Sunday, February 21, 2021

Origen: God (the Father) Can Choose to become Spatially Present

  

The rest of this passage is “God in his holy place” (Ps 67.6b. The stumbling block in this statement is the ascription of a “place” to God; God has no spatial location). God, whom neither heaven nor earth contains—for all creation is smaller than the creator—when he chooses, becomes spatially present; he becomes spatially present in a holy place, for wherever a place is defiled and profane, God cannot be there. What, then, is the holy place? That place, concerning which the Apostle tells you, “Do not give a place to the devil” (Eph 4.27. Origen asks “what” the place is, not “where” it is) concerning which Solomon says to you, “If the spirit of one having authority rises upon you, do not cede your place” (Eccl 10.4). But Judas had given a place to the devil, so that “with the sop Satan entered into him” (Jn 13.27). (Psalm 67 Homily 2 in Homilies on the Psalms: Codex Monacensis Graecus 314 [The Fathers of the Church; trans. Joseph W. Trigg; Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2020], 175)