The War With Temptation

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

The great characteristic of our age is not its love for religion, but its love for talking about religion. Even those who would smite God from the heavens make a religion out of this irreligion and a faith out of their doubt.

On all sides from a thousand pens, a hundred microphones, scores of university rostrums, we have heard it repeated until our very head reels that the acids of modernity have eaten away the old faith and the old morality, and that the modern man must have a new religion to suit the spirit of the age.

This new religion, we are told, must be absolutely different from anything that ever existed before. It must be just as fresh and modern as the brilliant age in which we live, with its new hopes, new visions, and new dreams.

When we inquire diligently into the characteristics of this new religion, we are told it must be social, it must be political, it must be worldly. By social, they mean it must dedicate itself not to the illusory pursuit of the spirit, but to the practical needs of the body.

The religious man of the new era will be the one who gives bread to hungry stomachs, clothes to naked backs, and roofs to unsheltered heads. Better milk for babies, better playgrounds for children, better bread for the poor. These, and not faith, grace, and the sacraments, are the things on which man lives. And that religion which gives these social necessities is the religion of the future.

Next, we are told that the new religion must be political. By that is meant that it should cease talking about the kingdom of God and begin talking about the republics of earth. All its energies and zeal must be directed to support governmental policies, such as liquor control, gold standards, and labor codes. There must be a swing away from the stress on eternity, prayers, and the communion of saints, for the world’s problems, in need of a solution, are not religious, we are told, but economic and political.

The final characteristics of the new cult will be its worldliness. Too long has religion emphasized responsibility to God and dwelt on duties to him instead of service to our fellow men. The new religion has no time for the thought of responsibility to God, for the modern man, says George Bernard Shaw, is too busy to think about his sins. It makes man the master of all he surveys, the lord of his own life, and therefore one who may shuffle off by his own hand if he chooses, for who is there who will dare say nay?

Now let us ask the new prophets, how old is their new religion? Is it really a new thing? Or is it merely an old error with a new label? Let us go back 2,000 years to the eternal Galilean and learn not only that the new religion is just an old temptation, but also that resistance to it is the pledge and promise of life everlasting.

Go back to the picture of Our Lord as he stood in the untenanted wilderness which stretches southward from Jericho to the Dead Sea. There his forerunner, John, with bronze countenance, unshorn locks, leather girdle, and mantle of camel’s hair, whose drink was the water of the river, and whose food was locusts and wild honey, he saw the heavens open and the Spirit of God descend in dove-like radiance over his master’s head, as there rang out over the Jordan River a voice which to unpurged ears was like thunder. “You are my beloved Son, in you I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:17).

With the waters still dripping from his noble head, Our Lord went into the solitude to put a desert between himself and humanity. For 40 years, the Jewish people wandered in the desert before entering into the kingdom promised by God. For 40 days, Moses remained close to God to receive his law on tablets of stone. Now, before announcing his kingdom, to which Moses and the chosen people had pointed, Our Lord retires for 40 days into the lonely mountains, where no human face was to be seen and where no human voice was to be heard.

After 40 days of fasting, he was tempted by Satan. Tempted he could be, for he had taken the armor of human flesh, not for idleness, but for battle. Do not mock the Gospels and say there is no Satan. Evil is too real in the world to say that. Do not say the idea of Satan is dead and gone. Satan never gains so many cohorts as when in his shrewdness, he spreads the rumor that he is long since dead. Do not reject the gospel because it says the Savior was tempted. Satan always tempts the pure. The others are already his. Satan stations more devils on monastery walls than in dens of iniquity, because the latter offer no resistance. Do not say it is absurd that Satan should appear to Our Lord, because Satan must always come close to the godly and the strong. The others succumb from a distance.

