The sage does not contrive to win,
and therefore is not defeated;
he is not grasping, so does not lose.^138There is a powerful call to proper Being in the story of the third temptation.
To obtain the greatest possible prize—the establishment of the Kingdom of
God on Earth, the resurrection of Paradise—the individual must conduct his
or her life in a manner that requires the rejection of immediate gratification,
of natural and perverse desires alike, no matter how powerfully and
convincingly and realistically those are offered, and dispense, as well with
the temptations of evil. Evil amplifies the catastrophe of life, increasing
dramatically the motivation for expediency already there because of the
essential tragedy of Being. Sacrifice of the more prosaic sort can keep that
tragedy at bay, more or less successfully, but it takes a special kind of
sacrifice to defeat evil. It is the description of that special sacrifice that has
preoccupied the Christian (and more than Christian) imagination for
centuries. Why has it not had the desired effect? Why do we remain
unconvinced that there is no better plan than lifting our heads skyward,
aiming at the Good, and sacrificing everything to that ambition? Have we
merely failed to understand, or have we fallen, wilfully or otherwise, off the
path?
Christianity and its Problems
Carl Jung hypothesized that the European mind found itself motivated to
develop the cognitive technologies of science—to investigate the material
world—after implicitly concluding that Christianity, with its laser-like
emphasis on spiritual salvation, had failed to sufficiently address the problem
of suffering in the here-and-now. This realization became unbearably acute in
the three or four centuries before the Renaissance. In consequence, a strange,
profound, compensatory fantasy began to emerge, deep in the collective
Western psyche, manifesting itself first in the strange musings of alchemy,
and developing only after many centuries into the fully articulated form of
science.^139 It was the alchemists who first seriously began to examine the
transformations of matter, hoping to discover the secrets of health, wealth and
longevity. These great dreamers (Newton foremost among them^140 ) intuited
and then imagined that the material world, damned by the Church, held