Refutation of All Heresies
Refutatio omnium haeresium · Κατὰ πασῶν αἱρέσεων ἔλεγχος
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Contents
- 0.1The heading introducing the contents of Book 1.
- 0.2Book 1 sets out the views of the natural, moral, and dialectical philosophers.
- 0.3A list of the natural philosophers treated in Book 1.
- 0.4Socrates and Plato are listed as the moral philosophers; Plato combined all three branches.
- 0.5Aristotle and the Stoics are listed as dialecticians.
- 0.6The list ends with Epicurus, Pyrrho, the Brahmins, the Druids, and Hesiod.
- 1.0.1Hippolytus explains that he once refuted the heretics only in outline, hoping shame would make them stop.
- 1.0.2Because the heretics do not repent, Hippolytus will expose the secret teachings they give only to those they have drawn in.
- 1.0.3The initiate is bound to secrecy by oaths and, still more, by the shame of what he has done.
- 1.0.4An initiate who revealed these deeds would be counted worse than a beast.
- 1.0.5Hippolytus resolves to set out all the heretics' teachings in detail so that others will not be misled.
- 1.0.6Only the Holy Spirit given to the church can refute heresy, and Hippolytus, as a successor of the apostles, must guard the church and teach.
- 1.0.7Hippolytus will both expose error and proclaim the truth received from the Father.
- 1.0.8Hippolytus will first set out Greek philosophy, to show that the heresies come from it rather than from Scripture.
- 1.0.9Each heresy will then be matched with the philosopher from whom its founder borrowed.
- 1.0.10The work is laborious, but its reward will be like the athlete's crown or the farmer's harvest.
- 1.0.11Hippolytus begins with the first Greek natural philosophers, from whom the heresiarchs stole their ideas.
- 1.1.1Thales taught that water is the origin and end of all things.
- 1.1.2According to Thales, all things arise from water as it thickens and thins.
- 1.1.3Thales held the first principle to be divine, without beginning or end.
- 1.1.4Thales founded Greek astronomy and, gazing at the sky, fell into a well, to a servant girl's amusement.
- 1.2.1Pythagoras founded the Italian school after fleeing Samos for Italy.
- 1.2.2Pythagoras called God a unity and taught that the universe is ordered by number and harmony.
- 1.2.3Pythagoras made his pupils keep silent until they were judged ready to speak.
- 1.2.4Pythagoras divided his followers into an inner and an outer circle.
- 1.2.5Pythagoras is said to have practiced magic and invented physiognomy based on number.
- 1.2.6In Pythagorean teaching the first monad is male and fathers the numbers; the dyad is female and even.
- 1.2.7The triad is male and odd; the tetrad female and even.
- 1.2.8One, two, three, and four add up to ten, the perfect number.
- 1.2.9Pythagoras called the four that make ten the sacred tetractys, the source of all number.
- 1.2.10Combining powers and cubes yields the seven numbers from which all things are generated.
- 1.2.11Pythagoras taught the immortality and transmigration of the soul and listed his own former lives.
- 1.2.12Pythagoras is said to have learned from Zaratas the Chaldean that all things come from two causes, light and darkness.
- 1.2.13Zaratas taught that two powers, heavenly fire and earthly water, produce all things.
- 1.2.14Pythagoras forbade eating beans, claiming they arose with the first life and smell of human seed.
- 1.2.15A further proof: a buried bean flower was said to take human form.
- 1.2.16Pythagoras died in a fire at Croton; his disciples gave up their property and kept years of silence.
- 1.2.17Some disciples escaped the fire, among them Zamolxis, said to have taught the Druids.
- 1.2.18Pythagoras learned his numbers from the Egyptian priests and imitated their secrecy.
- 1.3.1Empedocles taught that strife and love are the principles of all things and that all will return to fire.
- 1.3.2Empedocles taught that souls pass into all kinds of creatures, as he claimed of himself.
- 1.4.1Heraclitus wept over human ignorance, claiming that he alone knew all things.
- 1.4.2Heraclitus, like Empedocles, called strife and love the principles and God intelligent fire.
- 1.4.3Heraclitus held that evils fill the region below the moon but not above it.
- 1.5.1Hippolytus turns back to Thales' successors before treating ethical and logical philosophy.
- 1.6.1Anaximander, Thales' pupil, taught that all worlds come from the boundless.
- 1.6.2Anaximander was the first to name the boundless as the principle of things.
- 1.6.3Anaximander described the earth as a column floating unsupported at the center.
- 1.6.4Anaximander explained the stars as fire seen through vents in air, and eclipses as blocked vents.
- 1.6.5Anaximander explained the moon's phases and ordered the sun, moon, and stars.
- 1.6.6Anaximander held that living things arose through the sun's heat and that man first resembled a fish.
- 1.6.7Anaximander explained winds, rain, and lightning; he lived about 610 BC.
- 1.7.1Anaximenes taught that boundless air is the source of all things, even the gods.
- 1.7.2Air, said Anaximenes, is invisible when even and always in motion.
- 1.7.3Anaximenes taught that air becomes fire, cloud, water, earth, and stone as it thins or thickens.
- 1.7.4Anaximenes held that the flat earth and the heavenly bodies ride on air.
- 1.7.5The stars, said Anaximenes, arose from moisture rising from the earth and turning to fire.
- 1.7.6Anaximenes held that the stars circle around, not under, the earth.
- 1.7.7Anaximenes explained winds and clouds by the thinning and thickening of air.
- 1.7.8Anaximenes explained hail, snow, lightning, rainbows, and earthquakes; he flourished about 548 BC.
- 1.8.1Anaxagoras taught that mind ordered a mixture of boundless material principles.
- 1.8.2In Anaxagoras's account, heavy things gathered to form the earth and light things rose to the ether.
- 1.8.3Anaxagoras held the flat earth floats on strong air.
- 1.8.4Anaxagoras explained the origin of the sea.
- 1.8.5Anaxagoras explained rivers and the Nile's summer flood.
- 1.8.6The heavenly bodies, said Anaxagoras, are fiery stones.
- 1.8.7Anaxagoras ordered the heavenly bodies and said the sun is larger than the Peloponnese.
- 1.8.8The moon's light, Anaxagoras taught, comes from the sun.
- 1.8.9Anaxagoras explained eclipses and the turnings of sun and moon.
- 1.8.10Anaxagoras first explained eclipses and said the moon has plains and ravines.
- 1.8.11Anaxagoras explained winds, thunder, and lightning.
- 1.8.12Anaxagoras explained earthquakes, the origin of living things, and the sex of offspring.
- 1.8.13Anaxagoras flourished about 428 BC, when Plato was born.
- 1.9.1Archelaus was an Athenian.
- 1.9.2Archelaus followed Anaxagoras, making the separation of hot and cold the source of motion.
- 1.9.3Archelaus placed the earth at rest in the center, with the stars formed from burning.
- 1.9.4Archelaus argued the earth is hollow, since the sun does not rise and set for all at once.
- 1.9.5Archelaus taught that living things first arose from warm mud.
- 1.9.6Humans later separated from other animals and founded cities; all living things, Archelaus said, have mind.
- 1.10.1Hippolytus ends his survey of natural philosophy with Archelaus, the teacher of Socrates.
- 1.11.1Parmenides held that the universe is one, eternal, and spherical, yet named fire and earth as principles.
- 1.12.1Leucippus taught that worlds form from bodies colliding in the void by an undefined necessity.
- 1.13.1Democritus, pupil of Leucippus, learned from sages in India, Egypt, and Babylon.
- 1.13.2Democritus taught that atoms move in the void and that there are countless worlds.
- 1.13.3The worlds, said Democritus, arise, flourish, and perish by colliding.
- 1.13.4Democritus described the order of our world and laughed at all human affairs.
- 1.14.1Xenophanes first taught that nothing can be known with certainty.
- 1.14.2Xenophanes taught that God is one, eternal, spherical, and perceives with all his being.
- 1.14.3Xenophanes held that a new sun forms daily and that there are countless suns and moons.
- 1.14.4Xenophanes and Metrodorus explained why the sea is salty.
- 1.14.5Xenophanes cited fossils of sea creatures inland as proof that the land was once under the sea.
- 1.14.6Xenophanes held that the earth periodically sinks into mud, destroying mankind, and begins again.
- 1.15.1Ecphantus taught that indivisible bodies are moved by divine mind and that the earth rotates.
- 1.16.1Hippo made water and fire the principles and identified the soul with the brain or with water.
- 1.17.1Having covered the natural philosophers, Hippolytus turns to Socrates and Plato.
- 1.18.1Socrates, who valued "Know yourself," left no writings; Plato was his ablest pupil.
- 1.18.2Plato combined natural, ethical, and dialectical philosophy.
- 1.19.1Plato named God, matter, and the pattern as the principles of the universe.
- 1.19.2The pattern, in Plato, is God's thought, the ideas by which he fashioned all things.
- 1.19.3Plato held God to be incorporeal and matter to be potential body.
- 1.19.4Plato's world is unbegotten as made from eternal matter, but perishable as a composite body.
- 1.19.5Some Platonists compared the world to a wagon kept forever whole by repairing its parts.
- 1.19.6Some read Plato as teaching one God, citing the Laws.
- 1.19.7Others read Plato as teaching many gods, citing the Timaeus.
- 1.19.8Plato's gods, some say, are generated but kept immortal by God's will.
- 1.19.9Plato accepted good and bad daemons.
- 1.19.10Interpreters disagree whether Plato's soul is unbegotten, or generated but immortal, or perishable.
- 1.19.11Those who hold Plato's soul immortal point to his teaching on judgment after death.
- 1.19.12Some say Plato taught that souls return in new bodies according to their deserts.
- 1.19.13Others say Plato taught that souls receive places by desert, some with the gods and some in eternal punishment.
- 1.19.14Plato distinguished opposites with and without an intermediate.
- 1.19.15For Plato only goods of the soul are truly good; bodily and external goods are only so called.
- 1.19.16Plato's four virtues each lie between two vices, and possessing them brings happiness.
- 1.19.17Plato defines happiness as becoming as like God as possible, holy and just with wisdom.
- 1.19.18Plato held that the virtues always agree while the vices are many and conflicting.
- 1.19.19Plato admitted fate but also human freedom and responsibility.
- 1.19.20Plato taught that wrongdoing is involuntary, arising from ignorance of the good.
- 1.19.21Hippolytus cites a passage he attributes to the Republic that wrongdoing is involuntary.
- 1.19.22Plato said punishment is good because it purifies the wrongdoer and deters others.
- 1.19.23For Plato evil is not made by God but is a falling away from the good.
- 1.20.1Aristotle made philosophy systematic, distinguishing substance and nine kinds of accident.
- 1.20.2Aristotle's ten categories are illustrated with examples.
- 1.20.3Aristotle agreed with Plato on most points except the soul.
- 1.20.4Aristotle held that the soul survives only for a time and then vanishes into the fifth element.
- 1.20.5Unlike Plato, Aristotle held that the wise man also needs bodily and external goods.
- 1.20.6Aristotle placed evil below the moon and held only the world soul immortal.
- 1.20.7The Peripatetics were named for walking while they taught, the Stoics for the Painted Porch.
- 1.21.1The Stoics made God, the purest body, the principle of all, with providence pervading everything.
- 1.21.2The Stoics compared human freedom under fate to a dog tied to a cart.
- 1.21.3The Stoics held the soul to be a body formed by cooling air, surviving death.
- 1.21.4The Stoics expected a cleansing conflagration of the world.
- 1.21.5The Stoics held that everything is body and there is no void.
- 1.22.1Epicurus made atoms and void the principles of all things.
- 1.22.2For Epicurus even God is made of atoms, the smallest indivisible bodies.
- 1.22.3Epicurus denied providence, placing an untroubled God outside the world.
- 1.22.4Epicurus made pleasure the goal of wisdom, understood variously by his followers.
- 1.22.5Epicurus taught that the soul dies with the body and denied judgment after death.
- 1.23.1Pyrrho founded the skeptical school, which argued both sides and affirmed nothing.
- 1.23.2The skeptics held that nothing is certainly true and all things are in flux.
- 1.23.3Some skeptics refused all judgment; others said a thing is "no more" this than that.
- 1.24.1The Indian Brahmins live simply on fallen fruit and abstain from meat and cooked food.
- 1.24.2The Brahmins say God is light and Word, known only to those who cast off vainglory.
- 1.24.3The Brahmins despise death, hymn God, and live without wives or children.
- 1.24.4Others who join the Brahmins live across the river, where there are women and families.
- 1.24.5The Brahmins regard the body as a garment and a battlefield against enemies.
- 1.24.6Only those who conquer bodily passions, the Brahmins say, reach God.
- 1.24.7The Brahmins honor Dandamis, condemn Calanus, and hope to see the sun after death.
- 1.25.1The Celtic Druids learned Pythagorean philosophy from Zamolxis.
- 1.25.2The Druids foretell the future by Pythagorean number lore and practice magic.
- 1.26.1Hesiod claimed to learn about nature from the Muses, the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne.
- 1.26.2Hesiod's account of the origin of the gods, from Chaos, Earth, and Eros to Cronus and Zeus, is quoted at length.
- 1.26.3The philosophers, amazed by creation, took parts of it for God and did not know the Creator.
- 1.26.4Having set out the philosophers, Hippolytus will next treat mysteries and astrology, the other sources of heresy.
- 4.1.1The surviving text of Book 4 begins mid-sentence in an account of astrological terms.
- 4.1.2Astrologers speak of stars in trine and square aspects, and of sympathy between heaven and earth.
- 4.2.1The Peratae borrowed astrological ideas for their doctrine of Aeons and powers, which Hippolytus will refute later.
- 4.2.2Hippolytus will briefly show that Chaldean astrology is vain and harmful.
- 4.2.3Because the Peratae rely on astrology, Hippolytus first refutes astrology itself.
- 4.3.1All astrological prediction rests on fixing the horoscope, the rising sign.
- 4.3.2Without the horoscope the whole Chaldean method collapses.
- 4.3.3Fixing the horoscope requires knowing the moment of birth, an accurate signal, and exact observation.
- 4.3.4None of the three requirements for a horoscope can be met.
- 4.3.5Astrologers date birth either from conception or from delivery.
- 4.3.6The moment of conception cannot be known precisely.
- 4.3.7Conception may be instant or may take time as the seed travels in the womb.
- 4.3.8Because the seed's path varies, astrologers cannot fix the time of conception.
- 4.3.9If the seed changes before conception, the time is still less knowable.
- 4.3.10Women differ in how quickly they conceive, so the moment cannot be fixed.
- 4.4.1Nor can the moment of birth be defined precisely.
- 4.4.2Births vary for many reasons, so their timing is not uniform.
- 4.4.3The Chaldeans claim to know the hour of birth but cannot.
- 4.4.4Astrologers claim a gong signals the birth to an observer on a height, but the birth itself is indefinite.
- 4.4.5Even the sound of the gong takes time to reach the observer.
- 4.4.6As with distant woodcutters, the sound arrives late, so the rising sign cannot be fixed exactly.
- 4.4.7By the time the observer checks the heavens, the stars have already moved.
- 4.5.1If experts cannot fix the moment of birth, a layman cannot supply it either.
- 4.5.2The rising sign looks different from different places, so predictions cannot be precise.
- 4.5.3Water clocks cannot measure the heavens accurately either.
- 4.5.4People born at the same time live very different lives.
- 4.5.5Many were born with Alexander or Plato, but none became their equal.
- 4.5.6Same birth time, different fortunes: the similarity of charts proves nothing.
- 4.5.7If birth under a sign meant a violent death, thousands slain in one battle could not all share it.
- 4.5.8The Greeks drowned together returning from Troy cannot all have been born under the same sign.
- 4.5.9Why should one man's fate to drown overrule the fates of all his shipmates?
- 4.6.1Astrologers claim that people resemble the sign under which they are born.
- 4.6.2By this logic no Ethiopian could be born under Virgo.
- 4.6.3The constellations were named for convenience, not because they resemble the animals.
- 4.7.1Astrology unnerves kings and emboldens commoners to reckless ventures.
- 4.7.2Astrologers say a configuration returns only after 7,777 years, beyond any human observation.
- 4.7.3Astrology has been refuted here only because the heretics use it.
- 4.7.4Hippolytus turns to those who speculate about the sizes and distances of the heavens.
- 4.7.5These theorists speak of circles, ratios, and measures.
- 4.8.1The speculators follow Plato's account of the circles of the Same and the Other.
- 4.8.2The outer revolution of the Same carries even the planets round with it.
- 4.8.3The fixed stars move together, while the planets differ in period and distance.
- 4.8.4Six cuts make seven circles for the seven planets.
- 4.8.5The planetary distances follow the ratios of Plato's world soul.
- 4.8.6Various astronomers' figures for the size of the earth and the distance of the moon are listed.
- 4.8.7Distances between the planetary spheres are listed, from the moon to the outermost sphere.
- 4.9.1Archimedes' figures for the distances of the planets from the earth are listed.
