The Refutation of All Heresies is a Christian treatise in ten books, written in Greek at Rome in the early third century CE and ascribed to Hippolytus of Rome; the attribution is disputed. Its aim is to show that each Christian sect it opposes drew its teaching from Greek philosophy, mystery cult, astrology or magic rather than from scripture, and so it begins with a survey of those sources before turning to the sects themselves.
Two books are given here, both from the survey of sources. Book I lists the philosophers, from Thales and Pythagoras through Socrates, Plato and Aristotle to the Stoics and Epicurus, with the Indian Brahmans and the Celtic Druids, and summarises their doctrines. Book IV, its opening lost, begins in an account of astrology and goes on to the tricks of magicians, physiognomy and number-lore, closing the four books on what he calls earthly philosophy. Books II and III are lost; Books V to X, on the sects and on the author's own faith, are not included here.
Book I circulated separately in the manuscripts of Origen under the title Philosophoumena. Books IV to X are known from a single fourteenth-century manuscript brought from Mount Athos to Paris in 1842.
Hippolytus of Rome Refutation of All Heresies: summary and contents (PDF)
Hippolytus of Rome Refutation of All Heresies: summary and contents (Markdown)
Contents
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Αʹ Book I
Hippolytus opens his refutation with the Greek philosophers from whom, he holds, the heretics drew their ideas. He lists the natural philosophers from Thales and Pythagoras to Hippo, the moralists Socrates and Plato, and Aristotle the dialectician, then summarises their doctrines, among them Parmenides and Leucippus, alongside the Stoics, Epicurus, the Indian Brahmans and the Celtic Druids. He ends by faulting them for taking the parts of creation for the divine and failing to know its maker.
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Δʹ Book IV
Its opening lost, the book begins in the middle of an account of astrology, with the bounds of the planets in each sign, their attendance and their aspects. Hippolytus goes on to the tricks of magicians, such as reading a sealed question by means of copper sulphate or writing in milk, and to physiognomy and number-lore, and ends with the nerves of the brain, which he says Simon and Valentinus borrowed, closing his four books on earthly philosophy.