Crises in the History of the Papacy: A study of twenty famous popes whose careers and whose influence were important in the development of the church and in the history of the worldMcCabe, Joseph
History
Crises in the History of the Papacy: A study of twenty famous popes whose careers and whose influence were important in the development of the church and in the history of the world
McCabe, Joseph
Catholic Church -- History; Papacy -- History
Contemporary with Callistus, the saint and martyr, was Hippolytus, the
scholar and saint and martyr. They were the two shining jewels of the
Roman Church. The many works of Hippolytus had strangely disappeared,
and tradition was not even sure of which town he had been Bishop; but
there was evidence enough to connect him with the Roman Church and to
justify the claim that he was the Origen of the West. When, in 1551,
a broken marble statue of Hippolytus was discovered at Rome, it was
devoutly restored and set up in the Lateran Museum. And just three
hundred years afterwards, in 1851, there was given to the world a
lost work of the saintly scholar, from which it is plain that he was
the first Anti-Pope, and that the Pope whom he opposed and reviled
was Callistus. The first book of this work, the _Refutation of all
Heresies_ (sometimes called the _Philosophoumena_), had long been
known; the manuscript copy of Books IV. to X. was found in a monastery
on Mount Athos in 1842. Now that the true character of Hippolytus is
known, some doubt has been cast upon his scholarship, but it was
considerable for his age and environment. He was one of the very few
scholars of the Roman Church during several centuries, and one chapter
of his work throws an interesting light on the person of Callistus and
on a remarkable phase of the development of the Papacy.
The controversy about the authorship of the book and about the charges
against Callistus has brought to bear upon that period all the
available light; and the modern student will probably find the truth
somewhere between the extremes held by the contending historians of
the nineteenth century.[16] De Rossi himself, indeed, while pretending
to support, entirely discredits the arguments with which Döllinger, in
his years of orthodoxy, sought to defend the impeccability of the Popes
and to prove the moral obliquity of all who opposed them. The Italian
archæologist, it is true, imputes to Hippolytus a malice which goes ill
with _his_ reputation for sanctity, but perhaps we shall be able to
extricate ourselves from this painful dilemma without grave detriment
to the character of either saint.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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