- 4.10.1Hippolytus prefers Plato's double and triple ratios to the astronomers' conflicting figures.
- 4.10.2Figures not in harmonic ratios would contradict a harmonious universe.
- 4.10.3Only Archimedes' distance of the moon is trustworthy; the rest can be derived by Plato's ratios.
- 4.10.4The ratios between Archimedes' distances are shown not to be harmonic.
- 4.11.1Such ratios cannot belong to a harmonious world.
- 4.11.2Only double and triple intervals preserve harmony.
- 4.11.3The planetary distances are recalculated from Archimedes' lunar distance by Plato's ratios.
- 4.11.4The recalculated distances of Venus, Mercury, and Mars continue.
- 4.11.5The recalculated distances of Jupiter and Saturn complete the list.
- 4.12.1Hippolytus mocks Ptolemy's measurements: pity he was not there to advise the builders of Babel.
- 4.12.2Hippolytus ridicules the pride of the astronomers.
- 4.13.1Some heretics, like Colarbasus, built their teaching on numbers and measures.
- 4.13.2Number-diviners deceive the simple by boasting of their rare successes.
- 4.14.1Number-diviners reduce each number to its "root" digit.
- 4.14.2Hundreds and tens are likewise reduced to their leading digit.
- 4.14.3Each Greek letter has a number value, which is likewise reduced to its root.
- 4.14.4The method is illustrated with the name Agamemnon.
- 4.14.5Agamemnon's name reduces to nine.
- 4.14.6Hector's name reduces to one.
- 4.14.7A shortcut: divide the sum by nine and take the remainder.
- 4.14.8Hector reduces to one; the method is applied to Patroclus.
- 4.14.9Some reckon by nines, others by sevens; by sevens Patroclus reduces to six.
- 4.14.10When the sum divides exactly, the divisor itself is taken as the root.
- 4.14.11An exact division by nine or seven gives nine or seven as the root.
- 4.14.12Repeated letters are counted only once.
- 4.14.13Rules for deciding which name "wins" a contest, illustrated by Sarpedon and Patroclus.
- 4.14.14Letters counted as equivalent are reckoned only once.
- 4.14.15By the rules, Ajax defeats Hector.
- 4.14.16Menelaus defeats Paris by the number rules.
- 4.14.17When the numbers give the wrong winner, the diviners claim the name was only an epithet.
- 4.14.18Further contests of Homeric heroes decided by number.
- 4.14.19Some diviners count only vowels or treat classes of letters separately.
- 4.14.20Others use different values and ad hoc rules, finding nothing sound.
- 4.15.1Hippolytus concludes his account of divination by numbers.
- 4.15.2When their method fails, the diviners make excuses; any would-be heresiarch could exploit such nonsense.
- 4.15.3Hippolytus turns to physiognomy, divination from the face.
- 4.15.4Physiognomists describe the appearance of those born under Aries.
- 4.15.5The character traits supposedly given by Aries are listed.
- 4.16.1The appearance of those born under Taurus.
- 4.16.2The character of those born under Taurus.
- 4.17.1The appearance of those born under Gemini.
- 4.17.2The character of those born under Gemini.
- 4.18.1The appearance of those born under Cancer.
- 4.18.2The character of those born under Cancer.
- 4.19.1The appearance of those born under Leo.
- 4.19.2The character of those born under Leo.
- 4.20.1The appearance and character of those born under Virgo.
- 4.21.1The appearance of those born under Libra.
- 4.21.2The character of those born under Libra.
- 4.22.1The appearance of those born under Scorpio.
- 4.22.2The character of those born under Scorpio.
- 4.23.1The appearance of those born under Sagittarius.
- 4.23.2The character of those born under Sagittarius.
- 4.24.1The appearance of those born under Capricorn.
- 4.24.2The character of those born under Capricorn.
- 4.25.1The appearance and traits of those born under Aquarius.
- 4.25.2The character of those born under Aquarius.
- 4.26.1The appearance of those born under Pisces.
- 4.26.2The character of those born under Pisces.
- 4.27.1Hippolytus begins to refute astrological physiognomy.
- 4.27.2The names of the constellations were chosen for convenience and say nothing about human character.
- 4.28.1After a gap, Hippolytus describes a magician's trick with a written question.
- 4.28.2The magician pretends to burn the written question while secretly keeping it.
- 4.28.3The magician feigns possession and chants incantations in Greek and mock Hebrew.
- 4.28.4The trick is exposed: invisible ink revealed with chemicals.
- 4.28.5Other invisible inks and how they are revealed.
- 4.28.6The noise of the onlookers covers the magician's secret actions.
- 4.28.7In darkness the magician lays the boy down and places papers by his ears.
- 4.28.8Through a speaking tube the magician tells the boy what to say.
- 4.28.9The tube may be a bird's windpipe or joined bronze pipes.
- 4.28.10A leather tube or a rolled book can serve the same purpose.
- 4.28.11Where he lacks information the magician gives ambiguous answers that fit any outcome.
- 4.28.12The answer is revealed in water; frightening effects are made with salt hidden in incense.
- 4.28.13Chemical tricks produce bloody flames and moving coals.
- 4.29.1How magicians make eggs appear strangely colored.
- 4.30.1Lambs are made to cut their own throats by an itching drug.
- 4.30.2The drug is hidden in a double box.
- 4.31.1Various tricks for killing animals and setting houses alight.
- 4.31.2A flammable mixture that seems to burn without harming.
- 4.32.1How magicians imitate thunder.
- 4.32.2Magicians seem to handle boiling pitch and fire unharmed.
- 4.32.3The magician invokes Asclepius with a hymn in the dark.
- 4.33.1A fiery Asclepius and the gods appear in a basin of water.
- 4.33.2The pitch trick is explained: it only seems to boil, and the hands are protected.
- 4.33.3The burning stone pyramid is really oil-soaked clay.
- 4.33.4Smoke from the mouth and the unburned cloth are explained.
- 4.34.1How magicians open sealed letters and reseal them with a copied seal.
- 4.34.2Other mixtures for copying seals.
- 4.34.3The best compound for forging seals, used to read others' letters.
- 4.34.4Hippolytus exposes these tricks to protect the young, and advises how to make seals tamper-proof.
- 4.35.1Bowl divination uses a blue-painted room reflected in water to imitate the sky.
- 4.35.2Accomplices in a hidden room below appear as gods through the glass-bottomed basin.
- 4.35.3A demon's figure painted with flammable mixture seems to burst into flame.
- 4.35.4The magician prepares his audience to see Hecate fly through the air.
- 4.35.5The magician's hymn invoking Hecate.
- 4.36.1Hecate's fiery flight is a bird released with burning tow.
- 4.36.2The burning bird sometimes sets houses on fire.
- 4.37.1A mirror, a basin, and a lamp make a moon appear on the ceiling.
- 4.37.2A lit drum partly uncovered imitates the phases of the moon.
- 4.37.3A lamp in a cut-off flask is lowered to make the moon seem to descend.
- 4.37.4A lamp in a pot behind an altar throws a crescent moon on the ceiling.
- 4.38.1Fish scales stuck to the ceiling imitate stars.
- 4.39.1A burning mixture gives the illusion of an earthquake.
- 4.40.1Writing on a liver is transferred from the magician's hand.
- 4.41.1A talking skull is made of wax and caul, with a hidden speaking tube.
- 4.42.1The heresiarchs imitated the magicians' techniques of secrecy and display.
- 4.42.2Hippolytus explains why he has digressed on magic.
- 4.42.3Hippolytus proposes to summarize what he has shown so far.
- 4.43.1The philosophers disagreed about God, identifying him with one or another element.
- 4.43.2Overawed by creation, the philosophers took parts of it for God and could not reach the true God.
- 4.43.3The Persians said God is light.
- 4.43.4The Babylonians called God darkness; the Egyptians' view follows.
- 4.43.5The Egyptians held that God is a self-begotten unity from which all numbers and things come.
- 4.43.6Ten, a hundred, a thousand, and ten thousand all count as a unity.
- 4.43.7The dyad too has a kinship with the monad.
- 4.43.8From the unity came the four elements; the upper hemisphere of spirit and fire is male and beneficent.
- 4.43.9The lower hemisphere of earth and water is female and maleficent; each pair has male and female.
- 4.43.10Fire and water are male, spirit and earth female.
- 4.43.11The elements' number values are reduced by nines, since the circle of 360 degrees is made of nines.
- 4.43.12Light, life, and justice belong to the unity; darkness, death, and injustice to the dyad.
- 4.43.13Names reckoned by number reduce to male or female values.
- 4.44.1Names with odd values are counted lucky, even ones unlucky.
- 4.44.2Amulets and herbs are chosen for their number values.
- 4.44.3Egyptian number lore was even applied to healing.
- 4.45.1Hippolytus hopes his survey will make pagans respect Christians and see their own follies.
- 4.45.2Knowing these opinions will equip Christians to resist error and help the deceived.
- 4.46.1Hippolytus turns to the heresies themselves, hoping to bring their followers back to the truth.
- 4.46.2Some heretics allegorize Aratus's star-lore as images of Scripture.
- 4.46.3The deceived are like the horned owl, easily caught by a spectacle.
- 4.46.4The owl-catcher distracts the birds with a dance while others seize them.
- 4.46.5Readers should not be caught by the heretics' star-dance like the owl.
- 4.46.6Aratus describes the stars wheeling around the fixed axis of heaven.
- 4.47.1The heretics take Aratus's word for "many" to mean "turning".
- 4.47.2The heretics identify Aratus's Dragon near the pole with the devil in Job who goes about the earth.
- 4.47.3The Dragon at the pole never sets and so, they say, sees everything.
- 4.47.4Near the Dragon's head is the constellation of the Kneeler, which Aratus calls a toiling figure.
- 4.47.5The heretics identify the Kneeler with Adam, who guards the serpent's head as in Genesis.
- 4.48.1The Kneeler, between the Lyre and the Crown, seems to be confessing sin.
- 4.48.2The seven-stringed Lyre, made by the infant Hermes (the Word), stands for the seven days of creation.
- 4.48.3If Adam obeys the Word he wins the Crown; if not, he shares the beast's fate.
- 4.48.4A smaller serpent tries to snatch the Kneeler's crown.
- 4.48.5The Serpent-holder (Ophiuchus) holds the serpent back from the crown.
- 4.48.6The heretics say the Serpent-holder is the Word protecting man.
- 4.48.7The two Bears represent two creations: Adam's, and the new creation in Christ.
- 4.48.8The Great Bear, which the Greeks steer by, stands for a creation that turns men back.
- 4.48.9The Little Bear, by which the Phoenicians steer, stands for the narrow way of the few.
- 4.48.10The Little Bear ("dog's tail") signifies the Word as guard dog and begetter.
- 4.48.11Before the Dog Star rises, rootless plants still look alive.
- 4.48.12As the Dog Star shows which plants live, the Word judges the living and the dead.
- 4.48.13The Dragon lies between the two creations, keeping people from passing to the new one.
- 4.48.14Another constellation group, Cepheus and his family, teaches the same lesson.
- 4.49.1The heretics read Cepheus as Adam, Cassiepeia as Eve, Andromeda as the soul, and Perseus as the Word.
- 4.49.2Perseus the Word rescues Andromeda the soul from the monster.
- 4.49.3The Swan, which sings at death, symbolizes the divine Spirit.
- 4.49.4The animal constellations are patterns of the creatures on earth.
- 4.50.1Hippolytus warns readers not to be charmed like the owl by the heretics' star-lore.
- 4.50.2The star names are human inventions, much later than the stars, and prove nothing.
- 4.51.1Since most heresies build on Pythagorean number lore, Hippolytus summarizes it.
- 4.51.2Geometry begins from the indivisible point, from which all figures are generated.
- 4.51.3From the point come line, plane, and solid; Simon Magus borrowed this in his saying "the small will be great."
- 4.51.4Arithmetic begins from the male unity, father of all numbers.
- 4.51.5The dyad and tetrad are female and even; the triad male and odd.
- 4.51.6One to four add up to the perfect number ten.
- 4.51.7The tetractys is the root of all numbers.
- 4.51.8The seven kinds of number generate all things.
- 4.51.9Simon and Valentinus renamed the Pythagorean seven as their divine beings.
- 4.51.10Others derived their sevens from the anatomy of the brain.
- 4.51.11Hippolytus describes the anatomy of the brain.
- 4.51.12The spirit passes from the brain through the spine to the whole body and the generative organs.
- 4.51.13The cerebellum resembles a serpent's head, and seven pairs of nerves come from the brain.
- 4.51.14With the four books on pagan thought complete, Hippolytus turns to the heretics who copied it.
- 5.1.1The heading introducing the contents of Book 5.
- 5.2.1Book 5 will treat the Naassenes and show their debt to Greek philosophy and the mysteries.
- 5.3.1Book 5 will treat the Peratae and their astrological sources.
- 5.4.1Book 5 will treat the Sethians and their borrowings from Greek poets.
- 5.5.1Book 5 will treat the Gnostic Justin and his use of Herodotus.
- 5.6.1Hippolytus recalls the labor of the first four books.
- 5.6.2The heresiarchs patched together old errors and presented them as new.
- 5.6.3Hippolytus begins with the Naassenes, named for the Hebrew word for serpent.
- 5.6.4The Naassenes call themselves Gnostics and honor a divine Man and Son of Man.
- 5.6.5The Naassenes hymn a male-female heavenly Man called Adamas.
- 5.6.6The Naassenes divide the Man into intellectual, psychic, and earthly parts; knowing him leads to knowing God.
- 5.6.7The Naassenes say the three natures came together in Jesus, and there are three kinds of church: chosen, called, and captive.
- 5.7.1The Naassenes claim a tradition from James through Mariamne; Hippolytus will show it comes from pagan mysteries.
- 5.7.2The Naassenes apply Isaiah's "who will tell his generation" to their Man.
- 5.7.3The Greeks say Earth first brought forth man.
- 5.7.4Different peoples claim different first men.
- 5.7.5The Libyans and Egyptians have their own first men.
- 5.7.6The Chaldeans' Adam lay lifeless, an image of the heavenly Adamas made by many powers.
- 5.7.7A soul was given to the molded Adam so that the image of the perfect Man would suffer in bondage.
- 5.7.8The Naassenes seek the soul's nature in the mysteries, not in Scripture.
- 5.7.9The Naassenes use the Gospel of the Egyptians and Assyrian rites on the threefold soul.
- 5.7.10They teach that all nature, even stone, desires soul, the cause of growth.
- 5.7.11In Assyrian myth, Aphrodite (generation) loves Adonis (the soul).
- 5.7.12Persephone's and Selene's loves are read as allegories of the soul.
- 5.7.13The castration of Attis by the Mother of the gods is read as the soul's recall to the eternal realm.
- 5.7.14The heavenly Man is both male and female.
- 5.7.15The Naassenes forbid marital intercourse, reading Attis's castration as passage to a sexless new creation.
- 5.7.16They cite Paul in Romans on creation revealing God.
- 5.7.17The Romans passage continues on idolatry and unnatural passions.
- 5.7.18The Naassenes reinterpret Paul's word "shamelessness" as the first shapeless substance.
- 5.7.19They claim Paul's words hide their mystery, and that their baptism brings unfading pleasure.
- 5.7.20The Naassenes cite a saying from the Gospel of Thomas about finding the kingdom in children.
- 5.7.21Hippolytus traces the saying to Hippocrates, not Christ.
- 5.7.22The Naassenes turn to the Egyptian mysteries of Isis.
- 5.7.23Isis seeking Osiris is read as changeable creation clothed in the seven planets.
- 5.7.24They read Proverbs' "the righteous falls seven times" as the motions of the planets.
- 5.7.25The seed, cause of all things, is unmoved and becomes none of them.
- 5.7.26They apply Jesus' saying that only the Father is good to their first principle.
- 5.7.27This, they say, is the great Egyptian mystery.
- 5.7.28The Naassenes see the phallic image of Osiris, set up publicly, as the "good" proclaimed on the housetops.
- 5.7.29They say Hermes, shown as a phallic pillar, is the Word.
- 5.7.30They read Homer's Hermes leading the suitors' souls as the call to souls fallen from the heavenly Man.
- 5.7.31Homer's description of Hermes' golden wand is quoted.
- 5.7.32They link Hermes' wand with the Psalm's rod of iron.
- 5.7.33They cite "Wake up, sleeper" and say Christ is the Son of Man stamped on all things.
- 5.7.34They link the Eleusinian cry, the Psalm, and Homer's image of souls following Hermes like bats.
- 5.7.35They identify Adamas with the cornerstone of the Psalms and Isaiah.
- 5.7.36The Naassenes say the inner man, cut from Adamas, fell into the earthly body.
- 5.7.37Homer's souls following Hermes past Ocean are read as souls led to the eternal realm.
- 5.7.38Ocean flowing down begets men, flowing up begets gods.
- 5.7.39They read "you are gods" as promised to those who flee bodily union, and "you die like men" to those who return to it.
