Mind of the Church

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Library / The Catholic Expositors of the Divine Volumes

Folio 277–285

Letter O

O

Odo, first abbot of Cluny, of the order of St. Benedict, once a hearer of Remigius of Auxerre, most skilled in music, chief cantor of the Church of Tours, most studious of the divine Scripture, a distinguished declaimer of homilies — at the request of the brethren he compressed the thirty-five books of the commentaries of the blessed Gregory on Job [the Moralia] into one brief volume. He flourished in the year of the Lord 920.

Odo, Bishop of Cambrai [Cameracensis], a man elegantly learned in the Latin tongue, most skilled in Theology, a distinguished declaimer among his own [people], wrote one book On the Steward of Iniquity [the Unjust Steward]: whose beginning is A certain man was rich.

Odo the Gaul [Gallus], of the Order of Preachers, wrote a scholastic Postil on all the epistles of Paul, which is held at Venice in the library of SS. John and Paul, and begins, Out of the eater came forth meat.

Oecumenius, a Greek author, exceedingly learned — brief, plain, and elegant in explaining the divine Scriptures, and assiduously engaged in unrolling the commentaries of the ancients — collected with skillful care, from the sayings of the most excellent doctors of the Greek church, noble commentaries of annotations on the Octateuch, which he himself, in his commentaries on the epistle to the Hebrews, chapter six, testifies that he wrote. He collected also, with very similar industry, a Catena of explanations on the whole New Testament; of which I have read:

Now the names of the authors, out of whose explanations it is woven together, are these: Papias, Clement, Methodius, Dionysius, Irenaeus, Origen, Hippolytus, Athanasius, Eusebius, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa; Acacius, Isidore, Photius, Chrysostom, Gregory Nazianzen, Severian, Gennadius, Arethas, Andrew, Cyril, Theodoret. To these explanations Oecumenius inserted his own explanations also, marked with his own name, so that from the title the reader might know both what he had from Oecumenius himself and what from the other fathers. This work John Henten of Nechin [Hentennius Nechliniensis], a Hieronymite monk, translated into the Latin tongue, with annotations added on several passages in which the edition of Oecumenius differs from the Vulgate Greek edition of the New Testament. He flourished (as appears from the times of the authors who are cited by him) after the year of the Lord 800.

Olympiodorus the Monk, a Greek by nation, a Philosopher of the Peripatetic school, whose illustrious commentaries on Aristotle’s Meteorology are extant, wrote in Greek, according to the threefold sense, a concise, learned, brief, and elegant narration on Ecclesiastes; which Zenobio Acciaioli [Acciaiolus] the Florentine, into La-[tin → p297]

…[Zenobio Acciaioli] translated [Olympiodorus the Monk on Ecclesiastes] into Latin. Its beginning is A sure knowledge of things.

Olympiodorus the Deacon, a Greek by nation, a learned man, wrote in Greek most learned and most elegant commentaries on the whole book of Job, according to the sense of the letter; of which many fragments still survive in the Greek Catena on Job, which is held at Genoa in the Sauli Library. The work begins ὑπόθεσις μὲν ἡμῖν [Our theme indeed…]. But the whole work is kept in the Vatican library.

Orsiesius [Oresiesis], a monk and hermit, colleague of Pachomius and Theodore, monks dwelling in the solitudes of Egypt, a man fully instructed in the holy Scriptures, gathered from the divine oracles a volume containing the whole instruction of monastic discipline, in which the whole Old and New Testament is found expounded in compendious disquisitions, only so far as the need of monks [requires]; which, in the manner of a testament, he offered to the brethren near the day of his death. He flourished under Honorius Augustus, in the year of the Lord 420.

Origen Adamantius, of Alexandria by fatherland, son of Leonides the Martyr, a hearer and disciple of Ammonius [Saccas], a most excellent philosopher, in philosophy, and of Clement of Alexandria in the sacred dogmas — a man of such erudition and genius that most learned Greece, the parent of the most fortunate geniuses, never had his equal.1 For, as regards the secular disciplines, he so mastered the Greek and Hebrew tongue, so knew Rhetoric, Dialectic, Geometry, Arithmetic, Music, Astronomy, and Physics, and so embraced all Philosophy — and all the sects of the Philosophers, the authors and champions of the sects and all their assertions and dogmas, and the whole variety of histories and studies — with a certain wonderful and insatiable capacity of mind, that he had philosophers of great name (although strangers to Christ) as followers, admirers, and praisers. Of whose number Porphyry, a most bitter enemy of the Christian name,2 when in those books which he sent forth against our religion he impiously accused the divine Scriptures together with their expositors, and cast reproaches and calumnies against Origen, yet [wrote] among us things most worthy of all praise and commendation, writing plainly in this manner:

“The Christians cling to the follies of the Jewish Scriptures, and affirm that those things which Moses wrote in a rustic and simple style are divinely sanctioned and veiled with figures and enigmas; and they expound them as though filled with immense mysteries — of which absurd kind of exposition the beginning was had from a man whom I, when I was still quite a boy, saw holding the citadel of all erudition; as is also proved from those things which he handed down to the memory of posterity. This is Origen, whose immense glory is held among their masters; who had attained all the secrets of Plato, and had been instructed in the books of Numenius and Cronius and Apollophanes and Longinus and Moderatus and Nicomachus; and among the Pythagoreans the commentaries of the greatest men were not hidden from him. He touched also the volumes of Chaeremon the Stoic and of Cornutus; from which, taking all the secret and mystical things whatsoever are held among the Greeks, and fitting them, with a barbarian custom, to the Jewish superstitions, he turned the glory of the philosophers to the foreign and outlandish dogmas of the Christians.”

This [says] Porphyry, in the third volume against the Christians. But of what sort, and how great, Origen was in the divine Scriptures, we could easily know, if that huge index of the Origenian volumes survived, which Eusebius of Caesarea, in the book On the Life of Pamphilus the martyr, and Jerome, in the epistle to Paula, mother of Eustochium, described.

But in place of a most copious index, the testimonies of the most illustrious Fathers of the Church concerning him can suffice to show this.3 Didymus, first of all, calls him the second master of the Churches after the Apostles. Athanasius calls him a most abundant witness of his [own] faith. Sulpicius Severus asserts that, in that part in which he is approved, he had no equal after the Apostles. Jerome proclaims the same [Origen] the victor of all the sacred expositors, wishing — despite the odium of the name of Origen — to have his understanding of the Scriptures too. Epiphanius and Rufinus report that he elaborated six thousand volumes on the sacred Scriptures.4 Vincent of Lérins, contemporary with both, adds that no mortal wrote more than Origen, whose works it is not only impossible to have read through, but not even to be found. Pamphilus, a most holy martyr, affirms that he fought so bravely and constantly, with the arms of the divine Scripture, against all the heresies of his time, that he overthrew all the edifices of the heretics and the foundations of the diabolical machination. Finally, so great was the sacred doctrine of Origen — joined too with a wonderful sanctity of life — that certain of the highest chiefs of the Church did not sometimes hesitate to say that they would rather err with Origen than think rightly with others.

But although Origen was such and so great, he nevertheless suffered a grievous loss of his labors, by the fraud and fault of the heretics, who contaminated all his works with innumerable heresies,5 so that under the pretext and favor of the name of Origen they might the more easily persuade their impious thoughts and sell them the dearer. Which adulteration of the heretics many — either not noticing it, or believing it to be rather the fault of the author than the corruption of the heretics — rejected Origen, together with his works, among the heretics. But however it be, Origen, at the exhortation of Ambrose of Alexandria (who also supplied his living, paper, books, expenses, and copyists), published, besides infinite exoteric books, also innumerable Exegemata on the whole holy Scripture — that is, volumes of Explanations — which Jerome, in the preface of the commentaries on Ezekiel [dedicated] to Vincent, distinguished into a threefold kind, that is, into Scholia, Homilies, and Tomes.

The first kind, which the Greeks call σχολιαστικόν [scholiastikon], he assigned to the Scholia, which in Latin can be called vacationes [leisure-notes], or ocia, or things excerpted at leisure. In these, whenever leisure was lacking for a full commentary, he briefly touched upon, in a summary way, with certain short annotations, only those things which seemed to him obscure.

But in the second kind, which the Greeks call ὁμιλιαστικόν [homiliastikon], we call [it] Familiar colloquy

…[the second, homiletic kind we call Familiar colloquy] — he placed [here] the sermons and discourses, in which (as the blessed Pamphilus testifies) Origen daily, and as it were extempore, expounded the Scriptures to the people, seven notaries taking [them] down from his mouth, and as many maidens most swift in writing, and other scribes, who handed them down to the monument of posterity. His style in this homiletic kind is familiar, plain, and simple, and foreign to all the pomp of rhetorical apparatus — brief, succinct, and without prolix prefaces and long and frequent digressions, such as many are found in Chrysostom and Augustine in their homilies. But Origen in his homilies touches the historical explanation little and lightly, and that according to the common edition of the Seventy interpreters; but he ascends to the senses of the higher allegorical understanding, and from these descends again to moral topics and brief exhortations.6

