Saul and the Chasm

He seemed to have received rewards worthy of his labor, and then adding, he said: 'And between us and you there is a chasm,' he says, 'it has been made great, so that those wishing to cross from there to you are not able, nor those from there to us to pass through.'

If then there is an idea of a chasm dividing between the righteous and the unrighteous, so that those from there to that place are not able to wander across, nor those from here to arrive there, Saul, being unrighteous, is not with the prophet Samuel. For if the rich man cannot be with the poor man, even without having done wrong or persecuted him, but not having given to him readily from what he had, how much more is the stingy man unworthy to enjoy the fellowship of the saints?

But it is not to be thought that because of shameful gain the divine command is set aside, and being struck by a demon, he is driven about by a curse, David pursues the saintly one with nothing becoming the world, even though by prophetic psalmody he exposes the ferocity of the demon reveling in him; to slaughter three hundred priests of the Lord, being fifty to the number, does he stand away from God, divining impiously? And if he did these things and these things as brothers, how can one think that Samuel ended up with the wonder-worker, who in a season of summer caused rain to become, and by it an immeasurable multitude of waters was scattered?

If it is not possible to say that Saul is with Samuel, The one who said to him, 'Tomorrow you shall be with me' (1 Sam 28:24), lied. If indeed he who said these things is a liar, it is evident that this Samuel is not; for the prophet of the Lord would not so foolishly lie, so that such widely spreading words point out the nakedly hidden, many-faced, most cowardly beast. He himself is indeed the one who split into the chasm of Tartarus and the manifest Saul; whence he approached him familiarly, grasping him, saying: 'Tomorrow you shall be with me.'

He attempts to arrange things in a double way, striving to show that the righteous never differs from the unrighteous, and he agrees that Jonathan received the same inheritance as his father, even though he was not joined by his father's harshness. Who among those existing pretends not to perceive that the lover of the prophet David, having lived most excellently, but having undertaken to pursue the righteous unjustly, offers the same wages to the persecutor? For he will not die, to use the universal expression, a son for an unrighteous father. But indeed the charlatan is also convicted by this message.

The writer, adding a sequence to a lack of order, said that 'Saul hurried and fell standing upon the ground and was greatly afraid' (1 Sam 15:14), saying 'from the words of Samuel.' For we know those to be the words of Samuel, which he had prophesied to him, being present in body and tongue; but the phantom of these things took up the words and offered them up as his own; of whom, remembering the ruler and seeing the signs of war established opposite, having understood their end, he became fearful.

But Origenes plates doctrines for himself, knowing that most of those who happen to be weighing these things are one thing, yet in conversing with those arguing against him, he did not hasten with the due reverence to investigate accurately what is necessary; but rather, professing to touch upon the drama of the engastrimythos for all and calling the truth necessary for examination, he clearly fights against the truth itself.

Then, having extracted praises for Samuel, as many as the divine scriptures converse about him, he again, as if deciding him to be under the power of the demon, was framing him with words and with syllables: 'Is it then that if such a man was under the earth and the engastrimythos raised him up, the demon has authority over a prophetic soul?' But these things, though he says as if posing a question or perhaps asking, are insinuated to be said sometimes by some, so that through what he will later arrange, he might conclude that such things are so.