Refutation of All Heresies 6.31.5

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.

Summary: The Father emits the Aeon Cross, the Boundary that guards the Pleroma of thirty Aeons.

Greek text · Duncker–Schneidewin, 276

Ἵνʼ οὖν μηδʼ ὅλως τοῖς αἰῶσι τοῖς τελείοις καταφανῇ τοῦ ἐκτρώματος ἡ ἀμορφία, πάλιν καὶ ὁ πατὴρ ἐπιπροβάλλει αἰῶνα ἕνα τὸν σταυρόν, ὃς γεγεννημένος μέγας, ὡς μεγάλου καὶ τελείου πατρός, εἰς φρουρὰν καὶ χαράκωμα τῶν αἰώνων προβεβλημένος, ὅρος γίνεται τοῦ πληρώματος, ἔχων ἐντὸς ἑαυτοῦ πάντας ὁμοῦ τοὺς τριάκοντα αἰῶνας· οὗτοι γάρ εἰσιν οἱ προβεβλημένοι.

English · Claude translation

So that the formlessness of the abortion might not appear to the perfect Aeons at all, the Father too again further emits one Aeon, the Cross, who, begotten great, as from a great and perfect Father, and emitted for the guard and palisade of the Aeons, becomes the Boundary of the Pleroma, holding within himself all thirty Aeons together; for these are the ones that were emitted.

About this passage

Source

Duncker–Schneidewin, 276 · 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. 6.31.5 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/6/31/5/).

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

Plain text

Hippolytus, Haer. 6.31.5 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/6/31/5/).