HIPPOL'ETIIS, the name of several saints and martyrs of the early church, the chief interest is concentrated upon one who is believed to have flourished in the early part of the 3d c., to have been bishop of Portus, near-Rome, and to have suf fered martyrdom under Alexander Severus. All the facts connected with the history of this saint have long been the subject of much doubt and controversy; and the interest of the discussion has been much heightened of late years by the discovery of a very curious and important work, certainly of the age of the supposed Hippolytus, and calcu lated, if a genuine work of that author, to throw a most curious light upon the early history of the clinreh. The work in question was one of several Greek MSS. obtained at Mt. Athos in 1842, by M. Menas, an agent of the French government, and was pub lished in 1851, at the expense of the university of Oxford, to which it was recommended as a work of exceeding interest for the history of the early church, by M. Miller. who undertook the task of editing it. M. Millcr published it as a work of Origen, under the title of Origenis Philosophumena. The late baron Bunsen was th4 first to conjecture that the true author was Hippolytus, but lie-was mistaken as to tits particular Work of Hippolytus which he ..00k it to be; and for a time the question of the authorship remained in much uncertainty. Some critics cull adhcred to time opinion that the author 'aortic ascribed the work to the Roman Cams; others, .
again, to Tertullian; and others, in floe, to some unknown Novatian heretic. The result of the discussion, however, seems to be that although Bunsen was mistaken in supposing this treatise to be a work of Hippolytus, has described as a "little treatise against heresies," by that author, yet it is in reality a larger treatise on the same subject and by the same author.
There still remained, however, a further question, namely, Who is the Hippolytns who is to be regarded as the author? Without reckoning many later saints of that name, Dr. Doflinger, in his Hippolytus and Kallistus, enumerates at least six contemporaneous, or nearly contemporaneous, with the supposed Hippolytus of Portus. It must suffice to state that although not absolutely certain, the opinion that the author of the Philoso phu me lin was the Hippolytus already known in the ancient church as a writer and as a martyr, has met with almost universal acceptance.
From the autobiographical details contained in the treatise, added to the particulars already known, we learn that this Hippolytus, the time and place of whose birth are uncertain, was, about the year 218, bishop of Portus, near Ostia, a suburban see of Rome, and us such, a member of the ecclesiastical council of that city. This fact
receives a very decisive confirmation from a statue discovered in Rome in 1561, inscribed with the name of Hippolytus, the title of his see. " Portuensis," and the paschal cycle of which Hippolytus is known to have been the author. In the persecu tion of Maximin, 235, Hippolytus was exiled to the island of Sardinia, from which he was permitted soon afterwards to return; but in a new outbreak of the persecution, he • as put to death, probably in 239. Probably, from the connection of his see with the Roman church, Hippolytus took an active part in the affairs of that church, and ,ed himself in violent opposition to the bishop Callistus, whom he denounces in the treatise in the most unmeasured terms, both as to his private character and his public administration, as a person of most disreputable antecedents, as well as criminally hx in the government of the church, and especially in the administration of penance, Liter his election to the see. The tone which he adopts toward the Roman bishop, .deed, is so disrespectful as to appear to the Protestant critics a clear and conclusive vidence that, in the church of the 3d c., that bishop cannot have possessed the suprein cy which the advocates of tile papal pretensions ascribe to him. It is difficult, in truth, o conceive any bishop in the modern Roman system addressing the pope iu such terms is those which Hippolytus applies to Callistus.
The Roman Catholic critics reply that the very violence of the language employed, tnd the unscrupulous nature of the imputations, contain their own refutation; and they Contend that uo argument can be founded on Hippolytus's opposition to the authority of the Roman bishop, inasmuch as not only the opinions expressed in this very treatise, but also the direct testimony of Prudentius (hymn xi. v. 170-180), show him to have been tainted with the Novatian heresy, or rather, although somewhat earlier, with the same opinions which in Novatus were condemned as heretical, and which in the Novatian schism. The validity of this plea, however, is strongly controverted by Bunsen. The works of Hippolytus, which are numerous, and which comprise dogmatical, exegetical, ascetic, and chronological treatises, were first published in a collected form by Fabricius, at Hamburg, 1716-18. They are also found in the second volume of Gallan dus.—See Bunsen's Hippolytus and his Age (1852; 2d ed. 1854); Miller's Origenis phumena (Oxford, 1851); Hollinger's Hippolytus awl Kallistus (Regensburg. 1858); Words worth's St. Hippolytus and the Church of Bone in the Third Century (Lond. 1853).