Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/203

On the Martyrdom ana* Commemorations of St Hippolytus. 193 tions, pushed his theory of the church so far as to exhibit a decided separatist and purist tendency : he even disallows those symbols of the church which are universally accepted, as the Wheat with Tares, and the ark of Noah 12 . In fact he may be said to have broken ground for Novatian ; to have sown the seeds of hatred for papal laxity which in twenty years grew into a crop ripe for the reaping of Novatian the Puritan anti-pope 13 . We come now to a more curious question still. Prudentius next asserts the identity of our father Hippolytus with the mar- tyr Hippolytus, buried in the Ager Veranus, and there venerated on the Ides or 13th of August. The statement was apparently confirmed by the discovery in 1551 of a statue of the Bishop of Portus in this same Ager Veranus. To the Chev. Bunsen and other authors this has seemed so strong a confirmation of the fact that they have wholly ignored or but slightly weighed the existence of a vast mass of tradition, not to say evidence, which would tend to resolve into two this single star of martyrdom. 12 PhUosophumena, p. 290. (ix. 12). 13 Baronius, unaware of the real half-Novatianism of Hippolytus, treated this part of the poem as a mere con- fusion with an Antiochian presbyter of that sect, who at his martyrdom re- canted. The most satisfactory part of Dr Dollinger's chapter on the Name- sake Saints is his demolition of this Antiochian. It is most singular that the very same passage which gave rise to all the hypotheses of Hippolytus being Bp. of Bozra, also originated this other mistake. It is the passage in the Chronicle of Jerome for A. D. 230. "Geminus, Presbyter Antiochenus, Hip- polytus et Beryllus, Episcopus Arabiae Bostrenus clari scriptores habentur," which with a different stopping gives ' 'Presbyter A ntiocJienus Hippolytus. ' ' The early martyrologies mention celebrations (among others one at Antioch) in the end of January of S. Hippolytus martyr. This I shall hope to shew to be without doubt our Hippolytus of Portus, whom Vol. I. June, 1854. Ado in the ninth century, misreading the chronicle, made into an Antiochian Presbyter, and first made over to this personage the Novatian stigma which Prudentius bequeathed to the other. Dbllinger however conceives that this January Hippolytus was from the first a fictitious person derived entirely from the perplexed chronicle. I may be excused for adding here two excellent remarks of Dollinger's on Prudentius. First, that as an orthodox Spaniard the poet would be strongly in- clined to use his licence to give a Nova- tianist colouring to any doctrinal bias of Hippolytus, that the recantation might be a lesson to the Novatianists of Northern Spain in his own time. Se- condly, that Novatian especially prided himself on the adherence to his cause of so many confessors. If a famous Ko- man doctor had in the hour of death abjured him, we must have heard of it in the Correspondence of Cyprian on the subject (p. 61). 13