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| Chapter VI. Of the manner of the temptation in which our Lord was attacked by the devil.
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Chapter VI.
Of the manner of the temptation in which our Lord was
attacked by the devil.
For it was right that He
who was in possession of the perfect image and likeness of God should
be Himself tempted through those passions, through which Adam also was
tempted while he still retained the image of God unbroken, that is,
through gluttony, vainglory, pride; and not through those in which he
was by his own fault entangled and involved after the transgression of
the commandment, when the image and likeness of God was marred. For it
was gluttony through which he took the fruit of the forbidden tree,
vainglory through which it was said “Your eyes shall be
opened,” and pride through which it was said “Ye shall be
as gods, knowing good and evil.”1322
With these three sins then we read that
the Lord our Saviour was also tempted; with gluttony when the devil
said to Him: “Command these stones that they be made
bread:” with vainglory: “If Thou art the Son of God cast
Thyself down:” with pride, when he showed him all the kingdoms of
the world and the glory of them and said: “All this will I give
to Thee if Thou wilt fall down and worship me:”1323
in order that He might by His example
teach us how we ought to vanquish the tempter when we are attacked on
the same lines of temptation as He was. And so both the former and the
latter are spoken of as Adam; the one being the first for destruction
and death, and the other the first for resurrection and life. Through
the one the whole race of mankind is brought into condemnation, through
the other the whole race of mankind is set free. The one was fashioned
out of raw and unformed earth, the other was born of the Virgin Mary.
In His case then though it was fitting that He should undergo
temptation, yet it was not necessary that He should fail under it. Nor
could He who had vanquished gluttony be tempted by fornication, which
springs from superfluity and gluttony as its root, with which even the
first Adam would not have been destroyed unless before its birth he had
been deceived by the wiles of the devil and fallen a victim to passion.
And therefore the Son of God is not said absolutely to have come
“in the flesh of sin,” but “in the likeness of the
flesh of sin,” because though His was true flesh and He ate and
drank and slept, and truly received the prints of the nails, there was
in Him no true sin inherited from the fall, but only what was something
like it. For He had no experience of the fiery darts of carnal lust,
which in our case arise even against our will, from the constitution of
our natures, but He took upon Him something like this, by sharing in
our nature. For as He truly fulfilled every function which belongs to
us, and bore all human infirmities, He has consequently been considered
to have been subject to this feeling also, that He might appear through
these infirmities to bear in His own flesh the state even of this fault
and sin. Lastly the devil only tempted Him to those sins, by which he
had deceived the first Adam, inferring that He as man would similarly
be deceived in other matters if he found that He was overcome by those
temptations by which he had overthrown His predecessor. But as he was
overthrown in the first encounter he was not able to bring upon Him the
second infirmity which had shot up as from the root of the first fault.
For he saw that He had not even admitted anything from which this
infirmity might take its rise, and it was idle to hope for the fruit of
sin from Him, as he saw that He in no sort of way received into Himself
seeds or roots of it. Yet according to Luke, who places last that
temptation in which he uses the words “If Thou art the Son of
God, cast Thyself down,”1324
we can
understand this of the feeling of pride, so that that earlier one,
which Matthew places third, in which, as Luke the evangelist says, the
devil showed Him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time and
promised them to Him, may be taken of the feeling of covetousness,
because after His victory over gluttony, he did not venture to tempt
Him to fornication, but passed on to covetousness, which he knew to be
the root of all evils,1325
and when again
vanquished in this, he did not dare attack Him with any of those sins
which follow, which, as he knew full well, spring from this as a root
and source; and so he passed on to the last passion; viz., pride, by
which he knew that those who are perfect and have overcome all other
sins, can be affected, and owing to which he remembered that he himself
in his character of Lucifer, and many others too, had fallen from their
heavenly estate, without temptation from any of the preceding passions.
In this order then which we have mentioned, which is the one given by
the evangelist Luke,
there is an exact agreement between the
allurements and forms of the temptations by which that most crafty foe
attacked both the first and the second Adam. For to the one he said
“Your eyes shall be opened;” to the other “he showed
all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them.” In the one
case he said “Ye shall be as gods;” in the other, “If
Thou art the Son of God.”1326
| 1326 Cf. Gen.
iii. 5 with S. Matt. iv. 6, 8. | E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
