The Anti-Christian Conjuration (20)
THE RENEWED TEMPTATIONCHAPTER LV
I- THE TEMPTATION OF CHRIST
“As soon as the wickedness of the demon had poisoned us with the deadly venom of his envy,” says Pope Saint Leo (1), “the all-God powerful and merciful, whose nature is goodness, will, power, and action mercy, indicated in advance the remedy that his piety intended to heal humans; and this in the first times of the world, when he declared to the serpent that from the Woman would be born someone strong enough to crush his head full of pride and malice. He announced by this that Christ would come in our flesh both God and man, and that, born of a Virgin, his birth would condemn the one by whom the human source had been defiled, if after having deceived man by his deceit, the demon rejoiced to see him stripped of celestial goods; he rejoiced at having found some consolation in his misery through the company of prevaricators, and at having been the cause that God, having created man in such an honorable state, had changed his dispositions towards him. It was therefore necessary, beloved brothers, the marvelous economy of a profound design so that an Immutable One
1. 2nd sermon on the Nativity. THE TEMPTATION OF CHRIST 787
whose will cannot cease to be good, accomplished, by means of a more hidden mystery, the first views of his love, and so that man, led to evil by the cunning and wickedness of the devil, did not come to perish, contrary to the goal that God had proposed.”
In the time marked by divine wisdom, God executed this design of his mercy, manifested in the very hour of offense and fall. He sent his Son to repair the fault of our father. Among men, justice weakens when it becomes merciful; in the Redemption it remains intact: God forgives, but justice is satisfied since a God-Man replaces the guilty and atones for them. God of God, light of light, true God of A true God, He took the condition of a slave and appeared to demons as to men in the humility of the flesh, "in flesh like that of sin and thus recognized as a man by everything that started from him” (1).
1. Rom. VIII, 3, and Phil. II, 7.
There is as much danger in saying that there is not in Jesus Christ a nature similar to ours, as in denying that he is equal in glory to his Father. It is on divine authority that our faith is based, and it is a divine doctrine that we profess. They are true, these words which John, filled with the Holy Spirit, made resound: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was in God and the Word was God"... What the same preacher adds is also true: “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, as the glory of the only begotten Son of the Father.” In both natures, the Son of God is therefore the same, taking what is from us without losing anything of what is proper to him; renewing man in man, he remained in himself immutable... this is why, when the only Son of God confesses that he is inferior to his Father, to whom he calls himself equal, he shows that he truly has in Him the one and other nature, because, by the inequality of which he speaks, he proves that he has human nature; and by the equality which he affirms, he declares to possess the divine nature. (Saint Leo, Pope, 7th Sermon on the Nativity),
Satan was awake. He saw Jesus born in the altarpiece of Bethlehem and living in obscurity in the humble village of Nazareth. The wonders which had surrounded his cradle had not escaped him, but thirty years spent in a carpenter's workshop in submission and obedience, humility and poverty, did not seem to him to be the first fruits of the one who was to overthrow his empire (1). When he saw him come out of his retirement; when he heard the words of Jesus announcing that the kingdom of God was at hand; when he saw the Precursor refuse to baptize Jesus for the reason that he was not worthy to untie the straps of his sandals and say that He would baptize in the Holy Spirit; especially when he witnessed the descent of the Holy Spirit and heard the voice of the heavenly Father declare: “This is my beloved Son!” he began to wonder about Him
1. God is present everywhere, he knows everything that is done and everything that is said, because he is in all his creatures as the principle of their being and of their activity. It is not the same with angels, good or bad. The angel is in one place according as by his will he applies to this place the action of his virtue. He is there not circumscribed, as bodies are, but defined in such a way that he is not in another. So that many acts of Jesus or concerning his person could have escaped Satan. It is true that what he did not know by himself, he could have known through one or several demons whom he would have delegated to the divine Savior to be instructed in everything that concerned him, as Saint Augustine observes {City of God IX, 21), Christ was only known to demons as much as he wanted it, and he only wanted it as much as he wanted it. it was necessary... When he thought it was good to hide a little deeper, the prince of darkness doubted Him and tempted Him to find out if he was the Christ
