The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  Cain knew that he should neither be envious of his brother Abel, nor should he murder him. He was not in doubt about what was right, yet he did wrong. Joseph’s brothers knew that it was wrong to sell their younger brother into slavery, but they could not prevent themselves from acting on their passions even despite their knowledge. Jacob knew that he should not have cheated his brother Esau of his birthright, nor should he have deceived his old father in doing so, but he did it anyway. King David knew that it was wrong to lust after Bathsheba and to send her husband Uriah into the heat of battle to die so he could marry his widow, but he acted despite his knowledge. The cynical preacher of Ecclesiastes says, “For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” (Ecclesiastes 1:18) Saint Paul writes, “Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth. And if any man think that he knoweth anything, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know.” (I Corinthians 8:1–2)

  Ignorance is not why good people do bad things, and knowledge itself does not prevent good people from doing bad things. Good people do bad things because by themselves they are not able to manipulate their knowledge of what is good in behalf of goodness and over against what is bad. The first and most basic reason the good do bad is that the good are weak and are not fully in control of themselves or of their circumstances. This sounds like a ready-made alibi, and the now all too familiar moral escape of the perpetrator as victim. We want people to take responsibility for their actions and not to blame the devil, or voices, or circumstances, or victims. The moral chaos of our time is deepened by the sense of evasion and scapegoating that this concession to moral weakness would seem to condone, but we have no choice. We must begin here with the fact that our knowledge and our will, even our good intentions, are not sufficent to prevent the good from doing bad.

  This is not a concession to victimology, but rather a concession to the reality of evil. The only way to answer the question is to acknowledge that the good are not in control, and are usually outwitted and outsmarted by the forces of evil that surround them on every hand. To put it more plainly:

  Evil is real.

  The good are not as smart as they think they are.

  The good need all the help they can get; one cannot be good on one’s own.

  Let us look again at the lynch mob. Every faceless mob is composed of the faces of individual people, many of whom have much good in them. They do not see themselves or their neighbors as evil; they do not contemplate evil acts. In fact, under certain circumstances they are driven to their actions by a sense of offended righteousness. They would argue that it was a sense of justice that motivated them to join with their neighbors in dispensing rough justice. Where others see what they are doing and what they have begun as evil, they themselves literally see no evil, and would deny its power. If you do not recognize the reality of evil, and your own capacity for evil and its artful designs, then you are ripe to be overtaken by that which you deny exists. The first thing the good need to recognize is that they are at one with evil. The reason the church on earth is called the church militant is because it understands itself to be in a state of constant warfare with a real antagonist whose troops are legion and whose resources are without limit. To deny that reality is the first step toward moral defeat.

  Second, evil has a brain. Someone has said that cancer is not simply a medical condition that results in death but a disease with a brain and a strategy of death. It works to wear down the body, to outwit the physicians, outmaneuver the therapies, strategies, and potions. It almost seems as it if has a will of its own, and it can never be underestimated. Evil is like cancer; it has a brain and a strategy, and millennia of experience. As we have said before, evil is so smart that it will not attack our weak points, knowing that we have those guarded. Rather, it attacks those places in which we feel confident, hence places that we neglect. Thus, the morally superior person is vulnerable to evil at those points where the moral strength is felt to be sufficiently strong that he can afford to neglect it.

  This may perhaps explain the phenomenon of the abuse of moral trust by such people as physicians and psychiatrists and priests and clergy. Secure in the identity of their calling, confident in the honor others accord them, and unwilling to think themselves vulnerable in the work they do so well, they are prime targets for the power of evil over them. They think that they are in control, when in fact they are controlled. Roman Catholic priests charged with pedophilia often tell their victims that nothing is wrong because “I’m a priest: I can’t do wrong.” Protestant clergymen like Jimmy Swaggart say some variation on the same theme, and add, “and I can’t get caught.” The mousy bank clerk who embezzles millions from the accounts in his charge knows that embezzling is wrong, but his actions stem either from vengeance against an unjust employer—a form of radical redistribution of the undeserved wealth of patrons—or from meeting virtuous needs such as the support of an invalid relative who requires the money. These good often think themselves smarter than the evil they perform, and they are always mistaken.

  Finally, one cannot combat evil, especially the evil within, on one’s own. You cannot be good by yourself. One of the first defenses against evil is to acknowledge that one needs help against it. Confession is good for the soul not only because it performs a therapeutic cleansing of the impurities that clog the spiritual bloodstream but because to address it in confession immediately objectifies the evil and places one in a community outside of oneself. Evil’s greatest ally is solitary silence. The Roman Catholic Church long understood this in its rites of auricular confession. The sinner had to name the sin to a priest and to accept responsibility for the thought, word, or deed. The sinner then had to accept a penance as an act of expiation and contrition, and then the sinner had to promise an amendment of life. This was not “private,” in the sense of a psychiatrist’s conversation with a client, but an exercise done in the name of the community of the faithful.

