How the Devil Tempted the Lord

It was right that he who possessed the perfect image and likeness of God should himself be tempted through the passions through which Adam was tempted while he still kept the image of God unbroken, that is, through gluttony, empty glory and pride. He was not to be tempted through those passions in which Adam became entangled and caught by his own fault after he broke the commandment, when the image and likeness of God was marred. For it was through gluttony that Adam took the fruit of the forbidden tree; through empty glory, when it was said, “Your eyes will be opened”; and through pride, when it was said, “You will be like gods, knowing good and evil.” With these three sins, then, we read that the Lord our Savior was tempted too: with gluttony, when the devil said to him, “Command these stones to be made bread”; with empty glory, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down”; with pride, when he showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory and said, “All this I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” This was so that by his example he might teach us how we ought to defeat the tempter when we are attacked along the same lines of temptation as he was. So both the one and the other are called Adam: the first was first for destruction and death, the other first for resurrection and life. Through the one the whole human race is brought into condemnation; through the other the whole human race is set free. The one was fashioned out of raw and unformed earth; the other was born of the Virgin Mary. [a]

In his case, then, though it was fitting that he should undergo temptation, it was not necessary that he should fail under it. Nor could he who had defeated gluttony be tempted by sexual immorality, which springs from excess and gluttony as its root. Even the first Adam would not have been destroyed by sexual immorality if, before it was born, he had not been deceived by the wiles of the devil and fallen prey to passion. That is why the Son of God is not said simply to have come “in the flesh of sin,” but “in the likeness of the flesh of sin.” Though his was true flesh, and he ate and drank and slept, and truly received the prints of the nails, there was in him no true sin inherited from the fall, but only something like it. For he had no experience of the fiery darts of carnal lust, which in our case arise even against our will from the makeup of our nature; but he took upon himself something like this by sharing our nature. Since he truly fulfilled every function that belongs to us and bore all human weaknesses, he has accordingly been considered subject to this feeling as well, so that through these weaknesses he might appear to bear in his own flesh the condition even of this fault and sin.

Finally, the devil tempted him only to those sins by which he had deceived the first Adam. He reasoned that if he found the Lord overcome by the temptations with which he had overthrown his predecessor, then the Lord, being a man, would likewise be deceived in other matters. But since the devil was overthrown in the first encounter, he could not bring on him the second weakness, which had sprung up as from the root of the first fault. For he saw that the Lord had not even admitted anything from which this weakness might arise, and that it was idle to hope for the fruit of sin from him, since he took into himself no seeds or roots of it whatever. Yet according to Luke, who puts last the temptation in which the devil uses the words “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down,” we can take this one as the feeling of pride. Then the earlier one, which Matthew puts third, in which, as Luke the evangelist says, the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time and promised them to him, may be taken as the feeling of greed. For after the Lord’s victory over gluttony, the devil did not venture to tempt him to sexual immorality, but passed on to greed, which he knew to be the root of all evils. When he was defeated in this too, he did not dare to attack him with any of the sins that follow, which, as he knew full well, spring from this one as from their root and source. So he passed on to the last passion, pride. He knew that by pride even those who are perfect and have overcome all other sins can be affected, and he remembered that through it he himself, in his character of Lucifer, and many others too, had fallen from their heavenly state without being tempted by any of the passions that come before it. In this order, then, the one given by the evangelist Luke, there is an exact match between the allurements and forms of the temptations with which that most crafty enemy attacked both the first and the second Adam. To the one he said, “Your eyes will be opened”; to the other, “he showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory.” In the one case he said, “You will be like gods”; in the other, “If you are the Son of God.”