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I.

(Who first propounded these heresies, p. 11.)

Hippolytus seems to me to have felt the perils to the pure Gospel of many admissions made by Clement and other Alexandrian doctors as to the merits of some of the philosophers of the Gentiles. Very gently, but with prescient genius, he adopts this plan of tracing the origin and all the force of heresies to “philosophy falsely so called.” The existence of this “cloud of locusts” is (1) evidence of the antagonism of Satan; (2) of the prophetic spirit of the apostles; (3) of the tremendous ferment produced by the Gospel leaven as soon as it was hid in the “three measures of meal” by “the Elect Lady,” the Ecclesia Dei; (4) of the fidelity of the witnesses,—that grand, heroic glory of the Ante-Nicene Fathers,—who never suffered these heresies to be mistaken for the faith, or to corrupt the Scriptures; and (5) finally of the power of the Holy Spirit, who gave them victory over errors, and enabled them to define truth in all the crystalline beauty of that “Mountain of Light,” that true Koh-i-noor, the Nicene Symbol. Thus, also, Christ’s promises were fulfilled.

II.

(Caulacau, p. 52.)

See Irenæus, p. 350, vol. i., this series, where I have explained this jargon of heresy. But I think it worth while to make use here of two notes on the subject, which I made in 1845,¹¹⁰⁹

1109 I venture to state this to encourage young students to keep pen in hand in all their researches, and always to make notes.

Fleury (tom. ii.) makes this statement:  “Les Nicolaites donnaient une infinité de noms barbares aux princes et aux puissances qu’ils mettaient en chaque ciel. Ils en nommaient un caulaucauch, abusant d’un passage d’Isaie, où se lisent ces mots hebreux: cau-la-cau, cau-la-cau, pour representer l’insolence avec laquelle les impies se moquaient du prophète, en répétant plusieurs fois quelques-unes de ses paroles.” Compare Guerricus, thus:  “Vox illa tædii et desperationis, quæ apud Isaiam (xxviii. 13) legitur, quia, viz., moram faciente Domino, frequentibus nuntiis ejus increduli et illusores insultare videntur: manda remanda,” etc. See the spurious Bernardina, “de Adventu Dom., serm. i.,” S. Bernard., opp. Paris (ed. Mabillon), vol. ii. p. 1799.

III.

(The Phrygians call Papa, p. 54.)

Hippolytus had little idea, when he wrote this, what the word Papa was destined to signify in mediæval Rome. The Abba of Holy Writ has its equivalent in many Oriental languages, as well as in the Greek and Latin, through which it has passed into all the dialects of Europe. It was originally given to all presbyters, as implied in their name of elders, and was a title of humility when it became peculiar to the bishops, as (1 Pet. v. 3) non Domini sed patres. St. Paul (1 Cor. iv. 15) shows that “in Christ”—that is, under Him—we may have such “fathers;” and thus, while he indicates the true sense of the precept, he leads us to recognise a prophetic force and admonition in our Saviour’s words (Matt. xxiii.), “Call no man your father upon the earth.” Thus interpreted, these words seem to be a warning against the sense to which this name, Papa, became, long afterwards, restricted, in Western Europe: Notre St. Père, le Pape, as they say in France. This was done by the decree of the ambitious Hildebrand, Gregory VII. (who died a.d. 1085), when, in a synod held at Rome, he defined that “the title Pope should be peculiar to one only in the Christian world.” The Easterns, of course, never paid any respect to this novelty and dictation, and to this day their patriarchs are popes; and not only so, for the parish priests of the Greek churches are called by the same name. I was once cordially invited to take a repast “with the pope,” on visiting a Greek church on the shores of the Adriatic. It is said, however, that a distinction is made between the words πάπας and παπᾶς; the latter being peculiar to inferiors, according to the refinements of Goar, a Western critic. Valeat quantum. But I must here note, that as “words are things,” and as infinite damage has been done to history and to Christian truth by tolerating this empiricism of Rome, I have restored scientific accuracy, in this series, whenever reference is made to the primitive bishops of Rome, who were no more “Popes” than Cincinnatus was an emperor. It is time that theological science should accept, like other sciences, the language of truth and the terminology of demonstrated fact. The early bishops of Rome were geographically important, and were honoured as sitting in the only apostolic see of the West; but they were almost inconsiderable in the structural work of the ante-Nicene ages, and have left no appreciable impress on its theology. After the Council of Nice they were recognised as patriarchs, though equals among brethren, and nothing more. The ambition of Boniface III. led him to name himself “universal bishop.” This was at first a mere name “of intolerable pride,” as his predecessor Gregory had called it, but Nicholas I. (a.d. 858) tried to make it real, and, by means of the false decretals, created himself the first “Pope” in the modern sense, imposing his despotism on the West, and identifying it with the polity of Western churches, which alone submitted to it. Thus, it was never Catholic, and came into existence only by nullifying the Nicene Constitutions, and breaking away from Catholic communion with the parent churches of the East. Compare Casaubon (Exercit., xiv. p. 280, etc.) in his comments on Baronius. I have thus stated with scientific precision what all candid critics and historians, even the Gallicans included, enable us to prove. Why, then, keep up the language of fiction and imposture,¹¹¹⁰

