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 master's 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.3 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 un- married 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
1 Save for a few sentences quoted in patristic writings, the only \ 1? extant Gnostic works are the Coptic collection in the British Museum .■-*"* and the Bodleian at Oxford, known as the Pistis Sophia and the Bruce \\/ Papyrus respectively. There are said to be some other fragments of Coptic MSS. of Gnostic origin in Berlin which have not yet been published.
2 An account by the present writer of this worship in Roman times is! q. given in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for October 1917,1 *•"£ PP- 695 K I S
3 II, pp. 125 ff. infra,
4 PHILOSOPHUMENA
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.1 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.
These facts, however, were not immediately patent. The MS., written as appears from the colophon by one Michael in an extremely crabbed hand of the fourteenth century, is full of erasures and interlineations, and has several serious lacunae. 2 Hence it would probably have remained unnoticed in the Bibliotheque Royale of Paris to which it was consigned, had it not there met the eye of Be'nigne Emmanuel Miller, a French scholar and archaeologist who had devoted his life to the study and decipherment of ancient Greek MSS. By his care and the generosity of the University Press, the MS. was transcribed and published in 1851 at Oxford, but without either Intro- duction or explanatory notes, although the suggested emendations in the text were all carefully noted at the foot of every page.3 These omissions were repaired by the German scholars F. G. Schneidewin and Ludwig Duncker, who in 1856-1859 published at Gottingen an amended text with full critical and explanatory notes, and a Latin version.4 The completion of this publication was delayed by the death of Schneidewin, which occurred before he had time to go further than Book VII, and was followed by the appearance at Paris in i860 of a similar text and translation by the Abbe Cruice, then Rector of a college at Rome, who had given, as he tells us in his Prolegomena, many years to the study of the work.5 As his edition embodies all the best features of that of Duncker and Schneidewin, together with the fruits of much good and
1 II, p. 124 infra.
2 The facsimile of a page of the MS. is given in Bishop Wordsworth's Hippolytus and the Church of Rome, London, 1880.
3 B. E. Miller, Origenis Philosophumena sive Omnium Haresium Rcfutatio, Oxford, 1 851.
4 L. Duncker and F. G. Schneidewin, Philosophumena, etc. Gottingen, 1856-1859.
5 P. M. Cruice, Philosophumena, etc, Paris, i860.
INTRODUCTION . 5
careful work of his own, and a Latin version incomparably superior in clearness and terseness to the German editors', it is the one mainly used in the following pages. An English translation by the Rev. J. H. Macmahon, the translator for Bonn's series of a great part of the works of Aristotle, also appeared in 1868 in Messrs. Clark's Ante- Nicene Library. Little fault can be found with it on the score of verbal accuracy ; but fifty years ago the relics of Gnosticism had not received the attention that has since been bestowed upon them, and the translator, perhaps in consequence, did little to help the general reader to an understanding of the author's meaning.
2. The Authorship of the Work
Even before Mynas' discovery, doubts had been cast on the attribution of the Philosophumena to Origen. The fact that the author in his Proicmium speaks of himself as a successor of the Apostles, a sharer in the grace of high priesthood, and a guardian of the Church,1 had already led several learned writers in the eighteenth century to point out that Origen, who was never even a bishop, could not possibly be the author, and Epiphanius, Didymus of Alex- andria, and Aetius were among the names to which it was assigned. Immediately upon the publication of Miller's text, this controversy was revived, and naturally became coloured by the religious and political opinions of its protagonists. Jacobi in a German theological journal was the first to declare that it must have been written by Hippolytus, a contemporary of Callistus,2 and this proved to be like the letting out of waters. The dogma of Papal Infallibility was already in the air, and the opportunity was at once seized by the Baron von Bunsen, then Prussian Ambassador at the Court of St. James', to do what he could to defeat its promulgation. In his Hippolytus and his Age \ (1852), he asserted his belief in Jacobi's theory, and drew from the abuse of Callistus in Book IX of the newly dis- covered text, the conclusion that even in the third century the Primacy of the Bishops of Rome was effectively denied.
