All these things—to
take the Psalm, to give a drum and so on, and to do what has been said
already—are ordinances to Israel, to the one seeing God. And it is a judgement,
pronounced by the God of Jacob: “he set it as a testimony against Joseph”
(Ps 80.6a). He made this ordinance “a testimony against Joseph.” What is
the testimony, and to whom was it made? Not to the Patriarch Joseph but to the
one from Joseph, the one from Ephraim, to Jeroboam, who divided the people.
These oracles become a testimony against that man. This has often been
interpreted by us against those who are dividing from the Church, because they
are heterodox; thus the oracles and ordinances of God become a testimony
against that person. (Psalm 80 Homily 1 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], 420)
In the footnote to the above, we read the
following from Trigg, the translator of this work:
Again addressing the
question, “Who is worthy?” Origen states that, to refute heretics in advance,
the prophet reveals what should otherwise remain secret, namely that Hebrew,
the language of the Old Testament, is actually the language for speaking to
God. In rejecting the Old Testament, by implication, heretics are rejecting
God. In his homily, Origen’s own speech falls into alignment with Asaph. By the
logic of Origen’s interpretation so far, someone such as he with fuller access
to divine mysteries—things not known to, or knowable by, simple Christians—may
disclose them in the restricted circumstances symbolized by the new moon. Thus
Origen, like Asaph, may share secrets about the beginning and end of creation
with those who deny the goodness of the creator-god because those secrets
testify to the goodness of the creator. Such motivated by fear, so sharing them
entails risk. In Cels. 5.15 we see this principle applied to similar
criticisms from a Platonist. On the way in which Jeroboam’s schism prefigures
Christian heresy . . . (Ibid., 420 n. 72, emphasis added)
