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ART. I. Hippolytus and his Age; or, The Doctrine and Practice of the Church of Rome under Commodus and Alexander Severus; and Ancient and Modern Christianity and Divinity compared. By CHRISTIAN CHARLES JOSIAS BUNSEN, D.C.L. London: Longmans. 1852. 4 vols. 12mo.

WHY this work is in four volumes, or why not in forty, is a question the solution of which rests solely with the author and his publishers. The Chevalier Bunsen merely tapped his mental reservoir at the point indicated by the first word of the title-page, and stopped the vent when he had filled the prearranged measure. Of book-making as an art, he has less than an intelligent child's conception. Of the contents and limitations of a subject, he takes no note whatever. The only law of association which seems to preside in the collection and collocation of materials is that of juxtaposition in time or space. Such a shapeless work, had it made its first appearance in his native language, would have been no rare phenomenon; for a German theologian or philologist not infrequently sends through the press a volume full of miscellaneous learning bound together by no discernible filament of rhetorical or logical unity. But in England and America, with less prodigality of erudition, we expect of an author some reference VOL. LXXVIII. NO. 162. 1

to form and coherency,-some manifest reasons why what is in his book should be there.

This work betrays still other luculent tokens of its author's nationality. The Anglo-Saxon mind builds upon a broad basis of facts or phenomena successive series of generalizations, pyramid-wise, and culminating in some single law of matter or of mind. The German inverts the pyramid, - reasons from premises intangibly minute to theories that span the universe. With him, a possible indication is often an unanswerable argument; and immense, top-heavy piles of ratiocination rest on a mere hair's breadth of assumed or halfproved fact. Bunsen's reasoning is often of this class; and acquiescence in his conclusions not infrequently demands a voluntary ignoring of the lower strata of the lofty, yet compact fabric. It is this habit of the German mind, that fits it so eminently for the obscurer departments of literary and historical research. In the very nature of things, an isolated event must often leave only the slightest and most questionable tokens of its authenticity, or an unofficial document, only the faintest traces of its authorship and its purpose. A strong effort of the imagination is needed, at once to develop the capacities of the hypothesis thus feebly indicated, and to exclude the score of possible theories which might equally satisfy all the conditions of the problem. But to the vision which can thus follow up in the dark the merest sand-tracks of probability, a blaze of light is dazzling and bewildering; and as to truths and facts patent to all the rest of the world, German philosophy and theology are prone to grope in incurable blindness.

But as to the salient doctrines, the canonical records, and the historical evidence of Christianity, Bunsen is free from the sceptical tendencies of his nation. He is a man of sincere faith and profound religious reverence. His subtlety

is exercised, not in undermining the foundations, but in strengthening the buttresses, of evangelical truth. His intellectual instincts are all in the direction of Christian belief, and his earnestness in its behalf, in numerous instances, supplies the almost invisible thread of inference and hypothetical reasoning. With regard to the unessential details of the

primitive ages, his aim is to disinter whatever may confirm the verities devoutly cherished by his moral nature, and to elicit corroborative testimony from witnesses whom he calls forth from centuries of silence and oblivion. To an English or American reader, the results which he reaches may seem utterly inadequate to the labor expended upon them. We could admit the converse of all his conclusions, without the slightest disturbance to our faith. But in quarters where the microscope seems to be the only instrument employed in the investigation of truth, we cannot overestimate the importance of its use in hands so wary and skilful as his.

In 1842, among other similar treasures, was brought from Mount Athos and deposited in the National Library at Paris a Greek manuscript of the fourteenth century, inscribed “On all Heresies." M. Emmanuel Miller first examined its contents, and procured its issue from the Oxford press, as a recovered work of Origen, the first book having been previously extant, under the title of "Philosophoumena," among the reputed writings of Origen. But no treatise on heresies is named or quoted by any ancient writer among the numerous works of that Father. Moreover, this first book contains certain statements of the author concerning himself which that Father could not have made. He speaks of himself as a bishop, which Origen was not. Subsequent portions of the work imply that it was written by a person who was at the time resident at or near Rome, and a prominent actor in the ecclesiastical affairs of the Roman Church. But Origen never lived at Rome, or made more than a brief visit to that metropolis. This negative argument is beyond dispute; and, in the name prefixed to the treatise, M. Miller is undoubtedly chargeable with an oversight which does little credit to a learned editor.

