Putting Ourselves in Question: A Brief Phenomenology of Temptation
All terrain erodes, including even the steepest slopes, and those of words do not escape this law of time. By dint of passing from one mouth to another (and from one generation to the next), some words are so old and oafish that they end up becoming nothing more than harmless pebbles, completely smooth and round, bland little gossip balls eventually. Such is the pitiful fate of the biblical word “temptation” in today’s usage: “Let yourself be tempted,” we say when offering another helping of a dish or when suggesting a pleasant outing. The extremely vague association of this pleasure with the transgression of duty, as if coming somehow from a past life or a lost underwater civilization, alone gives the word what remains of its spice. Mass “advertising,” which like certain animals feasts only on what is dead and renders what it does all the more insignificant as it gives us the illusion of being original or audacious, has not failed to seize on the term.
Fortunately, we have “test” (l’épreuve), the very resilient twin for the word “temptation,” still uncorroded despite all the chatter. The following pages will draw upon them concurrently. The universal conviction underlying the vocabulary of trial and temptation in the languages invoked here is that we cannot really know a thing, an animal, another man, even oneself, as long as we have not been put to the test, which is to say, so long as we have not been subjected to trials, experiences, efforts, and conflicts which alone reveal what we are (or are not) capable of. The Greek word peirasmos is the quintessential biblical word for temptation in the spiritual sense, but its root is classic, referring to the testing or trying of something or of oneself. The duality of the French verb “to undergo” (éprouvé) where one actively experiences something other than oneself, but also experiences a feeling, is not so apparent in Greek. Yet, be that as it may, to “be proved” (éprouvé) is both to have suffered and to be experienced, as with “tried” in English. The Latin temptare has these same meanings, as does the German Versuchung, which translates the French tentation and whose root connotation resounds with the sense of an active search, like a dog following a trail. But Luther also prefers the word Anfechtung, which does not have this sense of trial, and refers to a living and agonizing struggle (and can also be translated “tribulation”).
The opening line of Henri Michaux’s work Les grandes épreuves de l’esprit, in which he relates the trial he made of trying various drugs, shows that for him it is not a matter of sampling them as if he were taste-testing, but of trying them out in a form of self-experimentation, so singular was his attempt, or temptation. It aligns with the meanings just mentioned: “I would like to reveal the ‘normal,’ the misunderstood, the unsuspected, the incredible, the enormously normal. The abnormal has made it known to me.” Through the alteration produced by intoxication, Michaux discovers that we are, in our ordinary state, a much richer and more complex mental “computer” than we think. This self-experimentation leads him in the direction of what Emmanuel Levinas forcefully criticizes in the second of his Four Talmudic Lessons of 1968, “The Temptation of Temptation.” It is a matter “of trying everything, of testing everything,” of knowing everything, even evil, which is “perhaps Western man’s condition” (this “perhaps” is strange and pregnant with meaning; it is an attempt at thinking, a philosophical attempt at questioning the very philosophical project itself). But Levinas does not take the word “temptation” in a biblical sense here.
And yet, all this still remains vague, because obviously what distinguishes biblical temptation is the fact that we are tested by God or before God, and that the dimension at stake in this test is salvation itself, eternal life. It can only be described by posing these questions: Who tries? To what end? What layers within ourselves can temptation uncover? Why can they only be uncovered (if at all) by testing? And finally, last but not least: does what it reveals only come to light having formerly been hidden or latent within us (like Michaux’s unsuspected and unrecognized “normal”), or does temptation as a decisive crisis bring to the surface what in us would never have been acted upon without it, whether for good or ill?
In this latter case, even the coming of the Savior could be considered temptation, as in this abyssal word of Christ: “If I had not done among them the works that no one has done, they would have no sin; but now they both have seen and hated both me and my Father” (John 15:24). The Good provokes Evil with an otherwise incomparable force. It is not a question here of drawing up a litany of temptations, any more than of studying the many biblical passages that discuss them (along with the traditions that meditate on them), but only of advancing somewhat in these questions, so as perhaps to pose them better.
