Question 41, Articles 1–2: Why Christ willed to be tempted, and why in the desert (with digressions on Mozart's symmetry and the virtues in music)

Orientation #

He opens question 41 fresh (“Okay, let’s start question forty-one here”), lists its four articles, and ends in the middle of a. 2 ad 3, announcing the next step: “Now, how about the time when the temptation?” The preceding class treated Thomas’s articles on Christ’s manner of life (austerity, poverty, conformity to the Law).

The class, in order #

1. Opening exchange: guardian angels and the inequality of creatures (“God makes everything for the sake of what himself”) #

• Is one’s guardian angel included in “love your neighbour”? He grants the angel “a good claim to it,” though loving an angel is different since angels are unlike us. There are as many guardian angels as people; an aside: “Angels take up less space than people.” The Fathers commonly speak of the angels assisting at Mass.
• From Summa Contra Gentiles II, cc. 39–45: God makes all things for himself, yet gains nothing — his goodness does not depend on the universe. So what is he up to? He is making creatures like himself.
• Thomas’s reason for the inequality of creatures: without it, no creature would be like God in perfecting others. Example: Christ is “the light that enlightens every man,” but Thomas Aquinas, or one’s guardian angel, also enlightens us, and so is like God in this. Hence we are made inferior to Aquinas, Augustine, Euclid, Aristotle, so as to be enlightened by them — Euclid about squares and triangles, Aristotle about the soul and God. “That’s the way it should be, right? Rather than all of us thinking for ourselves and no enlightening anybody else.”

2. Question 41 laid out, and the three objections of article 1 (“whether it was suitable for Christ to be tempted”) #

Four articles: (1) fittingness of the temptation; (2) place; (3) time; (4) manner and order of the temptations. Objections to a. 1:

1. To tempt is to take experience, and experience is only of the unknown; but Christ’s power was known even to the demons (Luke 4: he would not let them speak, since they knew him to be the Christ).
2. Christ came to dissolve the works of the devil (1 John 3); but dissolving someone’s works and undergoing them are not of the same person.
3. Temptation is threefold — flesh, world, devil. Christ was tempted by neither flesh nor world, so not by the devil either. He flags this: Socrates would call it example, from one particular to another particular — “the weakest of the arguments,” the weakest of the three [ed.: he says “the weakest of the four arguments,” then corrects to four; three objections stand in the text]. Sed contra: Matthew 4 — Jesus was led by the Spirit (the Holy Spirit) into the desert to be tempted by the devil.

3. The four reasons Christ willed to be tempted (“Christ willed to be tempted”) #

1. To give us aid against temptations. Gregory, in a homily: it was not undignified for our Redeemer to wish to be tempted, who came also to be killed, that he might overcome our temptations by his temptation as he overcame our death by his death. He praises the proportion — Plato and Aristotle on seeing a proportion, “the fourth tool of dialectic.”
   • Aside on “homily”: we made the English word from the Greek, but the Greek means talk — less formal than a lecture; a student offers “sermon.”
2. For our caution/warning: that no one, however holy, should think himself secure from temptation. Hence he willed to be tempted after baptism; Hilary on Matthew: in those made holy the devil’s temptations are most abundant, since victory over saints is more desired — a successful temptation of a saint gives greater joy in hell. Ecclesiasticus: “Son, when you approach the service of God, stand in justice and fear, and prepare your soul for temptation.” Examples: the Trappist told at his first confession, “You’re going to be tempted to leave here someday”; St. Anthony of the Desert (student): “Cast all your care upon the Lord and expect temptation to your last breath”; a Dominican who said he’d kept his body in subjection all these years, like an old character you can’t quite trust, looking for an opportunity.
3. For an example, to instruct us how to overcome the devil’s temptations. Aristotle, Poetics: man is the most imitative of the animals, and first learns by imitation — hence Plato wrote dialogues, giving an imitation of philosophical conversation to be imitated; hence Mary as model (the last chapter on the Church is about her). Augustine, De Trinitate IV: Christ gave himself to be tempted that he might be mediator in overcoming temptation not only by aid but by example.
4. To give us hope/confidence about his mercy. Hebrews 4: we do not have a high priest unable to have compassion on our infirmities, for he was tempted in all things in likeness, but without sin.

• Aside: “That’s the whole sermon itself” — the old rule of three points.

