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?

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.

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.

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.

Deadly Sins Vs. Capital Vices

There is no such thing as Seven Deadly Sins in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas. Also Pride isn’t one of them. Wait, what?

“Everyone knows” the medieval list of sins–at least everyone who loves Dante, watches anime, or appreciates a good Fincher movie starring Freeman and Pitt. In some order, these Seven Deadly Sins are Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust. That’s the order Dante treats them in The Divine Comedy, anyway. In the eponymous anime we meet Wrath first and Pride last; Fincher’s detectives discover Gluttony first while Envy and Wrath are revealed only at the very end. These seven sins are supposedly the deadly ones, the not-fooling around ones, the most awful things humans do. I saw Se7en in the theater when it came out and boy did it work hard to depict them as the most depraved of all evils.

Except, with a little reflection, that’s not true at all. If we are making a list of “seven most serious evils,” why is eating too much on the list? Being lazy? Where is idolatry, or murder? Is this supposed to be an improvement on the Decalogue? These sound an awful lot like internal disorders rather than actions, right? Perhaps most damningly, the Catholic tradition already has a way to name “sins that kill”–mortal sins. I assure you, there are waaaaay more than seven mortal sins.

Sacrifice and Sanctity

One of my pet peeves is the way people throw around the word “holy” to mean a lot of things other than what the word historically means.  Sometimes when word-use shifts you just have to shift with it; thems the breaks in the evolution of language.  Sometimes it’s worth the effort of preserving the older usage alongside the new one and recognizing which one you are facing in any given context.  But sometimes, if the word and its concept matter enough, you just have to draw a line in the sand and say “No further!” and break your little ships if people try to take liberties with the word.

“Holy” is one of those latter words.

I think that the erosion of the meaning of the word “holy” has been a disaster for thinking seriously about the meaning of life and religious matters.  I go out of my way to teach a basic sense of the word to my younger students and always resolve to find more ways to use the concept with my older students.  I have occasionally alluded to the correct use of this word in some of my older posts, but I have never set down a full account of what I take to be the essential features of the concept of “holy.”  Let’s remedy that.

Debt, Worship, Sacrifice

Let’s reinvent the wheel a little bit.  By the end of this we will have come back around to a very common, very basic doctrine of the Catholic Church.  In writing this I have in mind primarily my students, for whom connecting all the things we teach is usually very difficult.

Justice

We begin with justice, the repaying of debts that we owe.  Among all the different kinds of justice-relations we can find ourselves in, the just person above all recognizes that there are some debts that can never be properly repaid.  To be truly just is to attempt to repay those debts anyway, even knowing that it will never really be done.

By way of introductory example, consider the case of one person saving another person’s life.  It doesn’t seem strange to imagine a person feeling that they could never repay their savior, but that they would in any event constantly strive to do so.  Just because “thanks” or “a check for a million dollars” doesn’t seem to cover the debt doesn’t mean we should do nothing.  It’s not hard to imagine the indebted party gladly doing good for their savior in a variety of ways, hoping that some day they could reciprocate in some genuine way.  Anyone who shrugged and ceased to care about their debt because of the inadequacy of their efforts would be wicked.

Theological Virtues

Brandon has a thoughtful piece on the virtue of hope which I enjoyed very much and yet with which I find myself in several points of disagreement.  Much as I typically agree with Brandon, that I might disagree on a few points here is no surprise: the nature of the theological virtues and their relation to the other virtues is notoriously problematic.  Perhaps putting down my own thoughts on the matter can mark a return to active blogging!

Caution: what follows is my idiosyncratic attempt to re-invent the wheel.  It is not really a proper response to Brandon either, more of a set of counter-thoughts inspired by him (much like his original post with respect to the article, I think).  Caveat lector.

The Eternal Significance of the Jew

(I’ve just read Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz.  Consider this a creative reflection on his wonderful book)

The Church has been struggling internally against anti-Semitism since the time of Marcion.  The dualism that periodically surfaces in our history courts it–from “Matter Is Evil” to “Creator Is Evil,” it is a short jump to tar that Creator’s Chosen People.  Marcion’s “theoretical anti-Semitism” found practical cause in the splitting of the synagogue and the rancor of a divided family; later forms found their blood from the more insidious fear of Other.  An interesting thought–as it has become more bloodless, it has become more appalling.  Though I suppose I need to account for the wealth and banking angle that drives some people; economic hardship and class envy is anything but bloodless.

Marcion got as far as he did by being enormously selective in his use of the New Testament canon (I take him as the first deviant, the reaction against him a sign that the canon is already largely formed).  Overemphasis on the writings of St. Paul is his major tool, and it shows a weakness in the Apostle’s writings (or rather, our understanding of them)–St. Paul’s references to “The Law” are not always clear and often confusing.  Marcion was the first but by no means the last to take “The Law” as meaning everything from Adam to the Baptist, and to overlook all references to that Law as good and necessary.