We continue our deep dive into THE HEART OF CATHOLIC PRAYER.
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St. Paul tells us:
For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, indeed it cannot; and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.
But you are not in the flesh, you are in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Any one who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. But if Christ is in you, although your bodies are dead because of sin, your spirits are alive because of righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit which dwells in you.
So then, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh– for if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of sonship. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. (Romans 8:5-17)
Satan’s temptation, of course, always consists of using some good thing God has made and trying to lure us into loving it in a disordered way. No fish bites a bare hook. It’s always wrapped in a juicy worm that is, like the apple in the Garden of Eden, tasty-looking both to our appetite and to our pride. But the hook is still death. This is why Paul tells us that Satan appears as an “angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). The mark of the world, the flesh, and the devil is that they tell us to seek some good (it matters not what) by rejecting what God has commanded. To break this ancient habit it is necessary that God permit us to face trials even as he teaches us to avoid temptation—and to learn to tell the difference.
Therefore, the Catechism tells us:
The Holy Spirit makes us discern between trials, which are necessary for the growth of the inner man (cf. Luke 8:13-15; Acts 14:22; Romans 5:3-5; 2 Timothy 3:12), and temptation, which leads to sin and death (cf. James 1:14-15). We must also discern between being tempted and consenting to temptation. Finally, discernment unmasks the lie of temptation, whose object appears to be good, a “delight to the eyes” and desirable (cf. Genesis 3:6), when in reality its fruit is death.
God does not want to impose the good, but wants free beings. . . . There is a certain usefulness to temptation. No one but God knows what our soul has received from him, not even we ourselves. But temptation reveals it in order to teach us to know ourselves, and in this way we discover our evil inclinations and are obliged to give thanks for the goods that temptation has revealed to us.[1] (CCC 2847)
One thing to note about temptation is that when we aren’t actively courting it, we’re facing, not sin, but concupiscence. Sadly, this term is one that has fallen into disuse in contemporary culture, leading to the tendency to conflate temptation with sin itself. A pattern of thought that afflicts many believers and one that the devil, the accuser of the brethren, loves is “If I were truly a Christian, I wouldn’t be having these thoughts and feelings at all.” But this is not so. Temptation only sprouts into the weed of sin when we water it with consent of the will. That is why the Church speaks of concupiscence, not as sin, but as the “tinder for sin” when she teaches:
Yet certain temporal consequences of sin remain in the baptized, such as suffering, illness, death, and such frailties inherent in life as weaknesses of character, and so on, as well as an inclination to sin that Tradition calls concupiscence, or metaphorically, “the tinder for sin” (fomes peccati); since concupiscence “is left for us to wrestle with, it cannot harm those who do not consent but manfully resist it by the grace of Jesus Christ.”[2] Indeed, “an athlete is not crowned unless he competes according to the rules” (2 Timothy 2:5). (CCC 1264)
To vary the metaphor, think of it this way. Original sin is like a birth defect. It’s not so much a thing as the lack of something; a hole in our souls where God was supposed to be. Our first parents, in losing the life of God in the soul, lost it for us, so we are born without something that ought to be there just as, for instance, a baby might be born with a missing heart valve. In Baptism, the life of God is given us so that we can “walk with Christ” (cf 1 John 2:6), just as heart surgery for an otherwise fatal defect might save a child’s life, yet leave him with a weakened constitution that easily tires. In the same way, we are healed from the death-dealing effects of original sin, but still must grapple with a weakened will, a darkened intellect, and disordered appetites caused by that severe blow to our God-given human nature. None of these things are sinful by themselves and, in fact, they are the field of battle on which we live out our fidelity to Christ. Indeed, it is precisely because concupiscence is not sin that God sees our struggle to overcome temptation, not as a revelation of how rotten we are at heart, but as the glorious battlefield upon which we grow in virtue, courage, and grace.
[1] Origen, De orat. 29:PG 11, 544CD
[2] Council of Trent (1546): DS 1515
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