In the third kind, which Origen [calls] τόμους [tomous], we name Volumes, Jerome placed the greater commentaries — namely those in which Origen, expounding the divine Scriptures according to the Hebrew verity, gave all the sails of his genius to the breathing winds; and, receding from the land, so fled off into the midst of the deepest senses and the ocean of mysteries, that he brought fear and peril even upon the most learned readers who wished to follow him thither. Yet in treating these so hidden secrets he always used the utmost humility of mind and modesty of words, affirming nothing rashly, but — as one eager to learn — humbly inquiring into each thing, and rather rousing the reader to a common zeal of investigation than teaching; compelling him with these perpetual formulas of admonition, namely: Consider whether perhaps these things which we say can be fitted to the sacred Scripture? Let us see whether we can find this which we say in the divine Scriptures; likewise, I indeed suspect thus; see you whether it can be so; and he wished everywhere to use these and similar little rousings, as befitted a man almost αὐτοδίδακτος [self-taught], and who was the first to undertake the explanation of all the divine Scriptures, not yet attempted by anyone on account of their immense difficulty. He was delighted, too — both in this and in the higher [homiletic] kind — with the structure of allegories, to such a degree that it was objected against him by his rivals that, with the wrappings of allegory and the windings of anagogy, he did violence to the protesting Letter, and destroyed the truth of the Scriptures. He uses also, in this kind chiefly (after the imitation of Clement his teacher), many apocryphal testimonies from the most ancient monuments of hidden volumes, such as are the book of the Shepherd [Hermas], the book of Enoch, the Gospel according to the Hebrews, the Preaching of Peter, the Prayer of Joseph, the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, and others like these.

To these three kinds of exposition Eusebius adds also two others, namely ἐπιστολικόν [epistolikon] and ἑρμηνευτικόν [hermeneutikon] — that is, the Epistolary, and [the kind] of Interpretations. In the Epistolary [kind] he explained, by written-back epistles, questions from the divine Scripture sent to him by the letters of friends; among which is that magnificent [letter] on the history of Susanna, [addressed] to Julius Africanus, most celebrated among the hundred Origenian epistles collected by Eusebius. In the Interpretative, or Translational kind, are finally to be placed all the translations of the divine Scripture which he embraced in the Hexapla, the Octapla, and in the codices of the Palestinian edition. In this so manifold variety of labors, then — although Origen always showed himself the same — yet the divine Ambrose, writing to Clementianus, judges that he was far greater in the Old Testament than in the New.

But those volumes, out of each of these orders [genres], which still survive, or are found only cited by ancient authors, are these:

Collections of various Translations of the whole Old Testament. For Origen — as Epiphanius writes in the book On Weights and Measures — after the four editions (namely of the Seventy interpreters, of Aquila, of Symmachus, and of Theodotion) found two other Greek translations: one, together with very many other Hebrew and Greek volumes, in the city of Jericho in Palestine, which he called the Fifth; but the other on the Actian shore at Nicopolis, hidden in jars, which he named the Sixth edition. Out of which six versions Origen composed two different kinds of copies, namely the Hexapla and the Octapla. And first the Hexapla: in whose codices he so distinguished six little columns through each page, that —

And on account of this kind of composition, as Eusebius notes, he named these copies ἑξαπλᾶ [Hexapla, “sixfold”]. For which reason also — as Suidas and John Zonaras testify — they are by some called Τετραπλᾶ [Tetrapla], that is, “Quadruple,” on account of the four Greek editions (namely of the Seventy, of Aquila, of Symmachus, and of Theodotion). Then, after these sixfold copies, Origen again composed other Octapla [eightfold] copies, in which — eight little columns being arranged through each page — he added the fifth and sixth editions after the four aforesaid; which, because he had found them without the title of their authors, he called the one of them the Fifth (prefixing to it an inscription by the letter E, the index of the number five among the Greeks), but the other he named the Sixth, and inscribed on it the mark of the number six, ϛ — namely that which the Greeks call episēmon. And these copies were afterward called Octapla, on account of the number of the eight columns.

Which [Octapla], after Origen had completed [them] not without immense labor, he undertook again another translation for the daily use of the Church; which he compounded out of two editions — namely the Seventy and Theodotion’s — mixing both together, and marking with asterisks what was lacking [in the Seventy], but with obeli and metobeli what seemed superfluously added. Which edition, when afterward it had been divulged by Pamphilus the martyr and by Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, published

…[when it had been] divulged [by Pamphilus and Eusebius], it was called the Palestinian translation, because all the Churches of Palestine and Syria received the reading of it in their daily lections. Origen mentions this labor published by himself, in the eighth treatise on Matthew and in the sixth tome on John.

