Fragmenta ex commentariis in epistulam i ad Corinthios Unit 3 opening

—watering, they are one.

1 Cor. 3:16–20: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If anyone ruins God’s temple, God will ruin him; for God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple. Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks he is wise in this age, let him become a fool, that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For it is written, ‘He catches the wise in their craftiness,’ and again, ‘The Lord knows the reasonings of the wise, that they are futile.’”

Origen says: If you want to learn what the true temple of God is, seek living stones, cleanly quarried, set in place by the Word, standing four-square, with nothing unstable or rolling. For even if holy stones roll on the earth, the stonecutters do not let them keep rolling to the end. So you, as living stones, are being built into a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

And with the Apostle it is said that all of us are one temple, each of us a stone of the temple. So he speaks in Ephesians: “So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but fellow-citizens with the saints and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole building, fitted together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit.”

So no stone must be ill-fitted to the building. For if two of you agree on earth about any matter they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven—how much more, then, if all the stones agree in one harmony and all share one heart and one soul, will their prayer be able and strong? It is good, then, that we all say the same thing, that we may be fitted together in the same mind and the same judgment; for so you are a building fitted together into a holy temple in the Lord.

And in another sense each of us can be a temple by himself. For if a temple is what has God’s glory, everyone who has God’s glory in himself is in that respect God’s temple. One has more glory or less who makes the name of the Father in heaven glorified by his deeds; therefore it is written, “Those who glorify me I will glorify.” Then we will most of all be God’s temple if we prepare ourselves to receive the Spirit of God. Yet no one who has a spirit of some sin can be God’s temple, because the Spirit of God alone dwells where he judges it right to dwell.

“If anyone ruins God’s temple, God will ruin him.” As far as each person can, even if he is a stone, he ruins God’s temple when he sins; and anyone who puts a stumbling-block before the church also ruins God’s temple. Still more properly the one who fornicates ruins God’s temple, since your bodies are a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God. So the pure person is called uncorrupted, and the one who is no longer a virgin is called corrupted—as if this deed alone were the corrupting. If, then, this is a work of corruption, let us guard against it above all; for the Lord also, with all who love God, is in incorruption.

So much for that stretch on its own. But because the Corinthians were proud of the world’s wisdom, he says to them, “If anyone among you thinks he is wise”—not “if anyone is wise,” but “thinks he is wise among you”—“in this age let him become a fool.” He did not say simply “a fool,” but “in this age,” as people call us fools relative to this age. So let him become a fool in this age, that by becoming a fool to this age he may become truly wise; for the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For how is he not a fool who says there is no providence, or that from atoms and void the