But there are numerous traces of a work of this character by Hippolytus, Bishop of Portus. Eusebius expressly enumerates such a work among his writings, as does St. Jerome also. Epiphanius cites him as among the principal writers against the Valentinian heresies, which occupy a prominent place in the treatise under discussion. But, what might seem decisive as to the question of authorship, Peter of Alexan

dria not only mentions the work of Hippolytus by name, but quotes a passage from it; and that passage is not found in the manuscript edited by M. Miller. Yet Bunsen argues for the identity of that manuscript with the work of Hippolytus from the absence of the passage thus quoted. Its absence leaves a hiatus in an important train of argument, while the fact which it contains and its argumentative value are elsewhere alluded to in the treatise, and could not in this place have been omitted by the author. The presumption therefore is, that the transcriber, on whose labors the learned world is just entering, occasionally saved work for himself by abridging his author. We cannot, with Bunsen, call this "a curious and striking proof of Hippolytus's authorship"; but it is a rare and happy instance of success in evading what, to a less subtle mind, would seem an insuperable difficulty.

Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople in the ninth century, presents a similar opportunity for parrying objections. He gives a long account of the work of Hippolytus; and while the account is in part applicable to the new-found manuscript, it presents at first sight points of apparent discrepancy. Photius calls the treatise of Hippolytus βιβλιδάριον, a little book; while the Oxford edition, of seven and a half out of the ten books of which the recently discovered work consisted, makes about three hundred octavo pages. But the portion which actually relates to heresies occupies less than two hundred and fifty pages, and Photius's language may be construed without violence to denote only that portion. This, however, might seem to exceed the possible scope of the learned patriarch's diminutive, were it not that he elsewhere uses the same term concerning a book, the contents of which, according to Bunsen's over-generous estimate, would form a volume fully equal to this portion of the manuscript. Again, the treatise which Photius describes enumerates "thirty-two heresies, beginning with the Dositheans, and going down to Noetus and the Noetians." M. Miller's manuscript contains thirty-two heresies, and closes with the Noetians; but it begins with the Ophites, and makes no mention at all of the Dositheans. These last, however, were not a Christian sect, but a sect of mystic Samaritans; and Bunsen supposes that the term had

come inaccurately into use, to designate collectively the sev eral classes of Judaizing Christians which occupy the first place in the recently recovered work. This supposition receives color from that name being thus employed by the author of the appendix to Tertullian's book on heretics. According to Photius, the treatise of Hippolytus was founded on the Lectures of Irenæus; and, though our manuscript contains much that is not to be found in the extant work of Irenæus on Heresies, it coincides to a considerable extent with that work. Photius also says that Hippolytus denied the Pauline origin of the Epistle to the Hebrews. But no mention of that Epistle occurs in the manuscript sub lite. Yet it is easy to maintain, and impossible to deny, that such mention may have been made in the lost introduction, or rather in that which "seems to be wanting," or else in the undoubtedly lost portion of the body of the work, namely, the second, the third, and part of the fourth book. Yet our author seems to forget that he has excluded all this lost matter from the treatise described by Photius, in order to legitimate the diminutive employed in describing it.

There yet remains the question, whether Hippolytus was indeed a Roman bishop; for if he were not, the whole argument falls to the ground. He is repeatedly spoken of by ancient writers as Episcopus Portuensis, sometimes as bishop of the Portus Romanus or Portus urbis Roma. Now there were two places answering to this name. One was the new harbor of the Tiber, opposite to Ostia, formed by Trajan. The other was a place in Arabia, now called Aden. Eusebius enumerates, as the principal Christian authors of the beginning of the third century, Beryllus, "bishop of Bostra in Arabia," Hippolytus, "bishop of another church," and Caius, well known to have been a Roman presbyter. Jerome repeats concerning Hippolytus the designation of Eusebius, and adds, "The name of the town I could not learn." In a work ascribed to Gelasius (about 492), a passage from an undoubted work of Hippolytus is quoted as from a work Hippolyti episcopi et martyris Arabum metropolis." The genuineness of this inscription is doubted; but, if genuine, it may have resulted from a misunderstanding of the passage

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