Cain turns to Evil to obtain what Good denied him, and he does it voluntarily,
self-consciously and with malice aforethought.
Christ takes a different path. His sojourn in the desert is the dark night of
the soul—a deeply human and universal human experience. It’s the journey
to that place each of us goes when things fall apart, friends and family are
distant, hopelessness and despair reign, and black nihilism beckons. And, let
us suggest, in testament to the exactitude of the story: forty days and nights
starving alone in the wilderness might take you exactly to that place. It is in
such a manner that the objective and subjective worlds come crashing,
synchronistically, together. Forty days is a deeply symbolic period of time,
echoing the forty years the Israelites spent wandering in the desert after
escaping the tyranny of Pharaoh and Egypt. Forty days is a long time in the
underworld of dark assumptions, confusion and fear—long enough to journey
to the very center, which is Hell itself. A journey there to see the sights can
be undertaken by anyone—anyone, that is, who is willing to take the evil of
self and Man with sufficient seriousness. A bit of familiarity with history can
help. A sojourn through the totalitarian horrors of the twentieth century, with
its concentration camps, forced labor and murderous ideological pathologies
is as good a place as any to start—that, and some consideration of the fact
that worst of the concentration camp guards were human, all-too-human, too.
That’s all part of making the desert story real again; part of updating it, for
the modern mind.
“After Auschwitz,” said Theodor Adorno, student of authoritarianism,
“there should be no poetry.” He was wrong. But the poetry should be about
Auschwitz. In the grim wake of the last ten decades of the previous
millennium, the terrible destructiveness of man has become a problem whose
seriousness self-evidently dwarfs even the problem of unredeemed suffering.
And neither one of those problems is going to be solved in the absence of a
solution to the other. This is where the idea of Christ’s taking on the sins of
mankind as if they were His own becomes key, opening the door to deep
understanding of the desert encounter with the devil himself. “Homo sum,
humani nihil a me alienum puto,” said the Roman playwright Terence:
nothing human is alien to me.
“No tree can grow to Heaven,” adds the ever-terrifying Carl Gustav Jung,
psychoanalyst extraordinaire, “unless its roots reach down to Hell.”^134 Such a