1110 Pompey and others were called imperatores before the Cæsars, but who includes them with the Roman emperors?

1111 How St. Peter would regard it, see 1 Pet. v. 1–3. I am sorry to find Dr. Schaff, in his useful compilation, History of the Christian Church, vol. ii. p 166, dropping into the old ruts of fable, after sufficiently proving just before, what I have maintained. He speaks of “the insignificance of the first Popes,”—meaning the early Bishops of Rome, men who minded their own business, but could not have been “insignificant” had they even imagined themselves “Popes.”

1112 See Bossuet, passim, and all the Gallican doctors down to our own times. In England the “supremacy” was never acknowledged, nor in France, until now.

IV.

(Contemporaneous heresy, p. 125.)

Here begins that “duplicating of our knowledge” of primitive Rome of which Bunsen speaks so justly. A thorough mastery of this book will prepare us to understand the great Cyprian in all his relations with the Roman Province, and not less to comprehend the affairs of Novatian.

Bunsen, with all respect, does not comprehend the primitive system, and reads it backward, from the modern system, which travesties antiquity even in its apparent conformities. These conformities are only the borrowing of old names for new contrivances. Thus, he reads the cardinals of the eleventh century into the simple presbytery of comprovincial bishops of the third century,¹¹¹³

1113 See his Hippol., vol. i. pp. 209, 311.

1114 See vol. ii. p. 298, this series.

1115 p. 207.

1116 Vol. iv. p 114, Elucidation II., this series.

1117 Even Quinet notes this. See his Ultramontanism, p. 40, ed. 1845.

Now let us turn to the thirty-fourth¹¹¹⁸

1118 Bunsen gives it as the thirty-fifth, vol. i. p. 311.

Let the “Apostolical Constitutions” go for what they are worth:¹¹¹⁹

1119 Of which we shall learn in vol. viii., this series.

1120 See Bingham, book ix. cap. i. sec. 9.

V.

(Affairs of the Church, p. 125.)

“Zephyrinus imagines that he administers the affairs of the Church—an uninformed and shamefully corrupt man.” This word imagines is common with Hippolytus in like cases, and Dr. Wordsworth gives an ingenious explanation of this usage. But it seems to me to be based upon the relations of Hippolytus as one of the synod or “presbytery,” without consent of which the bishop could do nothing important. Zephyrinus, on the contrary, imagined himself competent to decide as to the orthodoxy of a tenet or of a teacher, without his comprovincials. This, too, relieves our author from the charge of egotism when he exults in the defeat of such a bishop.¹¹²¹

1121 Wordsworth, chap. viii. p. 93.

VI.

(We offered them opposition, p. 125.)

Here we see that Hippolytus had no idea of the sense some put upon the convenire of his master Irenæus.¹¹²²

1122 See vol. i. pp. 415, 460, this series.

All this illustrates the position of Tertullian, who never thinks of ascribing to Rome any other jurisdiction than that belonging to other provinces. As seats of testimony, the apostolic sees, indeed, are all to be honoured. “In Greece, go to Corinth; in Asia Minor, to Ephesus; if you are adjacent to Italy, you have Rome; whence also (an apostolic) authority is at hand for us in Africa.” Such is his view of “contemporaneous affairs.”

VII.

(Heraclitus the Obscure, p. 126.)

“Well might he weep,” says Tayler Lewis, “as Lucian represents him, over his overflowing universe of perishing phenomena, where nothing stood;…nothing was fixed, but, as in a mixture, all things were confounded.”  He was “the weeping philosopher.”