4. Digression: Magnificat, praise and love (“my soul magnifies the Lord”) #

Why does “my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour” follow on “my soul magnifies the Lord”? Augustine on the next world joins love and praise — amare in laudibus, laudare in amore. Argument: you praise someone for something good in him; from the treatise on love, the object of love is the cause of love, and the good is the object of love, therefore the good is the cause of love. So praise and love go together; and love gives rise to joy, since we take joy only in what we like. Examples: he takes no joy in eating fish (“the only good fish is a disguised fish”) but joy in steak, and in Shakespeare — “you don’t sing the praises of fish”; the cat at the lakeside jumping into the wastebasket for the smell of the fish paper. The principal hours are lauds (named from praise) and vespers (named from the time of day); Psalm 99, “enter his gates with thanksgiving, his courts with praise… for he is good.” A student’s praise of a Shakespeare play before class shows he likes it. Then Don Giovanni, “the opera of operas,” and a writer calling The Marriage of Figaro “the vindication of opera”; Brahms said he could not understand how anything as perfect as Figaro could be written, never letting down, every number perfect — the height being the ensembles of six singers.

5. Replies of article 1 (“they had a certain guess that Christ was the Son of God”) #

• Ad 1 (what the devils knew): Augustine, City of God IX — Christ was made known to the devils only so far as he willed, not as eternal life but through temporal effects of his power. From these they had a suspicio — the Latin word for a guess — that he was the Son of God; but seeing in him signs of human infirmity, they did not know it for certain, and so wanted to tempt him. Matthew 4: after he hungered, the tempter approached. Hilary: the devil would not have dared to tempt him unless, by the infirmity of hunger, he recognised him to be a man. Gregory on “If you are the Son of God”: what does such a beginning wish, except that he knew the Son of God was coming, but did not think he came through infirmity of the body? A student adds: Mary was betrothed partly to safeguard her honour, partly to keep the devil ignorant — it might look like just another human birth.
• Ad 2 (how the devil is overcome): Christ dissolved the devil’s works not potestative, by acting powerfully, but by suffering from the devil’s members, so that justice, not power, might overcome the devil. Augustine, De Trinitate XIII: the devil was to be overcome not by God’s power but by his justice. He adds his own gloss: this is seen most of all in the crucifixion — in being unjust the devil merits to lose his authority, his kingdom; and Christ does not want you to be a lover of power.
  • Distinction within the temptation: what Christ did by his own will (offering himself to the tempter — led by the Spirit into the desert, which Gregory takes of the Holy Spirit, who led him where he knew the evil spirit would find him) versus what he suffered from the devil (being taken to the pinnacle and the high mountain). Gregory: no wonder he let himself be led onto the mountain, who let himself be crucified by that devil’s members. Origen’s image, which he likes: he follows out the temptation “as an athlete proceeding spontaneously.”
• Ad 3 (flesh vs. enemy): temptation from the enemy can be without sin, since it comes only through exterior suggestion; temptation from the flesh cannot be without at least venial sin, since it comes through pleasure and desire, and, as Augustine says, there is some sin when the flesh lusts against the spirit. Hence Christ willed to be tempted by the enemy, not by the flesh.
• Aside before a. 2: imitating the Blessed Virgin means, humorously, making sure the wine doesn’t run out at your feast — “an example I can follow.”

6. Article 2, objections (“Christ ought not to be tempted in the desert”) #

1. Christ willed to be tempted for our example; an example ought to be proposed openly to those to be formed by it; so not in the desert, but in the temple or somewhere visible.
2. Chrysostom on Matthew: the devil presses hardest when he sees us alone — in the beginning he tempted the woman finding her without the man. So Christ went into the desert to expose himself to temptation; if his temptation is our example, we too should cast ourselves into temptations — which is dangerous, since we ought rather to avoid occasions. (“So you shouldn’t go to the bawdy house.”)
3. Matthew 4:5 — the second temptation took him to the holy city and the pinnacle of the temple, not in the desert; so he was not tempted only in the desert. Sed contra: Mark 1 — in the desert forty days and forty nights, and tempted.

• Digression on dwelling on the sufferings of saints: his mother doubted she could undergo what a saint like Isaac Jogues suffered; his cousin Don answered, “If you get in that situation, God will give you the grace.” His point: one shouldn’t dwell on such horrors, because that is a temptation to despair — subtler than the obvious temptation to unchastity. Rely on God’s grace if it comes, don’t rehearse it. Students add Solzhenitsyn [ASR “Sisic”/“final Sisic”; uncertain] taking on the whole communist party and finding men physically and mentally broken, then recovering by grace; and one of the North American martyrs, weaker than his companion, who endured worse — evidently a special divine grace.

