Refutation of All Heresies 7.17.1

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, 350

Εἰ δὲ οὐκ ἔστι τούτων οὐδὲ ἓν ἐκεῖνο τὸ ζῷον, ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων γέγονεν ἡ τῶν γεγενημένων κατὰ Ἀριστοτέλην ὑπόστασις· καὶ γὰρ τὸ ζῷον, ὅθεν ταῦτα ἐλήφθη κατὰ μέρος, ἐστὶν οὐδὲ ἕν· οὐδὲ ἓν δὲ ὂν γέγονε τῶν ὄντων μία τις ἀρχή. Τίς δὲ ὁ ταύτην καταβεβλημένος τὴν οὐσίαν τῶν γεγονότων ὕστερον ἀρχήν, ἐπὶ τὸν οἰκεῖον ἐρχόμενοι τοιούτων λόγον ἐροῦμεν.

English · Claude translation

But if that animal is not a single one of these, then according to Aristotle the subsistence of the things that have come into being has come from things that are not; for the animal from which these were taken one by one is not a single one of them, and being not one of them it has become a single origin of the things that exist. But who it is that laid down this origin as the substance of the things that later came into being, we shall say when we come to the proper account of such things.

About this passage

Source

Duncker–Schneidewin, 350 · 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.

Notes

Translation notes

The last sentence is compressed in the Greek; “later” (ὕστερον) may go with “came into being” or with “we shall say.”

Notes on the original text

Digital text corrected (missing breathing and accent): ὑστερον → ὕστερον.

Cite this passage

Hippolytus, Haer. 7.17.1 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/7/17/1/).

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

Plain text

Hippolytus, Haer. 7.17.1 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/7/17/1/).