Some Questions About the Temptation of Christ

And immediately the Spirit drove Him into the desert. He was in the desert forty days and forty nights trialed by Satan. He was with the beasts, and angels served Him (Mark 1:12-13).

The three synoptic Gospels each give some account of Christ’s encounter with Satan in the wilderness at the outset of His public ministry. Mark gives no more than a bare assertion of the event, while the other two give quite a bit more detail about what that secret testing looked like. It is a scene much beloved in modern art, from the literary to the cinematic, and it is of course the backbone of the spiritual discipline known in English as Lent (but perhaps more helpfully known as Forty or Fasting in most other languages).

One of the more obvious reasons for the fuller account given in Matthew and Luke is no doubt didactic: Christ acts out for us how to resist the temptations of Satan in our own lives. I think this has tended to force into sameness all our imaginings of the trial. No matter how much more modern or secular or sophisticated we (think we) get, we still just retell the story from our own perspective of grappling with our own vices and failures. In the spirit of breaking out of this spiritual rut, and possibly to help structure some future writing assignments, here are some leading questions about the Temptation of Christ.

Who are these characters and where are they?

Aquinas on Benefit of the Doubt

Judge not, lest ye be judged (Matthew 7:1)

Far and away my favorite part of the Summa is when St. Thomas takes a look at judgment in ST II-II Q60. It’s very basic, very down to earth, and unbelievably direct in challenging so many ways that we tend to interact with others and with the world. Of all the topics St. Thomas ever writes about, I feel most directly indicted by this one. To see what those indictments are, we have to start with a few basics.

St. Thomas very neatly unifies the different ways in which the word judgment (iudicium) can be used to name an act of the intellect or a legal act of justice. It’s tempting, given order of presentation, to think of judgment first as an act of the intellect–formation and evaluation of propositions, determinations about what should be done or avoided, that sort of thing–and then think of legal judgment as an extension of this. For Aquinas this way of thinking is precisely backwards. Properly iudicium is the act of a iudex and means a right determination about matters of justice. It is only by extension that we speak of our intellectual acts as judgments since they are right determinations about anything. This is a bit of a subtle point since that proper act of judgment does depend on the right use of reason, and Aquinas does us no favors by elsewhere talking about synesis, an intellectual virtue, as properly being about judging well. All that, however, just gets us into the ways in which prudence is always found in all virtues and nothing in reality ever carves up quite as neatly as a flow chart would like.

Pharaoh and Abraham

“[Abraham] reasoned that God also had the power to raise from the dead” (Hebrews 11:19)

There are many ways a sophisticated reader of Sacred Scripture might fruitfully read Genesis 22:1-14, commonly known as “the binding of Isaac.” It is a marvelous story of God testing Abraham, challenging him to continue to rely entirely on His command and His promises even after having apparently fulfilled them all. However fancy we might get, however, there must always remain at the forefront God’s own explanation of Abraham’s motivations. Abraham believed God could (and would?) raise Isaac from the dead. It’s a startling claim in the letter to the Hebrews precisely because there is no obvious textual support for it in the Genesis account itself. It stands or falls as an explanation of Genesis entirely (?) on the basis of one’s understanding of the inspiration and authorship of Sacred Scripture.

My children put me in mind of this delightful passage while we were reading and discussing another famous scene in Sacred Scripture: the plagues of Egypt in Exodus 7-12. At the end of our little session I fired up the relevant scenes from the best Old Testament movie ever made: the DreamWorks masterpiece The Prince of Egypt. After the terrifying death of all the firstborn, as grieving Pharaoh lays his dead son on a funeral bier, Moses approaches him from behind. His face is filled with such sadness and compassion for his old friend’s loss that my young son spontaneously asked me, “Is he going to raise him from the dead?”

Now that, readers, is one of the greatest intuitions into the meaning of the story that I have ever seen. It is not merely that the letter to the Hebrews opens the way for us to read it like this. The text of Exodus itself furnishes the materials for this interpretation! Four times Pharaoh finds the burden of the plagues too great to bear and asks Moses to intercede for him to the Lord. Four times Moses does so, and four times God did as Moses asked, bringing an end to the second, fourth, seventh, and eighth plagues (the frogs, the flies, the hail, and the locusts).

Why assume that the tenth plague is irreversible? Why assume that God could not or would not restore Pharaoh and all of Egypt? Is this wonder too great for the Lord of Hosts? What would Job say? Abraham believed and it was credited to him as righteousness. Pharaoh instead hardened his heart. He had not, because he asked not. Had he faith the size even just of a mustard seed…

The Gregorian Difference: John 1:36

Reading Gregory’s commentary on Job changes the way one approaches is approached by Sacred Scripture.

What did the Baptist see when he declared to his disciples, “Behold the Lamb of God?” Is his experience of that meeting buried beneath layers of pre-textual tradition and authorial intent? Was it a continuation of a conversation he had been having with his disciples over the previous weeks and months? Did he see, by a movement of the Holy Spirit, that this Messiah would die to set sinners free in a new Passover? Just how far did he see into the future, into Divine Providence, or even understand his own utterance?

Consider instead the possibility that the greatest of all prophets was consumed by the same mystical vision the Evangelist would one day see: a multi-horned and multi-eyed lamb, slain, on a throne, surrounded by four fantastical creatures. Consider that before it became a liturgical exclamation, “Behold the Lamb of God” was the only stammering possible for the greatest man born of woman. Consider that if they also had been able to see this, the disciples would not have followed Jesus but simply beheld Him.

