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For it was right that He who was in possession of the perfect image and
likeness of God should be Himself tempted through those passions, through
which Adam also was tempted while he still retained the image of God
unbroken, that is, through gluttony, vainglory, pride; and not through
those in which he was by his own fault entangled and involved after the
transgression of the commandment, when the image and likeness of God was
marred. For it was gluttony through which he took the fruit of the
forbidden tree, vainglory through which it was said "Your eyes shall be
opened," and pride through which it was said "Ye shall be as gods, knowing
good and evil." With these three sins then we read that the Lord our
Saviour was also tempted; with gluttony when the devil said to Him:
"Command these stones that they be made bread:" with vainglory: "If Thou
art the Son of God cast Thyself down:" with pride, when he showed him all
the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them and said: "All this will I
give to Thee if Thou wilt fall down and worship me:" in order that He
might by His example teach us how we ought to vanquish the tempter when we
are attacked on the same lines of temptation as He was. And so both the
former and the latter are spoken of as Adam; the one being the first for
destruction and death, and the other the first for resurrection and life.
Through the one the whole race of mankind is brought into condemnation,
through the other the whole race of mankind is set free. The one was
fashioned out of raw and unformed earth, the other was born of the Virgin
Mary. In His case then though it was fitting that He should undergo
temptation, yet it was not necessary that He should fail under it. Nor
could He who had vanquished gluttony be tempted by fornication, which
springs from superfluity and gluttony as its root, with which even the
first Adam would not have been destroyed unless before its birth he had
been deceived by the wiles of the devil and fallen a victim to passion. And
therefore the Son of God is not said absolutely to have come "in the flesh
of sin," but "in the likeness of the flesh of sin," because 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
what was 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
constitution of our natures, but He took upon Him something like this, by
sharing in our nature. For as He truly fulfilled every function which
belongs to us, and bore all human infirmities, He has consequently been
considered to have been subject to this feeling also, that He might appear
through these infirmities to bear in His own flesh the state even of this
fault and sin. Lastly the devil only tempted Him to those sins, by which he
had deceived the first Adam, inferring that He as man would similarly be
deceived in other matters if he found that He was overcome by those
temptations by which he had overthrown His predecessor. But as he was
overthrown in the first encounter he was not able to bring upon Him the
second infirmity which had shot up as from the root of the first fault. For
he saw that He had not even admitted anything from which this infirmity
might take its rise, and it was idle to hope for the fruit of sin from Him,
as he saw that He in no sort of way received into Himself seeds or roots of
it. Yet according to Luke, who places last that temptation in which he uses
the words "If Thou art the Son of God, cast Thyself down," we can
understand this of the feeling of pride, so that that earlier one, which
Matthew places 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 of the feeling of covetousness, because after His
victory over gluttony, he did not venture to tempt Him to fornication, but
passed on to covetousness, which he knew to be the root of all evils,
and when again vanquished in this, he did not dare attack Him with any of
those sins which follow, which, as he knew full well, spring from this as a
root and source; and so he passed on to the last passion; viz., pride, by
which he knew that those who are perfect and have overcome all other sins,
can be affected, and owing to which he remembered that he himself in his
character of Lucifer, and many others too, had fallen from their heavenly
estate, without temptation from any of the preceding passions. In this
order then which we have mentioned, which is the one given by the
evangelist Luke, there is an exact agreement between the allurements and
forms of the temptations by which that most crafty foe attacked both the
first and the second Adam. For to the one he said "Your eyes shall be
opened;" to the other "he showed all the kingdoms of the world and the
glory of them." In the one case he said "Ye shall be as gods;" in the
other, "If Thou art the Son of God."
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