  Public liturgical confession helps to accomplish the same goals. It is a point worth making that those religious traditions within which acts of confession both private and public are minimized or nonexistent are those traditions in which a wise and necessary restraint to evil masquerading as moral zealousness is missing. Confession of sins helps articulate what the sins are and acknowledges the trespass, it calls upon God and the community to witness the confession and to assist in the amendment of life, and it reassures the penitent that he or she is not alone either in the sin or in the redemption from it.

  Now indeed one could take the self-righteous prayer of the biblical Pharisee as one’s own: “I thank thee, Lord, that I am not as others are,” and one could argue, “I am confessing on behalf of those other people who need it.” If I am right that the person who seeks after righteousness and is anxious to know and to do the good knows his or her sin and recognizes that sin as a reality and not an abstraction in his or her life, that tinny moral boasting of the Pharisee will be seen for the whistling in the dark that it really is.

  Good people do bad things because good people are not good enough. They have to fight and to outwit a superior enemy, and they need all the help they can get to do it, all the time. The Bible reminds us over and over again that Satan, the personification of evil, is not interested in the wicked, but in the righteous. Therefore those who would be righteous, or hunger or thirst after it, are and always have been Satan’s prime targets. It is to amplify this fact for the sake of our spiritual welfare that the gospels make the first encounter Jesus has after his baptism an encounter with Satan himself. We are meant both to take notice and to take what we notice very seriously indeed. With evil working overtime, virtue cannot be a hobby.

  Chapter 13

  The Bible and Temptation

  WHOEVER could devise a cure for temptation would be richer even than the discoverer of the cure for the common cold, or the successful alchemist who is able to turn base metals into gold. People for whom abstract theories of sin and evil are just that can easily observe a
daily existential experience of the moral combat called temptation—the would-be dieter. She knows that it is in her absolute best interest to maintain the healthy regimen upon which she and her advisers have embarked; she knows what is good and what is bad for her in this regard. She is not ignorant of the facts, and perhaps indeed knows more than is necessary for her to know about nutrition, for all food and drink have been reduced to grams, ounces, calories, and carbohydrates; and the aesthetics of eating are subordinated to the rational process of achieving and maintaining an ideal weight. Moral self-interestedness is not only clear but easily measured and monitored, and yet no day passes, not even an hour of it, when visions of chocolate indulgence or the imagined smell of hot buttered popcorn, or some other forbidden delight fails to initiate moral warfare. To resist the diet buster is understood to be a short-term sacrifice for a long-term gain, and deprivation becomes the moral substitute for gratification. To yield and eat is an exercise of the will, but the instant gratification is instantly overcome by a sense of guilt and a renewed resolve not to do so again, thus raising the stakes for the next level of encounter.

  Substitute the keeping of a diet for fidelity in marriage, honesty in finance, truth telling in conversation, responsibility in conduct, and we have the wretched pathology of human moral ambition and human moral failure. We can call the act, whatever it is when we betray our moral ambition, “sin.” We can call the interior reaction to our own knowledge of that failure, “shame,” and we know that the phenomenon that ignites this seemingly ineluctable transaction is called “temptation.”

  Temptation is older than sin and the mother of shame. More than sex, with which from ancient times it has been most intimately associated, temptation is the single greatest source of human anxiety. In the thousands of people with whom I have counseled over the years of my ministry, I have found the problem of temptation to be at the heart of their personal anxiety. Very few people have come to me lacking knowledge of what is good for them or bad for them. People generally are not ignorant, and to suggest that they are generally sells them short. If people were truly ignorant or uninformed there would be neither wrong nor sin, and certainly no shame, for all of these require a sense of transgression, a knowledge of error, and hence a sense of right: You don’t know it’s wrong if you don’t know what’s wrong. So, the young man who cheats on an examination in order to better his chances for admission to the graduate school of his choice knows that he has done a wrong thing. He knows that the desirable end does not justify his wrong deed, and he feels appropriate shame, although not yet enough to risk his ill-gained advantage by repudiating his actions and facing the music. When I asked a certain young man why he did it, his answer was simple: “I wanted what I could get, and I knew of no other way of getting it.” It is as pure an answer under the circumstances as that which Willie Sutton, the famous bank robber of a generation ago, gave when asked why he robbed banks: “Because that’s where the money is.”

  My young man’s situation, however, was more complicated than that of Willie Sutton. My young friend did not act out of mere expedience. He cheated, he said, because he felt powerless to do otherwise. He knew what the choices were but he had no choice, so he felt. He was under the power of a force beyond the scope of his moral compass. He was, in short, tempted, and like those before and after him, he yielded. He was not fundamentally wicked, evil, perverse, or a moral cripple; he was human, and where temptation is concerned, that is good, or bad, enough. Of course he is not alone. He has lots of company in the Bible, and the Bible, if it is anything at all, is an essay in the genealogy of temptation. We will look at three heroic instances of temptation, and the struggle with it, in the Bible. The first of these is the story with which the Bible begins its narrative of the human condition, the account of Adam and Eve and the temptation in the Garden of Eden. The second is the account of Jesus’ temptation, not in a garden but in the wilderness, at the beginning of his ministry, an account that takes pride of place in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The third instance is the account in I Corinthians 10 of Saint Paul’s struggle with what he calls his “thorn in the flesh,” an allegory, I suggest, of the great apostle’s temptations.

