Homilies on the Psalms: Codex Monacensis Graecus 314 by Origen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Homilies on the Psalms: Codex Monacensis Graecus 314 by Origen Mark Randall James Origen. Homilies on the Psalms: Codex Monacensis Graecus 314. Translated by Joseph W. Trigg. [The Fathers of the Church, Volume 141.] (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press: 2021. Pp. xii, 486. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-8132-3319-2.) One of the most exciting events in recent patristic scholarship was Marina Pradel’s 2012 discovery of twenty-nine of Origen’s homilies on the Psalms, hiding in plain sight in the manuscript collection of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich. The eminent scholar Lorenzo Perrone quickly and conclusively identified these anonymous homilies as belonging to Origen, delivered in Caesarea near the end of his life. In collaboration with Pradel, Emanuela Prinzivalli, and Antonio Cacciari, Perrone rapidly produced an excellent critical edition.1 Thanks to Joseph Trigg, these homilies are now available to an English-language readership. Together with Trigg’s learned introduction and illuminating notes, they provide a new window onto the work and the world of one of the Church’s most influential teachers. [End Page 790] For Origen, the Psalms were not primarily liturgical texts. As Trigg observes, there is very little evidence of Christian liturgical use of the Psalms in the third century (p. 20). Instead, Origen regards the Psalms as “patterns” for imitation (Hom Ps 15.2.4), pedagogical texts that guide the soul’s deification by forming how one speaks. (Karen Jo Torjesen’s classic study of Origen’s hermeneutic procedures, which begins with an analysis of the Psalm homilies then extant in Latin translation, remains an excellent guide to these new Greek texts.2) These new homilies show how much Origen envisioned deification as a process of linguistic formation. Even when the proper speaker (prosopon) of a psalm is the divine Logos, Origen teaches human beings how to use and imitate his divine words as they come to share his divine nature.3 As Trigg rightly emphasizes, the Psalms (like the rest of the Septuagint) were often a culturally and linguistically alien literature to Origen’s third-century Hellenized community (pp. 10–12). Trigg aims to preserve the Septuagint’s linguistic difficulty, sometimes leading to translations that will sound clunky to the ears of modern readers, accustomed to smoothed-out contemporary translations, as in his rendering of Psalm 15:57b (LXX): “yet also until night my kidneys disciplined me” (p. 61). Origen brings the full weight of his grammatical training to bear resolving linguistic difficulties, from infelicitous Hebrew syntax to unfamiliar words, some of which Origen correctly recognized as novel coinages (Hom Ps 36.1.1). The homilies also contain familiar defenses of Origen’s strategy of reading allegorically, sometimes tinged with humor. As Trigg observes, “[Origen] asks those who resist figurative interpretation if they actually think that the angels have kitchen utensils for cooking manna or a brass section that will play the trumpet of doom” (p. 8). Trigg’s translation happily eschews the unhelpful term “literal.” I cannot agree, however, with Trigg’s distinction between lexis (wording) and rheton (statement): [Origen] uses the grammatical term lexis to refer to the actual words of Scripture and rheton to refer to the immediate, intuitive sense of those words. The first two columns in the Hexapla are the lexis in Hebrew letters and transliterated in Greek characters. The remaining columns translate the rheton of that lexis. The rheton is simply what the words say, even if it ascribes a “hand” to God or “doors” to heaven. (pp. 31–32) Trigg is right that Origen always distinguishes the words of scripture from their immediate sense when taken at face value. But for Origen, rheton too refers to the actual words themselves. Thus when exhorting his hearers to memorize scripture, [End Page 791] Origen says, “Often someone comes seeking to understand concepts laid up in the Holy Scripture . . . but not knowing an evangelical statement [rheton], nor remembering an apostolic logos. . .” (Hom Ps 80.2.5). To memorize the evangelical rheton is simply to learn the words of the gospels. By contrast, to signify the immediate understanding of the words, Origen can use either lexis or rheton, usually in a prepositional phrase. For...