Part 9 (1/2)

CREED AND HERESIES OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY

1 O???e???? F???s?f??e?a ? ?ata pas?? a??ese?? e?e????

_Origenis Philosophumena sive omnium haeresium refutatio E codice Parisino nunc prirapheo Acadee; or the Doctrine and Practice of the Church of Rome under Commodus and Alexander Severus; and Ancient and Modern Christianity and Divinity compared_ By CHRISTIAN CHARLES JOSIAS BUNSEN, DCL In Four Voluate of the Clarendon Printing-house, and presents his petition for aid, the University of Oxford ives its ns its name, without very close inquiry into the case The documents are really so respectable that there cannot be much amiss; and a venerable institution, well known to be fond of the house, cannot be expected to go trudging through the back-lanes of history, and exposing its nostrils in the purlieus of heresy, in order to identify a literary petitioner, evidently above all common imposture

So it supplies all his wants upon the spot, dresses him handsoh eccentric) friend, the catechist of Alexandria The introduction, being left at the Prussian Legation, falls into the hands of no stay-at-home benefactor, but of one who knows the by-ways of human life, and has an ear for the dialects of ht have reypt; and no sooner does he raise his eyes froer, than he discovers hinizes the accent of the West; is re even more familiar with the Tiber than the Nile, detects a Roe the friend of Niebuhr the honor of a discovery which no one could turn to lish scholar reat Ecclesiastical University should appear on a title-page lance what the learned proprietors had missed; and that their _Editio Princeps_ of a recovered monument of Church antiquity should be superseded within a year or two of its publication They are not principals, it is true, but only secondaries to the Editor, in the coht reasonably expect, in resorting for aid to so renowned and reverend a body, that his own judgment would be kept in check; and their very consent to issue the work implies _soe and authorshi+p

Whether they are called upon to adopt at once M Bunsen's proposed title-page, and substitute the naen, ill not say; but that the present title gives the book to the wrong author, seems placed beyond the reach of doubt

M Emmanuel Miller, one of the curators of the National Library in Paris, was the first to make himself acquainted with the contents of this work, and to appreciate their i the manuscripts under his care was one on cotton paper of the fourteenth century, which had been brought froent elected treasures of that celebrated spot The superscription, ”On all Heresies,” was not inviting; but on turning over the leaves, some lines, unknown before, of Pindar and of another lyric poet, were found and copied; and the value of these excerpts being ascertained, M

Miller's attention was directed to the body of the treatise containing them The treatise had already been described, in the _Moniteur_ of the 5th of January, 1844, as a Refutation of all Heresies, in ten books, but with the first three , as well as the conclusion of the whole; and he soon beca books, the first already existed, and had been printed under the naen's works Its very title is found in the manuscript at the end of the fourth book, and denotes that the portion of the work there concluded completes the sketch of philosophical systems, which the author prefixes to his account of ecclesiastical aberrations; and there are mutual references, backwards and forwards, between the printed book and the manuscript, which leave no doubt that the latter is a sequel to the former The Editor, therefore, has very properly reprinted the ”Philosophumena” as the commenceular plan, and consists of two parts, viz: first, four books,--of which the second and third are lost,--expounding the Pagan philosophies, especially the Greek, from which, the author contends, the various heresies of Christendo an account, in an order prevailingly historical, of thirty or thirty-two heresies, supported by extracts fros, and wound up in the recapitulary book at the end by the writer's own profession of faith Noho is the author?

Not Origen; for, as Huet had already re the ”Philosophu an episcopal position; and, in the ninth book, he gives an account of transactions in Ro over many years, in which he was evidently an eyewitness and an actor While the scene is thus laid at a distance froen's sphere, and the date also of the personal ical doctrine is wholly different from his; for instance, in a certain ”Treatise on the Universe,” to which the author refers as his own, and of which a fragment is preserved, the penal condition of the wicked after death is said to be iht a doctrine of final restoration Add to this, that no such work as the present is attributed to Origen by any ancient witness, and the case against his naarded as complete

