Somewhat famously, Pope St. Gregory the Great suggests that the forty days of Lent, or rather the thirty-six days of fasting in Lent, constitute a kind of tithe of the year—that is, ten percent of 365 days. This is one explanation of how Lent makes sense.
Many of the older commentaries focus on the whole time, beginning at Septuagesima, of what, among those of us who still observe it, is called Pre-Lent. So you can pick your favorite number: seventy or forty. Then again, the great medieval commentator Amalar manages to find some significance in sixty and fifty as well.
The committees that produce modern liturgical books tend to chafe at this sort of thing. Allegory, they insist, may have been useful for all those illiterate medieval people, but modern man needs meaning, which usually seems to consist of cold hard facts, not poetry.
Fortunately, it is pretty difficult to expurgate all the poetry from things. All things are created, after all, which means they have meaning, which means they exist not just in and of themselves, but rather from God, their creator. As such, they are always tending away from nothingness toward being, always telling a story by their bare existence.
Certainly, Lent is a practical time full of practical disciplines. We can talk a lot about how ascetical discipline is good for us, how fasting brings us closer to God and detaches us from transient things, how hunger gives us solidarity with the poor, how offering sacrifices prepares our hearts for Easter. In a way, the story of the Lord’s temptation in the wilderness reinforces this practical emphasis. Jesus is an example to us because he was “tempted in every way as we are yet did not sin.” He shows us how to resist the world, the flesh, and the devil.
In other words, there’s information embedded in the story. Facts. We like that. There is likewise a modern way of reading the old medieval allegory as just another layer of information. So one traditional gloss on the temptation in the wilderness suggests that the wilderness in question is the road between Jerusalem and Jericho, depicted in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The wounded man, in that story, is traditionally a symbol of humanity beaten and left for dead by the devil, saved unexpectedly by the Samaritan, a symbol of Christ. And so it is fitting that when Christ goes out to do battle with the devil, he goes to the place where the devil, symbolically, won this great victory.
But knowing all that isn’t really the point of Lent, is it? If so, do we really need it? I think often we remain at that surface level, where we appreciate, for example, the numerical connections of forty—forty days and nights with Noah and the Flood, forty years of wandering the wilderness—but we miss what we are supposed to do with this apart from just accumulating trivia. This is where the renovating liturgists often have a point: Surely, there is something more to it than just being clever about historical similitude.
There is more to it, but it takes a pretty big shift, because the modern world teaches us that there really is nothing but trivia and that meaning is whatever we want to do with the trivia. That is, as Joseph Ratzinger once put it, the problem with people going around thinking the Church needs to be “creative” in her worship. Creativity becomes necessary because the world is meaningless. It is only trivia. It is up to us to make it meaningful through force of will. It means what we want it to mean.
But what if the world is not merely the accumulation of meaningless facts? What if all things have a purpose in the will of a loving God? The old instinct to allegorize the liturgy, as well as Scripture, stems from this basic conviction that God loves us and wants us to know him, and that the entirety of creation is filled with the signs of his presence. The entirety of history is an engine driving us closer to the knowledge of God, to the glory of God, to the love of God.
In his great psychological analogy for the Trinity, St. Augustine suggests that the mind remembers, understands, and loves itself. The mind is its memory. The mind doesn’t just have memory; the mind is inseparable from its remembrance. This is just a very philosophical way of observing what Moses requires of the people of Israel in Deuteronomy 26: They must remember. It is not even right to say that they must remember who they are, as if they were who they are and who they are is a piece of information that needs to be held by the consciousness or not. No, it is in this act of remembrance that they are who they are. Memory, for Israel, is life. No longer to remember is no longer to be.
This is consistently the way the scriptures and the Christian tradition speak about being remembered by God. To be saved is to be remembered by God. Over and over in prayer and song we ask, like Israel before us, that God remember not our sins; that instead he remember us according to his mercy and loving kindness.
The remembrance that we do every year in the sacred liturgy is just this kind of remembrance. We aren’t remembering the forty days in the wilderness the way that a fourth-grader remembers her multiplication tables. We remember in the way that we remember Christ’s body in the Eucharist, which is to say, with Flannery O’Connor, “If it’s just a symbol, to hell with it.” Having partaken of his nature, we join with him in his struggle against the devil, and at Easter, we win.
Lent is forty days not because it resembles the forty days; it is the forty days. There’s a realism here that we need to accept, which seems to have been much easier for the poetic imagination of the ancients than it is for us. Lent is meaningful not because I make it meaningful, but because in it I die to myself and become more and more configured to Jesus Christ. This isn’t just a remembrance of the past in my mind, but the ongoing historical work of redemption. Christ accomplishes his salvation in us by bringing us with him through temptation, through suffering, through death, into the joys of heaven.
This first step, today, is perhaps the most crucial. We have to resist the devil’s offer to skip ahead, to get the results that we want without the cost.
Peter Kreeft has an unusual take on the second temptation. He suggests that the real temptation wasn’t worldly power per se, but the salvation of souls. You can have all these lost souls, the devil suggests, if you’ll just stop this ridiculous attempt to work things out in history. The Lord resists, because of course there is no real salvation without him as the Savior, no healing of human nature without . . . well, the healing of human nature in time. There is no shortcut.
We too can resist temptation, because he resists in and for us—walking with us one step at a time, in time, all the way to the end.