The nature of devil’s sin still holds lesson for us

The Catholic Register, 07 March 2020

The devil rebelled against the created order of nature; he wanted to be the author of nature.

Temptations indulged, temptations resisted. On the first Sunday of Lent we heard about the devil’s tempting of Adam and Eve in the garden, to catastrophic effect, and the devil’s tempting of the Lord Jesus in the desert, to salvific effect.

The first Sunday of Lent always recounts the Gospel of the three temptations; the account of Jesus being tempted by the devil to give way to hunger, to exploit His divinity for spectacle, to seize worldly power by paying obeisance to the “prince of the world.” Venerable Fulton Sheen characterized these temptations as “three shortcuts” to avoid the Cross. 

Jesus faced these temptations and victoriously resisted the wiles of the evil one. He thus reverses the story of Genesis where Adam and Eve would fall to the serpent’s promise to “be like gods.” Jesus, the new Adam, born of Mary, the new Eve, is God. There is no fruitful tree in the desert, but there Jesus is looking ahead to the saving tree of the Cross; He will not avoid it.

The learned Swiss priest and theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar, would say “the ernstfall (decisive moment) of Christianity is the Cross of Christ.” The devil’s pre-emptive efforts in the desert to avoid this ernstfall raises the question of the decisive moment of evil. What was the ernstfall of the fallen angel?

The fall of the devil and the nature of his sin invites us to consider the essence of evil. The Catechism puts its strongly, that the sin of the fallen angels was the radical and irrevocable rejection of God and His reign (CCC 392).

But why did Lucifer fall? Why was there a serpent to tempt Adam and Eve? Why was Satan in the desert to tempt Jesus?

Angels are rational creatures without bodies, pure spirits. They have the intellect and free will to choose good and avoid evil. The Catechism (#391) quotes the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) that “the devil … (was) indeed created naturally good by God but became evil by (his) own doing.”

What did he do?

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