if he had not been mistaken until then, and if this Jesus was not this Son of the Woman who had been shown to him on the day of his first victory as having to take away the empire and crush his head He wanted to make sure of it; God allowing it, because of the lessons that would result for us (1), he was able to try his suggestions and his prestige on Jesus as he had done in the earthly paradise and in the heavens (2). We know the story of the Gospel. After his baptism Jesus withdrew into the desert, abstaining from all food for forty days. Seeing him pressed by hunger according to the weakness of the flesh which he had taken, Satan took advantage of this opportunity to tempt him, to discover what it was important for him to know, by a completely decisive test. “Demon Christum aggressus est, potissimum ut exploraret utrum vere Films Dei esset” says Suarez (3). It was above all to find out if he was the Son of God that the demon attacked Christ.” His first words manifested his thought: "If you are the Son of God..." Pointing to the rounded stones in the shape of bread which littered the ground, as he had
1. Let us not persuade ourselves, Christians, that it would have been permitted it is up to Satan to tempt the Savior without some high counsel from divine Providence. (Bossuet, Sermon on the demon. 1st Sunday of Lent.) 2. It is not unworthy of our Redeemer, says Saint Gregory the Great, to have wanted to be tempted, because he had come into this world to be put to death. On the contrary, it was right that he thus conquered our temptations with his own, just as he was able to triumph over our death with his death... The Son of God could have been tempted by suggestion; but never did delight penetrate his soul. Also this temptation of the devil was entirely external and not at all within Him. (Sermon on the Gospel of the 1st Sunday of Lent.) 3. In tertiam partem divi Thomae. Q. XLI, art. I, com. II
showed Eve the forbidden fruit, he proposed to her to perform a miracle which would prove his divinity: to change the stones into loaves. He did not notice that this miracle, if it were performed, would prove precisely the opposite, because the alleviation of hunger could be obtained by natural and human means, and wanting to obtain it by calling on divine power to help, it was a lack of respect due to God. Perhaps he saw it and his proposal was doubly mischievous. We know what Jesus' response was; he expressed his respect for his Father and for the Word which God has made the rule of our conduct, for us, children of men and for the incarnate Word himself. On the other hand, he left the tempter in ignorance regarding his Person. The second temptation visibly betrays Satan's trouble. In his extreme desire to achieve the desired goal, he would have agreed to know, at the cost of his own humiliation, if Our Lord was truly the Son of God. If Jesus, rushing from the top of the temple, as he requested, the angels had come to support him, he would have thereby recognized, he thought, that he was the sovereign master of the celestial hierarchy, but to his shame and his confusion. For it would have been cruel for him to see Jesus falling from the top of the temple as if he were coming down from heaven, carried by the good angels, who are the ministers of God in the punishment inflicted on him, before the crowd which filled the courts of the temple, and present it in this celestial pomp and majesty which would have commanded the adorations of the spectators. Jesus, as he had done the first time, dispelled with a word taken from the Holy Scriptures this temptation which Satan had thought very seductive. He did not yet consider himself satisfied; and using again the superhuman power of the spirits, masters of gravity and space, he transported Jesus to the summit of a high mountain. “When it is said that the Man-God was transported by the devil to a high mountain or to the holy city,” observes Saint Gregory, Pope, “the mind is reluctant to believe it and human ears are frightened to hear it affirmed. We will recognize, however, that this is not incredible, if we compare other facts to this one. Indeed, the devil is the head of all wicked men and all the ungodly are members of this head. Was not Pilate a member of the devil? Were they not the members of the devil, the Jews who persecuted Jesus Christ and the soldiers who crucified him? Also, what is surprising if Christ allowed himself to be transported by the demon, himself on a mountain, since he was willing to suffer from being crucified by the members of the demon (1).”
The first two temptations could not resolve the question which tormented the Prince of this world. He understood that it would be useless to continue pushing his attempts in the same direction. Also, at the third temptation he no longer says: “If you are the
1. Sermon for the 1st Sunday of Lent. Saint Augustine, in his commentary on Psalm LXIII, V. 7, also says: Christ, as man, placed himself within reach of the perverse intentions of the Jews, and as man he suffered them to take hold of Him. , In fact, we could not have seized Him, if He had not been a man, nor seen Him if He had not been a man, nor struck Him if He had not been a man, nor crucify him and put him to death if he had not been a man. It was therefore as a man that he exposed himself to all these sufferings, which could not have had control over him if he had not been a man. But if He had not been a man, man would not have been delivered. This man penetrated the depths of hearts, that is to say the secret of their heart, offering to the gaze of men, his humanity, without revealing his divinity; hiding his nature as God, by which he is the equal of the Father.