7. The body of article 2 (“as it were, to the field of struggle”) #

Christ by his own will exhibited himself to the devil to be tempted, as he exhibited himself to the devil’s members to be killed. The devil attends to a man more when he is solitary — Ecclesiastes 4: if someone prevails against one, two can resist him (he compares Alcoholics Anonymous). Hence Christ went into the desert as to the field of battle, to be tempted there. Ambrose on Luke: Christ went into the desert by counsel, to provoke the devil, for unless he had fought he could not have conquered. Ambrose’s further reasons: in mystery, that he might free Adam from exile, who was cast from paradise into the desert; by example, to show that the devil envies us when we tend to greater things. His gloss: envy is sometimes spoken of as the devil’s second sin — first pride, then envy toward us as still capable of beatitude.

8. Ad 1: faith comes by hearing (“faith, as is said in Romans ten, is ex auditu”) #

Christ is proposed as an example by faith (Hebrews 12: looking on the author and finisher of faith, Jesus); faith is ex auditu, not ex visu — “Thomas never forgets that” — and John 20: blessed are those who have not seen and have believed. So it was not necessary that the temptation be seen, enough that it be narrated. A student links this to the Eucharist and Thomas’s hymn.

9. Digression: which sense is greater, and is music higher than painting? (“Which is the greater sense, sight or hearing?”) #

• He’d incline to say seeing is the greater sense, though hearing may be more useful to us now, since we do not yet see. Students asked whether they’d rather be blind or deaf mostly chose deaf; one organist chose blind.
• The disputed question: is music or painting the greater art? He grants music is greater — and a student once used that against him to argue the ear is therefore better. Replies raised: people judge by sense-impact rather than by what is required of the artist; painting is more imitative, music seems to have nothing to imitate — but Aristotle, Politics VIII, says music imitates the emotions and also the virtues.
• The symmetry of five (A B C B A), which he says he has spoken of before: the sung parts of the Mass (Kyrie and Agnus Dei both ask mercy; Gloria and Sanctus both praise; the Credo the odd one, a confession of faith); A Midsummer Night’s Dream (court – peasants’ house – forest – peasants’ house – court); the dialogues around Socrates’ death (Meno, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo — the Apology the odd bird, not a dialogue but a courtroom defence; Euthyphro and Crito short, Meno and Phaedo long; Meno gives logic and an argument for immortality, recalled and improved in the Phaedo, which gives an argument about arguments; Euthyphro discusses piety, Crito shows Socrates’ piety to Athens in refusing escape).
• Mozart’s last five symphonies: 36, 38, 39, 40, 41. Why no 37? Michael Haydn (brother of Joseph) wrote a symphony to which Mozart wrote an introduction; the whole was thought Mozart’s and numbered 37, and the numbering was kept. Later “42s” from early works are not chronological.
• Their content, using the division of the emotions (concupiscible: love/hate, desire/aversion, pleasure/pain or joy/sadness, concerned with what pleases or displeases sense; irascible: pursuing something for the sake of something else, fighting to keep food, hope overcoming difficulty — and the irascible is closer to reason): 36 and 41 represent magnanimity, “the virtue that does great things,” in D major and C major respectively; 38 and 40 represent fortitude in its two acts — 38 approaching the terrible, 40 patience in suffering; 39 is the relaxation of the great man, more like the musical yet on a high level. In the finale of the 41st (“Jupiter”) Mozart combines four or five melodies at once — Warren Murray pointed this out to him — and tones it down, giving an impression of quiet confidence. Of the 36th’s introduction someone said that if only it survived it would establish his greatness; he first heard it at the St. Paul Public Library on a blue day with two-storey windows.
• A student asks how imitation comes through the senses: some say it is tied to the representation of emotion in the tone of the human voice (Corelli, Mozart). Mozart’s major keys: joy, hope, audacity; minor: sadness, despair, fear, anger — Don Giovanni goes down to hell in D minor. C and D major are more irascible, B flat and G more concupiscible. Haydn changes key for variety’s sake; Mozart always has a reason. The piano concertos (20th, 23rd) have almost a plot of emotions; in the clarinet quintet “you can hear Mozart speaking” — he used to tell his children so, and they heard his voice.
• Poetry and preaching: Figaro is like The Merry Wives of Windsor and has a moral effect; the poet leads us to virtue by representation but must not preach — that is not his role. Pope Paul VI: the artist has an advantage over the preacher, who is almost always an adversary, scolding, while the artist makes people sympathetic with the hero’s virtue and so makes it easier to imitate. (“Perhaps a preacher should preach with a guitar.”) The biography of Delzon [name uncertain in recording]: aristocratic and poor at sermons at first, later very good at holding an audience. “The first mistake of a preacher is to try to say everything he knows about the subject.” Brother Mark prized Newman’s sermons for simplicity and directness, not lecture-like and never wearying; and the Fathers’ sermons collected by the Dominicans for the older calendar — Leo the Great on the Incarnation, “magnificent.”