He wrote also a book On the interpretation of the Hebrew names occurring in the sacred letters, which Justin mentions in the book of Questions, and Epiphanius in the book On Weights and Measures.

He composed also Stromata, that is, [a work] of variegated [work], ten books: in which, comparing the sentences of the holy Scriptures and of the Philosophers, he confirmed all the dogmas of the Christian religion from the sayings of the Philosophers. The ninth and tenth of these books he completed wholly in a comma-style [clause-by-clause] exposition of the book of Daniel and of the whole epistle to the Galatians.

He then dictated, on the first four chapters of Genesis, thirteen Tomes of continuous explanation, most filled with the deepest senses and more sublime mysteries — that is, from the beginning of the book down to that sentence of the fourth chapter, Everyone who kills Cain shall be punished sevenfold. In the exposition of which, as Jerome in the Questions to Damasus left attested, he composed the twelfth and thirteenth tome by dictation. Of these, as I judge, nothing at present survives, except a certain Disputation On the Stars and Fate, comprised in three leaves, which is held in Eusebius, book 6, On the Evangelical Preparation, chapter 9. I suspect that these tomes perished — the ancient Fathers so wishing it — on account of many suspect dogmas sprinkled in them; concerning which some are reviewed in the following book, in the censures of the book of Genesis.

He published besides, as Rufinus indicates in the 2nd volume against Jerome, two books of homilies on Genesis; of which only seventeen, on various passages of the same book, have come down to us, namely:

He elaborated also other, almost innumerable, lucubrations on the Octateuch, of whose number are:

On Exodus, one book of Excerpts, or Annotations, cited by Rufinus in the aforesaid place. Likewise, one book of homilies on Exodus, of which now, from Jerome’s version, only thirteen survive, namely:

On Leviticus, one book of Excerpts, which Rufinus recalls in the work already mentioned. Likewise, on Leviticus, one book of homilies from various passages, of which sixteen are held as translated by Jerome, namely:

On Numbers chapter 1, On the first numbering of the children of Israel, 1 homily.

(The page opens completing the last entry of p. 299 — “On Numbers 3, On the twenty-two thousand Levites, 1 homily.”)

On Joshua chapter 1, On the beginning of the book of Joshua, 1 homily.

On Judges chapter 2, On that the people served the Lord under Joshua, 1 homily.

On 1 Kings chapter 2 [Vulgate Regum; = 1 Samuel], On the Song of Hannah, 1 homily.

On Job he issued many Homilies, or Treatises, which Jerome mentions in writing against Vigilantius. In place of these we now have, inserted among the Origenian volumes, a twofold work of exposition: the one very prolix, distinguished into three books, containing an exposition from the opening of the history of Job down to the middle of the third chapter; the other, which quite briefly and almost paraphrastically sets forth the historical sense of the whole book of Job, lately translated from the Greek by the industry of Joachim Périon. But neither is Origen’s, although both are learned and worth reading. For, besides that the phrasing of both, and their method of teaching, is far removed from Origen’s diction, this too is to be added: that the author of the former work, contrary to Origen’s custom, abounds in almost countless battologies [vain repetitions], and consumes much time while he fashions for the persons speeches longer than is fitting, and by apostrophe speaks now to Job, now to the devil, and amid all this celebrates the combat of Lucian the Martyr, and commemorates the name of Homousius [Homoousios] and the opinion of the Homousians.7

In the latter work, however — in which, contrary to Origen’s manner, he keeps to the bare letter — he also expounds those words of Job’s wife which are found in the Greek codices in the second chapter, and which are rejected by Origen himself as apocryphal and adventitious [spurious]. Next he brings in an exposition of Lucian the Martyr on the third chapter of Job, and in the seventh and in the eighth chapter he refutes the Manichaeans by name, and in the thirty-eighth chapter he makes mention of the Homousianists. But it is established that both Lucian the Martyr and the Manichaeans lived after Origen, and that the very name of Homousius and of the Homousians came into being long after Origen’s time. Again, in the same 38th chapter, he condemns the opinion of those who affirm

…[those who] affirm the stars to be animate [ensouled] — which is Origen’s own peculiar dogma.8 In each work there are read certain few little points worthy of censure, which you will find noted in the following book of censures.

