Hippolytus

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Hippolytus, traditionally called Hippolytus of Rome, was a Greek-writing Christian theologian active in the imperial city in the late second and early third centuries — by the standard reckoning, born around 170 and dead around 235. He is remembered for two things that sit awkwardly together: he was a learned defender of orthodoxy who fought the bishops of Rome to the point of schism, and his great work against heretics is now read mainly for the heretics it quotes. He stands at the seam between two ages of the Roman church — the last generation in which its theologians wrote in Greek, and the first in which the bishop of Rome began to act with something like the authority a later church would claim for the office — and his career is a record of the strain along that seam.

That great work is the Refutation of All Heresies, known also by the title the Philosophumena. Its method is to expose Christian heresy by tracing each deviation back to a pagan source — the argument being that error in doctrine is borrowed Greek speculation in disguise, dressed in scriptural clothes. The author announces this thesis at the outset: the heretics’ doctrines, he writes in the proem, have “derived their origin from the wisdom of the Greeks, from the conclusions of those who have formed systems of philosophy,” and from the astrologers and the mystery cults. To prove it he opens with a survey of the Greek philosophers themselves, then sets each heresy beside the school he holds responsible for it. To make the indictment stick he reproduces the teachings of his targets in detail, and in doing so preserves long stretches of material that would otherwise be lost entirely. Much of what is known of certain Gnostic currents — the Naassenes, the Peratae, the Sethians, the obscure teacher Justin and his Book of Baruch — survives only on these hostile pages, including the Naassene Sermon, a dense allegorical exposition quoted at length. The heresiologist copied his enemies in order to defeat them, and thereby kept them.

The Refutation and its salvage

The Refutation was conceived on a large scale: ten books, of which Book I is a doxography of the Greek philosophical schools and Books IV through X work through the heresies one by one and against their alleged philosophical ancestors. Books II and III, which the author seems to have devoted to the mysteries and to Egyptian and Chaldean lore, are lost from the manuscript tradition and have never been recovered — a gap that runs through every edition of the work. What survives is enough to make Hippolytus, with Irenaeus of Lyon before him, one of the two principal windows onto second-century Gnosticism from the side of its opponents, and the later compiler Epiphanius of Salamis drew on both. The three together form the backbone of patristic heresiology, the genre that for most of Christian history supplied — and shaped — what was known of the movements it set out to destroy.

Where Irenaeus organized his catalog around descent from Simon Magus, Hippolytus organized his around descent from philosophy: the Valentinians from Pythagoras and Plato, the Basilidians from Aristotle, the Naassenes from the mysteries, the astrological heretics from the Chaldeans. The scheme is polemically convenient and often strained, but it has a consequence the author did not intend. Because he had to demonstrate the genealogy, he summarized each system with a precision that the simpler refuters did not bother with, and he had access to sources they did not. The single richest case is Basilides: Hippolytus is the sole witness to the apophatic version of that Alexandrian’s system, the one built on a God so far beyond being that he is called not the ineffable God but the God who is not — a world-seed unfolding under a non-existent deity, a threefold divine sonship, a Great Archon who rules in the conviction that he is the summit of all things. That account, found nowhere else and irreconcilable with the emanationist Basilides of Irenaeus, is the heart of one of the genuine puzzles of early Christian thought, and it exists because Hippolytus needed to prove that Basilides had cribbed his metaphysics from Aristotle.

The caution scholarship attaches to this role is the obvious one: a refuter selects, arranges, and frames, and the systems reach the reader already turned against themselves. Where independent witnesses survive — above all the Coptic codices of the Nag Hammadi library, found in Egypt in 1945 — they can be set beside the heresiologists, and the comparison shows both how much the refuters reported accurately and how much they distorted. On the whole Hippolytus emerges as a careful, if hostile, copyist; the Naassene Sermon and the Basilidian report read as genuine documents he had in front of him, not as caricatures he invented. The systems he transmits belong to the common world of late antique speculation that produced the Hermetic writings as well, sharing its vocabulary of emanation, graded heavens, and a Nous or divine mind from which lower orders unfold; the Logos doctrine that Hippolytus defended against his own bishops is itself a piece of that Hellenistic theological grammar, turned to orthodox ends.

A career that was a quarrel

Hippolytus’s own life, so far as it can be reconstructed, was a sustained conflict over both doctrine and discipline. He held a rigorous line on the Logos: the Word was a distinct divine person, generated by the Father, against the teaching the Romans called modalism — the view, associated at Rome with the otherwise shadowy figure Noetus and his follower Sabellius, that Father, Son, and Spirit were merely names or aspects of a single undivided God. (On the modalist side of that quarrel, see Sabellius.) Hippolytus’s treatise Against Noetus argues the case for a real distinction within the Godhead. To his opponents this looked dangerously like making two gods; to Hippolytus, the refusal to distinguish the persons collapsed the gospel into a single masked actor playing three parts. The dispute was the Roman front of the long third-century argument over how the oneness of God could be squared with the divinity of Christ — the argument that would run on until the councils of the fourth century settled it in terms neither side at Rome had quite reached.

