THE FIRST TEMPTATION OF JESUS CHRIST: A MODEL FOR SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY
"If thou be the son of God, command this stone that it be made bread..."
Written primarily with a class of intellectuals in mind: largely unknown, mostly undistinguished, living and toiling away in those parts of the world where only lip service is still paid to science while religion is elevated beyond her deserved estate and where supernaturalism is still the unofficial culturally dominant paradigm for engaging with epistemic questions. These workers of the scientific tradition, locked in an atmosphere hostile to and chokes every sincere and genuine manifestation of fine intellectual impulse, continue to faithfully strive for and uphold the universal virtues of the scientific mindset. And like Christ who, though knowing in advance that his refusal to capitulate to The Cunning One could only culminate at Golgotha, nevertheless persisted in daily labor and resistance till His very last breath. Confronted with the fateful choice - Christ or Barabbas, The Silent One or The Grand Inquisitor, an ideal or the mundane, the sublime or the basal? - the preference, it seems, has always been the same.
Of Temptations…
It will be worth stating that a temptation would not qualify as one if it has not the power and the potential to debase and reduce the spiritual worth or moral integrity of the target; to leave him compromised and make him of less worthy account. In other words, to make him fall who had been gloriously standing and walking tall. A temptation is meant to test the limit of a man’s loyalty to an ideal he has come to personify.
Varieties of temptation can, therefore, be graded according to the standing, purity, and integrity of the targets in their observances of and services to an ideal. In this regard, the biblical temptations of Abraham, of Job, and of Christ, stood out among the rest. In contemporary times, the likes of Ghandi, Luther, and Mandela readily come to mind. The greatest temptations are, therefore, mostly an exercise reserved for the strong-willed rather than the tender-hearted, though the tender-hearted might be no less faithful. Should a weak but faithful heart fall in the throes of a temptation, forgiveness is often not far behind if they would but ask for it in earnest sincerity. Iscariot, I have no doubt, would have met with forgiveness with the infinitely Merciful One had he only but prostrated himself rather than yield to the dictate of his prideful and shameful heart. And indeed, Heaven knew better not to make a drama out of Judas’ temptation or even stake anything on it. The Great Tempter must be yielded some victories after all.
Of Ideal and Character…
However, men like Abraham, Job, and Jesus (or Ghandi, Luther, and Mandela) were not ordinary men by a long stretch - they each in their own right personified an ideal, an embodiment of a state of complete character in relation to a value - Job of stewardship, Abraham of obedience, Jesus of self-sacrifice, Ghandi of non-violence, Luther of equality, and Mandela of tolerance and forgiveness. And whenever such men are tempted (much less often than the common lot) everything is usually at stake. Should such men falter in character in the face of temptation, great is their punishment, and in most cases even death, either spiritual or physical, for such men betray something greater than humans themselves and can no longer be held up as shining examples of spiritual/moral emblem – “have you seen my servant, Job?” boasted God to His eternal counterpart; “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased”, said He of Christ to the whole world.
This boast, this confidence, this affirmation, this satisfaction and wonderful delight in the steadfastness of a soul held in service of a great ideal, is what is at stake when men of unparalleled moral stature are subjected to temptations. Thus, when persons of little consequence betray an ideal or a movement, the ideological or moral edifice is hardly shaken, but when persons of great consequence fall, the very foundation of the movement they represent is threatened and, in many cases, destroyed. A good recent example is the case of Sam Bankman-Fried, Cryptocurrency, and Effective Altruism.
David failed God only once and that was all it took to revise a divine covenant that was originally meant to be sacrosanct and eternal not to mention the severe punishment that followed. Who could dare imagine what the consequence would have been had Christ succumbed to the evil one in the wilderness or gave in to the weakness at Gethsemane? Well, He was never at any time ignorant of what he represented and stood for, this Jesus. And this, ultimately, is the surest armor of such ideal men – knowing that they stand for something bigger than themselves and eternal.
If Thou be the Son of God…
THE first temptation of Christ, turning stone to bread, can be viewed, among many other possible views, as symbolizing the pressure upon the awareness of a man of pure ideas to turn his sterile, incorporeal knowledge into something material and consumable. The first challenge for any man of excellent theoretical mind established in a scientific wilderness (territories hostile to scientific attitude) is confronting the fact that pure scientific enquiry is almost an impossibility – an existential threat to his very survival. To seek to know for the sake of knowing (which comes with great sacrifice) is a risky business in such anti-science or prescientific societies. And the few who could afford this intellectual luxury are anything but scientifically or intellectually inclined. Though it is true that the true man of genius is most often observed to be materially poor, and even if by some lucky chance he comes into possession of wealth, the true man of genius soon divests himself (as a matter of higher principle) of all superfluous material indulgences.
Of course, Christ was nothing but a supreme moral genius himself. And what was he always telling the rich and the materially clad? Go sell your properties and give the proceeds to the poor! Without doubt, no man on earth is equipped to follow this charge except they are of a truly spiritual or scientific temperament (which are one and the same in that they are both transcendental in attitude, one upwards towards the heavens, the other downwards towards the earth). And by ‘spiritual’ I do not mean men of the pulpit or the religious class. In fact, all but a few of this latter class of men are anything but spiritual in the most fundamental sense and spirit of the word. Spiritual men are found both in the secular and religious spheres and they share one thing in common: a disdain for acquisition and accumulation of material wealth, a resentment for that which is purely hedonic while embracing that which is either modest or spartan.
