"And out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that the Lord God had made..." (Genesis 2:9; 3:1).
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"Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, Doth Job fear God for nought?
Hast not thou made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side? thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land.
But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face.
And the Lord said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand. So Satan went forth from the presence of the Lord" (Job 1:9-12).
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"Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!”
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"Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!”
'Here I am,' he replied.
Then God said, 'Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you'" (Genesis 22: 1-2).
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"Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil" (Matthew 4:1).
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We are stewards, we are not masters; we are sub-creators, we are not the Creator; thus, we are tried and tested in the fires of temptation. We are sons, not slaves; thus, we are disciplined, not dominated.
There are moments in the Holy Scriptures that move me, and not primarily rationally; I am slain in wholeness by these moments: sometimes in love, sometimes in awe. One of these moments is in the Garden, after Adam and Eve fall to the the serpent's solipsistic rhetoric, and their world, their souls, are shattered in a preemptive knowledge reserved by their Father for Himself. Perhaps it was for them also, but at the right time. In the lengthening of that brass day, the metallic taste of their choice raging in their mouths, they cower in the shadows: "And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day...[a]nd the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?" (Genesis 3:8; 3:9).
The Lord brings His presence to them; I've always had the impression that this was normal, a part of each day. In the Middle East, and in Mediterranean countries, this "walking in the cool of the day" is a time in the later afternoon when the sun, his raging joy, his life-giving abundance finished, becomes a gentle presence, his gold now liquid like a calmed, early-summer stream after the snow-melt rush. This is the time of day for leisure, for the commerce between families and friends over a drink at the end of a work day that began in the very early hours of the morning. One has had a siesta, and this is the magical moment when people find each other again after an absence of sleep in a heat impossible to resist.
The Lord finds them then, when they are meant to be rested and ready for conversation, as perhaps He did every day, in that jeweled pattern, that cool-wine-laden, patterned stream of life. Instead, He knows, and finds, that they are not rested. They are disturbed by death, by gluttony, by arrogance, by pride; their souls are bleeding, and He knows that they must now carry these wounds, and scars, into the generations, and that He will have to take on wounds, and scars, to heal them, finally. He knows all this.
Yet, He comes as is His wont, and calls to them: "Where are you, my son, my daughter?"
Every parent knows this moment...you know that something has happened to your child's will, to their soul, you know it well and the consequences it will bring, yet you do not rage into the shadows where they have hidden their soul from you in angst and shame. You call them: "Where are you, Ana? Where are you, Sophie? Where are you, TJ, my son?"
First come the denials, then the excuses; second, the silence; third, the tears. You want so much to erase it, to go backwards; but you know these tests are necessary.
You know these tests are necessary.
Why?
Why did God plant the tree, the temptation, in the garden with them; why did He allow the serpent to ply his pandering rhetoric; why did God allow Satan to test Job; why did God ask Abraham to go out into the wilderness and sacrifice his son; why did the Israelites have to be tested in Egypt and in the wilderness of Sinai?
It has to do with desire, which is the foundation for virtue, for vice, for love; it is love, in a sense. The desires are appetites, which are, according to St. Thomas, a kind of will which moves towards objects of desire. We are bodily and spiritual creatures, or as the poet Bruce Cockburn quips, "Angel-beasts"; therefore, our desires are also bodily and spiritual, a kind of two-tiered, or twin-nature. Our knowledge is also different from the angels, from purely spiritual beings; we live in the body, in time and without that sight, as St. Augustine discusses, of beings in the eternal present, beyond time.
Furthermore, our true happiness, or fulfillment, must come through our nature, as God made it thus. We receive this nature, and it is meant to be perfected in God, where the dual appetites will give Him a varied glory, different from other creations. It is the glory of beauty one finds in the variety of the flowers, in the very multitudinous aspects of sunlight throughout a single day, in the very varied veins in our beautiful bodies. He loved us, thought of us, and we were made: We are His, in our very bodily and rational and spiritual desires, our true happiness to give Him joy and glory.