On the Psalter also Origen exhibited a twofold labor. For he wrote — as Jerome indicates in the preface to the Psalms — an Enchiridion [Handbook] on all the Psalms, in a comma-style, or clause-by-clause, kind of exposition, annotated with terse and necessary little interpretations. He then composed, for the sake of Ambrose of Alexandria, the amplest narrative expositions upon the Psalter, following the order of the edition of the Seventy interpreters, of Aquila, of Symmachus, of Theodotion, and of the fifth and sixth editions; and, first of all the Greeks — as Jerome in his letter to Augustine is witness — he published upon the whole body of the Psalms very many tomes. Of these the same Jerome relates that he translated seven tomes, or treatises, that is, from the tenth psalm up to the sixteenth. Best known among his other treatises on the Psalter is the exposition of Psalm 1, which, on account of the variety of very great matters, is discussed in almost all the writings of the ancients.

There are still extant, under Origen’s name, three Treatises on the Psalms, namely on Psalms 36, 37, and 38, which Rufinus — without indicating the name of their author — asserts that he translated from Greek into Latin, and, for the greater convenience of readers, divided into nine homilies. Trithemius in his Catalog relates that he saw 150 Treatises of Origen on the Psalter, whose beginning was, Blessed is the man, etc. This Psalm. But in Epiphanius, and in the Greek Catena of the Psalms, the preface of Origen on the Psalms so begins: Κεκλεῖσθαι καὶ ἐσφραγίσθαι τὰς θείας γραφάς [so printed; the 16th-c. Greek type is hard] — that is, That the divine Scriptures are shut up and sealed.

After these Origen worked out Commentaries on the Proverbs of Solomon, cited by St. Pamphilus in his Apology.

On Ecclesiastes also, Explanations, of which Methodius, bishop of Olympus, makes mention in his book On the Resurrection.

Likewise, ten books of Commentaries on the Song of Songs: of which he wrote the first five at Athens, and finished the other five after returning to Caesarea. He also had, on the same book, some Homilies to the people, of which Jerome translated two, having prefixed at their front a little epistolary preface to Pope Damasus; in which he set forth an encomium both of the commentaries and of the homilies, in these words:

ORIGEN, though in all other things he has surpassed everyone, in the Song of Songs surpassed even himself. For, having completed ten volumes — which reached almost to twenty thousand verses — he discoursed, first upon the Seventy interpreters, then upon Aquila and Symmachus and Theodotion, and finally upon the fifth edition, which he writes he found on the shore of Actium, so magnificently and so openly that it seems to me there was fulfilled in him what is said, The king has brought me into his chamber. And so, setting that [larger] work aside — because it is of vast leisure, labor, and expense to translate into Latin things so great, a work so worthy — I have translated these two treatises, which he composed after the manner of everyday speech, for little ones still nursing, more faithfully than elegantly, offering you a taste of his meaning, not [full] food. Do you take note how highly those things are to be esteemed which are great, since even these small ones can so please. Thus far Jerome.

There is also carried about, under Origen’s name, another pious, learned, and eloquent work — or rather a fragment of a work — in which the first two chapters of the Song of Songs are most eloquently and most learnedly explained. In certain old codices this was headed with the name of JEROME. Someone or other divided it into four Homilies, although they are not homilies but a continuous and unbroken explanation. Its beginning is, A little book, an Epithalamium. The Master of the Sentences, in book 3, distinction 29, and St. Thomas, in the Second [part], question 26, cite testimonies from this work under the name of Ambrose. He wrote besides,

On Isaiah, volumes entitled [as follows], namely: upon the whole of Isaiah, in scattered fashion, ΣΗΜΕΙΩΣΕΩΝ [so printed; = σημειώσεων] — that is, one book of Annotations or Excerpts.

Likewise, on a part of Isaiah according to the four editions, up to the vision of the four-footed beasts in the desert; that is, from the beginning of the book up to the thirtieth chapter, thirty tomes of continuous exposition. In these, ranging through the free fields of allegory, by interpreting the names of the several things, he made his own genius [into] the mysteries of the Church. But of these volumes the twenty-sixth book had already perished by Jerome’s time.

Likewise, On the vision of the Four-footed Beasts [Τετραπόδων] in the desert, which begins, The burden of the beasts of the South in a land of tribulation and distress, upon the thirtieth chapter of Isaiah, to Grata, an illustrious woman: two books, which very many have falsely supposed to be inscribed with the name of Origen.

Likewise, upon various passages of Isaiah, 25 Homilies to the people, of which only the nine written below survive [so printed “nine”; the entries below total ten homilies], namely:

On Jeremiah also he is said to have written a huge number of homilies: of which Rabanus [Maurus], archbishop of Mainz, in the preface of his commentaries on Jeremiah, affirms that forty-five were known to him; of which number we have only the fourteen written below, in Jerome’s translation, namely:

- On Jeremiah 12, On the land laid waste, 1 homily.