The doctrinal fight became a personal and institutional one. Hippolytus clashed bitterly with the Roman bishops Zephyrinus (in office c. 199–217) and his successor Callistus (c. 217–222), accusing Zephyrinus of culpable laxity in letting modalist teaching stand and Callistus of both theological error and a scandalous relaxation of penance — Callistus had ruled that even grave sins, including sexual ones, could be forgiven and the sinner readmitted to communion. For a rigorist of Hippolytus’s temper this was a betrayal of the church’s holiness. He withdrew into open opposition and, according to the long tradition, allowed himself to be set up as a rival bishop of Rome by his own faction. Later ages, reading the episode through the lens of a much more developed papacy, remember him as the first “antipope” — though how organized that counter-church really was, and whether Hippolytus thought of himself in any such terms, is impossible to recover, and the word and the institution it presupposes both postdate him by centuries.

The tradition further holds that the quarrel ended in reconciliation written in blood. Under the emperor Maximinus Thrax, in a persecution that struck the Roman clergy around 235, Hippolytus and Pontian — by then the reigning bishop — were both deported to the mines of Sardinia, a sentence that amounted to a slow death by labor. The story is that the two estranged men were reconciled in exile, that both died there or of its effects, and that their bodies were later brought back to Rome and honored together. Hippolytus was afterward venerated as a martyr and saint, his rebellion quietly folded into a story of penitence and restoration. The historical bones of this — the deportation, the deaths under Maximinus, the joint commemoration — rest on the fourth-century Roman calendar of martyrs and on the Liberian Catalogue, and are about as secure as anything in the dossier.

The Hippolytus question

A second difficulty is the man himself, and it has grown rather than shrunk with study. A large and miscellaneous body of work travels under the name Hippolytus — the Refutation; exegetical commentaries, including one on the Book of Daniel that is among the oldest surviving Christian biblical commentaries and one on the Song of Songs; the Against Noetus; a treatise On the Antichrist; a Chronicle of the world down to 234; and the church order discussed below. These writings differ so markedly in language, theological temper, and apparent setting that the unity of their author has become the long-running “Hippolytus question.”

The materials of the puzzle are themselves strange. A marble statue of a seated figure, recovered in Rome in 1551 and now in the Vatican Library, carries on its base a list of works and an Easter-reckoning table; it was long taken to be a portrait of Hippolytus and a catalog of his writings, and it anchored the traditional picture of a single great Roman scholar. But the statue as carved represents a woman, not a man — it appears to have been reworked — and the list need not record the output of one author at all. The Refutation, moreover, was never transmitted in antiquity under Hippolytus’s name; its modern attribution is an inference, and the work circulated for centuries either anonymously or under the name of Origen.

Modern scholarship has responded with a spectrum of theories. In an influential 1995 study, Allen Brent argued that the corpus is the product of not one man but a Roman “house-school,” a teaching circle of which several members wrote, the list on the statue recording the school’s collective output rather than one author’s; on this reading the acrimonious Refutation and the gentler commentaries belong to different hands within the same Roman community. J.A. Cerrato, in a 2002 monograph, pressed a sharper division along geography: the exegetical commentaries, he argued, betray an Eastern author with roots in western Asia Minor, while the Refutation, the Chronicle, and the lost treatise On the Universe form a separate Roman block. On the strongest versions of the two-author hypothesis there were effectively two Hippolyti — an Eastern exegete and a Roman polemicist — later fused by tradition into a single composite saint. Others continue to defend a single author, allowing that a long life and changing circumstances could account for the range. No consensus has formed, and the surviving evidence may never permit one; what the long debate does establish is that the name “Hippolytus” labels a problem as much as a person.

The Apostolic Tradition

The most consequential of the works long credited to Hippolytus is a church order — a manual of the offices, prayers, and procedures of a Christian community: how a bishop is ordained, how the eucharist is offered, how candidates are prepared and baptized, how the daily rhythm of prayer is kept. No Greek original survives whole. The text was reconstructed in the early twentieth century out of later translations and derivative church orders — a Latin version in a Verona palimpsest, Coptic, Arabic, and Ethiopic renderings, and the material absorbed into such compilations as the Apostolic Constitutions, the Canons of Hippolytus, and the Testamentum Domini. In 1916 R.H. Connolly identified this reconstructed order with a work titled Apostolic Tradition named on the Vatican statue list, and the identification was widely accepted; Gregory Dix’s 1937 edition and his enormously influential The Shape of the Liturgy (1945) fixed it in the imagination of liturgists, and Bernard Botte’s critical edition consolidated the text. For most of the twentieth century the Apostolic Tradition was read as a near-photograph of early third-century Roman worship and as the prize exhibit of Hippolytus’s authorship.