- 5.7.40They distinguish mortal fleshly birth from immortal spiritual birth of water and spirit.
- 5.7.41They read Joshua's parting of the Jordan as Jesus reversing the flow of generation.
- 5.8.1The Naassenes treat Homer as their prophet and teach that all things come from three.
- 5.8.2The three natures are the heavenly Man, the mortal below, and the "kingless race" figured by Moses' household.
- 5.8.3They cite Homer's threefold division and Jesus' saying about hearing without hearing.
- 5.8.4Their three secret words name the heavenly Man, the mortal man, and the upward-flowing Jordan.
- 5.8.5They read John's prologue so that the material world is the "nothing" made without the Word.
- 5.8.6They identify Joseph's divining cup with the cup of Anacreon's drinking song.
- 5.8.7They link Anacreon's cup with the water turned to wine at Cana.
- 5.8.8They say the kingdom of heaven lies hidden within like treasure or leaven.
- 5.8.9They claim the Samothracian mysteries teach their Primal Man.
- 5.8.10Two statues at Samothrace are said to represent the Primal Man and the reborn spiritual man.
- 5.8.11They combine Jesus' sayings about eating his flesh and drinking his cup.
- 5.8.12They teach that each person can only receive what fits his own nature.
- 5.8.13They say the Thracians call this Man Corybas, whose descent from the "crown" cannot be understood.
- 5.8.14They read "we have not seen his form" of the hidden Man in the body.
- 5.8.15They read the Psalms' God over the flood as the Man crying out from the waters of generation.
- 5.8.16They read Isaiah's promise of safety through rivers and fire as protection from generation and desire.
- 5.8.17They put Isaiah's words of God's remembering into the mouth of Adamas.
- 5.8.18They read Psalm 24's King of glory and Psalm 22's "worm and no man" as the reborn Man.
- 5.8.19They read the Psalm's "war" as the body's inner conflict and Jacob's vision as the gate of rebirth.
- 5.8.20Jacob's "gate of heaven" is linked with Jesus' "I am the gate."
- 5.8.21Salvation, they say, requires rebirth through this gate.
- 5.8.22The Phrygian name Papas is linked with "stop" and with the peace for those far and near.
- 5.8.23They read "whitewashed tombs" and the dead leaving the tombs as bodies without and with the spiritual Man.
- 5.8.24Resurrection for them is entry through the heavenly gate, by which one becomes a god.
- 5.8.25They cite Paul's rapture to the third heaven.
- 5.8.26They cite Paul on spiritual things that the "psychic" man cannot receive, claiming them for themselves.
- 5.8.27They cite Jesus' sayings on being drawn by the Father and doing his will.
- 5.8.28They pun on "tax collectors" and "ends", claiming to be those on whom the ends of the ages have come.
- 5.8.29They apply the parable of the sower to themselves as the only true hearers.
- 5.8.30They read the land of milk and honey as the Pleroma shared by the perfect.
- 5.8.31The Man is "unfruitful" when fleshly; the only true fruits are the spiritual who enter the third gate.
- 5.8.32They quote a saying about eating dead and living things, meaning spiritual words and men.
- 5.8.33They read "do not throw pearls to swine" as a condemnation of sexual union.
- 5.8.34They derive "goatherd" from a word for turning, making the Man the mover of the cosmos.
- 5.8.35They support the etymology with "poles", Homer's Proteus, and "cities".
- 5.8.36They read "more are the children of the desolate" as the many reborn spiritual children.
- 5.8.37They read Rachel's weeping and Jeremiah's lament as grief over fleshly generation.
- 5.8.38They cite Jeremiah's "who will know him" of the hidden perfect Man.
- 5.8.39They say the Eleusinian mystery of the reaped ear of grain points to the Man.
- 5.8.40They cite the Eleusinian hierophant's cry announcing the birth of a holy child.
- 5.8.41They derive "Eleusis" from "coming" down and "Anactoreion" from going back up.
- 5.8.42The lesser mysteries lead to the greater, for "greater deaths obtain greater portions."
- 5.8.43The lesser mysteries of Persephone lie at the end of the broad road of the perishing.
- 5.8.44The greater mysteries are the gate of heaven, open only to the spiritual, who become bridegrooms.
- 5.8.45The virgin of Isaiah bears a spiritual Aeon; they cite the narrow and broad ways.
- 5.9.1They call the Father an "almond" that split open to beget the ineffable Son.
- 5.9.2The almond's splitting produced the invisible one through whom all things were made.
- 5.9.3The one begotten is a "piper", harmonious spirit; they cite Jesus on worship in spirit.
- 5.9.4The perfect worship in spirit the many-named being that all nature desires.
- 5.9.5They describe the hidden word of God as a point from which all things grow.
- 5.9.6They identify the kingdom and the mustard seed with the hidden point in the body.
- 5.9.7They claim that everything, even theater, secretly speaks their mysteries.
- 5.9.8A theater hymn to Attis lists his many names, which the Naassenes claim as their own.
- 5.9.9Another hymn to the many-formed Attis.
- 5.9.10The Naassenes attend the rites of the Great Mother and imitate her castrated priests.
- 5.9.11The Naassenes forbid intercourse with women and worship the serpent.
- 5.9.12They derive the word for temple from the serpent, claiming every rite honors him.
- 5.9.13They make the serpent the moist substance, like Thales' water.
- 5.9.14The serpent is good and gives beauty to all, like the river from Eden dividing into four.
- 5.9.15They read Eden as the brain and the rivers of paradise as the senses, beginning with Pishon.
- 5.9.16Pishon is the eye and Gihon hearing; the Tigris follows.
- 5.9.17The Tigris is the sense of smell.
- 5.9.18The Euphrates is the mouth, and the water above the firmament is the living water Jesus offers.
- 5.9.19Each nature draws its own from this water, as a magnet draws iron.
- 5.9.20Through the Naassenes, they claim, the blind may see how one water gives each plant its own fruit.
- 5.9.21The Man is despised in the world; the Naassenes claim to draw their own from the living water through Jesus, the gate.
- 5.9.22The Naassenes claim to be the only true Christians, anointed from the horn like David.
- 5.10.1Hippolytus has given only a sample of the Naassenes' teaching and adds one of their hymns.
- 5.10.2The Naassene psalm tells of the soul's wanderings and of Jesus descending with seals to reveal the hidden way.
- 5.11.1Hippolytus compares heresy to the many-headed Hydra and will strike its heads one by one.
- 5.12.1Hippolytus turns to the Peratae, who teach a world divided in three.
- 5.12.2The Peratae's three parts are the perfect Good, the infinite powers, and the particular world.
- 5.12.3The Peratae speak of three gods, words, minds, and men, one for each part of the world.
- 5.12.4The Peratae say a threefold Christ came down in Herod's time bearing the powers of all three worlds.
- 5.12.5They cite Colossians on the fullness dwelling bodily in Christ, and say seeds of power came down from the upper worlds.
- 5.12.6The Peratae say Christ came to save the upper worlds, while the lower "world" must perish.
- 5.13.1Hippolytus begins to show that the Peratae took their teaching from the astrologers, who divide the cosmos into the fixed sphere of the zodiac and the sphere of the planets.
- 5.13.2The astrologers say the lower world draws power from the upper, and Hippolytus will quote their own words.
- 5.13.3The Chaldeans taught that births below are caused by the outflow of the stars, the seven planets acting and the zodiac assisting.
- 5.13.4The zodiac is divided into twelve signs of thirty degrees, each degree into sixty minutes.
- 5.13.5The signs are classed as male or female, double-bodied or not, and turning or fixed.
- 5.13.6Signs alternate male and female, which Hippolytus thinks led the Pythagoreans to call odd numbers male and even numbers female.
- 5.13.7Some astrologers subdivide each sign into twelve parts and apply the same male–female alternation.
- 5.13.8Hippolytus lists the double-bodied signs and the four turning signs where the sun marks the seasons.
- 5.13.9The four turning signs mark the seasons; the Peratic leaders Euphrates and Celbes merely renamed the astrologers' doctrines.
- 5.13.10Astrologers speak of zones where planets are stronger, of harmful and helpful planets, and of their aspects to one another.
- 5.13.11Stars are said to be in aspect by their spacing, and earthly things are said to feel with the heavenly as the body with the head.
- 5.13.12The Peratae took over Chaldean star lore and passed it off as Christ's teaching under new names such as “toparchs” and “suburbans.”
- 5.13.13Hippolytus will set Peratic writings beside astrology to show they come from astrologers, not from Christ.
- 5.14.1Hippolytus quotes a Peratic book that describes a watery power from Chaos which people named the Sea.
- 5.14.2The Peratic book says that ignorance named this power Kronos, whose earthly copies were Cepheus, Prometheus, and Iapetus.
- 5.14.3A male-female power over the sea, called Chorzar, was named Poseidon by ignorance.
- 5.14.4A power around the twelve-angled pyramid, which ignorance named Kore, has five ministers with strange names.
- 5.14.5The book names the planets and the rulers of air and winds, equating them with the Curetes and with Aeolus.
- 5.14.6The rulers of night and day are named Soklan and Euno, whom ignorance called Osiris and Isis.
- 5.14.7The book lists further powers, identified by ignorance with Rhea and Demeter, and their human copies.
- 5.14.8The power over fruits (called Men) and the power of fire (called Hephaestus) are listed with their human images, many of them famed astrologers and magicians.
- 5.14.9Three powers in the air, causes of birth, were named the Fates by ignorance.
- 5.14.10The last power, called Eros by ignorance, ends the Peratic book titled “The suburbans up to the ether.”
- 5.15.1Hippolytus concludes that the Peratic system is astrology with new names.
- 5.15.2The Peratae hold that the world came about by outflow from above and that the visible stars cause its generation.
- 5.15.3They teach that earthly things arise, perish, and are ruled by the stars' outflow.
- 5.15.4The Peratae turned the astrologers' cardinal points into God (the center) and left and right powers.
- 5.15.5Their “right” and “left” powers are just the astrologers' ascension and declination.
- 5.16.1The Peratae (“those who cross over”) claim that they alone know how to pass beyond the fate that rules everything born.
- 5.16.2The Peratae identify corruption with water and with Kronos, whom nothing born can escape.
- 5.16.3Kronos brings every birth to decay, and the Peratae cite Homer's oath by the water of Styx as proof that even the gods fear water.
- 5.16.4They cite Heraclitus, that for souls it is death to become water, and apply it to the Egyptians drowned in the Red Sea.
- 5.16.5The Peratae read the Exodus as escape from the body: Egypt is the body and the Red Sea is corruption.
- 5.16.6The stars, gods of destruction, are the biting serpents of the wilderness.
- 5.16.7Only the perfect serpent that Moses showed can save those who leave the body and the world.
- 5.16.8The saving serpent is Moses' rod that swallowed the magicians' serpents, and it is the “wise word” spoken to Eve.
- 5.16.9The Peratae make the serpent the river of Eden and the mark of Cain, and say that the god of this world prefers bloody sacrifice.
- 5.16.10The Peratae say the serpent appeared under Herod and was prefigured by Joseph's coat and by Esau.
- 5.16.11The perfect serpent is Nimrod the hunter and the serpent Moses lifted up, as John 3:14 says.
- 5.16.12The Peratae identify the serpent with the constellation in heaven and with the Word of John's prologue.
- 5.16.13The “life” that came to be in the Word is Eve.
- 5.16.14Eve is the common nature of all beings, and the serpent in the sky is the source of all motion and every event.
- 5.16.15The head of the heavenly Dragon, where setting and rising meet, is the great wonder that the poet Aratus described.
- 5.16.16The Peratae read the neighboring constellations (Crown, Lyre, Kneeler, Serpent-holder) as parts of their myth.
- 5.17.1Hippolytus summarizes the Peratic system: the universe consists of Father, Son, and Matter.
- 5.17.2The Son, identified with the serpent, receives forms from the Father and stamps them on formless Matter.
- 5.17.3The Son is imprinted by the Father as Jacob's rods imprinted colors on the conceiving flocks.
- 5.17.4Powers flow from the Son into Matter like the colors onto Jacob's flocks, producing corruptible and incorruptible births.
- 5.17.5Like a painter copying without diminishing his models, the Son copies the Father's characters into Matter.
- 5.17.6Whoever recognizes that he is a copy of the Father becomes consubstantial with him and ascends; whoever does not perishes.
- 5.17.7The Peratae distinguish the heavenly Father of the Gospels from the murderous demiurge of John 8:44.
- 5.17.8Only the Son, the serpent, can carry the awakened back up to the Father.
- 5.17.9The Son is the door of John 10:9; the rest of the sentence is lost.
- 5.17.10As a magnet draws iron, the serpent draws the perfect race back from the world.
- 5.17.11The Peratae compare the brain to the Father and the serpent-shaped cerebellum to the Son.
- 5.17.12Life-giving substance passes through the pineal gland and cerebellum into the spinal marrow, as forms pass from the Son into Matter.
- 5.17.13Their secret mysteries, Hippolytus says, are easy to grasp from this analogy.
- 5.18.1Hippolytus ends his account of the Peratae, whose own teachings condemn them.
- 5.19.1The Sethians teach three principles, each with countless powers, that is, capacities to become anything.
- 5.19.2A child can become anything by being near a master of that art; so too with the principles.
- 5.19.3The Sethian principles are light above, darkness below, and between them spirit, like a fine fragrance.
- 5.19.4Light shines down into darkness, while the spirit's fragrance spreads in every direction.
- 5.19.5Light and spirit have been drawn down into the darkness, which is a fearful water.
- 5.19.6The darkness knows it is nothing without the light and strives to keep the captured spark.
- 5.19.7The pupil of the eye pictures the struggle: darkness keeps the light, while light and spirit strive to recover it.
- 5.19.8The countless intelligent powers of the principles are at rest when kept apart.
- 5.19.9When unlike powers meet, their meeting produces motion and activity.
- 5.19.10Each meeting of powers stamps an image like a seal, and so there are countless images.
- 5.19.11The first meeting of the principles produced heaven and earth, shaped like a womb.
- 5.19.12Countless further meetings of powers produced countless womb-shaped seals and so all living creatures.
- 5.19.13Spirit and light are scattered in all creatures, and from the water came a violent wind, the cause of generation.
- 5.19.14The wind stirs waves, which become pregnant with man or mind.
- 5.19.15The mind, a divine spark from the light above, is born of water into human bodies and seeks release.
- 5.19.16The light above seeks to free the mind from the dark body and from the wind that begot it.
- 5.19.17The captured ray of light is the spirit “borne above the water” of Genesis; the rest is damaged.
- 5.19.18The hissing wind is like a serpent, and from it all generation began.
- 5.19.19The serpent-wind enters the unclean womb and begets man.
- 5.19.20The Sethians say the Word took the serpent's likeness and entered a virgin's womb to free the imprisoned mind.
- 5.19.21After his birth the Word washed and drank living water, which all must drink to put on a heavenly garment.
- 5.20.1The Sethian doctrine is patched together from natural philosophy and borrowed sayings.
- 5.20.2The Sethians find their three principles in every triad of the books of Moses.
- 5.20.3The Sethians' three laws are the prohibition in Eden, the call of Abraham, and the commandments with fixed penalties.
- 5.20.4The Sethian teaching derives from the old poets Musaeus, Linus, and Orpheus.
- 5.20.5Their doctrine of the womb and navel is in Orphic poems and in the rites of Phlius, older than the Eleusinian mysteries.
- 5.20.6Hippolytus describes a painting at Phlius of a winged old man pursuing a dark woman, which he links to Sethian doctrine.
- 5.20.7The painting's inscriptions are read as light flowing downward and the dark water below.
- 5.20.8The Sethian rites resemble those of Phlius, and Homer's threefold division of the world is cited for their three principles.
- 5.20.9The Sethians borrow from Homer to describe the dark water that holds the fallen light.
- 5.20.10Homer's oath by the Styx shows, they say, that water is dreadful, as it is to the mind.
- 5.21.1The Sethians urge their disciples to study the philosophical theory of blending and mixture.
- 5.21.2The spark of light is mixed into the dark waters like many incenses in one scent.
- 5.21.3A skilled nose can pick out each ingredient in mixed incense.
- 5.21.4Metals mixed in gold or silver, and water in wine, can be separated by skill.
- 5.21.5The Sethians read Christ's “sword” as the separation of the light from its mixture.
- 5.21.6Only the Sethians, reborn as spiritual, know the place where the mixed elements are separated.
- 5.21.7Hippolytus charges that they twist good texts and hide their error in parables.
- 5.21.8Mixed things are drawn to their own places, as iron to a magnet.
- 5.21.9Through teaching, the captured ray hastens to the Word who came in a slave's form and becomes one with him.
- 5.21.10The Sethians cite a Persian well whose single draught separates into three substances.
- 5.21.11The well yields salt, asphalt, and black oil, as Herodotus relates.
- 5.21.12The Sethians count the well their best proof.
- 5.22.1Hippolytus points to the Paraphrase of Seth for the full Sethian system and turns to the Gnostic Justin.
