Refutation of All Heresies 6.34.8

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 foolishness of 1 Cor 2:14 is the Demiurge's ignorance of Sophia's work through him.

Greek text · Duncker–Schneidewin, 284

Διὰ τοῦτο ψυχικὸς, φησίν, ἄνθρωπος οὐ δέχεται τὰ τοῦ πνεύματος τοῦ θεοῦ· μωρία γὰρ αὐτῷ ἐστί· μωρία δέ, φησίν, ἐστὶν ἡ δύναμις τοῦ δημιουργοῦ, μωρὸς γὰρ ἦν καὶ ἄνους, καὶ ἐνόμιζεν αὐτὸς δημιουργεῖν τὸν κόσμον, ἀγνοῶν, ὅτι πάντα ἡ σοφία, ἡ μήτηρ, ἡ ὀγδοὰς ἐνεργεῖ αὐτῷ πρὸς τὴν κτίσιν τοῦ κόσμου οὐκ εἰδότι.

English · Claude translation

“For this reason,” he says, “‘the psychic man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness to him’; and foolishness,” he says, “is the power of the Demiurge; for he was foolish and mindless, and thought that he himself was fashioning the world, not knowing that Sophia, the Mother, the Ogdoad, was working everything for him, without his knowledge, for the creation of the world.”

About this passage

Source

Duncker–Schneidewin, 284 · 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.

Scripture

1 Cor 2:14 · quotation, high confidence

Topics

Heresy

Cite this passage

Hippolytus, Haer. 6.34.8 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/6/34/8/).

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

Plain text

Hippolytus, Haer. 6.34.8 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/6/34/8/).