Soloviev on the Three Temptations

I offer you this meditation for next Sunday’s Gospel from Vladimir Soliviev, God, Man and the Church, Cambridge 1937, pp. 123-127. Indeed, we clergy have to be constantly on our guard, particularly in regard to the temptation of power and controlling other people.

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(…) Christ as God freely renounces his glory and by so doing acquires as man the ability to become a sharer in that glory.

But before he can do this the Saviour's human nature and will must encounter the temptation of evil. There is a twofold consciousness in the theandric personality, of his divine essence and of his restricted natural existence. And since he really experiences the limitations of the last, the God-man can undergo temptation from an external source, the temptation to use his divine power as means to attain ends transcending these limitations.

For a being who lives under material conditions there is in the first place a temptation to make material well-being an end and object and to use his divine power as a means to attain it. “If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread”. Here the divine substance— “If thou be the Son of God” — and its manifestation — “command” — are to be the means to satisfy a bodily requirement. In reply to this temptation Christ declares that the divine voice is not at the beck and call of material existence but is itself the source of man's true life: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God”. In rejecting this physical temptation the Son of Man receives dominion over all flesh.

The Man-God is then tempted to use his divine power in the interest of his human personality, to sin against reason, to fall into presumption. “If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down. For it is written: He shall give his angels charge concerning thee; and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone”. To do this (“Cast thyself down”) would be a defiance of God by absolutely self-confident man, a temptation of God by man. Christ answers, “It is written again: Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God”[1]. In repudiating this sin of the understanding the Son of Man receives dominion over all understanding.

The third and last temptation is the strongest. Bondage to the flesh and spiritual presumption have been thrust aside ; the human will has reached a high degree of moral development and knows itself to be above all other earthly creatures ; and man can aspire, in the name of this moral worth, to dominate the world and lead it to perfection. But the world lies in evil and does not readily submit itself to moral superiority, so it must be forced and the divine power must be used to subdue it. But thus to use unjust violence to attain good ends is to avow that good is powerless by itself, that evil is the stronger, and to worship that principle of evil which reigns in the world. “The Devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, and saith unto him, ‘All these things will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me’”. Here is a clear statement of the crucial question for mankind: In whom do you believe? And whom will you serve? —the divine power that you cannot see, or the evil power that you can see all around you? The human will of Christ would have none of this temptation to seek power for itself, even though apparently justified; it repudiated the world's evil and freely submitted to good : “Then saith Jesus unto him, ‘Get thee hence, Satan, for it is written: Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and him only shalt thou serve’”. So did the Son of Man vanquish the sin of the spirit, and he received supreme dominion over all the spiritual kingdom; he had refused to use earthly weapons and to seek earthly domination and in that moment the powers of Heaven were at his command: “and behold! Angels came and ministered unto him”.

By dismissing the temptations that would commit his human will to self-affirmation our Lord shows the harmony of that will in him with the divine will which divinizes his manhood through the incarnation of his Godhead. But Christ's victory does not stop there. He is a whole man and so he has besides the purely human element (rational will), a natural material element: he is not only made man, he is also made flesh, “sárx egéneto”. And the spiritual triumph over temptation has to find its completion in the overcoming of suffering and death by the sensitive principle, the flesh; that is why it is said in the Gospel, after the account of the temptation in the wilderness, that the Devil departed from Christ for a season. After the principle of evil had been excluded from the innermost part of our Lord's human being it nevertheless still had power at the outer, over his physical nature, which could be made free only by a similar process of self-abnegation; the physical nature also was freely subdued to the Godhead by Christ's human will and, in spite of its weakness (“Let this cup pass from me …”), fulfilled the divine will even to the end in bodily torment and death.

The normal order of the three elements in man [divine, material and human uniting the first two] violated in the first Adam is thus restored in the second. The human element by voluntarily putting itself in submissive relationship to the divine element as the plenitude of its own good becomes again the mediating and unifying principle between God and the natural element; this last, cleansed by the death of the Cross, loses its material particularity and impenetrability and becomes the direct expression and instrument of the Spirit, the true spiritual body of the risen Man-God. In his life, his death and his resurrection Jesus Christ shows that God, incarnate in him, is above law and reason, that he can do far more than immobilize evil by his strength or unmask it by his light; he is the Spirit of life and of love, and he redeems and saves that nature which has fallen into rack and ruin, transforming its falsities into truth, its wickedness into goodness—and in this act of triumphant love God finds his own glory. “And we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth”.