- 5.23.1The Gnostic Justin leads his hearers back to Greek myths and binds them by oath before revealing his mystery.
- 5.23.2Justin sweetens his long books with myths, then binds his followers by dreadful oaths before handing on his mysteries.
- 5.23.3All these sects share one spirit and call themselves Gnostics, claiming special knowledge.
- 5.24.1Justin requires an oath of secrecy, citing Paul's “what eye has not seen” and the Lord's oath in the Psalm.
- 5.24.2Hippolytus will expose Justin's secrets from one of his books.
- 5.24.3Justin's book Baruch is built on a myth taken from Herodotus.
- 5.25.1Herodotus tells how Heracles, asleep in Scythia, lost his horse.
- 5.25.2A half-maiden in the wilderness promises to show Heracles his horse if he will lie with her.
- 5.25.3The creature is maiden above and viper below; Heracles lies with her and foretells three famous sons.
- 5.25.4Heracles names the sons, recovers his horse, and leaves; Hippolytus now turns to Justin's use of the myth.
- 5.26.1Justin teaches three principles: the Good, the Father, and a female half-maiden, half-viper.
- 5.26.2The Father, named Elohim, and the female Eden desire each other and unite.
- 5.26.3From Elohim and Eden come twelve paternal angels, among them Baruch.
- 5.26.4Eden makes twelve maternal angels, among them Babel and Naas.
- 5.26.5The twenty-four angels together are the paradise “planted in Eden.”
- 5.26.6The tree of life is the angel Baruch and the tree of knowledge is the angel Naas.
- 5.26.7Elohim's angels made man from Eden's human upper part, and the beasts came from her lower part.
- 5.26.8Adam receives soul from Eden and spirit from Elohim, a symbol of their marriage.
- 5.26.9Eve likewise has soul from Eden and spirit from Elohim, and the first couple is told to inherit “the earth,” meaning Eden.
- 5.26.10Justin explains the dowry as an imitation of Eden's gift to Elohim.
- 5.26.11Eden's twelve angels form four groups, the four rivers of paradise, and rule the world.
- 5.26.12The angelic groups rotate around the world in turn.
- 5.26.13Wherever each group of Eden's angels rules, famine and disease follow in turn.
- 5.26.14Evil began when Elohim rose to the heights of heaven, leaving the earthly Eden below.
- 5.26.15Seeing a higher light, Elohim asks to enter, realizing he is not the supreme Lord.
- 5.26.16Elohim enters to the Good one, sees what no eye has seen, and is seated at his right hand.
- 5.26.17Elohim asks leave to destroy the world in order to recover his spirit from humankind.
- 5.26.18The Good one refuses and bids Elohim stay with him, leaving creation to Eden.
- 5.26.19Abandoned, Eden adorns herself hoping to win Elohim back.
- 5.26.20In Justin's myth, the abandoned Eden has Babel (Aphrodite) cause adultery and the breakup of marriages to torment Elohim's spirit in humans.
- 5.26.21Eden sets the angel Naas to torment Elohim's spirit in humans, and Elohim sends Baruch to help.
- 5.26.22Baruch tells Adam to obey Eden's angels except Naas, the lawless tree of knowledge.
- 5.26.23In Justin's myth Naas seduces Eve and abuses Adam, the origin of adultery and of sex between males, while Elohim's ascent shows the way up.
- 5.26.24Baruch was sent to Moses to turn Israel to the Good one.
- 5.26.25Naas, working through the soul, obscured Baruch's commands to Moses; so soul and spirit war in everyone.
- 5.26.26Baruch was sent to the prophets, but Naas led them all astray.
- 5.26.27Elohim sent Heracles, a Gentile prophet, whose twelve labors were victories over Eden's twelve angels.
- 5.26.28Omphale (Babel) seduced Heracles and stripped him of his power, so his mission failed.
- 5.26.29Baruch comes to the twelve-year-old Jesus, a shepherd boy in Nazareth, and tells him the whole story.
- 5.26.30Baruch charges Jesus to proclaim the Good one and ascend to him.
- 5.26.31Jesus stayed faithful; Naas had him crucified, but he left Eden's body on the cross and ascended.
- 5.26.32From the cross Jesus gave the soul and body back to Eden and committed the spirit to the Father.
- 5.26.33Justin identifies the Good one with Priapus, “maker before” all things.
- 5.26.34In the myth of Leda and the swan, the swan is Elohim and Leda is Eden.
- 5.26.35Justin reads other Greek myths, Ganymede and Danae, as his own story.
- 5.26.36Justin reads Isaiah's “Hear, O heaven” as addressed to spirit and soul, with Israel meaning Eden.
- 5.26.37Israel (Eden) did not know that Elohim was with the Good one, and so she torments the spirit in humans.
- 5.27.1Justin's initiates swear the oath Elohim swore before the Good one.
- 5.27.2The initiate swears secrecy, enters to the Good one, and drinks living water as a ritual washing.
- 5.27.3Justin distinguishes the lower water of creation from the living water above, in which the spiritual are washed.
- 5.27.4Justin reads Hosea's command to marry an unfaithful wife as the mystery of Eden's departure from Elohim.
- 5.27.5Justin's followers twist the prophets in many books, chiefly Baruch; Hippolytus calls this the worst heresy he has met.
- 5.27.6Hippolytus compares refuting Justin to Heracles cleaning the Augean stables.
- 5.28.1Hippolytus closes Book 5 and announces that he will expose the following heresies, beginning with Simon.
- 6.1.1Heading of the table of contents of Book 6.
- 6.2.1Contents: Simon's doctrine, drawn from magic and poetry.
- 6.3.1Contents: Valentinus, whose doctrine comes from Plato and Pythagoras rather than Scripture.
- 6.4.1Contents: the Valentinians Secundus, Ptolemy, and Heracleon, who restated Greek philosophy.
- 6.5.1Contents: Marcus and Colarbasus, given to magic and number lore.
- 6.6.1Hippolytus recalls the serpent sects of Book 5 and promises to refute all the heresies that follow.
- 6.7.1Simon of Gitta, a magician refuted by the apostles in Acts, tried to make himself a god, and later sects took their start from him.
- 6.7.2Hippolytus introduces the story of Apsethus the Libyan, who also wished to be thought a god.
- 6.8.1Apsethus, unable to become a god, contrived to be worshiped as one by the Libyans.
- 6.8.2Apsethus taught parrots to say “Apsethus is a god” and set them free.
- 6.8.3The parrots' cry spread through Libya, and the Libyans took Apsethus for a god.
- 6.8.4A Greek retaught the parrots to expose the trick, and the Libyans burned Apsethus.
- 6.9.1Simon is to be seen as another Apsethus, a man who made himself a god by a trick.
- 6.9.2Hippolytus will “reteach Simon's parrots” that Simon was no Christ but an ordinary man.
- 6.9.3Simon misread Moses' “God is a consuming fire” to make fire the principle of all things, borrowing from Heraclitus.
- 6.9.4Simon's book, the Great Declaration, opens by calling the first principle the infinite power.
- 6.9.5The infinite power dwells in man; it is a fire with a hidden and a manifest nature.
- 6.9.6The hidden and manifest parts of fire correspond to Aristotle's potency and act or Plato's intelligible and sensible.
- 6.9.7The manifest fire holds all visible things, the hidden fire all intelligible things.
- 6.9.8Simon likens the heavenly fire to Nebuchadnezzar's great tree, which feeds all flesh.
- 6.9.9The visible parts of the tree are consumed by the fire.
- 6.9.10The fruit, if fully formed, is stored, while the chaff is burned.
- 6.10.1Simon uses Isaiah's vineyard to show that the tree is man.
- 6.10.2Simon cites “all flesh is grass” and makes the enduring word of the Lord the word born in the mouth.
- 6.11.1Simon calls the fire perfect and intelligent, so that everything in it thinks and acts, and cites Empedocles on like knowing like.
- 6.12.1All parts of the fire are intelligent, and the world arose from this unbegotten fire.
- 6.12.2From the fire came six roots in pairs, Mind and Thought, Voice and Name, Reasoning and Reflection, holding the infinite power potentially.
- 6.12.3The infinite power, “he who stands,” if fully realized in the six roots, becomes equal to the unbegotten power.
- 6.12.4If left unrealized, the power perishes like an untrained talent that dies with its owner.
- 6.13.1Simon pairs the powers with heaven and earth, sun and moon, air and water, and makes the seventh power the speaker of Isaiah 1:2.
- 6.14.1Simon reworks the six days and the seventh day of rest to make himself divine.
- 6.14.2The three days before sun and moon stand for Mind, Thought, and the seventh power.
- 6.14.3The saying “before all the ages he begets me” is applied to the seventh power.
- 6.14.4The seventh power is the Spirit borne above the waters, the image of the infinite power.
- 6.14.5God formed man double, according to image and likeness.
- 6.14.6The Spirit in man perishes with the world unless it is fully realized, when the small becomes great and eternal.
- 6.14.7Simon makes paradise mean the womb, where God forms man.
- 6.14.8Simon makes the river of Eden the umbilical cord, dividing into two arteries and two veins.
- 6.14.9The cord joins the child at the navel; the rest of the sentence is lost.
- 6.14.10The veins feed the fetus with blood and the arteries bring it spirit through the aorta to the heart.
- 6.14.11The unborn child does not eat or breathe but is fed and receives spirit through the umbilical vessels.
- 6.15.1Simon makes the rivers of Eden the senses of the unborn child and relates the five books of Moses to them.
- 6.15.2Genesis stands for sight; Exodus comes next.
- 6.15.3Exodus stands for hearing: after birth through the “Red Sea” of blood, the child tastes the bitter water of life.
- 6.15.4The bitter water made sweet by Moses is compared to the magic herb moly in Homer.
- 6.16.1Odysseus, protected by moly, escaped Circe's spell and restored his transformed companions.
- 6.16.2Leviticus, the book of sacrifices and incense, stands for smell.
- 6.16.3Numbers stands for taste and Deuteronomy for touch.
- 6.16.4As touch confirms the other senses, Deuteronomy sums up the other four books.
- 6.16.5With right teaching the potential in us is realized, bitter turns sweet, and we become like the infinite power.
- 6.16.6The unrealized tree bears no fruit and is cut down and burned.
- 6.17.1Simon explains his title “he who stands, stood, and will stand” as the stages of the divine power.
- 6.17.2There are three “standing” Aeons, and through them the begotten one becomes equal to the unbegotten power.
- 6.17.3The one power is all relations to itself, mother, father, consort, and child, and the root of all.
- 6.17.4The desire for procreation comes from fire, which is why desire is called burning.
- 6.17.5Blood turns to seed in men and milk in women; this is the “flaming sword that turns” in Genesis.
- 6.17.6This power is both father and mother, and the tree of life guarded by it is the seventh power.
- 6.17.7If rightly taught, the power in seed and milk grows from a spark into an infinite, unchanging power.
- 6.18.1By his own system Simon made himself a god, like Apsethus the Libyan.
- 6.18.2Hippolytus quotes the opening of a passage from Simon's Great Declaration.
- 6.18.3From one root, Silence, come a male Mind above and a female Thought below, with Air between them.
- 6.18.4Within the Air is the Father, “he who stands,” a male-female power from which Thought proceeded.
- 6.18.5The one power became two by manifesting himself, and was called Father only when Thought named him.
- 6.18.6Power and Thought mirror each other and are really one male-female being.
- 6.18.7The being that appears from them is one yet two, as Mind is in Thought.
- 6.19.1Simon also allegorized the poets, such as the Trojan horse and Helen, to fit his myth.
- 6.19.2Simon said his Thought was the lost sheep, who once dwelt in Helen of Troy and caused the Trojan war.
- 6.19.3Stesichorus was blinded for slandering Helen; passed from body to body, she ended in a brothel in Tyre, where Simon found her.
- 6.19.4Simon claimed to have come to redeem Helen; Hippolytus says he bought a woman he loved and invented the myth to excuse it.
- 6.19.5Hippolytus charges Simon's followers with promiscuity, which they call perfect love, claiming that the redeemed cannot sin.
- 6.19.6Simon claimed to have come in disguise to correct the angels' misrule, appearing as Son, Father, or Holy Spirit to different peoples.
- 6.19.7Simon's followers reject the prophets as inspired by the world-making angels and claim freedom to do as they wish.
- 6.19.8They teach that evil is only a convention of the world-making angels and expect the world's dissolution.
- 6.20.1Simon's disciples practice magic and worship images of Simon as Zeus and Helen as Athena.
- 6.20.2Simon, cursed by the apostles in Samaria, later went to Rome, where Peter opposed him.
- 6.20.3Simon had himself buried alive, promising to rise on the third day, and never rose.
- 6.20.4Valentinus's six Aeons are Simon's six roots renamed; Hippolytus turns to Valentinus.
- 6.21.1Hippolytus says that Valentinus built on Pythagoras and Plato, and first recalls their teaching.
- 6.21.2Hippolytus will summarize Pythagoras and Plato again so that Valentinus's borrowing can be seen.
- 6.21.3Pythagoras and Plato took their teaching from Egypt; Valentinus borrowed it from them, renamed it, and made a Greek heresy foreign to Christ.
- 6.22.1Plato's Timaeus traces its account of the world to Egyptian wisdom brought to the Greeks by Solon.
- 6.22.2Hippolytus will set out Pythagoras's teaching and then show how Valentinus applied it to Christ, the Father, and Silence.
- 6.23.1Pythagoras made the unbegotten monad the father and the begotten dyad the mother of all numbers.
- 6.23.2Zaratas, Pythagoras's teacher, called one the father and two the mother; from them come the numbers up to ten.
- 6.23.3For Pythagoras ten is the perfect number, bodies arise from point, line, and surface, and the tetraktys (1+2+3+4=10) generates the perfect number.
- 6.24.1Pythagoras distinguished an intelligible world from the monad and a sensible world from the tetraktys and the number ten.
- 6.24.2Substance with its nine accidents (Aristotle's categories) makes up the perfect number ten.
- 6.24.3We know the intelligible world by reason and the sensible world by the five senses.
- 6.24.4Intelligible things cannot be known by the senses.
- 6.24.5Sensible things are known by the senses, not by reason.
- 6.24.6Touch judges hard and soft, and the ordering of the world is seen to follow number.
- 6.24.7As numbers are built up by addition and broken down by subtraction,
- 6.25.1The world is held together by a numerical and musical bond, and Strife and Love will never cease.
- 6.25.2Love keeps the world one and everlasting; Strife tries to divide it into many.
- 6.25.3Strife divides the world into creatures and makes things come to be; Love gathers them back into the one universe.
- 6.25.4Pythagoras taught that souls come from the stars, are entombed in the body, and become immortal when released.
- 6.26.1Plato, a disciple of Pythagoras, called philosophy the separation of soul from body; Pythagorean riddles call the passions Furies.
- 6.26.2The riddle warns the soul leaving the body not to cling to it, reflecting belief in transmigration.
- 6.26.3Souls that do not practice philosophy pass through animals and plants; those that do return to their star.
- 6.27.1Hippolytus recalls Pythagoras's symbolic sayings, because the heretics imitate that manner of speech.
- 6.27.2“Tie up the bedding-bundle” means to be ready to die at any moment.
- 6.27.3Every morning the Pythagoreans reminded one another to be ready for death.
- 6.27.4Hippolytus explains several Pythagorean maxims: do not provoke anger, despise small things, stir up strife, or take up menial work.
- 6.27.5“Do not bite a whole loaf” means to preserve one's capital; “do not eat beans” means to avoid public office.
- 6.28.1The Pythagoreans make the sun the craftsman of the world, set in it like a soul in a body.
- 6.28.2Fire and earth, joined by air, make up the body of the universe, which the sun numbers and measures.
- 6.28.3The sun divides the world into the twelve signs of the zodiac.
- 6.28.4By dividing and recombining degrees and minutes, the sun produces the year and the great year of the world.
- 6.29.1Valentinus and his school, Heracleon and Ptolemy, built their teaching on Pythagorean number, not on the Gospels.
- 6.29.2The Valentinians' first principle is an unbegotten, generative monad, which they call Father.
- 6.29.3Some Valentinians make the Father solitary; others give him a consort, Silence.
- 6.29.4Hippolytus leaves that dispute aside and follows the version with a solitary Father.
- 6.29.5The Father, alone and at rest, was love, and so brought forth what was best in himself.
- 6.29.6The Father emitted Mind and Truth, mother of all the Aeons in the Pleroma.
- 6.29.7Mind and Truth emit Word and Life, who emit Man and Church, and Mind and Truth offer the Father ten Aeons.
- 6.29.8Ten is the perfect number offered to the perfect Father, who alone produced all roots through Mind and Truth.
- 6.30.1Word and Life wished in turn to glorify their parents, Mind and Truth.
- 6.30.2Because Mind and Truth were begotten, Word and Life offered them an imperfect number, twelve Aeons.
- 6.30.3The first six Aeons are the roots; ten Aeons come from Mind and Truth and twelve from Word and Life,
- 6.30.4Twenty-eight Aeons in all; the ten are named in pairs.