A key stretch of St. Augustine’s The City of God (XVI.32) interprets temptation as an interrogation addressed to us, not in word but by deed (non verbo, sed experimento), one to which we ourselves will respond with our conduct, good or bad, and that reveals to us unknown aspects of ourselves. To ponder temptation is therefore to question the significance of what is in itself a question, to ask the question of what makes us question ourselves. The beautiful French expression faire question is often weakened in its use, having become synonymous with making an issue of something or causing difficulty, of presenting an obscurity or an ambiguity. To define temptation, we must take it in its strongest sense, by emphasizing the proving: temptation is a situation, an encounter, or a thought that makes us question ourselves, and that dispossesses us of what we habitually believe about ourselves, thereby putting us, even if only for a moment, in a state of vacillation or abeyance, and demanding of us an urgent response in action, which is certainly not so with the verbal questions we are most often asked. I reveal myself in the test (l’épreuve), by deciding about myself (or even by deciding not to decide), by becoming who I am, or who I would have been in and through it (it is premature to decide between these two possibilities).
Because of this urgency, we could certainly be tempted to say that if the question of what temptation means for us really demands action, to speculate about it would be out of bounds, and a temptation in the form of procrastination. That would be to misunderstand the experimental or experiential character of this question. Understanding and discernment belong primordially to the correct response to temptation, since they are our first act in reply to the question that temptation poses. An essential chiaroscuro in fact bathes the question that will shed light on our selves. That is why temptation is neither primarily nor ultimately a moral matter. Its concept would not require so much scrutiny if there were only temptation to evil and towards evil, and if it were the case that what exposed us to temptation were only our weaknesses, our vices, our frailties (fragilités) which are recognized as such. Many men stumble and fall because of what in their own eyes (as in those of others as well) they possessed of the best.
Intelligence can make us blind by too much self-confidence (Oedipus, to name but one); power’s mastery can lead to impotence and disaster through too much presumption (Napoleon Bonaparte, with the same proviso); moral purity can become allergic and cruel through too much asepsis, and as a result immoral . . . Conversely, as the unforgettable lesson of St. Paul reminds us, our greatest weakness can be the source of the greatest strength in temptation (2 Cor 12:9). For, according to the word of the Epistle of James (1:2), temptations come in “many kinds,” which is why it is impossible to list them. If we take up the definition of temptation suggested just now, there is nothing that at a given moment cannot put into question a man: someone who has been victorious amid terrible trials that would have broken others, can crack and collapse under the strain of a simple doubt which to some would have been as light as a feather. Precariousness and poverty expose us to serious temptations, yet security and affluence have theirs also, which are no less serious in their effects.
“Temptation” being a biblical term, can we ask Scripture for calm clarity (something handy or portable, as it were) on the subject? Every Christian regularly, if not daily, pronounces the prayer taught by Christ himself, the “Our Father,” whose sixth request, the only one expressed in the form of a negative, is to lead us not into temptation (the verb having been translated in various different ways in modern languages). Similarly, in the Garden of Olives he invites his disciples to watch and pray so as not to enter into temptation (Matt 26:41). But what temptation, and can it be any temptation whatever? Many interpreters, like Joachim Jeremias, believe that this is the great eschatological tribulation, the onslaught of the powers of evil in their final insurrection against the Light. Do we pray never to have to struggle, or instead to receive help with the struggle? But if here temptation names the supreme peril, it is elsewhere taken as a positive. Tertullian bears witness to a tradition that attributed to Christ the saying that “no one can without having been tempted (neminem intemptatum) reach the celestial kingdoms” (On Baptism, XX.2). We can pray to be tested, as in verse 2 of Psalm 26: Proba me Domine et tempta me, “Examine me and prove me, Lord,” as we sometimes say in friendship or in love, test me, ask of me what you want. And the Epistle of James twice blesses temptations (1:2 and 1:12), while saying that God tempts no one, but that we are tempted by our own lust (1:13–14).
To which we must add that Jesus himself faced temptation and the tempter (Matt 4:1–11), and that this scene, preceded by the young orator who serves as a model for Lent, forms in a way the prologue in action to his entry into his ministry and the beginning of his preaching. (That he answers the devil only with biblical quotations is the origin of the tradition according to which we should not argue with the tempter, who is always a better sophist than we are. One should not believe oneself stronger than him on this basis: for as soon as one starts to discuss something, one concedes a shred of common ground, by entering into something of a negotiation.) If Christ himself had to face the powers of Evil, could the imitation of Christ, equipped with the strength that only he can give, be without struggle, especially since, so far as we are concerned, such struggle is also a struggle with ourselves? Incidentally, the Church Fathers have tried to classify our own temptations according to these three temptations of Christ.
