Philosophumena, or The Refutation of All Heresies, Volume I

Philosophumena · Introduction

1. The Text, its Discovery, Publication and Editions

The story of the discovery of the book here translated so resembles a romance as to appear like a flower in the dry and dusty field of patristic lore. A short treatise called Philosophumena, or “Philosophizings,” had long been known, four early copies of it being in existence in the Papal and other libraries of Rome, Florence and Turin. The superscriptions of these texts and a note in the margin of one of them caused the treatise to be attributed to Origen, and its Edito princeps is that published in 1701 at Leipzig by Fabricius with notes by the learned Gronovius. As will be seen later, it is by itself of no great importance to modern scholars, as it throws no new light on the history or nature of Greek philosophy, while it is mainly compiled from some of those epitomes of philosophic opinion current in the early centuries of our era, of which the works of Diogenes Laertius and Aetius are the best known. In the year 1840, however, Mynoïdes Mynas, a learned Greek, was sent by Abel Villemain, then Minister of Public Instruction in the Government of Louis Philippe, on a voyage of discovery to the monasteries of Mt. Athos, whence he returned with, among other things, the MS. of the last seven books contained in these volumes. This proved on investigation to be Books IV to X inclusive of the original work of which the text published by Fabricius was Book I, and therefore left only Books II and III to be accounted for. The pagination of the MS. shows that the two missing books never formed part of it; but the author’s remarks at the end of Books I and IX, and the beginning of Books V and X lead one to conclude that if they ever existed they must have dealt with the Mysteries and secret rites of the Egyptians, or rather of the Alexandrian Greeks, with the theologies and cosmogonies of the Persians and Chaldæans, and with the magical practices and incantations of the Babylonians. Deeply interesting as these would have been from the archæological and anthropological standpoint, we perhaps need not deplore their loss overmuch. The few references made to them in the remainder of the work go to show that here too the author had no very profound acquaintance with, or first-hand knowledge of, his subject, and that the scanty information that he had succeeded in collecting regarding it was only thrown in by him as an additional support for his main thesis. This last, which is steadily kept in view throughout the book, is that the peculiar tenets and practices of the Gnostics and other heretics of his time were not derived from any misinterpretation of the Scriptures, but were a sort of amalgam of those current among the heathen with the opinions held by the philosophers as to the origin of all things.