The Weakest Part Gives Way First

So you should apply the remedy of true humility to this member or part of the soul which we have described as especially wounded. For, as far as one can see, in you it is weaker than the other powers of the soul, and so it is sure to be the first to give way to the devil’s attacks. Injuries come on us, whether from hard work laid on us or from bad air, and in human bodies it is generally the weaker parts that are the first to give in and yield to such chances. Once the disease has taken a firmer hold of them, it spreads the same harm to the healthy parts of the body too. So it is with us. When the deadly wind of sin blows over us, each of our souls is sure to be tempted above all by that passion against whose powerful attacks its feebler and weaker part puts up the least stubborn resistance, and it runs the risk of being taken captive by those passions where a careless watch opens an easier way to betrayal. [a]

This is how Balaam reckoned that God’s people could be deceived by a sure method. He advised that the dangerous snares be set for the children of Israel in the quarter where he knew they were weak. He had no doubt that if women were provided for them, they would fall at once and be destroyed by sexual immorality, because he knew that the desiring parts of their souls were corrupted. In the same way the spiritual forces of wickedness tempt each one of us with crafty malice, laying their treacherous snares especially for those feelings of the soul where they have seen that it is weak. If, for example, they see that the reasoning parts of our soul are affected, they try to deceive us the way Scripture tells us King Ahab was deceived by the Syrians who said: “We know that the kings of Israel are merciful. So let us put sackcloth around our waists and ropes around our heads, and go out to the king of Israel and say to him, ‘Your servant Ben-hadad says: Please let my soul live.’” And Ahab was moved, not by any true goodness, but by the empty praise of his own mercy, and said, “If he is still alive, he is my brother.” In this way they can deceive us too, through the error of that reasoning part, and make us incur God’s displeasure through the very thing by which we were hoping to win a reward and receive the recompense of goodness. Then the same rebuke may be spoken to us: “Because you have let go from your hand a man who deserved death, your life will be for his life, and your people for his people.” Or again, when the unclean spirit says, “I will go out and be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets,” he was certainly spreading the nets of deception through the reasoning feeling, which he knew lay open to his deadly tricks.

The same spirit expected this in the case of our Lord as well. He tempted him in these three feelings of the soul, in which he knew the whole human race had been taken captive, but he gained nothing by his crafty tricks. He came at the part of his mind that desires when he said, “Command these stones to be made bread”; at the part that feels anger, when he tried to stir him up to seek the power of the present life and the kingdoms of this world; and at the reasoning part, when he said, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here.” His deception got him nothing in any of these, for this reason: he found nothing damaged in him to match the supposition he had formed from a false idea. So no part of his soul gave way when the enemy’s tricks tempted it. “For see,” he says, “the prince of this world is coming, and will find nothing in me.”