Gregory on the Virtuous Life

I have kept His way and have not turned aside from it (Job 23:11)

And now this is the concern of the just, that they examine their acts daily in accord with the ways of truth and, placing those ways on themselves as a rule, do not turn aside from the path of their rightness. For they strive daily to go above themselves and when they are borne to the pinnacle of virtues they judge with careful indictment whatever of themselves remains below themselves, and they hasten to drag their whole selves to that place where they find they have arrived only in part.

St. Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job 16.42 (my translation)

My Catholic Metaphysical Theory of Everything

This will be weird. Make of it what you will.

There are four kinds of substance: material, celestial, human, and angelic.

Material and celestial substance have as their essential feature disposition. Material substance is imperfectly disposed to form/motion/actualization while celestial substance is perfectly so disposed. The material is composed of the competing dispositions of the four elements (attraction and repulsion for the like and the unlike) which gives matter both its persistence and its instability. The celestial is composed of a fifth element which we style simply “obedience.”

Human and angelic substance have as their essential feature self-possession. Human substance is imperfectly self-possessed while angelic substance is perfectly self-possessed. The merely human dissipates like water poured out on the ground unless it is contained by something, while the angelic remains without any containment. As self-possession diminishes there arise change, time, and space. Because of their differing degrees of self-possession, humans and angels experience all three of these quite differently.

Gregorian Thanksgiving

Have mercy on me, have mercy on me, at least you my friends; for the hand of God has touched me (Job 19:21)

The mind of the pious is accustomed to have this property, that when it suffers injustices from enemies, it is not moved to anger so much as to prayer, so that if their wickedness could be moderated peaceably the pious would choose rather to pray for relief than to become angry. Behold he calls friend those who constantly afflict him with insults, because to good minds even those things which seem to be adverse become prospering. For any perverse person either is converted by the sweetness of the good so that he turn back and by the very fact that they become good they become friends, or they persevere in malice and even in this too, unwilling (nolentes), they are friends, because if the good have any failings the wicked unknowingly (nescientes) purify them by their persecutions.

(St. Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job 14.59)

Consider carefully for whom and for what we should be thankful.

Gregory on Gaudium et Spes

St. Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job 8.54 (my translation)

Even our very mind, excluded from the secure joy of a secret interior, in a way is snared by hope, in a way vexed by fright, in a way dejected by sorrow, in a way lightened by false laughter. It stubbornly loves passing things and ceaselessly is ground down by their loss because it also is ceaselessly changed by the seizing passage. Subjected to mutable things it is made variable by its very self. For seeking what it does not have, anxiously it lays hold; when it begins to have, it grows bored to lay hold of what it has sought. Often does it love what it had despised and despise what it used to love. With labor does it learn which things are eternal, but suddenly forgets them if it cease to labor. Long does it seek to discover a little of the highest things, but swiftly relapsing to its customs not even for a little does it persevere in what it discovered. Seeking to be educated it conquers with difficulty its ignorance, but once educated it fights harder against the glory of knowledge. With difficulty it subjects to itself the tyrant which is its own flesh, but still inwardly endures the images of sin whose works it now outwardly has bound by conquest. It lifts itself in search of its Author but the “friendly” mist of bodily matters confounds it, repelled. It wishes to see itself, how it rules the body while being incorporeal, and it cannot do so. Wondrously it asks of itself what it is not able to answer and ignorant it falters under that which it wisely asks. Considering itself great and small at once, it does not know how to judge itself truly. For if it were not great, never could it seek so to investigate, and again if it were not small, it would at least discover this thing which it asks.

Gregory on Anger

For wrath kills the fool (Job 5:2)

St. Gregory the Great has a very nice discussion of anger at the end of Part 1 of his commentary on Job (Moralia 5.78-83). It gets a bit intense, so buckle up.

Taking his lead from the words of Eliphaz, St. Gregory begins with a bracing account of just how deadly anger can be. Even if we only consider anger as a passion or emotion–don’t worry about bad habits or consequent evil actions or how this fits with Original Sin yet–anger is bad because it destroys our God-likeness. It is by being creatures of reason that we are like God. We live out that likeness when our minds rest at peace in the contemplation of truth and when we love in accordance with the truth. Anger, as is well known to everyone who has ever lost their temper, interferes with this by causing tumult and confusion within ourselves. So when we strive to master and direct our anger with reason, we are striving to return to that divine likeness in which God created us; when anger throws off the directing of reason we spoil that likeness. St. Gregory’s first order of business is to list out all (?) the ways that likeness is destroyed.

Gregory on Stages of Sin

Here’s a snippet from the Old Testament book of Job as found in the Vulgate:

“Why died I not in the belly? Perished immediately having gone forth from the womb? Why taken from the knees? Why nursed at the breast?”

This is part of Job’s opening lament to his friends who arrive to console him after Satan is given free rein to make him suffer. The general sense here is pretty easy–death would be preferable to the suffering Job now endures.

But if you are a religious genius like St. Gregory the Great, and if you take Job as a kind of super-prophet and exemplar of virtue, you see something more than a human complaint about suffering. You have to, really–to die in infancy and never receive baptism or cultivate virtue or contemplate divine truth is a tragedy in no way preferable to suffering. The scandal of the literal sense demands that we look for a deeper meaning to the passage, indeed to the whole book. Job is far more than a book about sympathizing with the suffering; it is part of the oracles of God showing us salvation history and the glory of our Redemption and how to live in our pilgrimage from this life to eternity.

Yeah…St. Gregory is something else. So when he reads this short snippet about stages of birth correlated with death, he sees the stages or degrees by which we sin (Moralia 4.48-53). At any one of these stages it would be preferable to die, for the Second Death of sin is far worse than our Sister Bodily Death. Let’s roll up the sleeves and start weaving passages of Scripture together.