- 6.30.5The twelve Aeons are named in pairs, ending with Willed and Wisdom.
- 6.30.6Sophia, the youngest Aeon, noticed that only the Father begets without a consort.
- 6.30.7Sophia tried to beget alone like the Father, not knowing that only the unbegotten can do so.
- 6.30.8Without a male partner Sophia could only emit formless substance.
- 6.30.9The formless substance is the “invisible and unfurnished earth” of Genesis and the promised land, the heavenly Jerusalem.
- 6.31.1Sophia's formless offspring caused alarm among the Aeons, who feared corruption.
- 6.31.2At the Aeons' plea the Father has Mind and Truth emit Christ and the Holy Spirit to shape the abortion and comfort Sophia.
- 6.31.3With Christ and the Holy Spirit the Aeons number thirty.
- 6.31.4Christ and the Holy Spirit separate Sophia's formless offspring from the other Aeons.
- 6.31.5The Father emits the Aeon Cross, the Boundary that guards the Pleroma of thirty Aeons.
- 6.31.6The Boundary is also called Participator and Cross, keeping the Deficiency out of the Pleroma.
- 6.31.7Outside the Boundary is the Ogdoad, the outer Sophia, whom Christ formed into a perfect Aeon.
- 6.31.8Having formed the outer Sophia, Christ and the Holy Spirit returned into the Pleroma.
- 6.32.1The thirty Aeons together emitted one Aeon, the common fruit of the Pleroma, as an offering to the Father.
- 6.32.2The common fruit is Jesus, the great high priest; meanwhile the outer Sophia feared she would perish without Christ.
- 6.32.3Sophia, grieving and perplexed, turned to entreat the one who had left her.
- 6.32.4The Aeons sent Jesus, the common fruit, to be Sophia's consort and heal her passions.
- 6.32.5The Fruit healed Sophia's four passions but saw that, being eternal, they could not simply be destroyed.
- 6.32.6Sophia's passions became substances: fear the psychic, grief the material, perplexity the demonic, and her turning the “right” power.
- 6.32.7The Demiurge arose from Sophia's fear; he is fiery and is called Place, Hebdomad, and Ancient of Days.
- 6.32.8The Demiurge is the “consuming fire” of Deuteronomy; the soul is a middle realm, the Hebdomad.
- 6.32.9The soul, between the Ogdoad and matter, becomes immortal if it is made like what is above, and perishes if it is made like matter.
- 6.33.1The Valentinians make the devil and Beelzebul the rulers of matter and demons, and the ignorant Demiurge a tool of Sophia who wrongly claims to be the only God.
- 6.34.1Valentinus reuses the Pythagorean tetraktys: Sophia is spirit, the Demiurge soul, and the devil and Beelzebul rulers of world and demons.
- 6.34.2The thirty Aeons emitted further Aeons in proportion, to complete a perfect number.
- 6.34.3Like the Pythagoreans, the Valentinians subdivide the Pleroma and the Ogdoad.
- 6.34.4Sophia and her bridegroom emitted heavenly “words”; the Demiurge, called Abraham, emitted souls and made bodies for them from matter.
- 6.34.5The breath of Gen 2:7 is the psychic inner man, housed in a material body made from the devilish substance.
- 6.34.6The body is an inn housing the soul alone, or the soul with demons, or the soul with heavenly words.
- 6.34.7The Valentinians read Eph 3 as describing the Father (depth), the Cross (breadth), and the Pleroma (length).
- 6.34.8The foolishness of 1 Cor 2:14 is the Demiurge's ignorance of Sophia's work through him.
- 6.35.1The Valentinians say the law and prophets came from the foolish Demiurge, citing John 10:8.
- 6.35.2The prophets knew nothing of the Valentinian mysteries; the psychic man had a veil over his heart until the time of revelation.
- 6.35.3The Valentinians read the annunciation as Sophia (Spirit) and the Demiurge (Most High) acting together in Jesus' birth.
- 6.35.4Jesus, the new man, received his body from the Demiurge and his substance from Sophia, a heavenly Word born through Mary.
- 6.35.5The question of Jesus' body split the Valentinians into Eastern and Italian schools.
- 6.35.6The Italian school (Heracleon, Ptolemy) held that Jesus' body was psychic and that the Spirit came on him at his baptism.
- 6.35.7The Eastern school (Axionicus, Ardesianes) held that the Savior's body was spiritual.
- 6.36.1Hippolytus leaves the dispute to them.
- 6.36.2Sophia taught the Demiurge that he was not the only God, and he kept the secret, as his words to Moses show.
- 6.36.3Jesus was born through Mary to heal the passions of the soul, as the higher Christ healed Sophia's.
- 6.36.4The Valentinians teach three Christs: the one emitted in the Pleroma, the common fruit, and the one born of Mary.
- 6.37.1Hippolytus will close his account of Valentinus with a refutation.
- 6.37.2Hippolytus quotes Plato's riddle to Dionysius about the king of all and the second and third things.
- 6.37.3Plato's letter continues: the soul's restless inquiry about these things is the source of evils.
- 6.37.4Plato's letter warns that such teachings can seem credible or incredible at different times.
- 6.37.5Plato says he has written nothing on these matters; Valentinus made Plato's “king of all” his Father and Depth.
- 6.37.6Valentinus made Plato's second things the Aeons within the Boundary, and the third things what lies outside.
- 6.37.7Hippolytus quotes Valentinus's psalm, which sets out the hierarchy of being from flesh up to the depth.
- 6.37.8Hippolytus decodes the psalm: flesh is matter, soul the Demiurge, air the outer Sophia, ether the Pleroma, and the fruits the Aeons.
- 6.37.9Hippolytus ends his account of Valentinus and turns to his followers' differing views.
- 6.38.1Secundus taught a right and a left tetrad and said that the fallen power came from the Aeons' fruits.
- 6.38.2Epiphanes taught that Oneness and Unity, without emitting, produced the Monad.
- 6.38.3Monad and One complete a first tetrad; others name the first Ogdoad Pre-principle, Inconceivable, Ineffable, and Invisible.
- 6.38.4Each of the first four powers emitted a second, completing the first Ogdoad, which they place before Depth and Silence.
- 6.38.5The Valentinians disagree about Depth; Ptolemy's followers give him two consorts, Thought and Will.
- 6.38.6From the Father's Thought and Will came the pair Only-begotten (Mind) and Truth.
- 6.38.7Mind images the Will and Truth the Thought, since Thought could emit only when Will was added.
- 6.39.1Marcus, a magician among the Valentinians, claimed to hold the greatest power.
- 6.39.2Marcus made the eucharistic cup turn purple or red to make people think grace had come upon it.
- 6.39.3Hippolytus explains the trick: Marcus secretly added a dye and talked until it dissolved.
- 6.40.1Marcus had a woman give thanks over a small cup and then poured it back and forth into a larger one.
- 6.40.2With an invocation of Grace, Marcus made the small cup seem to fill and overflow the larger one.
- 6.40.3The trick used an effervescent drug smeared in the empty cup, which foamed up as the wine was poured.
- 6.40.4Marcus had the cup drunk quickly before the foam subsided, and people took it as divine.
- 6.41.1Marcus was thought to prophesy and taught his disciples that, belonging to the perfect power, they could sin without danger.
- 6.41.2Marcus's followers promise a second rite after baptism, called redemption,
- 6.41.3They use the promise of a second forgiveness, and further promises, to keep their followers bound to them.
- 6.41.4A secret word is spoken over the one who receives the redemption, or into his ear by the bishop at death.
- 6.41.5The secret keeps disciples attached to their bishop; Hippolytus withholds it to avoid seeming to slander them.
- 6.42.1Irenaeus exposed these rites, which some deny; Hippolytus has inquired carefully into their two washings.
- 6.42.2Like Valentinus, who claimed to have seen the Word as a newborn child, Marcus invented a vision.
- 6.42.3Marcus claimed that the Tetrad appeared to him as a woman and revealed the origin of all things.
- 6.42.4The Father, wishing to express himself, spoke a Word like himself.
- 6.42.5The Father's name was spoken in four syllables of four, four, ten, and twelve letters.
- 6.42.6The name has thirty letters; each letter knows only its own sound and thinks it names the whole.
- 6.42.7The restoration of all things comes when all letters sound as one, pictured in the common “Amen”; the sounds are the angels who see the Father's face.
- 6.43.1Marcus calls the letters Aeons, Words, Roots, Seeds, Fullnesses, and Fruits.
- 6.43.2The last sound of the last letter fell below and produced the lower world, while the letter itself was taken back up.
- 6.43.3Each letter's name is spelled with other letters, whose names are spelled with others, without end.
- 6.43.4For example, “delta” is spelled with five letters, each of which is spelled with others.
- 6.43.5Hippolytus mocks the endless regress of letters out of which Marcus builds his Forefather.
- 6.43.6Since no one can utter the whole name, the Father let each Aeon sound its own letter.
- 6.44.1The Tetrad offers to show Marcus Truth herself.
- 6.44.2Marcus describes Truth as a body made of the Greek alphabet, paired letters for each part from head to foot.
- 6.44.3This lettered figure, called Man, is the source of all speech; Marcus is told to hear the Word from Truth's mouth.
- 6.45.1Truth spoke the name “Christ Jesus” and fell silent.
- 6.45.2The Tetrad tells Marcus he knows the name's sound but not its power.
- 6.45.3The six-letter name “Jesus” used by the called differs from the manifold name known in the Pleroma.
- 6.46.1The twenty-four letters of the alphabet are emanations of three higher powers.
- 6.46.2The nine mute consonants belong to Father and Truth, the eight semivowels to Word and Life, the seven vowels to Man and Church.
- 6.46.3To correct the deficient number, one who was set apart in the Father came down, restoring the unity of the Pleroma.
- 6.46.4Three groups of eight make twenty-four, which is also six times the ineffable Tetrad.
- 6.46.5The double letters, added to the twenty-four, make thirty.
- 6.47.1Marcus reads the Transfiguration as a number mystery: Jesus went up as the fourth and became the sixth.
- 6.47.2The dove at Jesus' baptism is “omega and alpha,” since the letters of “dove” add up to 801.
- 6.47.3Christ's passion on the sixth day and at the sixth hour regenerated the first man.
- 6.47.4Six is the number of creation and regeneration, and it completes the thirty-letter name.
- 6.48.1The Demiurge, in imitation of a higher sevenfold power, ensouled the world of the seven heavens.
- 6.48.2Each of the seven heavens sounds one of the seven Greek vowels.
- 6.48.3The heavens' united praise, echoing to earth, shapes earthly things, as newborns' cries show.
- 6.48.4Infants' cries praise the Word like the seven heavens, and the soul in pain cries “O” to summon help from above.
- 6.49.1Marcus derives the twenty-four letters from the first powers by addition and multiplication.
- 6.49.2The first tetrad's secret names are Ineffable, Silence, Father, and Truth.
- 6.49.3Marcus counts the letters of divine names, including the letters in the spelled-out names of each letter of “Christ,” and links “alpha and omega” to the dove.
- 6.50.1Jesus' secret generation: from the first tetrad came the second, making an ogdoad, and from it the decad.
- 6.50.2Eight multiplied by ten gives 8, 80, 800, totaling 888, the numerical value of “Jesus” in Greek.
- 6.50.3The Greek alphabet's numerals sum to 888, the number of Jesus, who is therefore “alpha and omega.”
- 6.51.1Marcus maps the annunciation onto the second tetrad: Gabriel, Holy Spirit, power of the Most High, and the Virgin.
- 6.51.2At the baptism the higher power came down on Jesus as a dove, carrying the seed of the elect.
- 6.51.3The power that descended on Jesus contains the Father, the Son, Silence, and all the Aeons.
- 6.51.4The Spirit united with Jesus spoke through him; the Savior destroyed death and made the Father known.
- 6.51.5“Jesus” names the human of the economy, who, receiving the heavenly Man, became all the Aeons.
- 6.52.1Hippolytus judges Marcus's system to be astrology and Pythagorean arithmetic, not godly knowledge.
- 6.52.2The Marcosians, like the Pythagoreans, derive all from monad and dyad; 1+2+3+4 makes ten.
- 6.52.3Even numbers 2+4+6 make twelve, and 2 through 10 make thirty.
- 6.52.4They say the twelfth Aeon's fall is the lost sheep, since twelve contains the “notable” number six.
- 6.52.5They connect the lost coin and the lost sheep with the number ninety-nine, which is also the value of “Amen.”
- 6.52.6Eta is eighth counting the episemon, and the values of the letters up to eta without it add up to thirty.
- 6.52.7The letter values from alpha to eta (without six) total thirty, and three times thirty is ninety.
- 6.52.8By adding and removing units from 8, 10, and 12 they arrive at ninety-nine.
- 6.52.9Lambda, the eleventh letter (value thirty), brings the sum of the letter values to ninety-nine, imaging the fall of the twelfth Aeon.
- 6.52.10Two lambdas make M, the twelfth letter; the Marcosians seek the “one” that turns ninety-nine into a hundred, from the left hand to the right.
- 6.53.1The four elements and their four qualities are said to image the upper tetrad and ogdoad.
- 6.53.2The Marcosians count ten heavenly powers: seven heavens, the enclosing eighth heaven, the sun, and the moon.
- 6.53.3They say the ten heavenly bodies image the invisible Decad and the twelve signs of the zodiac image the Duodecad.
- 6.53.4They make the slow outermost heaven, which takes thirty years to go round, an image of Limit, which encloses their thirty-named Mother.
- 6.53.5The moon's thirty days stand for the thirty Aeons, the sun's twelve months for the Duodecad.
- 6.53.6The twelve hours of the day and the 360 degrees of the zodiac are also made into symbols of their numbers.
- 6.53.7They say the earth is divided into twelve zones, each receiving a power from the heavens, as a type of the Duodecad above.
- 6.54.1They say the Demiurge, himself the fruit of a deficiency, tried to imitate the eternal Ogdoad by multiplying times and years.
- 6.54.2Because truth escaped the Demiurge, they say, his work is false and will be dissolved when its times are complete.
- 6.55.1Hippolytus sums up: the Valentinians keep inventing ever newer doctrines about creation and count novelty as fruitfulness.
- 6.55.2Hippolytus will not repeat their allegorical number-readings of Scripture, which Irenaeus already refuted, and says they took them from Pythagoreans and astrologers.
- 6.55.3Having finished with Marcus and Colarbasus, Hippolytus turns to Basilides.
- 7.1.1Heading for the table of contents of Book 7.
- 7.2.1Contents: Basilides took his system from Aristotle.
- 7.3.1Contents: Saturnilus, a contemporary of Basilides.
- 7.4.1Contents: Menander taught that angels made the world.
- 7.5.1Contents: Marcion's doctrine comes from Empedocles, not Scripture.
- 7.6.1Contents: Carpocrates also said angels made the world.
- 7.7.1Contents: Cerinthus drew on Egyptian ideas, not Scripture.
- 7.8.1Contents: the Ebionites and their Jewish customs.
- 7.9.1Contents: Theodotus borrowed from the Ebionites and Cerinthus.
- 7.10.1Contents: Cerdo, Marcion's teacher.
- 7.11.1Contents: Lucian, a disciple of Marcion.
- 7.12.1Contents: Apelles, Marcion's disciple, who departed from his teacher.
- 7.13.1Heresies are like a monster-filled sea, such as the Sicilian sea of the Odyssey, which a wise hearer should sail past.
- 7.13.2Odysseus stopped his companions' ears with wax and had himself bound to the mast to pass the Sirens safely.
- 7.13.3Hippolytus advises readers either not to listen to heresies at all or to listen while bound fast by faith to the cross of Christ.
- 7.14.1Hippolytus will first summarize Aristotle so that readers can see Basilides' doctrines are borrowed from him.
- 7.15.1Aristotle divides substance into genus, species, and the individual, which cannot be further divided.
- 7.15.2A genus is like a heap of many seeds from which all species come; an example will make this clear.
- 7.16.1Aristotle's example: “animal” in general, which is no particular animal, gives the particular animals their being.
- 7.16.2Every particular animal takes its origin from the general “animal,” which is none of them.
- 7.17.1Hippolytus argues that on Aristotle's account the things that exist come from something that is none of them, and he defers the question of who laid down this origin.
- 7.18.1When a member of the species “human” is picked out by a name such as Socrates, it is an individual substance.
- 7.18.2The named individual cannot be divided further; this is what Aristotle calls substance in the primary sense.
- 7.18.3“Said of a subject” means a common term like “animal,” which is truly said of many different species.
- 7.18.4The definition of animal, an ensouled and sentient substance, applies equally to every animal.
- 7.18.5“In a subject” means qualities such as color or justice, which cannot exist on their own but only in something else.
- 7.18.6Hippolytus concludes that on Aristotle's terms primary substance is made up of things that do not exist on their own, and so comes from what is not.
- 7.19.1Substance is also described as matter, form, and privation; Hippolytus now turns to Aristotle's picture of the world.
