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“Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” To tempt is to try. To tempt God means to try the limits of his magnanimity. Has he not created man “in his image”, almost “a micro-god”? “You are all gods, sons of the Most High.” Conscious of his greatness, this “little god” dares to claim the attributes of his high dignity. To tempt the Lord in this case is to make use of God, of the power equal to that of God, in order to satisfy all his desires.
In the second temptation14.31--to cast himself down from the top of the temple--there is no question of the exploit of Icarus. The latter was only a symbol of domination over the cosmic elements. The temptation here is to covet the much vaster power to which St. Luke refers when he writes:14.32 “I have given you power to tread upon serpents and scorpions, and over all the might of the enemy; and nothing shall hurt you.” This power includes domination over space; to throw oneself down from the roof of the temple would be to overcome earth's gravity and to rule the heavens. “Do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you (the submission of which Satan speaks); rejoice rather in this, that your names are written in heaven.” The name designates the person. The text speaks of the joy of seeing oneself admitted into the spiritual heaven of the divine presence. We see here the message of the freedom of the children of God and of their heavenly power as opposed to all temptation by the power of earthly magic.
In the hands of “leaders”, this magic power arouses the collective passions of crowds; it hypnotizes, charms and dominates. For everyone this magic means the power over space and all that it contains on the material plane. It violates the mystery of nature, profanes the sacredness of the cosmos, the creation of God.
We must remember the close relationship between woman and the cosmos. The whole gamut of pagan mysteries prefigured this even up to the cult of the Virgin Mary--“Blessed Land, Promised Land, Abundant Harvest.” These liturgical names are the cosmic symbols of the new Eve--Virgin and Mother. This mysterious bond explains the command not to tempt God, not to sully and profane chastity. This virtue goes beyond the physiological and expresses the entire and chaste structure of the human spirit. It constitutes the charism of the sacrament of marriage. In a wider sense, it inspires the meaning of the sacredness of every particle of God's creation, inviolable in its expectation of salvation that is to come from the chaste man.14.33 The power of chastity is the contrary of the power of magic and signifies the return to the true “supernaturally natural power” of paradise.14.34 “Thou shalt not tempt thy God” means then that you shall not make of your conformity to God the accomplice of your passions in anti-chastity.
Origen speaks of the “chastity of the Soul”14.35 which the Fathers of the desert called “the purification of the heart”. Even those monks who were already married attained this spiritual development. There was already a transcendence of the physiological state itself.
Chaste love is attracted by the heart that remains virgin beyond every corporeal actuation. According to the Bible, there is a total “knowledge” of two beings, a conversation of spirit with spirit in which the body seems amazingly the vehicle of the spiritual. This is why St. Paul says that man should learn “to possess his vessel in holiness and honor”.14.36 As undefiled matter suitable for liturgical use, the chaste man is entirely, body and soul, the matter of the sacrament of marriage, with the sanctification of his love. The charism of the sacrament effects the transcendence of the self toward the transparent presence of one for the other, of one toward the other, in order to offer themselves together as a single being to God.
Chastity--sophrosyne--integrates all the elements of the human being into a whole that is virginal and interior as to the spirit, and that is why St. Paul speaks of the salvation of every mother by means of chastity.14.37 The Pauline dialectic of the circumcision of the flesh interiorizes it even to “the circumcised... heart”.14.38 The same dialectic interiorizes chastity: “He who is not spiritual in his flesh becomes carnal even in his spirit,” and again, “the virginity of the flesh belongs to a small number, the virginity of the heart should belong to all.”14.39
Love penetrates to the very root of instinct and “changes even the substance of things”, says St. John Chrysostom.14.40 It raises the empirical aims to the ends created by the spirit, and makes of them a pure source of immaterial joy.
Familiarity with icons purifies the imagination, teaches “the mortification of the eyes” in order to contemplate beauty chastely. In the beauty of the body, the soul is its form, and in the beauty of the soul, the image of God delights us. Islamic wisdom has understood this, as can be seen in the saying: “The paradise of the faithful gnostic is his own body, and the hell of the man without faith or gnosis is equally his own body.”14.41
Bishop Nonnus of Edessa in contemplating the beauty of a dancer (the future St. Pelagia) “took it as a subject for glorifying the sovereign beauty, of which her beauty was only the reflection, and feeling himself transported by the fire of divine love, shed tears of joy... He was raised”, continues St. John Climacus, “to a wholly incorruptible state before the universal resurrection.”14.42
An erotic imagination decomposes the spirit by an unextinguishable thirst of hell. On the contrary, the sign of chastity, according to St. Clement of Rome, is when a man, looking at a woman, has no carnal thought in his mind. “O singular woman, you are the entire species for me,” says the poet of the unique woman in singing of chaste conjugal love.
The history of Tobias [Tobit] admirably describes the victory over concupiscence. The angel's name, Raphael, signifies “the remedy of God”; it is the chastity that is present in every great love when it is lighted by the “blazing fire of the Eternal”.14.43
Berdyaev clearly describes this inward chastity: “Love is called upon to conquer the `old' and to discover a new flesh in which the union of two is not a loss but an accomplishment of virginity, that is, of its entirely new integrality. In this incandescent point the transfiguration of the world uniquely can begin.”14.44
“To throw himself from the pinnacle of the temple”14.45 means to alienate himself and to render himself useless. The answer to this temptation and to the concupiscence that inclines a man to seize the power that Christ really possesses to the point of governing even the angels, is chastity. “To cast himself down” designates the movement from the high to the low, from heaven to hell; this was Lucifer's exact itinerary and that of the fall of man that brought concupiscence. Chastity is an ascension; it is the Savior's itinerary, from hell to the Father's kingdom. It is also an inward ascension toward the burning presence of God.
It is within one's mind that one throws himself into the presence of God, and chastity is only one of the names of the nuptial mystery of the lamb.