1 P- 34 infra.
2 Deutsche Zeitschrift fiir Christliche Wissenschaft umi Christliches leben, 1852.
6 PHILOSOPHUMENA
The celebrated Christopher Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln, followed with a scholarly study in which, while rejecting von Bunsen's conclusion, he admitted his main premises ; and Dr. Dollinger, who was later to prove the chief opponent of Papal claims, appeared a little later with a work on the same side. Against these were to be found none who ventured to defend the supposed authorship of Origen, but many who did not believe that the work was rightly attributed to Hippolytus. Among the Germans, Fessler and Baur pronounced for Caius, a presbyter to whom Photius in the ninth century gave the curious title of " Bishop of Gentiles, " as author ; of the Italians, de Rossi assigned it to Tertullian and Armellini to Novatian ; of the French, the Abbe Jallabert in a doctoral thesis voted for Tertullian ; while Cruice, who was afterwards to translate the work, thought its author must be either Caius or Ter- tullian.1 Fortunately there is now no reason to re-open the controversy, which one may conclude has come to an end by the death of Lipsius, the last serious opponent of the Hippolytan authorship. Mgr. Duchesne, who may in such a matter be supposed to speak with the voice of the majority of the learned of his own communion, in his Histoire Ancienne de PJ^g/ise2 accepts the view that Hippolytus was the author of the Philosophnme?ia, and thinks that he became reconciled to the Church under the persecution of Maximin.3 We may, therefore, take it that Hippolytus' authorship is now admitted on all sides.
A few words must be said as to what is known of this
Hippolytus. A Saint and Martyr of that name appears
* in the Roman Calendar, and a seated statue of him was
\!\ discovered in Rome in the sixteenth century inscribed on
t/ \ the back of the chair with a list of works, one of which
1 References to nearly all the contributions to this controversy are correctly given in the Prolegomena to Cruice's edition, pp. x fif. An English translation of Dr. Dollinger's Hippolytus unci Kallistus was published by Plummer, Edinburgh, 1876, and brings the contro- versy up to date. Cf. also the Bibliography in Salmon's article " Hippolytus Romanus " in Smith and Wace's Dictionary of Christian Biography (hereafter quoted as D.C.B.).
2 See the English translation : Early History of the Christian Church, London, 1 909, I, pp. 227 ff.
3 This is confirmed by Dom. Chapman in the Catholic Encyclopedia, s. vv. "Hippolytus,''" " Callistus."
INTRODUCTION 7
is claimed in our text as written by its author.1 He is first mentioned by Eusebius, who describes him as the " Bishop of another Church " than that of Bostra, of which he has been speaking ; 2 then by Theodoret, who calls him the "holy Hippolytus, bishop and martyr";3 and finally by Prudentius, who says that lie became a Novatianist, but on his way to martyrdom returned to the bosom of the Church and entreated his followers to do the same.4 We have many writings, mostly fragmentary, attributed to him, including among others one on the Paschal cycle which is referred to on the statue just mentioned, a tract against Noetus used later by Epiphanius, and others on Anti- christ, Daniel, and the Apocalypse, all of which show a markedly chiliastic tendency. In the MSS. in which some of these occur, he is spoken of as " Bishop of Rome," and this seems to have been his usual title among Greek writers, although he is in other places called " Archbishop," and by other titles. From these and other facts, Dollinger comes to the conclusion that he was really nn anti-pope or schismatic bishop who set himself up against the authority of Callistus, and this, too, is accepted by Mgr. Duchesne, who agrees with 1 )ollinger that the schism created by him lasted through the primacies of Callistus' successors, Urbanus and Pontianus, and only ceased when this last was exiled together with Hippolytus to the mines of: Sardinia.5 Though the evidence on which this is based is not very strong, it is a very reasonable account of the whole matter ; and it becomes more probable if we choose \ to believe — for which, however, there is no distinct evidence ] ,p — that Hippolytus was the head of the Greek-speaking community of Christians at Rome, while his enemy Callistus presided over the more numerous Latins. In that case, * the schism would be more likely to be forgotten in time of persecution, and would have less chance of survival than the more serious ones of a later age; while it would satisfactorily account for the conduct of the Imperial
1 The statue and its inscription are also reproduced by Bishop Words- worth in the work above quoted.
1 Hist. Eccks., VI, c. 20. 3 Haer. Fab., Ill, I.
4 Perisleph II. For the chronological difficulty that this involves see Salmon, D.C.B., s.v. " Hippolytus Romanus."
5 Duchesne, op. cit., p. 233.
8 PHILOSOPHUMENA
authorities in sending the heads of both communities into penal servitude at the same time. By doing so, Maximin or his pagan advisers doubtless considered they were dealing the yet adolescent Church a double blow.