That consensus has come apart. In a 2002 commentary, Paul Bradshaw, Maxwell Johnson, and L. Edward Phillips argued that the document is not a single composition by a single author at all but a piece of living, evolving literature — a text assembled and reworked across several generations and regions, its layers ranging from the second century to the fourth, its “Roman” features quite possibly read back into it from later Roman practice rather than original to it. On this account the Apostolic Tradition witnesses to no one church at no one moment, and its connection to Hippolytus is at best one strand among many. The revision matters well beyond patristics, because the order’s eucharistic prayer was taken as a model for liturgical reform in several modern churches in the twentieth century, on the understanding that it preserved the worship of third-century Rome; if the text is a composite of uncertain date, the historical warrant for treating it as an early Roman norm is weaker than the reformers supposed. The architecture of the rites it describes — the laying-on of hands in ordination, the question-and-answer at baptism, the prayer over bread and cup — remains a precious early picture of Christian worship taking institutional shape; what has changed is the confidence with which any of it can be pinned to a place, a date, or a name.

Textual transmission and scholarship

The recovery of Hippolytus is largely a nineteenth- and twentieth-century story, and an unusually dramatic one. Book I of the Refutation — the doxography of the Greek philosophers — survived through the Middle Ages on its own, copied and read under the name of Origen, and was printed in that guise. The decisive event came around 1842, when the Greek scholar Minoides Mynas brought back from a manuscript on Mount Athos the text of Books IV through X, the section containing the heresiological reports. Emmanuel Miller published this find at Oxford in 1851, still under Origen’s name, as Origenis Philosophumena; only afterward did the attribution to Hippolytus prevail, on the strength of cross-references within the work and its agreement with what was known of his other writings. The standard Greek text for a century was Paul Wendland’s edition in the Berlin Griechische christliche Schriftsteller series (1916); it was succeeded by Miroslav Marcovich’s critical edition (Patristische Texte und Studien 25, De Gruyter, 1986), and the most recent full English translation is M. David Litwa’s Refutation of All Heresies (SBL Press, 2016).

For the reader the primary texts are within reach. The oldest complete English Refutation is J.H. MacMahon’s, made for the Ante-Nicene Christian Library and reprinted in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, volume V (1886) — the most widely mirrored version, available in clean form at New Advent and at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. The substantively better English is F. Legge’s Philosophumena; or, The Refutation of All Heresies (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1921), translated from the text of Cruice and now itself in the public domain; it is freely readable at Project Gutenberg (volume I; volume II follows). On the heresiological corpus as a whole, the standard modern study of the genre is David Brakke, The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity (Harvard University Press, 2010), and the argument that the very category these writers assembled — “Gnosticism” — should not be assumed as a historical unity is made in Michael Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism” (Princeton University Press, 1996), and Karen King, What Is Gnosticism? (Harvard University Press, 2003).

On Hippolytus the person, the two pivotal modern monographs are Allen Brent, Hippolytus and the Roman Church in the Third Century: Communities in Tension Before the Emergence of a Monarch-Bishop (Brill, 1995), which set out the house-school hypothesis, and J.A. Cerrato, Hippolytus Between East and West: The Commentaries and the Provenance of the Corpus (Oxford University Press, 2002), which pressed the case for an Eastern author of the commentaries. The state of the Apostolic Tradition question is laid out in Paul F. Bradshaw, Maxwell E. Johnson, and L. Edward Phillips, The Apostolic Tradition: A Commentary (Hermeneia; Fortress Press, 2002). The reception of the heresiological record in the generations before Nag Hammadi runs through the work of G.R.S. Mead, whose Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906) renders the sect-notices of Hippolytus and the other refuters for an English readership and is read today as historiography rather than as current scholarship.

What is not in doubt is the value of the salvage. A writer — or a circle, or two writers later sewn into one — set out to bury a generation of teachers and to prove their heresies were nothing but recycled Greek philosophy. The proof required the evidence, and the evidence was the teaching itself, copied out at length. The refutation became the archive. Of the systems Hippolytus meant to extinguish, several reach the present day in no other hand than his, preserved by the precision of the man who hated them most.

→ In the library: Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Gnosis According to its Foes

→ Related: Irenaeus · Epiphanius · Origen · Tertullian · Clement Of Alexandria · Justin Martyr · Basilides · Patristic Heresiology · Gnosis · Gnosticism · Logos · Nag Hammadi Library · Apophatic Theology · Hermes Trismegistus