Son of God". Leaving this question which he felt he could not resolve, he pursued another design. Since then the catastrophe of the earthly paradise, he reigned supreme over humanity, wretched and degraded; but he trembled for his empire every time he remembered the Lord's prediction: a Woman and her Son will crush your head. Worried, he never ceased to spy on the children of men, particularly those who were against him, appeared to be the most intelligent and the strongest, to bring them into his service. Never had his attention been alerted to any matter on this one, never had anyone seemed to him to play such a great role in the world. He sees him enter the career and begin a work which, without doubt and given the extraordinary potentiality of the character, will have on the course of the world, on the direction of the human race, an influence which cannot be estimated. He tells himself that, to preserve his empire, he must seize this force. Therefore, after having demonstrated his power by transporting Jesus to the pinnacle of the Temple, he achieves a prestige which must seduce him, if he is only a man, and put him at his service. From the top of the mountain where he had transported him, he showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and he said: “I will give you all this power and the glory of these empires; for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whomever I wish.”
This was delivered to me. Alas! yes, by Adam and by his sin. I give it to whoever I want. No. Lucifer's power depends entirely on simple divine permission. “All this I will give you, if you bow down and worship me. You see, I am the master of the world. I know your genius. I will give you the government of the universe, under my Suzerainty, if you lend me faith and homage.”
No doubt that the preaching of John the Baptist announcing that the kingdom of God was near had induced Lucifer to take measures to maintain on earth the empire which he had enjoyed for so many centuries. A man was necessary for him to fight against the envoy of God, as he himself had done in heaven against the archangel Michael, to maintain the reign of naturalism on earth and prevent the kingdom of God, that is to say the supernatural to take possession of it. He wanted to see if Jesus was not this man. He strives to dazzle him, to excite in Him the love of the world and of what is in the world: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life (1), in a word, to immerse it in naturalism and through it to maintain all peoples there. The word of God spoken by the God-Man, with the authority that belonged to him, took away his illusion: “Begone, Satan. Because it is written, you shall worship the Lord your God and serve him only.”
“You shall worship the Lord your God and serve him alone.” This was what Adam's race had come to learn again, the one who had the mission to restore it to its primary dignity as a child of God destined for the eternal Beatitude that supernatural life provides. The temptation of Our Lord was one of the great mysteries of his life. In the earthly paradise, men had become the subjects of Satan and the slaves of nature. It was important that Our Lord, in undertaking the work that His Father had entrusted to Him "of introducing many sons into glory", first vanquished the enemy who had subjugated humanity to Himself and had limited its ambition to present life and the enjoyment of the goods of this world. He could then
1. Joan, II, 16.
new Adam, head of regenerated humanity, procure for it a blessing more precious than that originally lost. When Jesus had completed his mission as Evangelist, on the Monday of the Holy Week where he was to accomplish his other mission, that of redeeming us, the apostles Andrew and Philip presented to Jesus some Gentiles who had come to Jerusalem for the solemnity of Easter and who had expressed a desire to see the Messiah. At their request, Jesus flinches. He sees in them and in their approach as the first fruits and the pledge of the conversion of the pagan world, which will be the fruit of his death, which he has just shown is imminent. This thought moves him. It seems like a prelude to the terrible agony that was to occur three days later in the Garden of Olives. He cries: “My soul is troubled. And what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour! But that's why I came. Father, glorify your name.” And there comes a Voice from heaven: “I have glorified him and again I will glorify him.” The crowd is surprised. Jesus said: “This voice was not heard for me, it was for you... Now it is the judgment of this world, now the prince of this world will be thrown out.” Jesus, in concert with heaven, thus announced the ruin of Satan's empire and the inauguration of the new kingdom, the Kingdom of Christ, the Kingdom of Heaven, which would be founded on this ruin, by his death on the cross. Thus the supernatural order would be restored, to which Jews and Gentiles would once again be invited, the entire race of Adam redeemed by the blood of the Man-God.
