Author: CCW

Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.

At first glance it reads like a debating challenge, a war of words. And in one sense it is, yet not as a contest for what most persuades but rather as a testament to what is most true. That is what is at issue in the temptations of Christ.

They are our temptations. Matthew and Luke, though ordering them differently, present three temptations which encompass the meaning and nature of all temptation. Yet they all come down to one thing really: the denial of God, on the one hand, and a picture of the truth of our humanity as found in Christ, the word and son of the Father, on the other hand. All temptations are about turning to what are partial, incomplete, and distorted forms of the truth.

The three categories of temptation vary only in the degree to which God is denied. The three temptations can be understood as the temptation to distrust, the temptation to presumption, and the temptation to defiance and denial explicitly. All the temptations common to our humanity are comprehended in these three and all belong to the Lenten project of setting our loves in order over and against the forms of the disarray of our affections and thoughts. But what is the point of this whole matter of temptation? To highlight for us and to compel us to the realization of what properly belongs to the truth of our humanity and to the redemption of our humanity in the one who overcomes the tendencies in us to lose sight of the truth of our being which is only found in the truth and goodness of God.

“If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.” The first temptation is to distrust because it suggests that God will not provide for us, therefore we must shift for ourselves by way of whatever means, even unlawful and unnatural means, such as turning stones into bread, which is to say, subverting the order of things in creation to our own immediate ends. The temptation is to distrust God’s power and goodness. It is the false fear that God will not provide. The Old Testament form of this is the temptation in the wilderness (recalled in the Venite), “the temptation of Meribah” – the hungry temptation – when the people of Israel murmured against God’s provision for them in the wilderness, the provision of manna, the proverbial ‘bread from heaven.’

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Fr. David Curry delivered this homily at King’s College Chapel, Thursday, March 6th, 2025.

“Charity never faileth”

Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains…

With such a summary of natural philosophy – measuring the heights of mountains, fathoming the depths of seas, of ethical and political philosophy – the measuring and fathoming “of states, and kings,” of metaphysics or natural theology – “walking with a staffe to heav’n and tracing fountains,” the causes of things, Herbert begins his poem, The Agonie. Then by way of complete contrast to such a summa of philosophical thought, he immediately adds an important ‘but.’ But what? “But there are,” he says, “two vast, spacious things,/ the which to measure it doth more behove”, things that are more significant and more necessary for us to ponder, “yet few there are that sound them.” And what are those “two vast, spacious things?” They are “Sinne and Love.”

We meet just after Ash Wednesday to commemorate this evening, Thomas Aquinas, Doctor and Poet, as the Prayer Book calendar puts it, and the martyrs St. Perpetua and her Companions. Aquinas is one of the great theologians of the western church, one who, I think it is fair to say, has taken much care to sound out, meaning to inquire into and make known, sin and love in his theological writings and commentaries. But what might such a 13th century giant of medieval thought have to do with Anglican thinking and devotion? Rather a lot and as testimony to our essential catholicism. It would be hard to make sense of Richard Hooker’s Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity or John Pearson’s On the Creed, to name but two of many, without an understanding and appreciation of the works of Thomas Aquinas. It was Pearson who, as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford just after the English Civil War, argued for using Thomas’ Summa Theologiae for teaching systematic theology to those entering the church rather than the Sentences of Peter Lombard.

The structure and images of Herbert’s poem are profoundly Thomistic. The poem references the philosophical sciences as derived from Aristotle and as taken up by Thomas: in short, physics, ethics, and metaphysics. Like Thomas, he argues for the necessity of another science, what Thomas calls sacra doctrina, namely, what is revealed through the Scriptures. As Herbert suggests, Scripture teaches most clearly about what we most need to know, sin and love.

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