Annotatio CXIX

”You shall not drink wine, nor anything that may make drunk, when you enter into the tabernacle of the testimony.” — Leviticus 10:9

Origen, homily 7 on Leviticus, expounding the sense of this passage, writes this:¹ “My Savior even now mourns my sins, and my Savior cannot rejoice, so long as I remain in iniquity. For how can he be in joy, to whom the grief of my sins always ascends? For if the Apostle mourns certain of his own who have sinned before, what shall I say of him who is called the Son of charity? For, since the Lord is merciful and compassionate, he himself, with greater affection than the Apostle, weeps [for] his own, and much more mourns those who have sinned and have not done penance. For it is not to be thought that Paul mourns for sinners, but that my Lord Jesus abstains from weeping, when he approaches the Father and offers propitiation for us.” St. Bernard, in the sermon which is entitled On the Words of Origen, most copiously confuted this passage.² Yet we can easily recall Origen’s words to a pious understanding, if we say that Christ mourns our sins — not that he himself, who is devoid of all grief and weeping, mourns in any way or can mourn, but because he still mourns our sins in his members,³ when he infuses into his elect weeping and compassion for another’s iniquity. In which sense the Apostle said that “the Spirit of God prays for us with unspeakable groanings,”⁴ because he provokes us to groans and tearful prayers. Nor do the following words of Origen — which discuss most amply concerning the Church and the spiritual members of the body of Christ — differ from this understanding.

Origen also has certain things in this homily which seem to allude to the opinion of those who hold that the souls of the saints do not enjoy the beatitude of the divine vision until the final resurrection of the flesh.⁵ These you will be able to see on the second page of the present homily, in those words: “For the saints have not yet received their joy, nor even the Apostles: but they too await, that I may become a partaker of their joy,” etc. — which are to be interpreted of the full consummation of completed felicity, which the saints have not yet received in [their] bodies. But of these [we treat] more copiously in Annotation 345 of the following book.