THE TEMPTATION OF CHRISTIANITY
CHAPTER LVI
II. — VARIOUS ATTEMPTS
Mors et vita duello conflixere mirando. Death and life fought a battle on Calvary to which the angels watched full of admiration. In this battle the author of life dies, but in his death he is alive and through his death he reigns. Dux vitae mortuus regnat vivus. The ransom has been paid, the Redemption is accomplished, the sin of the world is removed and the prince of this world is defeated, his reign is ended in principle, but the kingdom he had made for himself must be reconquered, it is the magnum proelium of heaven which will continue on earth under the same conditions. Often the Church will appear to be expiring; always in her apparent death, she will draw new life. The duel first takes place between each soul and its tempter. The Redemption is universal, the divine Savior has merited the salvation of all men, but justification will continue to depend on the will of each person. The merits of Christ will only be applied to individuals with their consent and cooperation (1). The supernatural once again becoming the prerogative of humanity must, as always, be accepted by each of its members. Before this meaning, assumed in the child, effective in the adult, the son of Adam is still under the yoke of Satan, and he returns there by voluntary repudiation of the state of grace, or by committing acts condemned by Christian morality, which causes him to lose friendship with God, or by his resolution to confine himself to nature alone through religious indifference. This is the law which was established from the beginning in heaven and on earth. It has not changed, it could not change with the Redemption.
The new source of life that the spear of the Roman soldier caused to flow from the Heart of Jesus on the cross is open to all, but it only gives its waters to those who come to drink them there. What is true for individuals is true for peoples. Called by the voice of the Apostles, Jews and Gentiles went one by one to this source, and their combined operation formed the body of the Church. To reconquer his empire, Satan attacked the social body as he attacks people. This is what was said at the beginning and what divine Wisdom demanded: Inimicitias ponam inter semen tuum et semen illius. After announcing the Redemption of the human race through the Son of Woman, God had shown the struggle which was to
1. Baptism is conferred on the children of parents who ask it for them; it is then up to them to ratify what has been done. This is how things happened in heaven and in the earthly paradise: the angels and our first parents received sanctifying grace at the moment of their creation, they then had to consent to the gift that had been done to them.
follow between the two cities, one race of the serpent, the other race of the Blessed Woman. The Hebrew word used by Genesis to mark the attacks of the serpent clearly designates the two types of assault that the Church has continued to have to endure: persecutions and heresies. This word marks a hatred exercised both through cunning and through cruelty. These are indeed the two wars that history has continually seen alternate, or even merge, from the first days to the present. Satan first provoked the persecution of the Roman emperors which lasted three centuries and left so many thousands of martyrs. Not being able to suffocate the Church in her blood, he resorted to other means of destruction (1). Almost immediately after the reign of Constantine, we arrive at the pontificate of Pope Gelasius I in the year of Christ 493. How gloomy the situation is! The conversion of the empire, a century before, seems to have been fruitless, and the catastrophe seems imminent. The entire East is in the hands of Christians unfaithful to the ecumenical council of Chalcedon; the West is under the domination of the Arians who reject the ecumenical council of Nicaea; the Pope himself is the subject of an Arian sovereign. And as if a single heresy was not enough, Pelagianism is spreading in the Picenum with the connivance of the bishops. In the north of the dismembered empire, the Britons first infested by Pelagianism are now dispossessed by the pagan Saxons.
1. The following is borrowed from the book of Charles Stanton Devas; Master of Arts from the University of Oxford: The Church and the Progress of the World, translated from English by the Dominican Folghera.
The Catholic clergy was oppressed in the Arian kingdoms of Burgundy, Aquitaine, and Spain, and Catholic worship was temporarily abolished by the Arian Vandals of Africa. Almost the entire East sides with the patriarch of Constantinople Acacius in his schism, and adheres to the Monophysite heresy, while outside the empire, the opposing heresy, Nestorianism, is making scandalous progress. Is this an isolated case? One hundred and fifteen years earlier, when Saint Gregory Nazianzus was going to inaugurate his preaching in Constantinople (378), did not the situation seem desperate with growing Arianism and more and more numerous schisms? And later, at the beginning of the pontificate of Saint Gregory the Great, did not the Church seem threatened with an imminent end? The last vestiges of Roman civilization collapsed before the invasion of the Lombards in Italy; in the East and in the West, famines, plagues, earthquakes; the Christian Britons are massacred, reduced to slavery, driven into the deserted mountains by their pagan enemies, Arianism is the sole master of Spain and the large part of Italy. It is not surprising that Saint Columbanus - and he was not the only one - believed at the end of the world.