- 7.19.2For Aristotle the region below the moon runs by nature without providence, while the region above the moon is governed by providence.
- 7.19.3The outer heaven is a fifth substance beyond the elements, and Aristotle's philosophy is divided to match his division of the world.
- 7.19.4Aristotle's writings follow this division: the Physics for things below the moon, the Metaphysics for things above it, and a treatise on the fifth substance as his theology.
- 7.19.5Aristotle's doctrine of the soul is unclear: his definition is easy to state but hard to understand.
- 7.19.6Aristotle defines the soul as the actuality of an organic body, and God, cause of all good things, is harder still to know.
- 7.19.7Aristotle defines God as thought thinking itself, which Hippolytus calls inconceivable, and holds the world to be eternal.
- 7.19.8Aristotle also wrote on ethics; if Basilides has transferred Aristotle's words into the gospel, his disciples are pagans whom Christ will not profit.
- 7.20.1Basilides and his son Isidore claim secret teachings from Matthias, which Hippolytus says falsify both Matthias and the Savior.
- 7.20.2Basilides begins: once there was nothing at all, not even “nothing” as a thing; “was” is used only for want of a better word.
- 7.20.3What Basilides speaks of is beyond even the word “unspeakable,” above every name that is named.
- 7.20.4Basilides says names cannot fit even the world, and homonymy breeds confusion.
- 7.20.5Hippolytus says this teaching on names was stolen from Aristotle's Categories, written generations before Basilides.
- 7.21.1When nothing existed, Basilides says, the “non-existent God,” without thought or will, willed to make a world.
- 7.21.2“Willed” is only a manner of speaking, and the “world” meant is the seed of the world.
- 7.21.3Like a mustard seed or a peacock's egg, the one seed laid down by the non-existent God contained the whole world in potential.
- 7.22.1Everything the world would ever contain was stored in the seed, to unfold in time as teeth and reason appear later in a child.
- 7.22.2Basilides rejects emanation or pre-existing matter as the way God made the world.
- 7.22.3Basilides reads “Let there be light” as creation from nothing by the word of a God who “was not.”
- 7.22.4The seed of the world is the word “Let there be light,” which Basilides identifies with the true light of John's Gospel.
- 7.22.5This seed is Aristotle's genus, divided into countless species.
- 7.22.6Whatever comes into being later was already stored in the cosmic seed, so one need not ask where it came from.
- 7.22.7The seed contained a threefold Sonship, of one substance with the non-existent God: one fine, one coarse, one needing purification.
- 7.22.8The first, fine Sonship at once rushed upward to the non-existent God, whom every nature longs for.
- 7.22.9The second, coarser Sonship could not rise on its own.
- 7.22.10The second Sonship rises by putting on the Holy Spirit as a wing, like the winged soul of Plato's Phaedrus.
- 7.22.11Like a bird and its wing, the Sonship and the Spirit need each other to rise.
- 7.22.12When the second Sonship came near the non-existent God, it could not take the Spirit with it, since the Spirit was not of its substance.
- 7.22.13The realm of the non-existent God was as unnatural to the Spirit as dry air to fish.
- 7.22.14The Spirit, left behind as a boundary, keeps the scent of the Sonship like a jar that once held ointment; the third Sonship remains below in the seed-mass.
- 7.23.1After the two ascents, the Holy Spirit remained as a firmament between the world and what lies beyond it.
- 7.23.2Basilides divides reality into the world and what is above it, with the Holy Spirit as the boundary between.
- 7.23.3From the seed-mass there burst forth the great Archon, head of the world.
- 7.23.4The great Archon rose to the firmament and, thinking nothing lay beyond, took himself for the highest, not knowing the third Sonship was greater.
- 7.23.5Thinking himself lord, the Archon set about creating and begot a son wiser than himself.
- 7.23.6The Archon, amazed at his son's beauty, seated him at his right hand.
- 7.23.7The Archon's seat is the Ogdoad; he made the ethereal creation, prompted by his wiser son.
- 7.24.1Hippolytus says the Archon and his son are Aristotle's body and soul under new names.
- 7.24.2As Aristotle's soul governs the body, so Basilides' son governs the Archon.
- 7.24.3The ethereal region down to the moon is ruled by the great Archon; then a second, lesser Archon arose from the seed-mass.
- 7.24.4The second Archon rules the Hebdomad and likewise begot a wiser son.
- 7.24.5Below the Hebdomad things develop by nature as planned in the seed, with no ruler over them.
- 7.25.1The third Sonship must be revealed and restored above, which Basilides finds in Paul's words about creation awaiting the revelation of God's sons.
- 7.25.2Basilides' followers call themselves the spiritual sons left below to perfect souls.
- 7.25.3From Adam to Moses the great Archon reigned in ignorance, which Basilides reads as Paul's “sin reigned” and the hidden mystery.
- 7.25.4The Archon of the Hebdomad is the God who spoke to Moses and did not reveal the higher God's name.
- 7.25.5The prophets spoke from the Hebdomad; when God's children were to be revealed, the gospel came through every power.
- 7.25.6Nothing actually descended; like naphtha catching fire from afar, powers reach from below up to the Sonship.
- 7.25.7Through the Spirit at the boundary, the thoughts of the Sonship pass to the son of the great Archon.
- 7.26.1Through his son the great Archon learned he was not the supreme God, and he turned in fear.
- 7.26.2The Archon's fear was the beginning of wisdom, as the Christ beside him taught him the whole system, the wisdom spoken in a mystery.
- 7.26.3Taught by the Spirit's wisdom, the Archon confessed his sin of self-exaltation.
- 7.26.4The Archon's confession fulfilled the psalm; then the gospel had to go on to the Hebdomad.
- 7.26.5The light passed to the son of the second Archon, who preached to his father, and he too feared and confessed.
- 7.26.6Basilides' followers speak of 365 heavens ruled by Abrasax, whose name adds up to the days of the year.
- 7.26.7Next the mystery had to be revealed to the third Sonship left below in the formless world, as Paul speaks of revelation and unspeakable words.
- 7.26.8The light came down through the Hebdomad onto Jesus, son of Mary, and enlightened him.
- 7.26.9Basilides reads the angel's words to Mary as the descent of the light through the heavens.
- 7.26.10The world lasts until the whole third Sonship follows Jesus, is purified, and rises like the first.
- 7.27.1When the whole Sonship has ascended, God will bring a great ignorance on the world, so that nothing desires what is beyond its nature.
- 7.27.2Souls below will know nothing higher, so that they are not tormented by impossible longings, like a fish wanting to graze with sheep.
- 7.27.3Things stay incorruptible in their own place; ignorance will spare the lower Archon grief and sighing.
- 7.27.4Ignorance will also seize the great Archon, and all things will be restored to their natural places in their own seasons.
- 7.27.5Basilides cites “my hour has not yet come” and the Magi's star to show that even Jesus was under appointed times and stars.
- 7.27.6Jesus is the spiritual inner man within the psychic one, clothed with his own soul.
- 7.27.7For Basilides the gospel is the knowledge of the realities above the world, which made the great Archon rejoice.
- 7.27.8Jesus' life happened as the Gospels say, so that he might be the first fruits of sorting out what was mixed together.
- 7.27.9Because the world has three levels, the mixed elements had to be sorted out by dividing Jesus.
- 7.27.10At the passion each part of Jesus returned to its own level: body to the formless, soul to the Hebdomad, and higher parts to the great Archon and the boundary Spirit.
- 7.27.11Through Jesus the third Sonship was purified and ascended; their whole system is mixing, sorting, and restoring.
- 7.27.12The passion served only to sort out the mixture; the whole Sonship must be sorted as Jesus was.
- 7.27.13Hippolytus ends his account of Basilides, who he says learned it in Egypt.
- 7.28.1Saturnilus of Antioch taught one unknown Father who made the angels and powers.
- 7.28.2Seven angels made the world and, seeing a luminous image from above, tried to make a human being after it.
- 7.28.3The angels' man writhed like a worm until the higher power, pitying its likeness, sent a spark of life.
- 7.28.4At death the spark returns above; Saturnilus held that the Savior only appeared to be a man.
- 7.28.5Saturnilus made the God of the Jews one of the angels, whom Christ came to overthrow while saving those with the spark of life.
- 7.28.6Saturnilus taught two races of humans, evil and good, and that the Savior came to destroy the evil and save the good.
- 7.28.7Saturnilus said marriage and procreation come from Satan, and his followers abstained from meat; prophecies came partly from the world-making angels and partly from Satan.
- 7.29.1Marcion of Pontus taught two principles, one good and one evil, and founded a school of harsh Cynic living.
- 7.29.2Hippolytus claims Marcion took his two principles from Empedocles' Strife and Love.
- 7.29.3Hippolytus will again summarize Empedocles to compare him with Marcion.
- 7.29.4Empedocles names six elements: earth and water, fire and air, and the shaping powers Strife and Love, and he calls the four roots by gods' names.
- 7.29.5Hippolytus explains the four names: Zeus is fire, Hera earth, Aidoneus air, and Nestis water.
- 7.29.6Water is called Nestis (“fasting”) because it carries food but cannot nourish by itself.
- 7.29.7Summary of Empedocles' six principles: water and earth, fire and air, Strife and Love.
- 7.29.8Love makes the world one; Strife tears it into many.
- 7.29.9Destructive Strife makes the created world; Love leads things out of it and restores them to the One.
- 7.29.10Empedocles holds Strife and Love to be eternal and unbegotten, while the four elements die and come back to life.
- 7.29.11When the elements die, Love gathers them back into the unified whole.
- 7.29.12Strife in turn tears the unity apart into the elements, animals, plants, and the visible world.
- 7.29.13Empedocles describes the world under Love as a perfect sphere without limbs.
- 7.29.14Empedocles calls himself an exile from God, torn by Strife from the original unity.
- 7.29.15Empedocles calls the maker of this world “raging Strife.”
- 7.29.16Empedocles says souls, immortal “spirits,” are condemned for sin to exile by Strife.
- 7.29.17Souls wander for thirty thousand seasons, born in every mortal form, which Empedocles calls life's painful paths.
- 7.29.18Hippolytus explains this as the transmigration of souls from body to body as punishment.
- 7.29.19Empedocles describes souls tossed from ether to sea to earth to sun and back, hated by all.
- 7.29.20Like a smith plunging iron from fire into water, the Demiurge moves souls through the elements.
- 7.29.21Love, pitying the tormented souls, labors to lead them out of the world and back to the One.
- 7.29.22Empedocles taught his followers to abstain from meat, as housing punished souls, and from sexual intercourse, which serves Strife.
- 7.29.23Empedocles calls the alternation of Strife and Love an ancient decree of Necessity.
- 7.29.24Strife always wrongs and seizes; Love always calls back and reunites.
- 7.29.25This is Empedocles' account of the world's origin and end from good and evil.
- 7.29.26Empedocles speaks of a third, intelligible power: teachings held with pure attention stay and grow, and all things have understanding.
- 7.30.1Hippolytus says Marcion's contrast of good and evil gods comes not from Paul or Mark but from Empedocles of Sicily.
- 7.30.2Hippolytus addresses Marcion directly: calling the Creator evil is teaching Empedocles to the church.
- 7.30.3Marcion's good God is Empedocles' Love, and his ban on marriage and foods is Empedocles' purifications.
- 7.30.4Marcion forbids meat and dissolves marriages joined by God, following Empedocles' view that marriage divides the One.
- 7.31.1Hippolytus turns to a newer Marcionite, Prepon the Assyrian, who wrote against Bardesanes.
- 7.31.2Prepon added a third, just principle between good and evil, but this too came from Empedocles.
- 7.31.3Empedocles placed a just reason between Strife and Love, reuniting what Strife divides.
- 7.31.4Empedocles calls the just reason the Muse and invokes Calliope.
- 7.31.5Marcion denied Christ's birth, saying he came down from heaven in Tiberius's fifteenth year and taught in the synagogues.
- 7.31.6Prepon's Jesus came down unborn, free from both evil and good, as a middle being, citing “Why do you call me good?”
- 7.31.7The quotation continues: “One is good.”
- 7.31.8Hippolytus closes his refutation of Marcion as a borrower from Empedocles and turns to Carpocrates.
- 7.32.1Carpocrates taught that angels made the world and that Jesus, son of Joseph, received power from above because his pure soul remembered what it had seen with God.
- 7.32.2Jesus' soul, trained in Jewish customs, despised them and so received powers to overcome the passions.
- 7.32.3Carpocratians claim that anyone who despises the world-rulers as Jesus did gets the same power, and some think themselves superior even to the apostles.
- 7.32.4They claim their souls come from above and could even surpass Jesus by despising the world more.
- 7.32.5The Carpocratians practice magic, claiming power over the world's rulers and all their works.
- 7.32.6Hippolytus says Satan used such sects to bring the church into disrepute among pagans.
- 7.32.7Carpocratians teach reincarnation until a soul has committed every sin, after which all souls are freed and saved.
- 7.32.8Some souls finish all sins in one life; the sect brands its disciples' ears and keeps portraits of Christ said to be made by Pilate.
- 7.33.1Cerinthus taught that a lower power made the world and that Jesus was the natural son of Joseph and Mary.
- 7.33.2For Cerinthus the Christ descended on Jesus at his baptism and left him before the passion.
- 7.34.1The Ebionites accept the true God as creator but share Cerinthus's view of Christ.
- 7.34.2The Ebionites keep the Jewish law, saying Jesus became Christ by keeping it perfectly and that they too can become Christs.
- 7.35.1Theodotus of Byzantium agreed with the church on creation but took his view of Christ from the Gnostics, Cerinthus, and Ebion.
- 7.35.2Theodotus held that Jesus, a man born of a virgin, received the Christ-Spirit at his baptism; his followers differed on whether he ever became God.
- 7.36.1Theodotus the banker taught that Melchizedek is a great power, greater than Christ, who was made in his image.
- 7.36.2Hippolytus will not list the many Gnostic opinions, which he thinks less reverent than the Greek philosophers.
- 7.36.3Hippolytus blames Nicolaus, one of the seven deacons, whose followers John rebuked in Revelation for sexual immorality and eating idol sacrifices.
- 7.37.1Cerdo taught that the just God of Moses and the prophets is not the unknown, good Father of Jesus Christ.
- 7.37.2Marcion built on Cerdo's teaching in his Antitheses, and his disciple Lucian did the same.
- 7.38.1Apelles taught a good God, a just creator, a fiery God who spoke to Moses, and a fourth cause of evil, called angels.
- 7.38.2Apelles rejected the Law and Prophets, picked from the Gospels and Paul, and followed the prophetess Philumene.
- 7.38.3Apelles said Christ was not born of a virgin but made himself a real body from the elements.
- 7.38.4Christ died, rose after three days, and showed the disciples his wounds to prove he was not a phantom.
- 7.38.5Apelles said Christ returned his body to the elements and went to the good Father, leaving the seed of life through the disciples.
- 7.38.6Hippolytus turns next to the Docetae.
- 8.1.1Heading for the table of contents of Book 8.
- 8.2.1Contents: the Docetae and their debt to natural philosophy.
- 8.3.1Contents: Monoimus and his reliance on poets and mathematicians.
- 8.4.1Contents: Tatian and Hermogenes.
- 8.5.1Contents: the Quartodecimans, who kept Easter on the fourteenth of Nisan.
- 8.6.1Contents: the Montanists (“Phrygians”) and their prophets.
- 8.7.1Contents: the Encratites, whose teaching is not from Scripture.
- 8.8.1Hippolytus introduces Book 8 with the Lord's saying about the beam and the speck.
- 8.8.2Hippolytus begins his account of the Docetae, who named themselves from “seeming.”
- 8.8.3The Docetae liken the first God to a fig seed, tiny yet infinite, and read the Gospel fig tree story in that light.
- 8.8.4As a fig tree puts out branches, leaves, and fruit full of seed, so the world came into being.
- 8.8.5Like trunk, leaves, and fruit, three Aeons came from the first God, which the Docetae find in the three words of Deuteronomy.
- 8.8.6God added nothing to the three Aeons, which supply all things and grew to perfection, while he remains apart.
- 8.8.7The three Aeons, each perfected as ten, make thirty; they differ only by position and hence in power.
- 8.9.1The Docetae find the three Aeons in the hundredfold, sixtyfold, and thirtyfold of the parable of the sower.
- 8.9.2All the Aeons together begot from the virgin Mary a common offspring, the Savior, equal to the first seed except that he is begotten.
- 8.9.3The intelligible world, perfected, was a light full of forms that shone down into the chaos below.
- 8.9.4Seeing its forms caught in the darkness below, the third Aeon set a firmament under the Aeons.
- 8.9.5The Docetae read Genesis 1 as the third Aeon separating light above from darkness below.
- 8.9.6The impress of the third Aeon in the darkness became a living fire, the great Archon of whom Genesis speaks.
- 8.9.7The Archon is the fiery God who spoke from the bush, which they interpret as the dark air through which the forms passed.