  In the Beginning Was Temptation

  We do not think of Oscar Wilde as either a theologian or a biblical scholar, but in the aphorism he puts into the mouth of Lord Darlington, in Lady Windermere’s Fan, he proves himself insightful in both callings: “I can resist everything except temptation.” This is, of course, the trouble in paradise, the trouble with Adam and Eve. The problem, contra Augustine, is not sex, nor is it obedience, and it isn’t even evil as such. It is temptation, and the inability of men and women to resist it.

  Temptation as an abstraction does not work very well, and that is why the writers of Genesis are at very great pains to give temptation a personality, a persona, a character. It is a sort of incarnation, and the first in the Bible. When orthodox Christians think of an incarnation they tend to think, and rightly so, of the Incarnation, that divine Word made flesh in Jesus and described in the glorious prologue to the gospel of Saint John, “and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” That is the manifestation or the enfleshment of God in terms that human beings can begin to understand. The incarnation in Genesis of which I speak is also an enfleshment—not of the divine will or person but of the opposite force which temptation represents in its invitation to evil. Thus, temptation is given the form of the serpent; a name, the Tempter; and qualities we will recognize and even appreciate: He is called the subtlest of all the creatures. Adam and Eve are thus far morally neutral. They have no personalities, no characters, and no distinguishing characteristics other than that they should be companions to each other and serve as caretakers of the Garden. They are not even instructed to worship God, or to be good and kind to one another. They are, of course, forbidden to eat of the fruit of the tree, but that commandment tells us more about the anxieties of God than it does about the characters or personalities of Adam and Eve.

  Thus it is that the serpent has all the best lines, and we are meant to understand that the serpent is the actor and that Adam and Eve are acted upon. There is neither any one nor any thing to shield them from the impact of this, the mother of all temptations. It reminds one of the Victor Borge set piece where the Danish comic recalls a conversation between Adam and Eve before the Fall, where Eve, in a fit of unanticipated jealousy, asks Adam, “Do you really love me?” And Adam replies, “Who else?” It is the intention of Genesis to give us as clear and uncluttered a view of the moral stage as possible, so that we will not fail to get it.

  What is “it”? First, that temptation is as old as creation itself and is not an exception to the created order but inherent in it. Those who look to the environment as the cause of social and moral ills will find little comfort here. Eden is no corrupt urban environment filled with evil and moral ambiguity. It is the smallest unit of human society, a suburban paradise without children or neighbors, and those who argue that the dilemma of Eden is to be found in the failure of character in Adam and Eve, that somehow they should have “known better,” or “done something,” want to turn them into plaster moralists or rationalists, willfully and ignorantly participating in their own destruction. Such an analysis gets “it” wrong. Historically, Christian doctrine since Augustine has been so eager to foist responsibility for the original sin upon Adam and Eve without blaming God for the problem of evil, that it has tended to risk the minimalization of the naked, coercive, subtle power of the tempter and his temptation.

  Hebrew readings of the Adam and Eve story, not burdened with making the case for the doctrine of original sin, and confident of God’s role in the enterprise, tend to focus on the irresistibility of the tempter’s blandishments. The first moral decision is impossible to make in the absence of evil and the temptation that leads to it. Thus, in trying to explain both the origins of the human race and its inescapable dilemmas, those who constructed the story of Adam and Eve placed emp
hasis neither upon the virtue nor upon the vice of these ancestral figures, but upon the sophistication, attractiveness, and subtlety of the tempting force with which they in their moral ignorance must now contend. The tempter does have the best lines; they are natural and reasonable, and thus make it very clear from the beginning that nature and what is natural, and rationality and what is reasonable, are suspect, and part of the problem rather than the solution to the human dilemma. In paradise nature and reason may be seen to be morally neutral, but as the drama is constructed, it is clear that these neutral means are easily put to bad uses, with disastrous consequences for those who do not know better.

  The proximity of temptation to creation, and the overwhelming success of that first temptation within earshot of God, as it were, is meant to remind those who hear and read this story that temptation is a primal force to be reckoned with, never to be underestimated, and is forever a part of the human condition. If our foreparents, uncorrupted by a world not yet old enough to have gone sour, lost their innocence to the beguiler, the old deluder, the tempter, what reason have we as their descendants to expect that we will be spared their trouble? Neither temptation nor its agent, the tempter, have been banished from the created order. The punishment accorded Adam and Eve for their disobedience, their yielding to temptation, is not simply exile from Eden and innocence; it is exile to live forever with the very source of their trouble in their midst. In the moral household of the human being after Eden, temptation is the man who came to dinner and remains a permanent though unwelcome guest. To be human, therefore, is to live in daily proximity to temptation.