Note 202 — BOOK IV DIVINERS AND MAGICIANS

In this chapter Hippolytus for the first time sets himself seriously to prove the thesis which he has before asserted, i. e., that all the Gnostic systems are derived from the teachings of the Greek philosophers. His mode of doing so is to compare the elaborate systems of Aeons or emanations of deity imagined by heresiarchs like Simon Magus and Valentinus to the views attributed by him to Pythagoras which make all nature to spring from one indivisible point. Whether Pythagoras ever held such views may be doubted and we have no means of checking Hippolytus’ always loose statements on this point; but something like them appears in the Theaetetus of Plato where arithmetic and geometry seem to be connected by talk about oblong as well as square numbers and the construction of solids from them. If we imagine with the Greeks (see n. on p. 37 supra) that numbers are not abstract things, but actual portions of space, there is indeed a strong likeness between the ideas of the later Platonists as to the construction of the world by means of numbers and those attributed to the Gnostic teachers as to its emanation from God. Whether these last really held the views thus attributed to them is another matter. Cf. Forerunners, II, pp. 99, 100.