10. Replies 2 and 3 of article 2 (“two-fold is the occasion of temptation”) #

• Ad 2, the key distinction: the occasion of temptation from the side of man — when someone makes himself near to sin, not avoiding occasions of sinning — must be avoided (Genesis 19 to Lot: do not stand anywhere around Sodom). The occasion from the side of the devil, who always envies those tending to better things (Ambrose, quoted already), is not to be avoided. Chrysostom on Matthew: not only Christ but all sons of God having the Holy Spirit are led into the desert; they are not content to sit idle, the Spirit urges them to some great work — which is a desert as regards the devil, and every good work is a desert as regards the flesh and the world, being not according to their will. To give the devil such an occasion is not dangerous, because the help of the Holy Spirit is greater than the devil’s attack. He adds: read the Curé of Ars and other saints — they almost mock the devil.
• Ad 3 (the pinnacle was not in the desert): some say all the temptations were in the desert, some that Christ was led to the holy city only by an imaginary vision, some that Jerusalem is called a desert as abandoned by God. But this is not necessary: Mark says he was tempted in the desert, not that he was only in the desert. His own comment: he never thought of the taking to the temple and the mountain as imaginary — it was real.

Ends: “Now, how about the time when the temptation?”

His words #

• “guess” — his English for Latin suspicio, what the devils had about Christ’s divinity, short of certain knowledge.
• “example” (Socratic) — arguing from one particular to another particular; he calls it the weakest kind of argument.
• “proportion” — the likeness Gregory sets up (temptation:temptation :: death:death); “the fourth tool of dialectic.”
• “homily” — from the Greek for talk, less formal than a lecture; a student offers “sermon.”
• potestative — “by acting in a powerful way,” the manner in which Christ did not overcome the devil.
• “exterior suggestion” — how temptation from the enemy works, hence without sin.
• ex auditu / ex visu — faith is by hearing, not by sight (Romans 10).
• “field of struggle” / battle — the desert, as Christ enters it.
• “concupiscible” / “irascible” — the two groups of emotions; the irascible closer to reason.
• “magnanimity” — “the virtue that does great things,” represented in Mozart’s 36th and 41st.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 41, a. 1 (objections, sed contra, corpus, all three replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 41, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, corpus, ad 1, ad 2, ad 3)
• Within these, read as quoted by Thomas: Gregory (homily; on “If you are the Son of God”); Hilary on Matthew; Ecclesiasticus (“prepare your soul for temptation”); Augustine, De Trinitate IV and XIII, and City of God IX; Hebrews 4 and 12; Matthew 4; Luke 4; Mark 1; 1 John 3; John 20; Romans 10; Ecclesiastes 4; Genesis 19; Origen; Ambrose on Luke; Chrysostom on Matthew

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles II, cc. 39–45
• Aristotle, Poetics (man the most imitative of animals); Politics VIII (music imitates emotions and virtues)
• Thomas, treatise on love (object of love is its cause); treatise on the emotions
• Plato: Meno, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo
• Luke 1 (Magnificat); Psalm 99
• Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor
• Mozart, Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, Symphonies 36, 38–41, piano concertos 20 and 23, clarinet quintet
• Newman’s sermons; Leo the Great on the Incarnation

His questions #

• Does “love your neighbour” include your guardian angel? — Yes; he has a good claim to it, though loving an angel differs from loving a man.
• If God gains nothing from creating, what is he really up to? — Making creatures like himself, and some of them like him in perfecting others — hence the inequality of creatures.
• Was it fitting that Christ be tempted? — Yes, for four reasons: aid, caution, example, and confidence in his mercy.
• Did the demons know Christ to be the Son of God? — Not for certain; from temporal effects of his power they had only a guess, and the infirmity of hunger emboldened the tempter.
• How was the devil to be overcome? — By justice, not by power: Christ suffered from the devil’s members rather than acting potestative.
• Why was Christ tempted by the devil but not by the flesh? — Temptation from the enemy is exterior suggestion and can be sinless; temptation of the flesh involves at least venial sin.
• If the temptation is our example, why was it not done where men could see it? — Because faith is ex auditu: it was enough that it be narrated, not seen.
• Should we then expose ourselves to temptation as Christ did? — Only the occasion coming from the devil’s envy of those tending to better things; occasions we make near to sin must be avoided.
• Which is the greater sense, sight or hearing? and which the greater art, music or painting? — He inclines to sight as the greater sense (hearing more useful now), yet grants music greater than painting — left standing as a difficulty against him.
• Was Christ really taken to the pinnacle and the mountain, or only in an imaginary vision? — Really; Mark says he was tempted in the desert, not only in the desert.