶσα οὖν.

Cite this passage

Hippolytus, Haer. 5.19.16 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/5/19/16/).

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

Plain text

Hippolytus, Haer. 5.19.16 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/5/19/16/).