Translations of Christian literature. Series I. Greek texts

Philosophumena; or, The refutation of all heresies, Volume I

The story of the discovery of the book here translated so resembles a romance as to appear like a flower in the dry and dusty field of patristic lore. A short treatise called Philosophumena, or Philosophizings, had long been known, four early copies of it being in existence in the Papal and other libraries of Rome, Florence and Turin. The superscriptions of these texts and a note in the margin of one of them caused the treatise to be attributed to Origen, and its Edito princeps is that published in 1701 at Leipzig by Fabricius with notes by the learned Gronovius. As will be seen later, it is by itself of no great importance to modern scholars, as it throws no new light on the history or nature of Greek philosophy, while it is mainly compiled from some of those epitomes of philosophic opinion current in the early centuries of our era, of which the works of Diogenes Laertius and Aetius are the best known. In the year 1840, however, Mynodes Mynas, a learned Greek, was sent by Abel Villemain, then Minister of Public Instruction in the Government of Louis Philippe, on a voyage of discovery to the monasteries of Mt. Athos, whence he returned with, among other things, the MS. of the last seven books contained in these volumes. This proved on investigation to be Books IV to X inclusive of the original work of which the text published by Fabricius was Book I, and therefore left only Books II and III to be accounted for. The pagination of the MS. shows that the two missing books never formed part of it; but the authors[2] remarks at the end of Books I and IX, and the beginning of Books V and X[1] lead one to conclude that if they ever existed they must have dealt with the Mysteries and secret rites of the Egyptians, or rather of the Alexandrian Greeks,[2] with the theologies and cosmogonies of the Persians and Chaldans, and with the magical practices and incantations of the Babylonians. Deeply interesting as these would have been from the archological and anthropological standpoint, we perhaps need not deplore their loss overmuch. The few references made to them in the remainder of the work go to show that here too the author had no very profound acquaintance with, or first-hand knowledge of, his subject, and that the scanty information that he had succeeded in collecting regarding it was only thrown in by him as an additional support for his main thesis. This last, which is steadily kept in view throughout the book, is that the peculiar tenets and practices of the Gnostics and other heretics of his time were not derived from any misinterpretation of the Scriptures, but were a sort of amalgam of those current among the heathen with the opinions held by the philosophers[3] as to the origin of all things. The same reproach of scanty information cannot be brought against the books discovered by Mynas. Book IV, four pages at the beginning of which have perished, deals with the arts of divination as practised by the arithmomancers, astrologers, magicians and other charlatans who infested Rome in the first three centuries of our era; and the authors account, which the corruption of the text makes rather difficult to follow, yet gives us a new and unexpected insight into the impostures and juggleries by which they managed to bewilder their dupes. Books V to IX deal in detail with the opinions of the heretics themselves, and differ from the accounts of earlier heresiologists by quoting at some length from the once extensive Gnostic[3] literature, of which well-nigh the whole has been lost to us.[4] Thus, our author gives us excerpts from a work called the Great Announcement, attributed by him to Simon Magus, from another called Proastii used by the sect of the Perat, from the Paraphrase of Seth in favour with the Sethiani, from the Baruch of one Justinus, a heresiarch hitherto unknown to us, and from a work by an anonymous writer belonging to the Naassenes or Ophites, which is mainly a Gnostic explanation of the hymns used in the worship of Cybele.[5] Besides these, there are long extracts from Basilidian and Valentinian works which may be by the founders of those sects, and which certainly give us a more extended insight into their doctrines than we before possessed; while Book X contains what purports to be a summary of the whole work. This, however, does not exhaust the new information put at our disposal by Mynas discovery. In the course of an account of the heresy of Noetus, who refused to admit any difference between the First and Second Persons of the Trinity, our author suddenly develops a violent attack on one Callistus, a high officer of the Church, whom he describes as a runaway slave who had made away with his masters money, had stolen that deposited with him by widows and others belonging to the Church, and had been condemned to the mines by the Prefect of the City, to be released only by the grace of Commodus concubine, Marcia.[6] He further accuses Callistus of leaning towards the heresy of Noetus, and of encouraging laxity of manners in the Church by permitting the marriage and re-marriage of bishops and priests, and concubinage among the unmarried women. The heaviness of this charge lies in the fact that this Callistus can hardly be any other than the Saint and Martyr of that name, who succeeded Zephyrinus[4] in the Chair of St. Peter about the year 218, and whose name is familiar to all visitors to modern Rome from the cemetery which still bears it, and over which the work before us says he had been set by his predecessor.[7] The explanation of these charges will be discussed when we consider the authorship of the book, but for the present it may be noticed that they throw an entirely unexpected light upon the inner history of the Primitive Church. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 65478
Author: Hippolytus, Antipope
Release Date: May 31, 2021
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Translator: Legge, Francis