On the Lamentations [Threnoi] of Jeremiah also Origen wrote, while he was at Alexandria, nine Tomes, of which Nicephorus makes mention in the fifth volume of his History; and, while he was living at Athens, already more than sixty years old, he worked [them] out — Eusebius being witness.

On Ezekiel, 25 Tomes — though before that he had given very many homilies on the same prophet, of which 14 are extant in Jerome’s translation, which are:

On Daniel chapter 13 he wrote to Julius Africanus, in defense of the history of Susanna, one letter — lately translated into Latin by Ambrose [Traversari], of Milan, a Cassinese monk, a most learned man: concerning which Eusebius, in the 6th book of the Ecclesiastical History, thus writes: At that time there was also Africanus, a man renowned in the ecclesiastical Scriptures; whose letter is said to have been written to Origen, objecting to him, or proposing, that the history of Susanna, which is written in Daniel, seemed fictitious and foreign to the prophetic Scripture. To whom Origen, writing back most magnificently, [replied] that one must by no means give ear to the fabrications and frauds of the Jews, but that this alone is to be held for true in the divine Scriptures which the Seventy interpreters translated; for that alone is [truly Scripture] which is confirmed by apostolic authority. Thus far Eusebius.

Again, Origen followed out the whole context of the history of Susanna in the tenth book of the Stromata, in a clause-by-clause explanation; a part of which is now contained in the Hieronymian commentaries on Daniel, inserted by Jerome himself under the title of Origen.

He wrote besides, on the fourteen [so printed; = twelve] Minor Prophets, ἐξηγήσεων — that is, very many books of Narrative-Expositions [Enarrationes] — of which Eusebius complains that he could scarcely find twenty-five. Concerning these Jerome, in the Catalog of writers, thus speaks: I found, on the Twelve Prophets, volumes written by the hand of the blessed Pamphilus the Martyr, which I embrace and keep with so much joy that I believe I possess the wealth of Croesus. For if it is a joy to have one letter of a martyr, how much more so many thousands of verses, through which he seems to me to have signed the traces of his own blood?

Of these books he composed two in particular. On Hosea, one to which he gave the title Περὶ τοῦ πῶς ὠνομάσθαι τοῦ Ὡσηὲ Ἐφραίμ [so printed; the 16th-c. Greek type is hard] — that is, Why Ephraim is [so] called in Hosea — wishing to show that whatever things are said against him [Ephraim] are to be referred to the person of the heretics; and the other, [called] ἀκέφαλον καὶ ἀτέλεστον, so called because it lacks both a head [a beginning] and an end.

Likewise, on Zechariah he wrote two books, expounding allegorically scarcely a third part, from the beginning of the book up to the vision of the four-horse chariots [quadrigae].

Likewise, on Malachi, three books of allegorical exposition.

And these are the things which I have found written by Origen upon the Old Testament. But those which pertain to the New Instrument [Testament] are these:

On Matthew, a threefold kind of explanation, that is: Tomes, Scholia, and Homilies. Of these, first he composed on this whole gospel 36 Tomes; of which the first ten tomes are wanting, the rest survive, namely from the exposition of that passage, Then, having dismissed the crowds, he came into his house, from chapter 13 up to chapter 27 — which the copyists imprudently divided into treatises, or 35 homilies, although not a trace of the homiletic kind appears in them, which [kind] always runs from brief openings into little prefaces and doxologies.

Secondly, he wrote also, on the same Evangelist, one book of the scholastic kind, in which, through clauses and intervals, with certain brief scholia, he briefly annotated whatever seemed to him obscure.

Thirdly, he published, of the homiletic kind, on various passages of Matthew, twenty-five Homilies to the people; of these, those which now survive are these:

On Luke he dictated five Tomes, which are now wanting, and very many Homilies, of

…of which 39 are still extant, which — because they are little wrought out, and because some are sprinkled even with condemned errors — Jerome, their translator, excuses, as having been born from Origen when he was quite young; for some are the preludes of youth, and others the serious [works] of old age. Of these, the first thirty-three homilies explain Luke in a continuous series of exposition, from the beginning of the gospel up to the middle of the fourth chapter; but the six later ones expound certain scattered passages, and are these:

On John’s Gospel, [books] of complete explanation, to Ambrose of Alexandria, 39 Tomes — which Jerome, in the preface to the 39 homilies of Origen on Luke, excuses himself for not having dared to render into the Latin tongue, deterred by the magnitude of the labor and the expense. They lay hidden, unknown to all the Latins down to our age; but lately, out of these, Joachim Périon, a Cassinese monk, first translated nine tomes into Latin. For only so many survived in a very ancient Greek codex, which he obtained from the most illustrious library of the King of the French; and these indeed [are], in many places, mutilated, by no means consecutive, and interpolated — namely the first, second, sixth, tenth, thirteenth, eighteenth, twentieth, twenty-eighth, [and] thirty-second:

These nine tomes of the interrupted [fragmentary] explanation, a certain petty Greekling of uncertain name, by a new kind of imposture, cut apart into thirty-two tomes — so that he might render the work more desirable (swollen by a multitude of numbers and made continuous by the order of arithmetical reckoning) and sell it at a greater price. Deceived by his fraud, Ambrose the Milanese, a Cassinese monk, a man otherwise shrewd and of a clever wit, translated this very work into Latin, and published it in print, divided into thirty-two tomes, thus beginning, Just as the people who once [were] God’s.

He published also, on this gospel, several homilies, but now only two are extant inscribed with his name: one on the beginning of John, the other on the beginning of chapter 20, on Mary weeping at the tomb; of which the former — whose beginning is, The voice of the spiritual eagle — it appears is not Origen’s, both from the names of the Manichaeans and of the Arians commemorated in it, [sects] which arose long after Origen. So much for the expositions of the Gospels; after which, having undertaken to explain Paul, he labored [as follows].

On the Epistle to the Romans, fifteen books of commentaries: concerning which it pleases [me] to append the judgment of Jerome from the little preface which he set before those same commentaries, translated by himself, writing in this manner to Heraclius:9

You compel me, brother Heraclius — me who am willing, carried in a little skiff, to skirt the shore of a tranquil coast and to gather little fishes from the pools of the Greeks — to loose my sails into the deep; and, the work abandoned which I had in hand in translating the homilies of the old man Adamantius [Origen], you urge that I should render in our tongue his fifteen volumes, in which he discoursed upon the epistle of Paul to the Romans: in which [volumes] that [author], while he pursues the Apostle’s meaning, is carried out into so deep a sea that there is great fear in following him thither, lest I be overwhelmed by the magnitude of the meanings, as by the monstrous vastness of the waves. Then, neither do you consider this — that my breath is too slight to fill up his so magnificent throng of speaking. But above all the difficulties is this: that the books themselves are interpolated. For in almost everyone’s libraries there are lacking (by what chance is indeed uncertain) some volumes from the very body [of the work]; and to fill these up in the Latin work, and to give a complete sequence, is not [a thing] of my talent, but, as you believe — you who demand these things — perhaps of a divine gift. You add, moreover, that nothing may be lacking to my labors, that I should abbreviate this whole body of fifteen volumes — which the Greek discourse brought forth to almost forty, or more, thousands of verses — and, if it can be done, compress it to half its extent. Commands hard enough, and imposed as if by one who would not know the weight of this work; yet I will attempt [it], if perhaps by your prayers (which seem to me, as to a man, impossible) — with the Lord breathing upon [them] — they may become possible. But let us now hear the man himself, if it seem [good], namely Origen, how he directs the preface of the work undertaken. Thus far Jerome.

There are some who think that the translation of these commentaries is Rufinus’s, the conjecture being taken from the peroration of the translator himself, placed at the end of the whole work. Origen wrote likewise:

On the first Epistle to the Corinthians, commentaries, of which Jerome makes mention in the letter to Pammachius, which begins, Of Christian modesty.

On the Epistle to the Galatians he elaborated various [works] according to the threefold kind of exposition, that is: five Tomes of continuous and complete narration on the whole epistle. Likewise, out of the ten books of his Stromata, he completed the tenth volume, in a clause-by-clause discourse, upon the explanation of this epistle. Likewise, one book of Eklogai [Ἐκλογῶν], or Excerpts. Likewise, not a few Treatises to the people; all of which the injury of time has consumed. Jerome mentions these in his letter to Augustine.

On the Epistle to the Ephesians, three Tomes, which Jerome — in the preface of his commentary on the epistle to the Ephesians, and in the first apology against Rufinus — confesses that he followed.

On the Epistle to the Colossians, 3 books of commentary, of which Pamphilus cites the third book in his Apology.

On the first Epistle to the Thessalonians, several books, of which Jerome cites the third in his letter to Minervius and Alexander, saying: Origen, in the third volume of the Expository [works] [ἐξηγηματικῶν] on the Epistle of Paul to the Thessalonians (the first), after many things which he discoursed in a varied and prudent discourse, introduced these; in which there is no doubt to anyone that Acacius drew off [borrowed] very much, etc.

On the Epistle to Titus, one book, a fragment of which is cited by Pamphilus in the Apology.