Here let me add Henry Nelson Coleridge’s remarks on the Greek seed-plot of those philosophies which were begotten of the Egyptian mysteries, and which our author regards as, in turn, engendering “all heresies,” when once their leaders felt, like Simon Magus, a power in the Gospel of which they were jealous, and of which they wished to make use without submitting to its yoke. “Bishop Warburton,” says Henry Nelson Coleridge, “discovered, perhaps, more ingenuity than sound judgment in his views of the nature of the Greek mysteries; entertaining a general opinion that their ultimate object was to teach the initiated a pure theism, and to inculcate the certainty and the importance of a future state of rewards and punishments. I am led by the arguments of Villoison and Ste. Croix to doubt the accuracy of this.” In short, he supposes a “pure pantheism,” or Spinosism, the substance of their teaching.¹¹²³

1123 Introduction to Greek Classics, p. 228.

VIII.

(Imagine themselves to be disciples of Christ, p. 126.)

This and the foregoing chapter offer us a most overwhelming testimony to the independence of councils. In the late “Council of Sacristans” at the Vatican, where truth perished, Pius IX. refused to all the bishops of what he accounted “the Catholic universe” what the seven suburbicarian bishops were able to enforce as a right, in the primitive age, against two successive Bishops of Rome, who were patrons of heresy. These heretical prelates persisted; but the Province remained in communion with the other apostolic provinces, while rejecting all communion with them. All this will help us in studying Cyprian’s treatise On Unity, and it justifies his own conduct.

IX.

(The episcopal throne, p. 128.)

The simple primitive cathedra,¹¹²⁴

1124 See vol. ii. p. 12, also iv. 210.

1125 See Treatise on the Lapsed, infra.

X.

(Unskilled in ecclesiastical definitions, p. 128.)

It has been sufficiently demonstrated by the learned Döllinger, than whom a more competent and qualified witness could not be named, that the late pontiff, Pius IX., was in this respect, as a bishop, very much like Callistus. Moreover, his chief adviser and prime minister, Antonelli, was notoriously Callistus over again; standing towards him in the same relations which Callistus bore to Zephyrinus. Yet, by the bull Ineffabilis, that pontiff has retrospectively clothed the definitions of Zephyrinus and Callistus with infallibility; thus making himself also a partaker in their heresies, and exposing himself to the anathemas with which the Catholic councils overwhelmed his predecessor Honorius and others. That at such a crisis the testimony of Hippolytus should come to light, and supply a reductio ad absurdum to the late papal definitions, may well excite such a recognition of divine providence as Dr. Bunsen repeatedly suggests.

XI.

(All consented—we did not, p. 128.)

The Edinburgh editor supposes that the use of the plural we, in this place, is the official plural of a bishop. It has been already explained, however, that he is speaking of the provincial bishops with whom he withstood Callistus when the plebs were carried away by his hypocrisy. In England, bishops in certain cases, are a “corporation sole;” and, as such, the plural is legal phraseology. All bishops, however, use the plural in certain documents, as identifying themselves with the universal episcopate, on the Cyprianic principle—Episcopatus unus est, etc.

In Acts v. 13 is a passage which may be somewhat explained, perhaps, by this: “All consented…we did not.” The plebs joined themselves to the apostles; “but of the rest durst no man join himself to them: howbeit, the plebs magnified them, and believers were added,” etc. “The rest” (τῶν δὲ λοιπῶν) here means the priests, the Pharisees, and Sadducees, the classes who were not the plebs, as appears by what immediately follows.¹¹²⁶

1126 Ver. 17.

XII.

(Our condemnatory sentence, p. 131.)

Again: Hippolytus refers to the action of the suburbicarian bishops in provincial council. And here is the place to express dissatisfaction with the apologetic tone of some writers, who seem to think Hippolytus too severe, etc. As if, in dealing with such “wolves in sheep’s clothing,” this faithful leader could show himself a true shepherd without emphasis and words of abhorrence. Hippolytus has left to the Church the impress of his character¹¹²⁷

1127 See p. v. supra.

“Eternal smiles its emptiness betray,

As shallow streams run dimpling all the way.”

