Refutation of All Heresies 4.43.2

Authorship disputed: The work names no author. Book 1 was long printed among Origen's works as the Philosophumena; after books 4–10 were found in a manuscript from Mount Athos (published 1851), it was assigned to Hippolytus, the usual view today, though some scholars ascribe it to another Roman writer of the same circle. Books 2 and 3 are lost, and book 4 lacks its beginning.

Summary: Overawed by creation, the philosophers took parts of it for God and could not reach the true God.

Greek text · Duncker–Schneidewin, 108

Τοῦτο δὲ συνέβη τοῖς τοῦ κόσμου σοφοῖς, ὅπερ ἐστὶ τοῖς νοῦν ἔχουσι πρόδηλον, ὅτι ἰδόντες τῆς κτίσεως τὰ μεγέθη ἐπὶ τῇ τῶν ὄντων οὐσίᾳ ἐταράχθησαν, μείζονα ταῦτα νομίσαντες τοῦ ὑφʼ ἑτέρου γένεσιν ἐπιδέξασθαι δύνασθαι, καὶ οὐδὲ ὁμοῦ τὸ σύμπαν αὐτὸ εἶναι τὸν θεόν. Ἀπέφηναν δὲ τὸ αἴτιον πρὸς θεολογίαν ἓν τῶν βλεπομένων, νομίσας τις ὅπερ ἔκρινε, καὶ οὕτως ἐπὶ τοῖς ὑπὸ θεοῦ γενομένοις καὶ κατὰ τὴν ἐκείνου ὑπερβάλλουσαν μεγαλειότητα ἐλαχίστοις ὑπάρχουσιν ἐνιδόντες, μὴ δυνηθέντες δὲ εἰς τὸ μέγεθος τοῦ ὄντως θεοῦ ἐκτεῖναι τὸν νοῦν, ταῦτα ἐθεολόγησαν.

English · Claude translation

This befell the wise men of the world, as is plain to those who have understanding: seeing the greatness of creation, they were confounded about the substance of existing things, thinking them too great to have received their origin from another, and yet not that the whole together is God. They declared one of the visible things to be the cause, for purposes of theology, each thinking so of what he judged; and so, gazing at the things made by God, which are least in comparison with his surpassing majesty, and unable to stretch their mind to the greatness of the true God, they made these into gods.

About this passage

Source

Duncker–Schneidewin, 108 · Ludwig Duncker and F. G. Schneidewin, eds., S. Hippolyti episcopi et martyris Refutationis omnium haeresium librorum decem quae supersunt (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1859); section divisions from Paul Wendland, ed., Hippolytus Werke 3: Refutatio omnium haeresium, GCS 26 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1916) · Greek text: L. Duncker and F. G. Schneidewin, Refutationis omnium haeresium (Göttingen, 1859), digitized by the Perseus Digital Library; section divisions from P. Wendland (GCS 26, 1916), digitized by the First Thousand Years of Greek project (Open Greek and Latin); both CC BY-SA 4.0

Text

As printed in Duncker–Schneidewin. Manuscript variants and the editor's apparatus are not reproduced; no textual problem is noted in this passage.

Translation

Claude translation (claude-opus-5-5), 2026-09-27 · Translated by Claude from the Greek text of Duncker–Schneidewin; made independently of existing English translations.

Compare

Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5 (1886) (an older public-domain English translation, whole volume at CCEL; checked against ours only after ours was made) · Its chapter numbers differ from the standard (Wendland) numbering used here.

Scripture

Rom 1:20 · echo, medium confidence
Rom 1:25 · echo, medium confidence

Cite this passage

Hippolytus, Haer. 4.43.2 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/4/43/2/).

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

Plain text

Hippolytus, Haer. 4.43.2 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/hippolytus-refutatio/4/43/2/).