- 8.9.8Speech, smells, and colors all reach us through the air, the “bush.”
- 8.10.1The fiery God made the world; until the Savior came, the souls, “cooled” from above, passed from body to body under his guard.
- 8.10.2The Docetae cite Job and Jesus' words about Elijah for transmigration, which they say ended with the Savior.
- 8.10.3The only-begotten Son contracted his greatness into a small body, like the light of the eye that reaches the stars yet hides under the eyelids.
- 8.10.4We see only the coverings of the eye, not the light of sight itself.
- 8.10.5Clothed in the thirty Aeons, the only-begotten entered the world hidden, unknown, and disbelieved.
- 8.10.6To put on flesh, the “outer darkness,” he was announced to Mary by an angel and born of her.
- 8.10.7At his baptism Jesus received a copy of his body in the water, so that at the cross his soul, stripping off the flesh, would not be found naked.
- 8.10.8The Docetae read John 3:5–6 as the water-body of baptism, and Jesus' thirty years as the thirty Aeons.
- 8.10.9Each soul, from one of the thirty Aeons, can know only the aspect of Jesus that matches its own origin.
- 8.10.10This is why the sects quarrel over Jesus: each sees only the aspect of him akin to itself and thinks it the only one.
- 8.10.11The Docetae claim that they alone, coming from the highest realms, know the whole Jesus; others know only in part.
- 8.11.1Hippolytus ends his account of the Docetae with a pun on their name and the beam in the eye.
- 8.11.2The Docetae's teaching was anticipated by the Greek sophists; next comes Monoimus.
- 8.12.1Monoimus the Arab made Man what Homer made Ocean.
- 8.12.2Monoimus taught that Man is the eternal first principle of all things, and the Son of Man is begotten and passible.
- 8.12.3Monoimus: the Son came from the Man faster than thought or will.
- 8.12.4Monoimus reads “he was and came to be” as the Man and his Son, like fire and its light.
- 8.12.5Monoimus's Man is a monad that unites all opposites like a musical harmony, both mother and father.
- 8.12.6The perfect Man is imaged by the single stroke of the letter iota, simple yet containing multiplicity.
- 8.12.7The one stroke of the iota is the image of the invisible perfect Man.
- 8.13.1The iota, whose number value is ten, contains all the numbers from one to ten.
- 8.13.2Monoimus reads Colossians' “all the fullness dwelling bodily” as the numbers contained in the iota.
- 8.13.3The Son of Man, unknown to all, is wrongly imagined by creation as born of a woman; his faint rays sustain the world.
- 8.13.4Everything in the world came from only a part of the Son of Man, who is the single iota flowing from above.
- 8.14.1The six days of creation are six powers in the iota, and the Sabbath comes from the seventh.
- 8.14.2The geometric solids that make up the elements come from the numbers in the iota, the perfect Son.
- 8.14.3Moses' rod, which brought ten plagues, is the one stroke of the iota, and the plagues symbolize creation.
- 8.14.4Everything is produced by a “stroke,” as vines by pruning and a man from a man; the Ten Commandments allegorize the one stroke.
- 8.14.5All knowledge is the ten plagues and ten commandments; even the five books of the Law come from the number five in the iota.
- 8.14.6The Passover, chosen on the tenth day and kept on the fourteenth, is read as a number mystery of the iota.
- 8.14.7The seven days of unleavened bread mean that creation needs no outside “leaven”; the whole world is the Lord's Passover.
- 8.14.8The plagues show God rejoicing in the changes of creation; the locusts eating grass mean elements turned into flesh, for “all flesh is grass.”
- 8.14.9Hippolytus suggests Monoimus's ten-fold reading of the law comes from Aristotle's ten categories.
- 8.15.1Monoimus wrote to Theophrastus: stop seeking God outside and seek him within yourself.
- 8.15.2By examining one's own mind and involuntary feelings, Monoimus says, one finds God within, one and many.
- 8.15.3Monoimus's teaching comes from Pythagorean geometry and arithmetic; Hippolytus moves on.
- 8.16.1Tatian, Justin's disciple, taught invisible Aeons, called marriage corruption, and denied Adam's salvation.
- 8.17.1Hermogenes taught that God made everything out of eternal, unbegotten matter.
- 8.17.2Hermogenes said God tamed part of seething matter into the world and left the rest wild, an idea Hippolytus traces to Plato.
- 8.17.3Hermogenes confessed Christ's virgin birth and resurrection but said at the ascension he left his body in the sun.
- 8.17.4Hermogenes supported his view with Psalm 19's “in the sun he set his tent.”
- 8.18.1The Quartodecimans insist on keeping Easter on the fourteenth of Nisan, fearing the law's curse, not seeing that the true Passover is now kept by faith.
- 8.18.2They ignore Paul's warning that keeping one part of the law obliges one to keep it all; otherwise they agree with the church.
- 8.19.1The Phrygians (Montanists) follow Montanus, Priscilla, and Maximilla as prophets of the Paraclete and claim to learn more from their books than from Scripture.
- 8.19.2The Montanists exalt their prophetesses above the apostles; orthodox on God and Christ, they add new fasts and dietary rules.
- 8.19.3Some Montanists side with the Noetians, saying the Father himself is the Son who was born and died.
- 8.19.4The Montanists' many books are worthless and should be ignored by the sound-minded.
- 8.20.1The Encratites, orthodox about God and Christ, abstain from meat and wine and forbid marriage, more like Cynics than Christians.
- 8.20.2Paul foretold those who would forbid marriage and certain foods, which God created good.
- 8.20.3Paul's words suffice to show that Encratism is a heresy; lesser sects like the Cainites and Ophites are not worth describing.
- 8.20.4Hippolytus turns to the Noetian heresy, which he calls the cause of all evils.
- 9.1.1Heading for the table of contents of Book 9.
- 9.2.1Contents: Noetus followed Heraclitus, not Christ.
- 9.3.1Contents: Callistus and his new heresy, and his life.
- 9.4.1Contents: Elchasai, who claims to keep the law but practices Gnosticism, astrology, and magic.
- 9.5.1Contents: Jewish customs and sects.
- 9.6.1Hippolytus now faces the greatest task: refuting the heresies of his own day, which have troubled the church everywhere.
- 9.7.1Noetus of Smyrna founded a heresy from Heraclitus; his disciple Epigonus brought it to Rome.
- 9.7.2Cleomenes spread the teaching in Rome under Bishop Zephyrinus, whom Hippolytus calls ignorant and greedy, with Callistus as his adviser.
- 9.7.3Hippolytus says he repeatedly forced Zephyrinus and Callistus to confess the truth, but they soon fell back.
- 9.8.1Hippolytus will set out Heraclitus's views to show that the Noetians' doctrines are his, not Christ's.
- 9.8.2Though Heraclitus was covered in the earlier Philosophumena, Hippolytus presents him again for a closer comparison.
- 9.9.1Heraclitus calls the All both divisible and indivisible, generated and ungenerated, and Father and Son.
- 9.9.2Heraclitus says the wise agree that all is one, and that opposites fit together like the tension of a bow or lyre.
- 9.9.3Heraclitus says the eternal Logos governs all things, yet people fail to understand it.
- 9.9.4Heraclitus calls time a child at play who is king, and war the father and king of all.
- 9.9.5Heraclitus prizes the unseen harmony above the visible, yet also prefers what can be seen, heard, and learned.
- 9.9.6Heraclitus tells of Homer fooled by boys' riddle about lice to show how people are deceived about visible things.
- 9.10.1Hippolytus concludes that Heraclitus treats visible and invisible as one.
- 9.10.2Heraclitus holds light and darkness, good and evil to be one, and mocks Hesiod for separating day and night.
- 9.10.3Heraclitus: doctors who cut and burn the sick show that good and harm are the same.
- 9.10.4Heraclitus says straight and crooked, up and down are the same, like the fuller's screw.
- 9.10.5Heraclitus: seawater is both life-giving for fish and deadly for people.
- 9.10.6Heraclitus calls mortals and immortals one, and Hippolytus reads him as speaking of a bodily resurrection caused by God.
- 9.10.7Heraclitus teaches that an intelligent fire steers all things and will judge the world in a conflagration.
- 9.10.8Heraclitus says God is all opposites together, day and night, war and peace, which Hippolytus says is the root of Noetus's view.
- 9.10.9Whether or not they read Heraclitus, Noetus's followers teach the same thing.
- 9.10.10The Noetians say one God is invisible and visible, unbegotten and begotten, immortal and mortal, just as Heraclitus paired opposites.
- 9.10.11Noetus taught that the Father, by being born, became his own Son, so that Father and Son are one person under two names at different times.
- 9.10.12Cleomenes and his followers say that the one crucified, buried, and raised is himself the God and Father of all.
- 9.11.1Hippolytus says Callistus, hungry for the episcopate, manipulated the unlearned Bishop Zephyrinus and played both sides, telling each he agreed with them.
- 9.11.2Sabellius listened to Hippolytus but was swayed by Callistus in private, only later seeing through him.
- 9.11.3Callistus had Zephyrinus make ambiguous public statements; when Hippolytus resisted, Callistus called his party “worshippers of two gods.”
- 9.11.4Hippolytus will tell the life of Callistus, who became a “martyr” under the prefect Fuscianus.
- 9.12.1Callistus, a Christian slave of Carpophorus, ran a bank in Rome and lost the deposits of widows and fellow Christians.
- 9.12.2Fearing his master, Callistus fled to the harbor at Portus and boarded a ship, but Carpophorus was told.
- 9.12.3Seeing his master coming, Callistus threw himself into the sea.
- 9.12.4Rescued by sailors, Callistus was returned to Rome and sent to the treadmill.
- 9.12.5Fellow Christians asked Carpophorus to release Callistus, who claimed money was owed to him.
- 9.12.6Concerned for the depositors, Carpophorus agreed to release him.
- 9.12.7Unable to repay, Callistus sought death by disrupting a synagogue service, and the Jews dragged him before the prefect.
- 9.12.8The Jews complained that Callistus, claiming to be a Christian, had disrupted their lawful worship.
- 9.12.9Carpophorus said Callistus was no Christian but a debtor; the prefect, pressed by the Jews, had him flogged and sent to the Sardinian mines.
- 9.12.10Marcia, Commodus's Christian-leaning concubine, asked Bishop Victor for the names of the confessors in Sardinia; he left out Callistus.
- 9.12.11Marcia obtained a release, and the presbyter Hyacinthus freed the confessors in Sardinia except Callistus.
- 9.12.12Callistus begged, and Hyacinthus persuaded the governor to release him too.
- 9.12.13Victor, displeased but merciful, sent Callistus to live at Antium on a monthly allowance.
- 9.12.14Zephyrinus recalled Callistus, put him in charge of the cemetery, and fell under his influence.
- 9.12.15Once bishop, Callistus expelled Sabellius to clear himself of suspicion, but Hippolytus calls him a charlatan.
- 9.12.16Callistus devised a new teaching: the Word is the Son, and the same is called Father, one indivisible Spirit.
- 9.12.17Callistus said Father and Son are one and the same, and that the Spirit incarnate in the virgin is the Father, citing John 14:10.
- 9.12.18For Callistus the visible man is the Son and the Spirit in him is the Father; they are one God and one person, so the Father co-suffered with the Son.
- 9.12.19Hippolytus says Callistus avoids saying the Father suffered but wavers between Sabellius and Theodotus.
- 9.12.20Hippolytus charges that Callistus founded a rival school and was lax, promising forgiveness to any sinner who joined him.
- 9.12.21Hippolytus says Callistus's rule drew people with bad consciences and excommunicates, and that he refused to depose bishops even for mortal sin.
- 9.12.22Hippolytus complains that under Callistus men married more than once were ordained, and clergy who married after ordination kept their office, justified by Rom 14:4 and the parable of the weeds.
- 9.12.23Callistus likened the church to Noah's ark, with clean and unclean animals together, and crowds flocked to him.
- 9.12.24Hippolytus charges that Callistus allowed unmarried women of rank to take a slave or free man as a partner, regarded as a husband without legal marriage.
- 9.12.25Hippolytus says that as a result some Christian women used contraceptives and procured abortions, and he calls Callistus's teaching adultery and murder.
- 9.12.26Under Callistus a second baptism was introduced, and his community, which admitted all to communion, took the name Callistians.
- 9.13.1Alcibiades of Apamea came to Rome with a book said to have been received by a righteous man, Elchasai, from the Seres of Parthia.
- 9.13.2The book was said to have been revealed by a gigantic angel, whose measurements Hippolytus reports.
- 9.13.3A female figure of the same size accompanies the angel; the male is the Son of God, the female the Holy Spirit.
- 9.13.4The book proclaimed a new forgiveness of sins through a further baptism, dated to Trajan's third year (about AD 100), which Hippolytus links to Callistus's laxity.
- 9.13.5Hippolytus says he opposed Alcibiades as a wolf among the sheep that Callistus had scattered.
- 9.13.6Hippolytus will expose Alcibiades's pretended asceticism and quote his writings.
- 9.14.1The Elchasaites require circumcision and the law, and teach that Christ is an ordinary man reborn many times.
- 9.14.2They claim foreknowledge by Pythagorean number-lore.
- 9.14.3The Elchasaites practice astrology, magic, and incantations for dog-bites and demon possession.
- 9.15.1The book of Elchasai offers a second baptism for forgiveness to anyone guilty of sexual sins, once they hear the book.
- 9.15.2The baptized must call seven witnesses, heaven, water, holy spirits, angels of prayer, oil, salt, and earth; Hippolytus mocks these “mysteries.”
- 9.15.3The book calls adulterers and false prophets to a second baptism in their clothes.
- 9.15.4For a rabid dog's bite the book prescribes immediate immersion in a river or spring, fully clothed.
- 9.15.5The bitten person prays and invokes the seven witnesses.
- 9.15.6He vows before the seven witnesses to avoid sin and is baptized in his clothes.
- 9.16.1The book prescribes repeated cold baths for the sick and possessed, and teaches that some stars are evil.
- 9.16.2The book warns against beginning work or baptizing on days ruled by evil stars.
- 9.16.3Wait until the moon leaves the evil stars before baptizing; and keep the Sabbath.
- 9.16.4The book forbids starting anything on Tuesday and foretells a war of evil northern angels three years after Trajan's conquest of Parthia.
- 9.17.1The book tells its readers to keep its secrets like costly pearls.
- 9.17.2Hippolytus mocks the book's wisdom as greater than anything the Greek sages learned in Egypt.
- 9.17.3Having covered the heresies, Hippolytus will describe the Jewish sects so as to leave nothing out.
- 9.17.4After the Jewish sects, Hippolytus will set out the true doctrine.
- 9.18.1The Jews had one law from one teacher, Moses, but after entering the land they split into sects.
- 9.18.2The three chief Jewish sects are the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes.
- 9.18.3The Essenes live in self-control and mutual love, abstain from marriage themselves without forbidding it, and adopt others' children.
- 9.19.1The Essenes share all property; newcomers sell their goods for a common fund distributed by need.
- 9.19.2No Essene is in want; they avoid oil, elect stewards, and always dress in white.
- 9.20.1Essenes live in many towns and welcome traveling members as family; they travel carrying only a weapon.
- 9.20.2Each town has an Essene steward; they own no spare clothing and exchange goods freely without buying or selling.
- 9.21.1Essenes pray and sing hymns before speaking at dawn, then work until the fifth hour.
- 9.21.2At midday they bathe in cold water and eat together in a room closed to outsiders.
- 9.21.3They eat bread and one dish in silence, with blessing and hymns before and after.
- 9.21.4They change out of their sacred linen and return to work until the evening meal.
- 9.21.5Their meals are quiet and orderly, and they are always sober and moderate.
- 9.22.1Essenes obey their leader, show mercy, avoid anger, and refuse oaths, since their word is stronger than an oath.
- 9.22.2They study the Law, the Prophets, and other writings, and are keen on the healing powers of herbs and stones.
- 9.23.1Candidates are tested for a year outside the community, receiving a hatchet, a loincloth, and a white robe.
- 9.23.2After the first year the candidate is tested two more years before full admission.
- 9.23.3The initiate swears to revere God, wrong no one, hate no one but pray for enemies, and be faithful to rulers, since authority comes from God.
- 9.23.4He also swears to rule humbly, love truth, not steal, keep nothing from members and reveal nothing to outsiders, and pass on the teachings unchanged.
- 9.24.1A member convicted of sin is expelled and, bound by his oaths, may starve, though they sometimes take pity at the last.
- 9.25.1Essene courts of a hundred are strict and final; they honor Moses next to God and defer to elders and the majority.
- 9.25.2They keep the Sabbath more strictly than all other Jews, not even moving a vessel.
- 9.25.3They bury their excrement with a small trowel in secluded places and then wash.
- 9.26.1The Essenes split into four groups; the strictest will not carry coins or pass under statues at city gates.
- 9.26.2Another group forcibly circumcises or kills Gentiles who speak of God's law, called Zealots or Sicarii; others call no one lord but God.
