On Paltering

Gospel of the First Sunday of Lent

At that time Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert, to be tempted by the devil. And when He had fasted forty days and forty nights, afterwards He was hungry.

And the tempter coming said to him: If Thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.' Who answered and said: 'It is written: Not in bread alone doth man live, but in every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God.

Then the devil took Him up into the holy city and set Him upon the pinnacle of the temple, and said to Him: If Thou be the Son of God, cast Thyself down. For it is written: That He hath given His angels charge over Thee, and in their hands shall they bear Thee up, lest perhaps Thou dash Thy foot against a stone. Jesus said to him: It is written again: Thou shalt not tempt the Lord Thy God.

Again the devil took Him up into a very high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, and said to Him: All these will I give Thee, if falling down Thou wilt adore me. Then Jesus saith to him: Begone, Satan! For it is written: The Lord thy God shalt thou adore, and Him only shalt thou serve.

Then the devil left Him: and behold angels came, and ministered to Him. Matthew 4:1-11

Minneapolis Institute of Art, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Against our Blessed Lord, Satan employs a sophistry some call “paltering”.

Paltering is when a communicator says truthful things and in the process knowingly leads the listener to a false conclusion. At its core, paltering is about manipulation to gain the upper hand.” - Deceiving with the Truth, Harvard Gazette

Everything the infernal enemy said was true. Even “If Thou be the Son of God”. Because at that point he himself was not sure, the work of God having been done quietly in Bethlehem and Nazareth. So he rips scripture from its context and empties it of meaning. He reshapes the words to manipulate.

Josef Pieper describes this as the nature of flattery.

His dignity is ignored; I concentrate on his weaknesses and on those areas that may appeal to him - all in order to manipulate him, to use him for my purposes. - Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, pp. 22-23.

There’s a lot of that going around these days. First with COVID-19. Now with Ukraine.

And it may end badly.

Brethren: We exhort you that you receive not the grace of God in vain. For He saith: In an accepted time have I heard thee, and in the day of salvation have I helped thee. Behold, now is the acceptable time, behold now is the day of salvation.

Now. This moment touches eternity. Now is the day.

Having been hid from them

The gospel of Quinquagesima Sunday, from Luke 18:31-43

At that time Jesus took unto Him the twelve and said to them: Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and all things shall be accomplished which were written by the Prophets concerning the Son of Man. For He shall be delivered to the Gentiles, and shall be mocked and scourged and spit upon: and after they have scourged Him, they will put Him to death, and the third day He shall rise again. And they understood none of these things, and the word was hid from them, and they understood not the things that were said. Now it came to pass, when He drew nigh to Jericho, that a certain blind man sat by the wayside begging. And when he heard the multitude passing by, he asked what this meant. And they told him that Jesus of Nazareth was passing by. And he cried out, saying: Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me. And they that went before rebuked him, that he should hold his peace. But he cried out much more: Son of David, have mercy on me. And Jesus standing, commanded him to brought unto him. And when he was come near, He asked him, saying: What wilt thou that I do to thee? But he said: Lord, that I may see. And Jesus said to him: Receive thy sight, thy faith hath made thee whole. And immediately he saw and followed Him, glorifying God. And all the people, when they saw it, gave praise to God.

There are two kinds of blindness here. One induced. The other imposed. I will limit myself to the former.

Passages like this have always troubled me. For some reason i have always taken perfect past tense as being something God did to the disciples: kekrummenon - having been hid from them. It just dawned on me they did it to themselves. They were blinded by their assumptions. They could not possibly understand what Jesus was plainly saying because “This is not how a Messiah talks…” They did not want to hear it because they did not want to believe it.

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We are all sophists at heart. Mundus vult decipi. The world wants to be deceived. Perhaps this is the philosophical harmonic of original sin. ( I recommend Josef Pieper: Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power - Read it or listen to it) And we have created lots of ways to hide things from ourselves.

Consider the current commentariat on Ukraine. The same supercilious wisenheimers that lied to us for two years about COVID-19 are now in a position to tell us the truth about Ukraine? “Two weeks to flatten the curve"

Gell-Mann amnesia writ large.

Ancient Hate

“…as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old, that we should be saved from our enemies, and from the hand of all who hate us..”

The rulers of this present darkness burn with hatred of God and everything he made. Especially humans. Our very being bears His image.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Our male & female bodies are bound up in being, in the imago Dei.

The war against the maleness and femaleness of the human body means to deface the Image of God.