Origenes Homilien zum Lukasevangelium (review)

This handsome edition of Origen's Homilies on Luke with translation, introduction, and notes corresponds closely to its French counterpart in the Sources Chrétiennes series, published thirty years earlier by Henri Crouzel, François Fournier, and Pierre Périchon. The world it thus makes more accessible is of considerable interest, since it provides, in Jerome's translation and in fairly extensive Greek fragments, the sole surviving example of Origen's preaching on a New Testament book. These homilies resemble Origen's homilies on the Old Testament in their style and content and differ mainly in being shorter and dealing with far briefer texts. Pierre Nautin argues plausibly that the brevity of the texts commented on comes from the New Testament's being read in course concurrently with the Old during a three-year liturgical cycle. Jerome translated thirty-nine homilies, the first thirty-three of which provide a close commentary on Luke 1.1-4.27 with only a few verses not commented on. The remaining six treat pericopes scattered throughout the rest of the book. They thus provide only a small fraction of Origen's preaching on the book. The Greek fragments tend to reduce Origen's text to dry, bare allegories by omitting his justification and application of his interpretations, but they provide substantial amplification of Jerome's translation.

Like Origen's other extant homilies, these build an allegorical exegesis upon solid literary, historical and textual criticism. As usual in his homilies, Origen downplays the more speculative side of his doctrine but does not contradict it, and one can see glimmerings of the system in On First Principles, as when he affirms that the demons are not all evil to the same degree. As in all of Origen's homilies, the character of the original text leads him to emphasize certain distinctive subjects and themes. Thus we have a extensive discussion of the role of John the Baptist in the divine oikonomia and of baptism in the Christian life. The reference to Jesus's growth in Luke 2.40 elicits a fascinating discussion of Christology, relating Christ's growth to his self-emptying in Philippians 2.7. Origen's interpretations are always interesting. From a modern perspective, they run the gamut from reasonable interpretations of authorial intention, as when he identifies the sisters Martha and Mary with theōria and praxis; to sensible application, as when he refers the parable of the talents to teaching; to the sort of fanciful interpretation for which he is notorious, as when he reduced the six characters (prosōpa) involved in domestic strife in Luke 12.52-53 to five by identifying the daughter with the daughter-in-law and then proceeds to find in them an allegory of the five senses.

Origen, in these homilies as elsewhere in his work, refers often to biblical interpretation. The boy Jesus' parents' seeking him with sorrow when he remains to teach in the Temple becomes an image of the anxiety of the interpreter to find the meaning of a difficult text. In his account of the temptation, we learn that Satan is, of all things, a biblical literalist (a Greek fragment reveals that he also has a clearly articulated Adoptionist Christology) and that he is incompetent in his identification of the prosōpa in the Psalms.

Besides making this work available in another modern language (there is as yet no published translation in English), Sieben's edition takes into consideration a whole generation of Origen scholarship including, notably, Gennaro Lomiento's detailed philological study of the homilies. Unfortunately, he fails to take into consideration Adele Monaci Castagno's Origene predicatore or, in any serious way, the work of Pierre Nautin. As a result, he is weak on the liturgical context of Origen's homilies, apparently believing that Origen's occasional direct addresses to catechumens is an indication that the homilies may have been preached specifically to them and not to the whole church. Sieben's introduction is shorter than...