Hippolytus

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Hippolytus, traditionally called Hippolytus of Rome, was a Greek-writing Christian theologian active in the 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.

That work is the Refutation of All Heresies, sometimes called the Philosophumena. Its method is to expose Christian heresies by tracing each back to a pagan philosophical source — the argument being that error in doctrine is borrowed Greek speculation in disguise. To make the case, the author reproduces the teachings of his targets in detail, and in doing so preserves long stretches of material that would otherwise be lost. Much of what is known of certain Gnostic currents — the Naassenes, the Peratae, the Sethians, and others — comes from these hostile pages, including the Naassene Sermon, a dense allegorical text quoted at length. The heresiologist copied his enemies in order to defeat them, and thereby kept them.

This makes Hippolytus, with Irenaeus before him, one of the two principal windows onto second-century Gnosticism from the side of its opponents. The caution scholarship attaches to that role is the obvious one: a refuter selects, arranges, and frames, and the systems reach us already turned against themselves. Where independent witnesses survive — above all the Coptic codices found at Nag Hammadi in 1945 — they can be set beside the heresiologists, and the comparison shows both how much the refuters reported accurately and how much they shaped.

His own career was a quarrel. Hippolytus held a rigorous line on the Logos and on the forgiveness of grave sin, and he clashed bitterly with the Roman bishops Zephyrinus and Callistus over both theology and church discipline. Later tradition remembers him as a rival claimant to the Roman see — an “antipope” in the language of a much later institution — though how organized that opposition really was remains uncertain. The tradition further holds that he was deported to the mines of Sardinia under the emperor Maximinus and died there, and that he was afterward venerated as a martyr and saint, his estrangement from the bishops quietly forgotten.

A second difficulty is the man himself. The works transmitted under his name differ in style and outlook enough that some scholars have proposed two distinct authors later merged into one figure — the long-running “Hippolytus question,” still unsettled. What is not in doubt is the value of the salvage: a writer who set out to bury a generation of teachers, and whose refutation became their archive.

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

→ Related: Irenaeus · Origen · Tertullian · Gnosis · Logos · Hermes Trismegistus