The evidence which disappoints this claim narrows also our choice of others The personal transactions to which we have referred took place at Rome, while Zephyrinus and his successor, Callistus, presided over the Christian co the first twenty years of the third century Wethe ymen of that period Still closer is the circle drawn by the fact, that the writer largely borrows froh vastly i on that foolish production, and copiously contributing fresh ht which unites the stronger disciple with the feeblerto find a pupil of the Bishop of Lyons a of the third century, two na the conditions,--those of Hippolytus, a suburban clergye lay within the city itself In order to vindicate the claim of the first, it has been necessary for M Bunsen to prove that his locality is right; and that the ”Portus Romae,” of which he was bishop, was not, as Le Moyne and Cave had groundlessly supposed, the Arabian ”Portus Romanus” of the district of Aden, but the new harbor ed, by Trajan, on the northern bank of the Tiber, immediately opposite to Ostia That he suffered martyrdom there, and was buried in a ceenerally admitted, on the evidence of Prudentius, who has left a poe his memorial chapel on that spot, and of a statue of hi up there three hundred years ago, and now stands in the library of the Vatican It is certainly perplexing to find Jeronorance of the see over which he presided, if, for a quarter of a century, he was active at the centre of the Christian world; and not less so to discover in Rome itself, nay, in a Pope, or his transcriber, at the end of the fifth century, the impression that his scene of labor had been in Arabia; and under the influence of these facts it has been supposed that though, co thethe bishops of the East On the whole, however, the reasons preponderate in favor of his residence, as ”Episcopus Portuensis,” within the presbytery of Rome

The title itself is an old one, still always assigned to soin from the time when the Northern Harbor of the Tiber--of which in the ninth century, scarce a trace was left--was a flourishi+ng emporium The name of Hippolytus is associated by tradition with the spot; it is given, our author assures us, to a certain tower, near Fiuhth and ninth centuries, a basilica of St Hippolytus was restored at Portus by Leo III and IV An episcopal palace still remains By acute and skilful combinations, effected with evidence scanty as a whole, and suspicious in every part, M Bunsen has endeavored to reproduce the historical ie of Hippolytus His office of ”bishop”

iation at Portus; the ation were the ”plebs” coe in which they lived was his diocese

His vicinity to the great capital drew him, however, into a wider circle of duties For while Rome itself was divided into several ecclesiastical districts, each of which had its own clergyman and lay deacons, the suburban bishops were associated with these officers to forement, or presbytery, presided over by thecontact with all theinterests of Christendoht be, found their way to the iht their equilibriuation would largely consist of teents, Greek brokers, Jewish bankers, African i-house rather than a honers he would hear tidings of the res in the city the newest gossip of all the heresies Possibly this position, with its opportunities of various intercourse, reeable address, and faculty of eloquent speech, which tradition ascribes to hi with studious care the hoation At all events he is the first of e distinctly hear as a great preacher His period extends, it is supposed, fron of Commodus (180-193) to the first year of Maxiht him into the same presbytery-room with five popes,--Victor (187-198); Zephyrinus (201-218); Callistus (219-222); Urbanus (223-230); and Pontianus (230-235); with the last of whom he shared, in the last year of his life, a cruel exile to Sardinia, and returned only to fall a victi in a canal It cannot be denied that, in order to recover this picture of Hippolytus, and still more in order to fix his literary position, the materials of evidence have to be dealt with in somewhat arbitrary fashi+on, and their _lacunae_ to be filled by conjecture Prudentius, for instance, is called as an historical witness, yet convicted of fable in much of what he says His poem declares that at one time Hippolytus had supported Novatus in his atteainst the _Lapsi_, but had been reconciled to the catholic doctrine before he died He must in this case have joined in the opposition raised by Novatianus (in 251) to the election of Cornelius to the papacy, and have died in the Decian persecution, which continued till the year 257 Moreover, the painting seen by the Spanish versifier on the walls of the memorial chapel introduces us to so ridiculous a story, as only to sho coends had already escaped all the restraints of history In this fresco the mythical fate of Hippolytus, the son of Theseus, is transferred to the Roman presbyter: he is represented as torn to pieces by horses; while the faithful follow to pick up his liround

If the sanctuary exhibiting this scene received the -place as early as the time of Constantine,--and such is our author's opinion,--into what a state of degradation had the history of Hippolytus sunk in three quarters of a century! And if alreadycould thus impudently lie, how can we better trust the statue, admitted to be later still? Yet this statue, on whose side is a list of the writings of Hippolytus, is appealed to in deter the martyr's written productions, as the painted chapel in evidence of facts in his personal career We fully ad a possible result fro us with a highly interesting personage But perhaps, as the venerable irown in clearness before his eye, and attracted his affection more and more, the very vividness of the conception may have rendered him insensible to the precariousness of the proof