In order to untangle this complex web of temptation’s biblical meanings, tradition has introduced a number of just and valuable distinctions, allowing them to be classified. There are tests that come from God and aim at some higher good, tribulations by which we mature and grow, what Augustine called tentatio probationis. And then there are temptations that come from the devil and aim at evil, a maneuver of deception and seduction (in the strong and primary sense of this term, as that which diverts from the way, and therefore leads astray), what he called tentatio deceptionis. There are external temptations that derive from the situations into which we are thrown, those of which we must believe there are none so great that God cannot give us the strength to overcome them (1 Cor 10:13), and there are internal temptations, whereby we are in some way our own tempter as a result of what in us is corrupt and complicit with evil (even the most peaceful and happy life will not escape these). The Epistle of James, right after proclaiming “blessed is the one who endures temptation” (1:12), describes these latter well.
In their explanations of this passage, it is striking to note the extent to which two commentators as distinct in time and temperament as Bede the Venerable and John Calvin agree. In the same lines, from one verse to another, we pass from mention of outward temptation to inward temptation, from a good trial coming from God to a bad one coming from us (or from the devil in us). “Now here,” Calvin says with Bede, “we must not doubt that he is speaking of another kind of temptation” different from the external temptations that “are sent to us by God.” And as for those temptations born of us, as Calvin asks with a beautiful expression, “what will the sinner gain by searching for some corridor of excuse, saying that he was incited from elsewhere?” But is this leap from one sense of temptation to the other natural, and does it align with the Epistle’s logic? An outward temptation, by definition, is only really so if it can at least arouse an internal disturbance.
The internal temptation’s inward progression itself has stages. According to St. Gregory the Great’s distinctions (Homilies on the Gospels, I.XVI.1), distinctions of great importance as guides for directing the conscience, an image or fantasy is presented to me (suggestio), I take more or less pleasure in a given instance considering it and playing with it (delectatio), I then consent to what it invites of me and act on it (consensus). Having turbulent fantasies and troubled dreams is simply the mark of the human condition as it is, and hence guilt itself only occurs, and grows, in the two following stages. All of these distinctions, and more, are put to best use for both directing our lives and for understanding the Bible, which is why it is not a question of negating them as vain. Yet if we place ourselves in the full concreteness of the tried and tested man, their implementation is neither automatic nor simple, since it supposes that a significant portion of the question is already solved.
For the trials that come to confront us do not reveal themselves by way of their family tree, nor with an indication of their origin. The devil presents himself as an “angel of light” (2 Cor 11:14), while by contrast the always higher and true God is a “hidden God” (Isa 45:15), who overflows, on all sides, the images and representations we make of him and his modes of action. Woven into the fabric of mundane life, in short, are questions so discreet, tests so humble, that we do not even discern them as questions that God addresses to us. And even the higher virtues have, dare one say it, a backside, a side that we cannot see and by which the tempter approaches and attacks us. We would never have suspected temptation could assail us this way, when we were on guard against what we identify and consider to be our weaknesses. Corruptio optimi pessima: the corruption of the best is the worst of all corruptions, says the Latin adage, a fact history and experience illustrate amply. Intellectual rigor, whether it be of a philosophical, moral, political, or religious order, is transformed into fanatical intransigence, the pure concern for justice into cruel iniquity, and the loftiness of the principle that we serve devotionally and with apparent self-effacement (possibly sacrificially so) excuses us from questioning the cause we claim to be serving. This is the tragic truth expressed by Pascal’s statement in Pensées: “Man never does evil so fully and cheerfully as when he does it out of conscience,” that is to say, out of a sense of duty and principle.
In the description, striking like a lightning-flash, of the Last Judgment given in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, Christ is said to manifest himself to those who fed him when he was hungry, clothed him when he was naked, or did not do so, none of them noticing, not knowing it was Christ himself who was the poor and humble one. They will have emerged victorious or defeated from the great test without even knowing they were ever dealing with one. It was too mundane to be identified as such. We can be so completely encased and imprisoned within the tightly knit armor of what we hold to be essential or unessential, good or bad, that we no longer have the freedom and flexibility of mind to answer the unforeseen, impromptu questions improvised by God. Like medieval knights flailing about helplessly, falling from their horses like dazed beetles, their greatest vulnerability was their sense of invulnerability. Thus, it is always with fear and trembling that discernment must be exercised over a temptation or a trial’s origin.
