Furtive Bread and the Fast of Christ: Receiving, Refusing, and Giving in Origen’s Tenth Homily on Leviticus

Rufinus’ Latin translation preserves Origen’s tenth homily on Leviticus as a sermon on the Day of Atonement fast and the goat sent into the wilderness. The homily begins from Leviticus 16, reads the two-goat rite through Christ’s passion, and brings Matthew 6 into the practice of Christian fasting before giving the command Ieiuna ab omni peccato, “Fast from every sin.” In the transmitted Latin order of Hom. Lev. 10.2, that command is plainly moral, but the clauses that follow give the moral exhortation an alimentary form: cibus malitiae, epulae voluptatis, vinum luxuriae, panes furtivos perversae doctrinae, and fallaces philosophiae cibos. The Christian is warned against what may be taken in, desired, or allowed to form judgment. Proverbs 4 and 9 provide a sapiential setting for this food-language, while the Rufinus-transmitted Commentary on the Song of Songs offers closer Origenian evidence for the association of food, wine, doctrine, knowledge, false knowledge, and destructive teaching. The homily then returns to bodily fasting: scheduled fasts, continentia ventris et gutturis, the cutting away of ciborum affluentia, and the fast undertaken to feed the poor. Christian fasting is presented as a discipline of reception, refusal, bodily restraint, and care for another person’s hunger.