Ecclesiastical fancy, in its unrestrained career, has torn his personality to pieces, and left the _disjecta membra_ so rudely scattered on the strand of history, that we almost doubt the power of any critical aesculapius to restore hiain

At the same board of church councillors with Hippolytus sat another ?????tat?? a???,[27] the presbyter Caius; and as an urban clergyman, he would be more constantly there than his suburban brother, separated by a distance of eighteen e of hiin with Eusebius and end with Photius, is quite impossible In one respect only do the personal characteristics attributed to hiuish him from the bishop of Portus He was a strenuous opponent of the peculiarities favored by the Christians of Lesser Asia, and especially of the claiifts, and the appeal to clairvoyant skill, by Montanus and his followers With one of these, by name Proclus, he held a disputation; fro, in conjunction with the title, not very intelligibly assigned to hied to the rossness of the popular nity of the Roainst the pretensions of the Eastern Christianity, and disowned the Epistle to the Hebrews This feature in the figure of Caius, though constituting the distinction, does not, however, necessarily _oppose_ him to Hippolytus, whose attitude towards the Montanists may not have been very different, but only less positively ainst the two men are of an opposite kind: with Hippolytus, the difficulty is to set him clear of sy classed with its uni[29] And a report even reaches us, that a the Chaldean Christians there exists, or did exist in the fourteenth century, a controversial treatise of Hippolytus against Caius[30]

Between these two men, so siues, a rival claim to property in the ”Refutation of all the Heresies”

The chief counsel for Hippolytus, besides our author, are the eminent Professors Jacobi, Duncker, and Schneidewin,--all, we believe, belonging to the Neander school of theology; and as the last two are about to edit the work anew, and probably to give it its final form, their opinion of its authorshi+p may be expected to prevail The other side, however, advocated by Dr Fessler, is sustained by perhaps the greatest of living historical critics, F C Baur, representative of the en school Into so intricate a question wefresh to offer towards its solution; but the chief iht from its study is one of astonishment at the extreme positiveness hich the learned men on either side affirm their own conclusion A more equal balance of evidence we never remember to have met with in any similar research; and the faint and slender preponderance which alone the scale can ever exhibit, aly contrasts with the triumphant assertion, of both sets of disputants, that not a reasonable doubt re points of M Bunsen's case are these A work ”On all Heresies” is attributed to Hippolytus, and in no instance to Caius, by Eusebius, Jero of the fourth century Such a book was still extant in the ninth century; for Photius, the celebrated patriarch of Constantinople, has given us an account of its contents in the journal and epito his report with the newly discovered book, the identity of the torks is established in so term_ of the series of heresies are the same; they both of the his order of treatment Further, in the newly found treatise reference is made by the author to other works of his, in which he has discussed certain points of early Hebrew chronology in proving the antiquity of the Abrahamic race Now, Eusebius was acquainted with a certain ”Chronicle”

of Hippolytus, brought down to the first year of Alexander Severus; and such a chronicle, in a Latin translation, is found in Fabricius's edition of Hippolytus, only that its list of Ro, but with the end, of Severus's reign It has, however, in common with our work, a peculiar number of tribes,--viz

seventy-two, derived from Noah Thus, the author of the ”Heresies” and of the ”Chronicle” would appear to be the sa to Eusebius, to be Hippolytus Lastly, both in our neork, and also in a book called the ”Labyrinth,” written against some Unitarians of the second century, reference is made to a treatise ”On the Universe,” which the author ment of this last in his edition of ”Hippolytus,” Fabricius has shown to what naiven to Caius is rendered evident by the occurrence, in the fragment, of certain Apocalyptic fictions inconsistent with his rejection of the Book of Revelations Moreover, the list of works on the statue of Hippolytus includes a disquisition ”Against the Greeks and against Plato, or _Respecting the Universe_”

