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← Collationes (Conferences / Collations)/Book 2 · Collationes — Liber II
Chapter 17OdoC.2.17

Caput XVI

The Call to Repentance and the Vanity of Pleasure

Odo urges his listeners to repent, resist temptation, and recognize the fleeting nature of worldly pleasure, while acknowledging God's mercy toward sinful thoughts.

But let us at last be ashamed that the base seat of lust exists. Let us break fresh ground for ourselves, as the prophet says, because the time for seeking the Lord is here. Let us resist the devil, and he will flee from us.✦✦ Let us hear blessed Jerome, who, arguing against the brevity of this life, says: Grant that our life be stretched to a thousand years — even if we reach the final day of the whole age, When the last hour comes, therefore, what good will the fruit of unbroken pleasure be — which, the moment it ends, will seem never to have existed? What good are daily pleasures, or fine linen and purple, now to someone burning among the dead? The prophet says: 'In three and four acts of wickedness, will I not oppose?'✦ It is wicked to think evil thoughts, according to that word: 'Woe to the one who plans what is useless' (Mic.✦ 2:1). But it is forgiven.

The Degrees of Sin and the Mercy of the Judge

Odo traces a progression from wicked thought to wicked desire to wicked deed, showing that God's mercy extends at every stage, and uses Adam's sin as a type of comparative divine clemency.

It is still more wicked to carry out what you have already thought through wickedly. But even this is forgiven. But now it is truly the most wicked thing of all to carry out sin in deed. Nevertheless, to one such as this the merciful Judge extends a hand and urges repentance. But if a sinner refuses to repent, then the Lord is compelled to oppose him and to let the sinner go to his own desire as a great punishment.✦ Adam sinned once, and he died — let us see what he did. He ate against the commandment, from the fruit of the tree.✦ You then — if you have disobeyed in anything, if He spared Adam, He will spare you. Yet Adam all the more deserved to be spared: he was still raw and newly made, with no one before him who had sinned, and he was being held back by the example of another dying for his own sin.✦12

The Weight of Sin Under Greater Light

Odo warns that those who sin after receiving the fullness of revelation — Law, prophets, Gospel, apostles — face far graver judgment, and illustrates how communal sin defiles the whole body of the faithful.

But to you — whoever you are, living as you do after the Law, after the prophets, after the Gospel, after the apostles — if you should choose to sin, I do not know how forgiveness could be granted. Achar, at Jericho, stole something from the forbidden spoils, and such wrath fell upon all of Israel that they could not stand against their enemies — even those who knew nothing about the theft — until the accursed one was stoned. And those who so ruthlessly plunder the property of the Church or the poor — what kind of triumphs over pagans do they expect? It is these whom the prophet calls evening wolves — on account of their shameless greed.✦ The Apostle would not allow that one man — the one who had committed fornication among the Corinthians — to pray among the faithful, lest his impure voice, as if hoarse, defile the pure voices of the rest in the ears of God. And how can that assembly presume its prayers please God, among whom — secretly or publicly, through similar guilt — not just one but many are defiled? For the Apostle says that anyone who makes void the law of Moses would be punished without mercy — just as it happened in the case of the man who was gathering sticks on the Sabbath.✦✦ And how much worse, he says, do you think the punishments deserved by the one who has trampled under foot the Son of God?✦

The Final Warning: No Sacrifice Remains

Odo closes with the stark words of Hebrews 10:26 — that for those who sin willfully after knowing the truth, no sacrifice for sins remains.

And likewise, for those who willfully sin after coming to know the truth, there is no sacrifice for sins left any longer.✦

Read the original Latin

Sed erubescamus aliquando vile subsellium libidinis esse: novemus nobis novale, ut ait propheta, quia tempus quaerendi Dominum est, resistamus diabolo, et fugiet a nobis. Audiamus beatum Hieronymum, qui brevitatem hujus vitae arguens dicit: Esto, vita nostra mille annis tendatur, ad extremum totius aetatis diem veniamus. Cum ergo ultima hora venerit, quid proderit continuatae voluptatis fructus, quae statim ut cessaverit videbitur non fuisse? Quid nunc apud inferos ardenti, vel quotidianae deliciae, vel byssus et purpura prosunt? Inquit propheta: In tribus et quatuor impietatibus nonne adversabor? sceleratum est male cogitare, juxta illud: Vae qui cogitat inutile (Mich. II, 1). Sed ignoscitur.