- 9.26.3Later members are less strict; many Essenes live past a hundred, face death gladly, and endure torture rather than blaspheme the law or eat idol-food.
- 9.27.1Hippolytus says the Essenes believe in the resurrection of the flesh and a bright resting place for souls until the judgment.
- 9.27.2Hippolytus claims the Greeks borrowed from the Jews, whose religion is older than that of all nations.
- 9.27.3Pythagoras and the Stoics learned from them; the Essenes expect judgment, a world-burning, and eternal punishment, and practice prophecy.
- 9.28.1Another order of Essenes marries, holding that renouncing marriage would end the human race.
- 9.28.2These Essenes test brides for fertility, abstain during pregnancy to show they marry for children, and their women also bathe in linen.
- 9.28.3The Pharisees are the largest group, found everywhere; all are Jews but named by their distinct views.
- 9.28.4The Pharisees keep the ancient tradition, debate purity, and train teachers of the law.
- 9.28.5The Pharisees hold both fate and free will under God's will, and believe in bodily resurrection, judgment, and eternal punishment.
- 9.29.1The Sadducees deny fate and say that humans choose good or evil freely.
- 9.29.2The Sadducees deny resurrection and the survival of the soul, saying one lives on only in one's children.
- 9.29.3For the Sadducees, whatever one gains in this life is profit and God does not concern himself with individuals; Pharisees love one another, Sadducees themselves.
- 9.29.4The Sadducees, strong around Samaria, keep only the law of Moses without interpretation and reject the prophets.
- 9.30.1Hippolytus describes the fourfold Jewish religion: theology, natural philosophy, ethics, and worship.
- 9.30.2The Jews confess one God who created all things from nothing by his will, and angels made to serve creation.
- 9.30.3Their laws produce a dignified and temperate life, admirable to any reader.
- 9.30.4Jewish worship offered first fruits to God with order and reverence; the Sadducees deny angels and spirits.
- 9.30.5All Jews await the Christ foretold by the prophets, but because they failed to recognize him and killed him, they still expect him.
- 9.30.6They say the Christ who came is not the one, and await another, misreading some of the prophecies.
- 9.30.7They expect a Messiah of David's line born naturally, a warrior-king who will gather Israel and restore Jerusalem.
- 9.30.8They expect this Messiah to fall in battle, followed by the end of the world, the resurrection, and judgment according to deeds.
- 9.31.1Hippolytus concludes that he has set out all doctrines of Greeks and barbarians and shown the heretics' borrowings.
- 9.31.2After nine books of refutation, Hippolytus will set out the doctrine of the truth in the tenth, so that readers may be saved.
- 10.1.1Heading for the table of contents of Book 10.
- 10.2.1Contents: summary of the philosophers.
- 10.3.1Contents: summary of the heresies.
- 10.4.1Contents: the doctrine of the truth.
- 10.5.1Hippolytus turns to the truth, which owes nothing to Greek, Egyptian, Chaldean, or Babylonian lore and refutes error simply by appearing.
- 10.5.2Although he has often set out the rule of truth elsewhere, Hippolytus will do so again here as the crown of the work.
- 10.6.1After four books on the Greeks and five on the heresies, Hippolytus summarizes: Greek philosophy is natural, ethical, and dialectical.
- 10.6.2Natural philosophers derived everything from one principle (with or without quality: fire, air, water, earth) or from many.
- 10.6.3Those who posited many principles differed on number and kind.
- 10.6.4The Stoics derived everything from qualityless matter; others from fire (Hippasus, Heraclitus), air, water (Thales), or earth (Xenophanes).
- 10.7.1Homer makes earth and water the two principles.
- 10.7.3Empedocles names four roots of all things.
- 10.7.4Ocellus and Aristotle add a fifth, heavenly element; Empedocles' followers posit more.
- 10.7.5Empedocles has four material and two active principles; Anaxagoras, Democritus, and Epicurus derived all from infinitely many.
- 10.7.6Anaxagoras posited like particles, Democritus and Epicurus atoms, Heraclides and Asclepiades loose masses, and Plato God, matter, and pattern.
- 10.7.7Plato divides matter into the four elements, with God as maker and mind as pattern.
- 10.8.1Since the philosophers' physics fails, Hippolytus will summarize the heresies and then set out the truth.
- 10.9.1Summary of the Naassenes: the first principle is Man, also Son of Man, divided into intellectual, psychic, and earthly parts.
- 10.9.2They call Man Adamas; all three natures came together in Jesus, who spoke to the three kinds of people.
- 10.9.3The Naassenes teach three races and three churches, elect, called, and captive, and falsely claim the teaching came from James through Mariamne.
- 10.10.1Summary of the Peratae: one world divided in three, the first part a great spring divisible without end.
- 10.10.2The Peratae divide the world into an unbegotten Good, a self-begotten multitude of powers, and a begotten particular world, with three gods, words, minds, and men.
- 10.10.3In Herod's time a threefold Christ came down, containing the elements and powers of all three parts of the world.
- 10.10.4The Peratae cite Col 2:9 and say Christ came down to save what was divided into three.
- 10.10.5The two higher parts will be saved through Christ; the third, the particular world, will perish.
- 10.11.1Summary of the Sethians: three principles, each able to become all things as a child can learn any art.
- 10.11.2The Sethians' principles are light above, darkness below, and between them Spirit, like a subtle fragrance.
- 10.11.3Light shines down into darkness and the Spirit's fragrance spreads between, so that light and Spirit are both caught in the darkness below.
- 10.11.4The darkness, a fearful water, strives to keep the captured light and Spirit, knowing it would be powerless without them.
- 10.11.5Like the dark pupil of the eye lit by spirit, the darkness holds countless powers that shape all things like seals.
- 10.11.6From the meeting of the three principles came heaven and earth, shaped like a womb, and all other things are impressed in the same way.
- 10.11.7From the water came a violent wind, the first-born cause of all generation.
- 10.11.8The wind takes the form of a hissing serpent and drives the womb-like world to generate all things.
- 10.11.9The spark of light, trapped in the body and the waters, strives to escape and cries out, as the Sethians read the Psalms.
- 10.11.10The light above sends the perfect Word, who took the form of a serpent and entered the womb to rescue the spark of light.
- 10.11.11The Sethians read Phil 2:6–7, “the form of a slave,” as the serpent form taken by the Word.
- 10.12.1Summary of Simon Magus: an infinite power, fire, is the root of all, with a hidden and a manifest nature.
- 10.12.2The world came from the unbegotten fire through six roots in pairs: Mind and Thought, Voice and Name, Reasoning and Reflection.
- 10.12.3The infinite power, “He who stands, stood, and will stand,” if fully formed in the six powers, becomes one with the unbegotten power.
- 10.12.4If not formed, the power perishes like an untaught talent; Simon claimed to be this highest power himself.
- 10.13.1Summary of Valentinus: the first principle is the Father, called Depth, alone for some, with Silence as consort for others.
- 10.13.2Six emanations complete the first Ogdoad; beings are ranked as within the Pleroma, outside it, and outside Limit in the Deficiency.
- 10.13.3The Demiurge came from the Deficiency; Christ descended from the Pleroma to save the spirit dwelling in the inner man.
- 10.13.4The Valentinians deny the salvation of the flesh, calling it a “garment of skin.”
- 10.14.1Summary of Basilides: a non-existent God laid down a seed containing the whole world, like a mustard seed or peacock's egg.
- 10.14.2The seed contained a threefold Sonship of the same substance as God: fine, coarse, and needing purification.
- 10.14.3The fine Sonship rose at once to the non-existent God.
- 10.14.4The coarser Sonship rose using the Holy Spirit as wings.
- 10.14.5The third Sonship stayed in the seed-mass; the world and what is above it are divided by the boundary Spirit.
- 10.14.6The great Archon rose to the firmament and thought himself supreme, ignorant of the wiser Sonship left below.
- 10.14.7The Archon begot a son greater than himself, seated him at his right hand in the Ogdoad, and made the heavens.
- 10.14.8A second, lesser Archon, the Hebdomad, rules the lower world and also begot a wiser son.
- 10.14.9The power of the gospel came down through the sons of both Archons onto Jesus, son of Mary, to purify the Sonship left behind.
- 10.14.10Basilides' followers claim to be the sons who purify souls and will rise with the Sonship; the world lasts until all souls ascend.
- 10.15.1Summary of the Gnostic Justin: three principles, the Good, the Father Elohim, and a female principle.
- 10.15.2The female principle, Edem or Israel, is half virgin and half viper.
- 10.15.3Elohim and Edem produced twelve angels, some siding with the father and some with the mother.
- 10.15.4Animals came from Edem's beastly half and man from her upper half; Edem gave him a soul and Elohim a spirit.
- 10.15.5Elohim ascended to the Good and left Edem, who in anger plots against his spirit in humans; Baruch was sent through the prophets to rescue it.
- 10.15.6Justin makes Heracles a prophet overcome by Omphale, who is Babel or Aphrodite.
- 10.15.7Jesus, son of Mary and Joseph, resisted Edem, who had him crucified; his spirit rose to the Good, and so will the spirits of Justin's followers.
- 10.16.1Summary of the Docetae: God is like a fig seed from which came three Aeons and then countless others.
- 10.16.2Together the Aeons begot from the virgin Mary the Savior, equal to the first seed except that he is begotten.
- 10.16.3The great light of the Aeons, full of forms, came down on the chaos and impressed the shapes of all things on it.
- 10.16.4The third Aeon made heaven to separate light from darkness.
- 10.16.5The impress of the third Aeon, living fire, became the great Archon, Moses' fiery God, who keeps putting forms into bodies.
- 10.16.6The Savior was born to show the captive souls the way of escape; clothed in the only-begotten power, he could not be seen in his glory.
- 10.17.1Summary of Monoimus: the first principle is Man and Son of Man, and the world came from a part of the Son of Man.
- 10.17.2The Son of Man is the iota, the number ten, source of all numbers and of the elements.
- 10.17.3The iota contains all; the six days of creation are six powers, and the geometric solids of the elements come from its numbers.
- 10.17.4Moses' rod and the ten plagues allegorize the iota.
- 10.17.5To know the whole, one must seek within oneself the one who says “my soul, my flesh, my mind.”
- 10.18.1Summary of Tatian: invisible Aeons, a Cynic life, and Marcion-like blasphemy and rules against marriage.
- 10.19.1Summary of Marcion and Cerdo: three principles, good, just, and matter; some add a fourth, evil.
- 10.19.2The Good made nothing; the Just (or evil) god made the world badly from matter.
- 10.19.3Marcion cites “a good tree cannot bear bad fruit” against the Creator and holds that Christ, son of the Good, only seemed to have flesh, birth, and suffering.
- 10.19.4Marcion denies the resurrection of the flesh and calls marriage corruption, to spite the Creator.
- 10.20.1Summary of Apelles: four gods, the good God, the creator, the fiery one, and an evil one, with Christ as a fifth.
- 10.20.2Apelles followed Philumene's Revelations, said Christ's flesh came from the world's elements, attacked the Law and Prophets, and denied the resurrection of the flesh.
- 10.21.1Summary of Cerinthus: an angelic power, ignorant of the highest God, made the world.
- 10.21.2For Cerinthus, Jesus was the natural son of Joseph and Mary, excelling in virtue.
- 10.21.3The Christ descended on Jesus at baptism and left him at the passion.
- 10.22.1Summary of the Ebionites: the true God made the world; they keep the law of Moses to be justified.
- 10.23.1Summary of Theodotus: God made all things; Christ was an ordinary man born of a virgin by God's will.
- 10.23.2Theodotus held that the Christ descended at baptism and that Christ is not God.
- 10.24.1The Melchizedekians agree with Theodotus but make Melchizedek a supreme power and Christ his image.
- 10.25.1Summary of the Montanists: orthodox on creation and Christ, but they prefer their prophets to the Gospels and impose new fasts.
- 10.26.1Some Montanists follow Noetus, saying the Father of all is himself the Son, visible and invisible, mortal and immortal.
- 10.27.1Summary of Noetus: the one Father and God of all made everything and was invisible or visible as he willed.
- 10.27.2For Noetus the one God is invisible or visible, unbegotten or born, impassible or suffering, and is called Son at different times.
- 10.27.3Summary of Callistus: one God, Father and Son by name, one Spirit in substance; God is not other than the Word.
- 10.27.4Callistus called the Word one God who became flesh, the visible flesh being the Son and the indwelling God the Father.
- 10.28.1Summary of Hermogenes: God made everything from eternal matter.
- 10.29.1Summary of the Elchasaites, who compiled a strange book from all the heresies.
- 10.29.2They teach that the Christ above passes from body to body, now in Jesus, and will keep reappearing.
- 10.29.3The Elchasaites use incantations, baptisms invoking the elements, astrology, and magic.
- 10.30.1Abraham, at God's call, moves from Haran to Canaan, later called Palestine and Judea.
- 10.30.2Judea is named after Judah, Jacob's fourth son, from whom came the royal line.
- 10.30.3A chronology from Abraham through Isaac, Jacob, and Levi to Kohath, who went down to Egypt with Jacob.
- 10.30.4Abraham's line in Canaan and his ancestors back to Eber, from whom the Hebrews are named.
- 10.30.5Hippolytus refers to his other works where he listed the nations.
- 10.30.6The line runs back through Eber, Shelah, Cainan, and Arphaxad to Shem and Noah, in whose time came the worldwide flood unknown to other nations.
- 10.30.7Noah alone with his family survived the flood in the ark, whose remains are shown in Ararat; so the God-fearing race is older than all others.
- 10.31.1Hippolytus will show that the nations devoted to philosophy descend from later settlers.
- 10.31.2From Noah's three sons all nations descend, by the power of God's word “increase and multiply.”
- 10.31.3Ham's sons are the ancestors of the Canaanites, Egyptians, Ethiopians, and Libyans.
- 10.31.4Since these nations descend from Noah, the God-fearing are older than all; the Greeks come from Javan, son of Japheth.
- 10.31.5If the philosophical nations are later than the God-fearing, all other nations are too.
- 10.31.6Hippolytus calls all nations to learn the truth about God and creation from the friends of God.
- 10.32.1The one God, alone from eternity with nothing beside him, made all things from nothing by his will, foreknowing all.
- 10.32.2God first made the elements, fire, air, water, earth, and composed creatures from one or more of them.
- 10.32.3Things made of one element are immortal; composites dissolve, and that dissolution is death.
- 10.32.4Hippolytus refers readers to his book On the Substance of the Universe for more.
- 10.32.5Not knowing these causes, the Greeks worshipped parts of creation instead of the Creator, and the heresiarchs built on their errors.
- 10.33.1The one God first begot the Word, not a spoken word but the inner reason of all things, from his own being.
- 10.33.2The Word, the Father's firstborn, carried the Father's will and ideas and made the world at his command.
- 10.33.3Creatures that reproduce were made male and female; those made for service were male only or neither.
- 10.33.4The elements themselves are neither male nor female and produce offspring only as God commands through the Word.
- 10.33.5Angels are made of fire and are not female.
- 10.33.6Sun and stars are from fire and air; water and earth brought forth male and female creatures as God willed through the Word.
- 10.33.7God made the human being from all the elements to rule creation; he made a man, not a god, but one who obeys him may become a god and be entrusted with greater things.
- 10.33.8The Word alone is from God himself and so is God; the world, made from nothing, is not God, and God made nothing evil.
- 10.33.9Humans were made with free will; evil is not a created thing but arises when a free being chooses it.
- 10.33.10The giving of the law proves human free will; God gave it through righteous men and finally through Moses.
- 10.33.11The Word, the Father's first-born, governs all things; righteous friends of God became prophets foretelling the future.
- 10.33.12The prophets spoke to all generations, recalling the past, rousing the present, and foretelling the future.
- 10.33.13Christian faith rests not on eloquence but on words spoken by divine power, through which the Word calls humans freely back from disobedience.
- 10.33.14In the last times the Father sent the Word himself, no longer through prophets or angels but visibly present.
- 10.33.15The Word took a body from the virgin and lived through every age of life, showing in his humanity that God made nothing evil and that humans are free.
- 10.33.16Christ's humanity is of the same stuff as ours; otherwise his command to imitate him would be unjust.
- 10.33.17Christ endured weariness, hunger, thirst, sleep, suffering, and death, and rose as the first fruits, so that suffering humans may hope for the same resurrection.
- 10.34.1Hippolytus appeals to all the nations of the world to come and learn the true doctrine.
- 10.34.2Knowing the true God, the hearers will escape the fire of judgment, dark Tartarus, the lake of Gehenna, the punishing angels, and the undying worm.
- 10.34.3Those who know God will receive an immortal body and soul, the kingdom of heaven, and a share as co-heirs with Christ.
- 10.34.4Hippolytus says the believer will be made divine, born immortal; truly knowing oneself means knowing one's Maker and being known by him.
- 10.34.5Hippolytus closes: Christ, the God over all, washes away sin and renews humanity; whoever obeys and imitates him will be made like him, a god by grace for his glory.