Refutation of All Heresies 8.9.3

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: The intelligible world, perfected, was a light full of forms that shone down into the chaos below.

Greek text · Duncker–Schneidewin, 416

Κεκοσμημένων οὖν τῶν τριῶν αἰώνων ἐκείνων παναρέτως καὶ παναγίως, ὡς δοκοῦσιν οὗτοι διδάσκοντες, καὶ τοῦ παιδὸς ἐκείνου τοῦ μονογενοῦς, (γέγονε γὰρ μόνος τοῖς ἀπείροις αἰῶσιν ἐκ τριγενοῦς· τρεῖς γὰρ αὐτὸν ἐγέννησαν ὁμοφρονοῦντες αἰῶνες ἀμέτρητοι·) κεκόσμητο μὲν ἀνενδεὴς πᾶσα ἡ νοητὴ φύσις, φῶς δὲ ἦν ἅπαντα ἐκεῖνα τὰ νοητὰ καὶ αἰώνια, φῶς δὲ οὐκ ἄμορφον οὐδὲ ἀργόν, οὐδὲ οἱονεί τινος ἐπιποιοῦντος δεόμενον, ἀλλὰ ἔχον ἐν ἑαυτῷ κατὰ τὸ πλῆθος τῶν ἀπειράκις ἀπείρων κατὰ τὸ παράδειγμα τῆς συκῆς ἀπείρους ἰδέας ζῴων τῶν ἐκεῖ πολυποικίλων, κατέλαμψεν ἄνωθεν εἰς τὸ ὑποκείμενον χάος.

English · Claude translation

When, then, those three Aeons had been adorned with all virtue and all holiness, as these teachers think, and also that only-begotten child (for he alone was born to the infinite Aeons from a threefold parentage, since three unmeasured Aeons of one mind begot him), the whole intelligible nature had been set in order, lacking nothing. And all those intelligible and eternal things were light; not a formless or idle light, nor one needing, as it were, someone to work on it, but having in itself, according to the multitude of the infinitely infinite, after the pattern of the fig tree, infinite forms of the manifold living beings there; and it shone down from above into the chaos beneath.

About this passage

Source

Duncker–Schneidewin, 416 · 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. 8.9.3 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/8/9/3/).

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

Plain text

Hippolytus, Haer. 8.9.3 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/8/9/3/).