If we divide the entire history of the Church and the storms that took place into three chronological periods ,we have just described relate to the first, but the other two are no less agitated. In the second (636-1270), the Church found itself repeatedly threatened with destruction: in the 8th century by the Arabs, in the 9th - the Normans; in the 10th century - the Germanic emperors. The third period, closest to us, is marked by three great facts, each of which, according to the principles of historical probabilities, should have been fatal to the Church. First, the Great Schism: for thirty-seven years, the very foundations are shaken, the principle of obedience is discredited, although, on the other hand, good faith, and what is more, holiness are shown in both obediences as if to attest to a divine authority, even though at war with itself. Then Protestantism broke out: Catholics were victims of slander and indescribable insults, soon followed by pillage, destruction and massacres. England in 1540 resembles a ravaged country: works of art and treasures of knowledge, amassed over centuries, disappear. France sees its churches destroyed by the hundreds, its priests and religious immolated by the thousands; Catholic princes are declared unworthy to command, and the Catholic religion is outraged by horrible sacrileges. Suddenly, in the midst of this hurricane of selfishness and fanaticism, two thirds of her empire seemed irremediably lost to the Church. Finally Jansenism triumphed during the eighteenth century: the great Church of France was infested to the marrow; Joseph II, the Archduke of Tuscany, the King of Naples are on the eve of breaking with the Holy See; bishops and professors openly discuss Catholic doctrines; The Jesuits, as champions of Rome against Protestantism and Jansenism, are excessively persecuted in Portugal, in Spain, in France, in Naples, and the threat of a schism forced the Pope to remove this elite guard at the very hour when it was most urgently needed.
Next comes the Revolution which renews the massacres of the first centuries. This picture is very dismal, but isn't the reverse consoling? On each of these dates, the Lord intervenes. Constantine succeeds Diocletian; the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries end with three conversions which are three dazzling blessings: that of Saint Augustine, that of Clovis, that of the Anglo-Saxons; the desolation of the following centuries culminated in Hildebrand and the Crusades; the zeal of the Dominicans, the Franciscans, the influence of the Summa Theologica of Saint Thomas Aquinas are, so to speak, God's response to imperial tyranny and the Albigensian heresy; the wound of the great schism is barely closed, and here is Fra Angelico, the flower of Christian art, and Thomas à Kempis, the flower of Christian mysticism;
After Luther and Calvin the true Reformation appeared, the work of the Council of Trent, and new missions extended to the East and the West, bringing to the Church more numerous peoples than those who had deserted it. In this gigantic struggle, let us observe, it was always France which provided the most contested and most illustrious battlefield. Clovis defeats the Arians, Charles-Martel the Arabs, Charlemagne the Lombards, Montfort crushes Albigensianism, Saint Louis plants the cross before Tunis, the Guises and the Sainte-Ligue triumph over death, and today, among the missionaries, it is those who came from the heart of France, who pushed the conquests of the Church furthest in infidel countries. How true is this word from history: Gesta Dei per Francos.
It is also in France that we see the battle front of another war more intimate than that which has just been described. The other combats were diverse, partial and relatively speaking, of short duration. It was the body of two giants who, after an effort in one direction, try to overthrow their adversary with an opposite thrust. What remains for us to describe is the continuous struggle because it must be decisive; it is the deep struggle which reaches the very sources of spiritual life in the individual as well as in society and in the Church. Its subject is that which was first in dispute between the angels, then between our first parents and the serpent: naturalism versus supernaturalism. From the first days of Christianity, this battle was fought in the depths of souls, but in the 15th century, Satan believed the time had come to transport this intimate drama onto the great stage of the world and to make it the august tragedy that we offers the history of Christian peoples in recent centuries.