A New Edition of the Elenchos of Pseudo-Hippolytus : David Litwa’s Refutation of All Heresies

The work entitled Refutation of All Heresies (in Greek : Ὁ κατὰ πασῶν αἱρέσεων ἔλεγχος) is definitely one of the most important Christian works that was transmitted to us by antiquity. It is also one of the most intriguing and mysterious. For more than a century and a half, several generations of scholars have scrutinized every aspect of the text although no definitive consensus has ever been reached. Despite notable achievements, current scholarship continues to bear witness to the vagaries of the research. There are, however, some good reasons to be less pessimistic and the publication I am reviewing here is one of them. Before getting to David Litwa’s book, I first would like to offer a number of preliminary remarks. The Refutation of all Heresies (I will come back to the title) had a hidden life before it was (re)discovered by nineteen-century scholars, antiquarians and controversialists. As early as 1701, a publication by Jacob Gronov entitled Origenis Philosophoumenωnsic fragmentum (Leiden), followed by three others in the first half of the eighteenth century, had made known a work with the title Ὠριγένους κατὰ πασῶν αἱρέσεων ἔλεγχοι, “Refutations of all Heresies by Origen.” In some of the five manuscripts in existence then, there was reference to an additional title, Ὠριγένους φιλοσοφουμένων. Accordingly, the work would go on to be circulated under the title, Φιλοσοφούμενα. At that time, it consisted of an overview of Greek philosophy beginning with Thales (I, 1) and ending with the Sceptics (I, 23), the Brahmans (I, 24), and the Druids (I, 25) for a total of some twenty “philosophers” or “schools.” These so-called Philosophoumena have since been one of the major ancient doxographies of Greek philosophy along with Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers. The public life of the Refutation of All Heresies began in 1842, due the initiative of a “precursor” in the person of Constant(inos) Minoïde Mynas. In the 1830s, Mynas, a Greek refugee from what was then Ottoman Greece, was teaching Greek literature in Paris and doing research on the Greek manuscripts of the Bibliothèque royale. In 1840, he was officially dispatched by the French government to the Levant in order to visit Greek convents in the Turkish Empire and Greece, especially those on Mount Athos, in order to copy or buy Greek manuscripts. His mission was quite successful and, on February 25^th, 1842, he announced to his sponsors that he acquired nine manuscripts ; one of the texts, in particular, he described as a “Refutation in ten discourses, by Origen, of the heresies of the ancients and those of his time ; the first three (discourses) and part of the fourth are missing.” In addition, Mynas informed that “the name of the author is not mentioned but, according to what he says towards the end of the tenth (discourse), where he expresses his profession of faith, the work seems to be from him,” that is, from Origen. Once he arrived in Paris, Mynas entrusted the manuscript to the Bibliothèque royale where it received the call number Supplément grec 464. The acquisition of the manuscript was announced in January 1844, in Mynas’ final report : “A bombycinus [that is, paper] manuscript, 14^th century, containing a refutation of all heresies. This work, [this time] from an anonymous author, is divided in ten books, but the first three are missing with the end [Supp. grec 464].” Some ten years after Mynas’ acquisition, the manuscript gained greater attention thanks to a French scholar, the Hellenist Emmanuel Miller who, at that time, was active in the Bibliothèque royale. Miller actually published the …