But in what did Satan tempt Christ? Here is the remarkable side of that temptation, and one which has such a bearing on our own day. Satan tempted Our Lord to preach another religion than that which he was about to preach. Our Lord was about to preach a divine religion. Satan tempted him to preach a religion that was not divine, but a religion which the modern world calls new. In a word, the three temptations of Satan against Christ are the three temptations of the world against the church today, namely, to make religion social, political, and worldly.

Satan first tempted Our Lord to make religion social, to make it center about the materialities of life, such as bread for starving bodies like his own. Pointing from the top of the mountain to the stones whose shapes resembled little loaves of bread, he said, “Tell these stones to become loaves of bread” (Matt. 4:3). It was Satan’s challenge to God to make religion center around the materialities of life.

But the answer of Our Lord was immediate. “Not by bread alone shall man live, but by every utterance proceeding from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4). By that response, Our Lord declared that religion is not social in the sense that its primary function is to give food to the body, but rather divine, in the sense that it must give food to the soul. Men must have bread. There’s no disputing that point. Our Lord taught us to ask the Father to give us this day our daily bread. He even went so far when men were in dire need of it in the desert places to multiply bread even to excess.

But beyond that, he told the thousands at Capernaum, he would not go. “You seek me because you ate the loaves and were satisfied. Labor not for the food that perishes, but for food that remains for life eternal” (John 6:26–27).

Religion is not purely social. If salvation were only economic relief, if religion were only to give bread to hungry stomachs, then dogs would be invited to its banquet. But man has a higher principle than that of the beasts and a higher life than that of the body. We come into this world not just to sit and rest, to work and play, to eat and drink. Hence, that religion which would make the securing of bread its chief object in life, and would seek no divine food, will starve with hunger in the midst of plenty.

There must come dark hours when God must be trusted, even in hunger. There must even come moments in starvation when bread must be refused if it means the sacrificing of a principle that endangers the soul. It is no justification to say we must live, because bodily life in itself is not necessarily the best thing for us. It is better for us not to live if we cannot live without sin, for it is never right for us to starve our spiritual nature to get bread for our bodies.

Sometimes the best thing we can do with our life is to lose it. And the best thing we can do with our body is not to fear those who would kill it, but rather to fear those who would cast our soul into hell.

Religion need not neglect sociology. The priest at the communion rail need not forget the bread lines. The minister in the sanctuary need not forget the playgrounds. The earthly, the human, and the social are part of religion, but not the primary part, as Satan would have us believe. Rather, in searching for higher things, do we find the lower. First seek the kingdom and the will of God, and all those things will be given to you besides.

Satan next tempted Our Lord to make religion political by exchanging the kingdom of God for the kingdoms of earth. Then the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world in an instant of time. And he said to him, “I can give you all this power and glory, because it has been given to me and to whomever I want to give them. So if you will worship me, it will be yours” (Luke 4:6–7). And in answer, Jesus said to him, “It is written, the Lord your God shall you worship, and him alone shall you adore” (Luke 4:8).

By this answer, Our Lord declared to all future ages that religion is not politics, that patriotism is not the highest virtue, that nationalism is not the highest worship, that the state is not the highest God. Devotion to the state there must be. Loyalties to the kingdom of earth there must be. Tribute to Caesar there must be. Man is social, and living in society, he must govern and be governed. He must be a patriot, not only by supporting the just policies of those who rule, but even to the extent of laying down his life in just warfare for the common good.

These things are self-evident. But Satan would have Christ adore the kingdoms of earth, convert the pulpit into a platform, and the gospel into a national anthem. Our Lord would tell us no, that earthly kingdoms are but scaffoldings to the kingdom of heaven, that patriotism towards country is but the nursery to the adoration of God, and that it profits us nothing if we gain the whole world and lose our immortal soul.

Politics and religion are related, something like the body and the soul. Both have their rights and their duties, but one is superior to the other. The primary concern of religion is not the rehabilitation of the kingdoms of the earth or the support of economic policies, because Our Lord came not to restore the politics of the world, but to make a new kingdom which needs neither armies, nor navies, soldiers, nor monies, slaves, nor judges, but only renewed and living souls.