On the Epistle to the Hebrews, several books, of which Pamphilus cites a fragment in the Apology.

These, then, are Origen’s works upon the sacred Letters. But concerning his life and sanctity, and concerning the rest of the exoteric volumes composed by him outside the explanation of the divine Scriptures, if anyone desires to know more, let him read Eusebius in the 6th book of the Ecclesiastical History. Many most illustrious men wrote, in defense of Origen’s works, various apologetic books,10 namely: Pamphilus of Caesarea, the most holy martyr, one book, to which is joined one book of Gregory [Thaumaturgus], bishop of Neocaesarea, On the Praises of Origen; Eusebius of Caesarea, the bishop, six books; Didymus of Alexandria, one book; Methodius of Olympus, one book — a Palinode [recantation] of the Origen he had once censured; Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen, by a common labor, one book; Rufinus, presbyter of Aquileia, to Macarius, two books; John Pico della Mirandola, one book; Jacques Merlin of Saint-Victurnien, one book.

Origen flourished under Alexander [Severus], son of Mamaea, down to Gallus and Volusianus his son — that is, down to the seventieth year of his age — and he died at Tyre, and was buried in the same place, in the year 260 from the birth of Christ.

Orontius Finaeus [Oronce Finé], a Dauphinois, royal professor of mathematics at Paris, drew a Chorography of the lands necessary for the understanding of sacred Scripture, which they call The Peregrination of St. Paul, in the year of the Lord 1540.

Orosius, a Presbyter, a Spaniard by nation, a man most learned in secular and in divine letters, a disciple of St. Augustine11 — to whom also he wrote his book of Histories, and by whom in turn he was sent from Spain to Bethlehem, to Jerome, to learn the question of the origin of the soul — wrote most praiseworthy commentaries on the Song of Songs, in the year of the Lord 420, Honorius and Arcadius reigning [so printed; Arcadius died in 408].

Otfrid [of Weissenburg], a German by nation, a Benedictine monk of the monastery of Weissenburg, a hearer of Rabanus [Maurus] of Mainz — that most excellent archbishop — a poet, rhetor, philosopher, and theologian, in the opinion of all most learned in the times of Louis, Lothair, and Charles, among many noble monuments of his erudition left three books of commentaries on the whole Psalter; likewise, on the four gospels, to Luitbert, bishop of Mainz, a notable work, digested into five books, which he entitled Gratiam Theotistae [so printed; apparently his Gospel-work in the Teutonic tongue] — its beginning is, By the summit of dignity. He flourished under the Emperor Lothair, in the year of the Lord —— [year left blank in the print].

Othmar Nachtgall [Otomarus Luscinius], a German, of Strasbourg by fatherland, a monk and lector of the monastery of Sts. Ulrich and Afra of Augsburg, a man distinguished both by the example of his life and by no common erudition — at the urging of John Schrot, his abbot — wrote, in polished discourse, to Wolfgang Rem, triumvir of Swabia, an Isagogic [Introductory] book to the mystical understanding of the Psalter: in which he arranged all the recondite and more abstruse expressions of the Psalms according to the order of the letters [alphabetically], and explained their spiritual and allegorical senses purely, aptly, and germanely. The book’s beginning is, Weaned. Quite fittingly, etc. He flourished under Charles V, Augustus, 1520.

Footnotes

  1. Eunapius of Sardis, in the book On the Lives of the Philosophers, writes that Origen was a disciple of Plotinus and a fellow-disciple of Porphyry. ↩

  2. Porphyry was a most bitter enemy of the Christian name. ↩

  3. Testimonies of the Fathers of the Church concerning Origen. ↩

  4. Origen wrote six thousand volumes on the sacred Scriptures. ↩

  5. The works of Origen are contaminated with heresies. ↩

  6. Eunapius of Sardis, in the volume which he wrote On the Lives of the Philosophers, reports that Origen’s style was one of acuteness and precision — praised indeed by Porphyry, but by very many neglected for this reason: that it had no graces of speech nor any charms of eloquence. ↩

  7. The name “Homoousios” arose after Origen’s time. ↩

  8. Origen held the stars to be animate [ensouled]. ↩

  9. The judgment of St. Jerome on Origen’s commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. ↩

  10. Authors who wrote apologetic books for Origen. ↩

  11. Orosius was a disciple of St. Augustine. ↩

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To cite this page

Sixtus of Siena, O.P., “Letter O,” in The Catholic Expositors of the Divine Volumes, English translation, Mind of the Church, https://mindofthechurch.com/works/bibliotheca-sancta-iv/013-letter-o/.

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