What can be said to weaken so strong a case? Two doubts at once arise upon it, which we find it by no means easy to set aside Granted, Hippolytus wrote a book ”On all Heresies”; is it the same which is now delivered into our hands? One inal and the present book, for a short space, side by side The very Peter of Alexandria who is one of the early witnesses called on Hippolytus's behalf has handed down to us a passage or two (preserved in the Paschal Chronicle) from the book which he attests, with a distinct reference to the place where they are to be found We turn to the right chapter, and the passages are _not there_ Nor is it a ret; the same topic--the controversy about the time of Easter--is treated; the same side--that of the Western Church--is taken, in both instances; but the arguments are different, and so far irreconcilable, that no one who had coives would ever resort to the feebler one which our work contains With the dauntless ingenuity of German criticism M Bunsen makes a virtue of necessity, and endeavors to convert this unfortunate discrepancy into a fresh proof of identity He thinks that, in this and some other parts, our work is but a cluinal, which the citations of Peter enable us to recover and coes his case as much by success as it could by failure For if the book presented to us by the Clarendon Press reflects the original no better than would appear from this only saenerate descendant from the pen of Hippolytus; but all reliable identity is lost, and the traces of his hand are no longer recoverable The second doubt is this:--Is the hich Photius read the same that has now been rescued? Of the few descriptive marks supplied by the patriarch, there are as many absent from our work as present in it The treatise which he read was a ”_little book_” or ”_tract_,” as Lardner calls it (???da????), a hich can scarcely apply to a volu (as ours would, if coes M Bunsen cuts down this nu Photius to have only the last six books, containing the historical survey, without the groundwork of the philosophical deduction, of the heresies The curtailment, if conceded, seems scarcely adequate to its purpose, and appears to us a very questionable conjecture The manuscript, stripped of the first four books, would want the very basis of the whole argument; and, if such a mutilation were conceivable, it is impossible that Photius should fail to observe and mention it; for the fifth book opens, not like an independent treatise, but with a summary statement of what has been accoain, Photius mentions the _Dositheans_ as the first set of heretics discussed; whereas their naht, in our work, and their place is occupied by the ”Ophites” M Bunsen treats this as a mere inaccuracy of expression on the part of Photius, who meant, by the na schools” that are better described as ”Ophites” The name, however, is so unsuitable to this purpose, that it would be a strange wilfulness in the learned patriarch to substitute it for the language of the author he describes He could not be ignorant that Dositheus, Simon, Menander, were the three founders of the Samaritan sect, exponents of the same doctrine, if not even reputed _avatars_ of the same divine essence;[31] and if he had applied the name _Dositheans_ to any of the heretics enumerated in our work, it would assuredly have been to the _followers of Simon_, who stand _fourth_ in the series of thirty-two, and not to Phrygian serpent-worshi+ppers, who commence the list Further, the author whom Photius read stated that his book was a synopsis of the Lectures of Irenaeus In our work no such stateree, either in quantity or character, with the substance of the assertion And, lastly, the patriarch's Hippolytus said ”sos which are not quite correct; for instance, that the Epistle to the Hebrews is not by the Apostle Paul” In our work there is no such assertion; and when M Bunsen suggests that perhaps its placeto his own conjecture, these books were no more in Photius's hands than in ours, and that he cannot first cut them off in order to make a ???da????, and then restore the criticism on the Epistle to the Hebrews The identity of our ”Philosophumena” with the treatise which Photius read and Hippolytus wrote, appears, therefore, to be extreained in the course of the argued position fro to set out Whoever wrote the disquisition ”On the Universe”

wrote also our work This fact rests on the assertion of the author himself; yet, if the author be Hippolytus, and our ”Philosophue that no list of his writings ues of Eusebius and Jero the ”Heresies” without the essay ”On the Universe”; and the engraving on the statue giving the essay ”On the Universe” without the ”Heresies” How can we explain it, that these ecclesiastical writers, in knowing our work, did not knohat is contained in it about the authorshi+p of the other book; and that this book should have wandered _anonymously_ about down to the ninth century, side by side with an acknowledged writing of Hippolytus, which all the while was proclai the solution of the question? We should certainly expect that the book of avowed authorshi+p would convey the name of Hippolytus to the companion production for which it claims the same paternity; but, instead of this, it not only leaves its associate anonymous for six hundred years, but afterward assumes the modest fit, and becomes anonyh to put the two things together, and pick out the testiin of the other, are we to charge the same stupidity on the erudite Photius, who had both books in his hand, and has given his report of both? In his account of Hippolytus's treatise, he nowhere tells us that it contains a reference to the essay ”On the Universe,” as being from the same pen; and that he found no such reference is certain; for he actually discusses the question, ”Who wrote the essay on the Universe?”