Next is a figurative
expression; who cannot allegorize? Say, you who are stumbling and not reckoning
that we should say these things forcefully, “You have rushed the heads of
the serpent, You have given him as good to the Ethiopians” (Ps 73.14). Do
the Ethiopians, the people from the edges of the inhabited world, actually take
the serpent’s body from God and cut it into pieces, so that they may eat the
flesh of the serpent? Is this notion worthy of the Holy Spirit? Is this worthy
of prophetic grace? Why are they stumbling at logoi that lift up our soul? But
it is possible to set forth that, just as the holy ones eat the body of Christ
and the Lord says: “My flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink” (Jn
6.55), so sinners eat the serpent’s body. Whenever the Valentinians and
Basilideans and the others from the sects make thanksgiving, do they then
actually eat the body of Christ, whom they blaspheme, whom they do not know?
Perish the thought (Mē genoito. This expression is characteristic of the
Apostle Paul, who uses it fourteen times)! But, on the one hand, if we also
pray to eat Christ’s body, then, on the other, pray to eat the body of the
serpent, about whom it is written, “You have given him as food to the
Ethiopians” (Ps 73.14b), those in ignorance, those in darkness (“darkness possibly
indicates a negative symbolism associated with dark skin pigmentation. See the
reproaches of Abba Moses, an Ethiopian, in Alphabetical Apophthegmata Patrum,
Moses 3), those who have been led apart by ignorance and by sins. (Psalm 73
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], 201-2—note here that Origen seems to reject
an ex opere operato approach to the Eucharist and “Real Presence”
instead, arguing that Jesus’ “presence” is contingent upon the recipient having
faith [N.B.: Origen did not hold to a concept of “Real Presence” similar
to Transubstantiation. See here,
here,
and here])