3. The Credibility of Hippolytus
Assuming, then, that our author was Hippolytus, schis- matic Bishop of Rome from about 218 to 235, we must next see what faith is to be attached to his statements. This question was first raised by the late Dr. George Salmon, Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, who was throughout his life a zealous student of Gnosticism and of the history of the Church during the early centuries. While working through our text he was so struck by the repetition in the account of four different sects of the simile about the magnet drawing iron to itself and the amber the straws, as to excogitate a theory that Hippolytus must have been imposed upon by a forger who had sold him a number of documents purporting to be the secret books of the heretics, but in reality written by the forger himself.1 This theory was afterwards adopted by the late Heinrich Stahelin, who published a treatise in which he attempted to show in the laborious German way, by a comparison of nearly all the different passages in it which present any similarity of diction, that the whole document was suspect.2 The differ- ent passages on which he relies will be dealt with in the notes as they occur, and it may be sufficient to mention here the opinion of M. Eugene de Faye, the latest writer on the point, that the theory of Salmon and Stahelin goes a long way beyond the facts.3 As M. de Faye points out, the different documents quoted in the work differ so greatly from one another both in style and contents, that to have invented or concocted them would have required a forger of almost superhuman skill and learning. To which it may be added that the mere repetition of the phrases that Stahelin has collated with such diligence would be the very
1 "The Cross-references in the Philosophumena," Hermathena, Dublin, No. XI, 1885, pp. 389 ff.
2 " Die Gnostischen Quellen Hippolyts" in Gebhardt and Har- nack's Texte und Untersuc hut/gen, VI, (1890).
3 Introduction d P Etude du Gnosticisme, Paris, 1 903, p. 68 ; Gnostiques et Gnosticisme, Paris, 1913, p. 167.
INTRODUCTION 9
thing that the least skilful forger would most studiously avoid, and that it could hardly fail to put the most credu- lous purchaser on his guard. It is also the case that some at least of the phrases of whose repetition Salmon and Stahelin complain can be shown to have come, not from the Gnostic author quoted, but from Hippolytus himself, and that others are to be found in the Gnostic works which have come down to us in Coptic dress.1 These Coptic documents, as the present writer has shown elsewhere,2 are so intimately linked together that all must be taken to have issued from the same school. They could not have been known to Hippolytus or he would certainly have quoted them in the work before us ; nor to the supposed forger, or he would have made greater use of them. We must, therefore, suppose that, in the passages which they and our text have in common, both they and it are drawing from a common source which can hardly be anything else than the genuine writings of earlier heretics. We must, therefore, agree with M. de Faye that the Salmon-Stahelin theory of forgery must be rejected.
If, however, we turn from this to such statements of Hippolytus as we can check from other sources, we find many reasons for doubting not indeed the good faith of him or his informants, but the accuracy of one or other of them. Thus, in his account of the tenets of the philoso- phers, he repeatedly alters or misunderstands his authorities, as when he says that Thales supposed water to be the end as it had been the beginning of the Universe,3 or that "Zaratas," as he calls Zoroaster, said that light was the father and darkness the mother of beings,4 which statements are directly at variance with what we know otherwise of the opinions of these teachers. So, too, in Book I, he makes Empedocles say that all things consist of fire, and will be resolved into fire, while in Book VII, he says that Empe- docles declared the elements of the cosmos to be six in
1 The theory that all existing things come from an "indivisible point " which our text gives as that of Simon Magus and of Basilides reappears in the Brace Papyrus. Basilides' remark about only I in iooo and 2 in 10,000 being fit for the higher mysteries is repeated verbatim in the Pistis Sophia, p. 354, Copt. Cf. Forerunners, II, 172, 292, n. 1.
2 Scottish Review, Vol. XXIT, No. 43 (July 1893).
3 V- 35 infra. * p. 39 infra.
io PHILOSOPHUMENA
number, whereof fire, one of the two instruments which alter and arrange it, is only one.1 Again, in Book IX, he says that he has already expounded the opinions of Heraclitus, and then sets to work to describe as his a perfectly different set of tenets from that which he has assigned to him in