Sceleratius vero, quod male cogitaveris, velle perficere. Sed et hoc ignoscitur. Jam sane sceleratissimum est, opere peccatum perpetrare. Tamen et huic tali benignus judex manum porrigit, et ad poenitentiam exhortatur. Quod si peccator poenitere noluerit, jam Dominus cogitur adversari, et pro magna poena suae peccatorem dimittere voluntati. Adam enim semel peccavit, et mortuus est; videamus quid fecerit. Contra mandatum de fructu arboris edit. Tu ergo si in aliquo contempseris, si pepercit Adae, parcet tibi; summo illi magis parcendum fuerat, qui adhuc rudis et novellus erat, et nullius ante peccantis, et propter peccatum suum morientis retrahebatur exemplo.

Tibi vero, quisquis ejusmodi es post legem, post prophetas, post Evangelium, post apostolos, si delinquere volueris, quomodo indulgeri possit, ignoro. Achar apud Jericho de interdictis spoliis aliquid furatus est, et super omnem Israel talis ira incubuit, ut stare contra hostes suos nullatenus posset etiam furti nescius, donec anathema lapidaretur. Et hi qui res Ecclesiae vel pauperum tantopere devastant, quales triumphos de paganis exspectant? Hos nimirum propter impudentem rapacitatem lupos vespertinos propheta appellat. Illum unum, qui apud Corinthios fornicatus fuerat, Apostolus inter fideles orare non patitur, ne impura vox ejus puras reliquorum voces divinis auribus, tanquam rauca, sordidaret. Et quomodo conventus ille suas preces Deo placere praesumit, inter quos, occulte vel publice simili reatu, non jam unus, sed multi foedantur? Nam praedictus Apostolus dicit quod irritam quis faciens legem Moysi sine retractatione puniretur, sicut in illo contigit, qui Sabbato ligna colligebat. Et quanto magis, inquit, putatis mereri deteriora supplicia, qui Filium Dei conculcaverit?

et item, voluntarie post cognitionem veritatis peccantibus, jam non relinquitur hostia pro peccatis.

Scripture echoes

  1. ↩Jas.4.7 — Therefore submit yourselves to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
  2. ↩Hos.10.12;Isa.55.6 — Sow for yourselves righteousness; reap according to steadfast love; break up your fallow ground for yourselves, for it is time to seek the LORD, until he comes and rains righteousness upon you. Isa.55.6 — Seek the LORD while he may be found; call upon him while he is near.
  3. ↩Amos.1.3 — Thus says the LORD: For three transgressions of Damascus, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment, because they have threshed Gilead with iron threshing sledges.
  4. ↩Mic.2.1 — Woe to those who devise iniquity and work out evil upon their beds! When the morning dawns, they do it, for they have the power to do so.
  5. ↩Rom.1.24 — Therefore God gave them over, in the lusts of their hearts, to impurity, so that their bodies were dishonored among themselves.
  6. ↩Gen.2.17 — but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for on the day you eat from it you shall surely die.
  7. ↩Rom.5.12-Rom.5.14 — Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and through sin death, and so death spread to all people, because all sinned— Rom.5.13 — For sin was in the world before the law, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Rom.5.14 — Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who did not sin in the likeness of Adam's transgression, who is a type of the one who was to come.
  8. ↩Zeph.3.3 — Her officials within her are roaring lions; her judges are evening wolves that leave nothing till morning.
  9. ↩Heb.10.28 — Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses.
  10. ↩Num.15.32-Num.15.36 — While the people of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man gathering wood on the Sabbath day. Num.15.33 — And those who found him gathering sticks brought him to Moses and to Aaron and to all the congregation. Num.15.34 — And they put him in custody, for it had not been made clear what should be done to him. Num.15.35 — Then the LORD said to Moses, "The man must surely be put to death. All the congregation shall stone him with stones outside the camp." Num.15.36 — And all the congregation brought him outside the camp and stoned him with stones, and he died, just as the LORD had commanded Moses.
  11. ↩Heb.10.29 — How much worse a punishment do you think will be deserved by the one who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, and has regarded as common the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has insulted the Spirit of grace?
  12. ↩Heb.10.26 — For if we sin deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins,

Notes

  1. 1 ↩summo magis parcendum fuerat: the gerundive of obligation is rendered as 'all the more deserved to be spared' to capture the force of the impersonal passive construction.
  2. 2 ↩The phrase 'retrahebatur exemplo' — 'held back by the example' — is compressed. The sense seems to be that Adam had the deterrent example of another (possibly the devil, or a prior creature) who had already died for sin, yet still sinned. The referent is not explicit in the text.

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