To this question, however, there is our deed’s answer. Resisting an evil temptation, whatever intelligences it has in us, does not leave us as we were, but enhances our strength and vision. Our answer, then, is livelier than the question. The path of righteousness is paved with a thousand victories over unrighteousness. Conversely, fleeing from the question (the trial, task, vocation) does not extinguish God’s perseverance in issuing it: consoling is the sign of Jonah, whose sinking to the bottom of the sea will have formed the prophetic figure (of course, this only applies to a fall imbued with acute knowledge of the God from whom one falls, by which he is intensely present to us!).
As for the distinction between outer and inner temptations, there is something porous about it. I respond, by definition, with all that I am to the trials I face in the world, which is how they manifest who I already was, even without my knowing it. The exterior makes my interior appear. Yet that interior is already fully penetrated by our falls and our triumphs, our encounters and our memories, by the whole of the outer life without which interiority would be empty. We can only be tempted by evil because we are “temptable,” but perhaps we are only “temptable” because we have been tempted. Milton in Paradise Lost invents a troubling dream of Eve, in which Satan circumvents her defenses while she is not on guard in her sleep (Iv, 799ff., and v, 30ff. for the account of the dream): this is what English commentators call “the fall before the Fall,” a wounding of her imagination, which will render her capable of a fall, without being an act as such. In less fantastic fashion, other spiritual authors seek, even at the risk of an infinite regress, the secret and imperceptible fault, the intimate slip by which I make myself fragile. Fleeting complacency over a possibility (“What if I . . . ?”) may initiate the infinitesimal fissure within me, placing me on a sad countdown to what will be subsequent explosions. A righteous and profound thought can become a disastrous temptation nonetheless, a puritanical (and also neurotic) hypervigilance whereby we scrutinize ourselves endlessly in the anguish that the smallest inner quiver is the sign of damnation, or the very first slide into the abyss. As an expert on the subject such as Amiel wrote, “every trifle is tied by an invisible thread to some catastrophe.” Aside from the fact that this type of fear often produces the very thing it dreaded, such self-obsession’s insomnia blinds us to the questions that come from the world, others, and God.
Are we thrown into foggy ambiguity by all these considerations, no longer knowing what comes from God or the devil, in which case this very meditation on temptation would itself be a fall? For we must not forget that one of Evil’s greatest seductions is to fascinate us (even in the horror and anguish we have of it) and, to stun us (in the strict sense), leaving us powerless against its assault. No, it leads to raising the question, the question of the question that is temptation, otherwise. St. Augustine, and St. Gregory the Great after him, lent great weight to a phrase from the book of Job (7:1), which in the Old Latin translation that preceded the Vulgate said that the whole temporal life of man is one temptation, a test. This may seem at first glance to be a very gloomy view of life, but all the stories that have ever been written of the human experience speak of nothing else, being only the stories of our trials, even if their meaning assuredly is understood in different ways. St. Augustine cites this word of Job time and again. As for St. Gregory, in his Morals on Job (VIII.6.8), he draws attention to the crucial point concerning the word: human life is not said to have or to present ordeals, but to be a trial. That shifts the problem to the matters of temporality and identity. The great continuous trial that we will have been (for we will in the end be what we will have made of our time, and thus of ourselves) cannot be reduced to any of its moments, even if there are decisive ones.
The Gospel saying (Luke 15:7) that there is more joy in heaven for one sinner who repents than for ninety-nine just people, the liturgical song of Easter evoking the felix culpa, the blessed fault that brought us so great a Redeemer, shows that this continuous trial is made up of falls and recoveries in which, through the grace of God, we get up better and stronger than before the fall. Grace that believes amid its trials is not an anesthetic, nor a mere bandage for our wounds, but rather something that gives superior health. Chapter twenty-nine of Origen’s treatise On Prayer furnishes a vivid and brief illustration of the patristic understanding of temptation’s usefulness.