Bon Dieu, bon diable, as the French say, is the creed of the times. Every one who insults the faith of Christians, who betrays truths he was sworn to defend, who washes his hands but then gives Christ over to be crucified, must be treated with especial favour. Christ is good: so is Pilate; and Judas must not be censured. My soul be with Hippolytus when the great Judge holds his assize. His eulogy is in the psalm:¹¹²⁸

1128 Ps. cvi. 30–31.

XIII.

(As if he had not sinned, p. 131.)

There is an ambiguity in the facts as given in the Edinburgh edition, of which it is hard to relieve the text. The word καθίστασθαι is rendered to retain (their places) in the first instance, as if the case were all one with the second instance, where μένειν is justly rendered to continue. The second case seems, then, to cover all the ground. What need to speak of men “twice or thrice married,” if a man once married, after ordination is not to be retained? The word retained is questionable in the first instance; and I have adopted Wordsworth’s reading, to be enrolled, which is doubtless the sense.

This statement of our author lends apparent countenance to the antiquity of the “Apostolic Constitutions,” so called. Perhaps Hippolytus really supposed them to be apostolic. By Canon XVII. of that collection, a man twice married, after baptism cannot be “on the sacerdotal list at all.” By Canon XXVI., an unmarried person once admitted to the clergy cannot be permitted to marry. These are the two cases referred to by our author. In the Greek churches this rule holds to this day; and the Council of Nice refused to prohibit the married clergy to live in that holy estate, while allowing the traditional discipline which Hippolytus had in view in speaking of a violation of the twenty-sixth traditional canon as a sin. As Bingham has remarked, however, canons of discipline may be relaxed when not resting on fundamental and scriptural laws.

XIV.

(Attempt to call themselves a Catholic Church, p. 131.)

The Callistians, it seems, became a heretical sect, and yet presumed to call themselves a “Catholic Church.” Yet this sect, while Callistus lived, was in full communion with the Bishop of Rome. Such communion, then, was no test of Catholicity. Observe the enormous crimes of which this lawless one was guilty; he seems to antedate the age of Theodora’s popes and Marozia’s, and what Hippolytus would have said of them is not doubtful. It is remarkable that he employed St. Paul’s expression, however, ὁ ἄνομος,¹¹²⁹

1129 2 Thess. ii. 8.

XV.

(Callistians, p. 131.)

Bunsen remarks that Theodoret speaks of this sect¹¹³⁰

1130 Bunsen, p. 134; Theodor., tom. iv. pt. i. p. 343, ed. Hal. 1772.

1131 St. Hippol., p. 315.

XVI.

(The cause of all things, p. 150.)

When one looks at the infinite variety of opinions, phrases, ideas, and the like, with which the heresies of three centuries threatened to obscure, defile, and destroy the revelations of Holy Scripture, who can but wonder at the miracle of orthodoxy? Note with what fidelity the good fight of faith was maintained, the depositum preserved, and the Gospel epitomized at last in the Nicæno-Constantinopolitan definitions, which Professor Shedd, as I have previously noted, declares to be the accepted confession of all the reformed, reputed orthodox, as well as of Greeks and Latins. Let us not be surprised, that, during these conflicts, truth on such mysterious subjects was reflected from good men’s minds with slight variations of expression. Rather behold the miracle of their essential agreement, and of their entire harmony in the Great Symbol, universally accepted as the testimony of the ante-Nicene witnesses. The Word was Himself the cause of all created things; Himself increate; His eternal generation implied in the eternity of His existence and His distinct personality.

XVII.

(Tartarus, p. 153.)

I am a little surprised at the innocent statement of the learned translator, that “Dr. Wordsworth justifies Hippolytus’ use of this word.” It must have occurred to every student of the Greek Testament that St. Peter justifies this use in the passage quoted by Wordsworth, which one would think must be self-suggested to any theologian reading our author’s text. In short, Hippolytus quotes the second Epistle of St. Peter¹¹³²

1132 ταρταρώσας, 2 Pet. ii. 4. A sufficient answer to Dr. Bunsen, vol. iv. p. 33, who says this Epistle was not known to the primitive Church.

1133 See Speaker’s Comm., ad loc.

XVIII.

(For Christ is the God, p. 153.)

Dr. Wordsworth justly censures Bunsen for his rendering of this passage,¹¹³⁴

1134 St. Hippol., p. 301, with original text.

1135 Vol. i. p. 141, etc.

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