Sunday, February 21, 2021

Origen Touching upon the Eucharist in his Commentary on the Psalter

  

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 (MÄ“ 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])