A sermon on Jeremiah where Origen allegorizes earth, sky, clouds, and lightning as the soul, the saints, and the paradox of God's "foolishness" surpassing worldly wisdom.
This homily opens from a single verse of Jeremiah describing God making the earth by strength, setting the world upright by wisdom, and stretching out heaven by understanding. Origen treats the three terms -- strength, wisdom, understanding -- as clues to three activities of God, and then reads "earth," "world," and "heaven" not primarily as physical realities but as states of the soul: a soul without God is a wasteland, a soul filled with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is an inhabited world, and a soul that has put on "the image of the heavenly one" is itself heaven.
The homily's centerpiece is an extended allegory built on Jeremiah's image of God bringing up clouds, lightning, and winds from his storehouses. Origen identifies the clouds with the prophets and saints -- Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Baruch, Paul -- who are called clouds because, like clouds sending rain, they deliver the word of God to the earth. Lightning is what happens when two such clouds "converse," as when Paul and Silvanus collaborate and "the lightning of the letter" results. The winds from God's storehouses become the gifts and spirits listed in Isaiah and Paul (wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge, piety), stored in Christ, "in whom are hidden the treasures both of wisdom and of knowledge."
The homily closes with a sustained meditation on Paul's paradox that "the foolishness of God is wiser than men." Origen argues that even the highest wisdom attained by Paul or Peter, measured against the wisdom above the heavens, counts as folly, and that God did not need to out-argue the wisdom of this world with superior wisdom -- a small foolishness sufficed to convict it, the way one sharp word refutes an uneducated opponent. This matters for understanding Origen's method: a single Old Testament verse becomes an occasion to map biblical vocabulary (earth, heaven, clouds, storehouses) onto the moral and spiritual life of the individual believer, and to defend Paul's paradoxical language about divine foolishness and weakness as itself a piece of theological argument.
“The Lord, who made the earth by his strength, who set the inhabited world upright by his wisdom, and by his understanding stretched out the heaven.”
— Homily on Jeremiah 8 · read this chapter →
“I know a soul that is inhabited, I know a soul that is a wasteland.”
— Homily on Jeremiah 8 · read this chapter →
“Moses was a cloud, Joshua son of Nun was a cloud. These, then, converse with one another, and from their words lightning occurs.”
— Homily on Jeremiah 8 · read this chapter →
“the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men”
— Homily on Jeremiah 8 · read this chapter →
“my Savior and Lord has taken up all the opposites, so that by opposites he might dissolve the opposites”
— Homily on Jeremiah 8 · read this chapter →
It is a sermon that takes a single verse of Jeremiah -- God making earth by strength, the world by wisdom, heaven by understanding -- and allegorizes it into a picture of the soul's relationship to God, then extends the allegory to clouds, lightning, and winds representing prophets, their collaborations, and the Spirit's gifts. It closes with a defense of Paul's claim that God's foolishness surpasses human wisdom.
Origen reads Jeremiah's phrase 'the inhabited world' as describing a soul that has been filled with God -- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. A soul lacking Christ and the Spirit is, by contrast, an uninhabited wasteland, so the physical image becomes a diagnostic for spiritual state.
He identifies the clouds God 'brings up from the end of the earth' with prophets and apostles -- Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Baruch, and Paul -- because like clouds releasing rain, they deliver God's word to people, often from a position of being 'last' rather than powerful or wealthy.
Origen argues that Paul's own wisdom, and even Peter's, counts as foolishness when measured against wisdom above the heavens, yet this small divine foolishness alone was enough to convict and defeat the wisdom of the world, much as one sharp reply refutes an uneducated arguer without need of deep dialectic.
Following a scientific idea that lightning comes from clouds striking one another, Origen allegorizes it as what happens when two prophetic or apostolic figures converse -- he gives the example of Moses and Joshua, and of Paul and Silvanus producing 'the lightning of the letter.'
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