He did not say religion must not be concerned with social injustice or indifferent to political graft. Our Lord loved his own country so deeply and warmly that as the first Christian patriot, he wept over it. But he also loved the kingdom of heaven so much more that he was willing to be put to death by the very country that he loved.

While time endures, Satan will always tempt religion to be wholly political. But until the end of time, the due order must be preserved. “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matt. 22:21).

Satan’s last assault was an effort to make religion worldly. The gospel tells us, Satan led Jesus to Jerusalem and set him on the parapet of the temple and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, he will give his angels orders concerning you to protect you, and on their hands they will carry you, lest you strike your foot against a stone” (Luke 4:9–11). And in answer, Jesus said to him, “It is said, you shall not tempt the Lord your God” (Luke 4:12).

What a lesson is hidden in that answer for those who would make religion worldly, by emptying it of all responsibility and by making God merely a passive spectator of our faults and our suicides. The plea to cast himself down from the pinnacle was not a sign of trust in God, but disbelief in God. It was an appeal not to a natural appetite, but to a perverted pride, which assumes that God is indifferent to our actions and disinterested in our decisions.

The answer of Our Lord was a reminder that religion centers about responsible persons and not about falling bodies, that man is endowed with free will and is therefore responsible for each of his actions down even to the least, that the universe in which he lives is moral, and therefore one in which we mount by making our dead selves stepping stones to higher things. That worldly religion which denies responsibility, sin, and judgment, would reduce us all to mere stones, falling from the giddy heights of stony pinnacles. It would make us merely material bodies obeying the law of gravitation, which pulls us to the earth, instead of spiritual beings which like fire, mount up beyond the stars to the light of the world.

Real religion does not say throw yourself down, but lift yourself up. For we are destined not to be stones of earth, but immortal children of God. Heaven and not the world is our final destiny. So instead of casting himself down like a cheap and vulgar magician, Our Lord cast Satan down, and then goes out to another mountain top to give from its heights the beatitudes of God, which lead to true beatitude with God in the everlasting glory of heaven.

Thus the so-called new religion proves to be an old religion which Satan would establish on earth. There is no new birth in this new faith, but the same old spirit in the same old Adam, full of selfishness, envy, and sin. By vanquishing temptation, the eternal Galilean has trumpeted to all nations and to all time, the supreme truth that religion is not primarily social, nor political, nor worldly.

Rather, its function is to minister divine life to society, divine justice to politics, and divine forgiveness to the worldly. The world today is really seeking such a divine religion and is near to starvation, as modern sects bring to it only the husks of humanism. The minds of today are beginning to see that our problems are not primarily economic and political, but religious and moral, that society will not and cannot be reformed from without, but only from within. It is only by the spirit of Christ and the spirit of prayer that the freedom of man, won by bloodshed and national sacrifice, can be safeguarded and preserved.

The shattering of all our material illusions during the World War and during the present economic recession has made the clear-visioned minds of our day see that apostasy from the principles of the Savior, the abandonment of the spiritual life, and the transgression of the commandments of God, have led of necessity to our ruin and confusion worse confounded.

There is hope for us, however, and a glorious hope it is, in the victory of Christ over Satan. By permitting the prince of darkness to tempt him, even though it was wholly exterior and did not touch his sinless soul, he proved that he is not insensible to our difficulties, our sorrows, and our temptations. We cannot say to him what Satan said to God about Job, “But now put forth your hand and touch his bone and his flesh, and surely you will see that he will blaspheme you to your face” (Job 2:5).

Our Lord does know what it is to be tempted away from divinity and the primacy of the spirit. His bones, his flesh were touched into scourging and crucifixion, and his answer was greater than Job’s. Job answered, “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21).

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

EW

From The Eternal Galilean, Chapter IV, Fulton J. Sheen (1934)