Note 664 — Chapter IV

These were exceedingly voluminous, and although several of them have perished, those which remain throw great light on one of the most obscure periods in the history of the church, and vindicate the title of Origen of the West, bestowed on Hippolytus by Pressensé. Among his most important works were a commentary on the greater part of the Old and New Testament, treatises on Antichrist, on the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, on Good and the Origin of Evil, on God and the Resurrection. He was especially noted, moreover, as a vigorous and skilful polemic, and wrote against Platonism and Judaism, and, as we have seen, (page 173,) against Callixtus, bishop of Rome, for his pantheistic heresy. His great work, however, is that entitled the Philosophoumena. “It is a vast repertory,” says Pressensé, “reviewing all the doctrinal controversies of the church from the earliest ages and most obscure beginnings of Gnosticism. Christian antiquity has left us no more valuable monument than the treatise “On all the Heresies” of Hippolytus, discovered a few years since among the dusty treasures of a convent of Mount Athos.”