: Antipope Hippolytus
: The refutation of all heresies Book I
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: 9783755795360
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: Christentum
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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.

5. The Style of the Work


Photius’ remark that Hippolytus did not keep to the Attic style is an understatement of the case with regard to our text. Jacobi, its first critic, was so struck by the number of “Latinisms” that he found in it as to conjecture that it is nothing but a Greek translation of a Latin original.

[68]

This is so unlikely as to be well-nigh impossible if Hippolytus were indeed the author; and no motive for such translation can be imagined unless it were made at a fairly late period. In that case, we should expect to find it full of words and expressions used only in Byzantine times when the Greek language had become debased by Slav and Oriental admixtures. This, however, is not the case with our text, and only one distinctly Byzantine phrase has

rewarded a careful search.

[69]

On the other hand neologisms are not rare, especially in Book X,

[70]

and everything goes to show the truth of Cruice’s remark that the author was evidently not a trained writer. This is by no means inconsistent with the theory that the whole work is by Hippolytus, and is the more probable if we conclude that it was originally spoken instead of written.

This is confirmed when we look into the construction of the author’s sentences. They are drawn out by a succession of relative clauses to an extent very rare among even late Greek writers, more than one sentence covering 20 or 30 lines of the printed page without a full stop, while the usual rules as to the place and order of the words are often neglected. Another peculiarity of style is the constant piling up of several similes or tropes where only one would suffice, which is very distinctly marked in the passages whenever the author is speaking for long in his own person and without quoting the words of another. In all these we seem to be listening to the words of a fluent but rather laborious orator. Thus in Book I he compares the joy that he expects to find in his work to that of an athlete gaining the crown, of a merchant selling his goods after a long voyage, of a husbandsman with his hardly won crops, and of a despised prophet seeing his predictions fulfilled.

[71]

So in Book V, after mentioning a book by Orpheus calledBacchicaotherwise unknown, he goes on to speak of “the mystic rite of Celeus and Triptolemus and Demeter and Core and Dionysus in Eleusis,”

[72]

when any practised writer would have said the Eleusinian mysteries simply. A similar piling up of imagery is found in Book VIII, where he speaks of the seed of the fig-tree as “a refuge