Can, however, temptations be reduced to a profitable revelation of what had been hidden in us? That would dissolve the temporal essence of human identity, and make the test a mere lifting of a veil, rather than a site of struggle for the truth of our being. The test’s being a surprise is inseparable from the drama of its successful overcoming exceeding any preconceived expectation. A timorous, dull man can in critical circumstances become a hero. And such heroes, returning from terrible situations and suffocating from mundanity, sometimes crumble under the lilliputian attacks of little everyday trials. The weak’s strength and the strong’s weakness is a commonplace that exhibits many variations. But from a higher observatory in which we would consider ourselves placed by power of our own decree, can we affirm that temptation only manifests unveiled nooks of the soul? Let us say instead, like the philosopher Jules Lequier, who writes these words in capital letters: “Your name is: What you were in the test.” For better or for worse, we become ourselves without having chosen the place where we will become so.
This raises a new question. Does everyone have his ordeal and his temptation, the one towards which he tends secretly as towards the decisive combat from which he will emerge victorious or defeated, just as, for Rilke, everyone bears within himself his own death (this does not mean that everyone dies his own death: one can deprive a man of his own death, which the twentieth century has colossally practiced)? The Early Church saw the supreme test in the eschatological clash between Good and Evil, of which martyrdom thereafter during times of persecution of the faith (which always remains) will be representative. Those of today’s generation, owing to their place in time and the stories of their elders, see the moral and political order’s supreme test in one’s attitude to Nazism: Would one have been a collaborator, or a resister, or a black-market profiteer? For later generations of the Church, however, there appeared the adage that peace has its martyrs also, highlighting that there were other temptations, other struggles, that required no less courage, perseverance, and sacrifice. Existence is critical even when it does not take place in a tumultuous historical moment. If the test is identifying, each has its own test, even if only in the form of the absence of one (temptation’s absence is the worst temptation, said Luther following others). Yet we cannot take a divine view from above, nor can we become intoxicated with romanticism by thinking that our trial is maturing within us, waiting for its time.
Great temptations and trials take us by surprise, without warning, and often find us unprepared: by presenting a task that seems impossible, they are of an entirely different sort than the challenges one throws at oneself when engaged in the project of trying to prove oneself. As a little reflection shows, we cannot even in faith adopt God’s own view to tribulation. If temptation, as a truly agonic place, constitutes the crisis where I become myself, can we wish it on others? A question such as this bears within itself its own answer, evidently negative, yet why? Because this would be to wish for his perdition, because the test is not a means, because we do not know what test would be the place of his truth, because we do not have to interfere between God and him, because we cannot draw up, by aerial surveillance, the cartography of the ways of his being. The trial is not a role on the world’s stage that we could, even in a dream, envisage to assign. The promise that God does not allow us to be tempted beyond our strength is a faithful word, certainly not an empirical or statistical statement. It can only be said in the hope that he will give us the strength that we certainly lack. The impromptu nature of the question that temptation addresses to us means that most of the time it takes us against the grain, at the very moment when it seems we are not up to it. It is the situation that asks stutterers to speak, the introspective to be organizers, the gentle to be firm, the violent to be gentle . . .
The ardent and great St. Teresa of Ávila (whom the novelist George Eliot, a Methodist who had become an unbeliever, takes in the preface to her masterpiece Middlemarch as the model of the accomplished woman) spoke of the exhausting weight of those small daily stresses and strains, which are not serious in themselves, but which we cannot overcome. Some tiny victories from the world’s perspective can cost more suffering and struggle than much more important human acts, where we have placed all our desire for dignity, and our pride too sometimes. It can happen that we are harsh by judging others for temptations that are not ours, and lenient when they are ours, which is unfair. Yet the opposite and equally unjust danger is common also, for we are irritated that others have not paid the price of renunciation and courage that we ourselves have paid in order to overcome what we have, and for which we consider ourselves the living proof that doing so is doable. All the while, other situations escape us.
If temptation is the place of a person’s true becoming, as well as of the personal becoming of the truth, then the most fitting word to express it is one uttered first-personally, a retrospective word too (what I was when I became a question for myself), and hence one of confession. Ordeals are recounted, tales always demand tests, real or imaginary. If my name is “the one I will have been in the test,” then the test always is somebody’s, for it bears a personal coefficient, a unique signature, which will only have been forged in it. This does not mean that we cannot derive temptation’s laws, nor think about them, but that these essential structures only reach intuitive fullness in an account that is always that of the unimaginable.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted with permission from Ten Meditations for Catching and Losing One’s Breath (Wipf and Stock, 2024), translated by Steven DeLay. All rights reserved.