But we must desire this with all our varied being, our composite selves. We must desire it, for in love, He created us with free wills, so that we can also love; for, there is no deep, selfless love without a self, a self with a will to love. There is no love without desire.
But physical appetite can become gluttony, with free will; mental appetite can become arrogance; spiritual appetite can become pride--because one can, using the will, turn the desire inward, and worship the self, or another creature, or another good. But the self, or another good besides the Good, cannot fulfill desire; these devolve into the slip-streams alongside the river where the water gets side-tracked and lost in a small place of stagnation and self-eating mold. All goods, even self, are only clear and healthy when they flow towards their true end, from their true end, the Source and End of all, for He is the source of all love, and all desire; thus is He also the End, and humility for the creature is the essential quality of knowing one's place, and understanding the love behind that placement.
Thus testing is a pattern with the Lord, right from our beginnings in that garden. He knows this is necessary to craft a creature as an Artist, to craft a creature capable of choosing rightly, a creature who understands the greater good as greater good, beyond the self, and yet chooses it.
An essential part of healthy desire, or appetite, is the understanding of the lower as related to the higher. I find an abysmal difference between understanding and knowledge; Adam and Eve took from the Tree of Knowledge, but did not thereby gain understanding. They gained knowledge not meant for them and it wounded their souls. The Tree of Knowledge is a temptation: it is if God is asking, "Do you desire knowledge alone, apart from Me, or do you desire that which is related, but Higher, and always with Me and through Me? Do you desire knowledge or knowledge within understanding?"
A few men and women chose understanding in the face of their own, lower knowledge, and the history of the Israelites, of Abraham and Sarah, of Moses, of the kings, of the prophets, is this story, its successes and failures. Sinai itself was a test of this: the great phenomenologist, Emanuel Levinas, images the moment at Sinai when the mountain towered over the Jews, when it suddenly was the navel of the cosmos, when they had before them the way of life and the way of death, when the Law was the mountain that would bring them to understanding, or the undigested knowledge of it would crush them.
And so, like the Israelites, the archetypal human community before Christ came, we each face this mountain, this tree, this parting of the ways, between knowledge apart from God, the knowledge that creates desires that ultimately enslave, and the understanding, or wisdom, that can only come from God and with God, the wisdom that creates right desire for all that is highest, and will ultimately free both soul and body.
We face this mountain toppling and the tree enticing and the emptiness of the crossroads, and wounded as we are, we cannot control our now revolutionary nature.
An image rises, then, in God, another Thought, and it is also His Word, a Word ringing out from the eons outside of time, and is born in time; this image we find now sitting alone in the desert beyond the City of God, facing again that mountain. Christ is led, by the Spirit of God, His spirit also, into the wilderness. That same Satan, so eager to defeat Eve, and Job, rushes in like Herod half-dressed but with intentions sharp as knife-edge, to play the play again. Yet Christ is now the actor in his own, deep drama, and He asks us to seek both katharsis and our own identity through imitative knowledge, an imtative knowledge that becomes, in the fire of suffering, understanding and wisdom.
St. Ambrose says, "See what weapons Christ uses to defeat the power of the devil. He does not use the almighty power he has as God--what help would that be to us? In his humanity he summons the help common to all--overlooking bodily hunger and seeking the word of God for nourishment. Whoever follows the Word is no longer attached to earthly bread, because he receives the bread of heaven and knows the divine is better that the human, the spiritual is better than the physical. Therefore, because such a person desires the true life, he looks for that which fortifies the heart by the means of its invisible substance" (On the Share of the Devil).
Our Lord, Our Bridge, Our Sharer in Suffering, who is also Our God who walks in the cool of the day calling us back, has given us the power through His own suffering in our stead to choose understanding and thus to desire rightly, and thus to be truly wise and fulfilled.
For this to be possible, He must go before us, and within us He must will it; for it to be love, we must follow him and also will it: this is the balance between faith and works, and it is our double-gift from God, it is our time of testing.
Let the Psalmist have the last word:
"Behold, You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart...restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit...the sacrifice to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise" (Psalms 51:6, 12, 17).
*painting by the Russian artist Ivan Kramskoi