But it so often happens that such men, in spite of their disdain, cannot help being rewarded for the value they bring among their fellow men. However, never will it be said of them that they take a penny for which they haven’t labored or through means of dubious character. Examples of such men as I have been talking about abound in the religious world. But they’re found in the secular world too and, most often, they manifest as philosophers, scholars, and writers: Bertrand Russell (yes, he was a profoundly spiritual man in spite of his “why I am not a Christian” pamphlet), Leo Tolstoy (a profoundly tortured man of towering spiritual stature), and Wittgenstein being ready examples (I’m sure there’re many others). These three men were also known to have, more or less, renounced their great inherited material privileges not because Jesus commanded it but because, in their own way, they were like Jesus. For if only from pride, the man of genius (which is almost the same thing as a spiritual man) must prove to himself that he is capable of fashioning out a subsistence upon the substance and merit of his intellect and character, having nothing but his mind to aid him onwards.
One of the greatest slights that can be contrived upon the sensibility of a true man of genius is to suggest to him that his genius was born of material privilege. And while he may be incapable of denying this, if indeed true, he will not hope to continue to feed upon that very privilege which now threatens to rob his genius of its spiritual merit, of its naturalness (Tolstoy readily comes to mind). Also, a man who knows that in attaining genius (I use this word grudgingly as I don’t believe that genius is ‘attained’), he had the benefit of all material and technical aids must necessarily feel spiritually inferior to an equally towering counterpart whose genius was nurtured amidst the wasteland of material wretchedness (Dostoyevsky and Ramanujan comes to mind). Indeed, I suspect that this is one of the serious motives that move certain class of extraordinarily brilliant and deeply aware men to renounce or treat with disdain their material endowment. A vanity, no doubt, but a worthy and sublime one.
Thus, a scientific mind that deals in the purest of theoretical abstractions will not consent to the request “if thou be the son of God, command this stone that it be made bread.” He doesn’t doubt his capacity to make bread out of stone or of stone out of bread, nor does he care for bread as an object of self-advertisement or commercial dealings. Why should he then base his self-validity upon an ability he does not in the least doubt or a substance he does not care for? Yes, it is true he operates by the principle of ‘doubt’, but he does not doubt this principle, for he believes that in it and through it alone is truth attained. And though for other things he may not care, but for the truth he lives and breathes.
“My son if sinners entice thee, consent thou not.”
A truly scientific mind, just like the spiritual soul, stands to be better fed from the mere act of contemplating the stone than devouring the bread, for indeed, he cannot live by bread alone. The stone has been in existence before the bread and would continue to be long after the bread has bloated out of existence. This is the lure of the eternal: for “whosoever come unto me shall have eternal life.” It is an invitation, not an imposition and those who lust after what is indestructible and feel within their soul the pangs of epistemic hunger cannot but heed this calling.
Thus, while it is in the interest of the purest and highest man of science to not only refuse to turn stone to bread but to positively choose the stone over the bread– “…the rock of salvation…” – the reverse is the case for a scientific artisan (not necessarily a charlatan) who is a workman of scientific goods. And this is the fate, but perhaps not yet ultimate, of a man of pure scientific temperament whom providence has established in any of such scientifically hostile regions of the world (Africa comes to mind). For if he must not wilt and perish in the harsh wilderness of his cultural reality, he must not only turn even the most jagged of stones into some kind of quick edibles, he must also learn to multiply this product as Christ would later do for the sake of those who, unlike him, could not subsist on eternal ideals. They insist, in defiance of Christ admonition not to live by bread alone that “by bread alone we shall live”.
The Basal Subsidizing the Higher
In economically and culturally advanced societies, the man of pure scientific impulse is not much bothered by this basic existential imperative as he lives in a society that has taken up this ‘baser’ imperative of crude survival on his behalf. Thus, while he focuses on the far weightier and more esoteric matters of existence, he leaves the ‘cruder’ task of conversion, utilization, and multiplication of utility to his compatriots. And this is by no means an inferior responsibility - for the crude labor of many make possible the sublime enquiry of the few. And any society who scorns endeavors that are neither immediately rewarding nor profitable is comparable to a child who cannot see beyond what is before him or care for what lies ahead of him, and such a people would suffer the consequence of an impoverished future.
The Stone Mistaken for a god.
However, even the compromising but pragmatic task of making bread out of stone is a difficult one for a scientific mind domiciled in an unenlightened society for a multitude of reasons. But primarily, he emerges within a tradition in which his forebears (and to a very significant extent, his contemporaries) saw in “the stone” not even a potential “bread” but a potential god. Thus, when in contact with the stone, they are moved to an attitude of worship rather than of contemplation. The irreverence needed for a scientific mind to debase the object in his brutal contemplation is thus suppressed by the pressure to bow down and worship that which has been deemed mysterious and impenetrable. And what a blasphemy to even have contemplated the possibility of any other attitude before the stone other than that of awe and worship!
It is against this mystifying climate that a scientifically energized mind must contend. Because his mission is one which is neither recognized nor approved of, he is provided with no societal cushion by means of which his sacred labor may be made more meaningful and less soul-crushing. His toil receives no subsidy either of the economic kind or of the spiritual kind which comes from the recognition, endorsement, and affirmation of his intellectual labor. And so, in darkness, in shame, in abject isolation, is he destined to continue his labor. And in this he has two options: to be like Sisyphus who cared not that the gods were against him or like Galileo who, faced with the terror of the Inquisition, recounted. Whichever he chooses, he is by no means the worse for his choice.