Temptation
Dr dear Dr: As a psychologist I am often surprised at the words of the Pater Noster in which we ask God, “and lead us not into temptation”, surprised because surely your religion is not suggesting really that God does lead us into temptation?
A parishioner came into the vicarage cum presbytery not long ago this year and pointed at a large tome on the kitchen table among the coffee cups from the Keatsian paradise eatery the Caffe Greco 1760 in Roma, called “De Revolutionibus” and said, “I hope you are not starting any more revolutions Fr - it was bad enough when you first came out with your simple 3-word sermon, Charles Darwin Prayed!!”
So the word in question is sometimes transposed as “revolution” meaning by that a political ferment and national fracas, the observer being unaware that a more correct translation of the word would render it “Concerning the Motions of the Heavenly Spheres”, with apologies and allusions to Pythagoras and his celestial music, but this was the largely now unknown work of 1543 of Niccolo Copernicus on the solar system, placing the Sun at the centre of the solar system and not the human homeworld called Earth that now features so benignly at the heart of the new encyclical “Laudate Deum” as of today, the 4.X.2023. The young man himself was astonished that I had a copy of this tome and in the original format in the original Latin which I was endeavouring to read, having polished off a copy again in the Latin original of Sir Isaac Newton’s book, the “Principia Mathematica” - I explained that I had been taking trips to the Duke Humfrey Library for 5 years in between Covid attacks at Oxford just to study this one noble textus, armed with a blue Balmoral Royal Over Seas League pencil.
But seized with indignation at the fracas and furore over there at 15 minute Oxford, those new rules for drivers and their driverless Teslas, it came into my mind to do something much simpler and even sharper than driving over there, in sum to try Amazon and order the said tome directly - “if Moses cannot get to the mountain, then the mountain can come to Moses.” So that sometimes happens to commentators, they render a Latin word as it sounds with the nearest phonetic equivalent available. And the same process occurs with the Latin word “tentatio” which the King who composed the modern English Pater Noster, won’t say which king that was just in case we scandalize the already traumatised flocks who do not enjoy being thrown under the buses by the verticals far above them, so the King rendered the word simply and without ceremony as “temptation” when a correct rendering would style it as “and lead us not into trial by ordeal or mortal combat”, something important for early Christians and early seminarians mutatis mutandis on their way to meet the Gladiators of the Colosseum or at the amphitheatre at Jerusalem.
So needs must, but the transliteration is deceiving and herewith has over the past 40 years produced lots of theological doubts and quandaries for the average Joe Bloggs in the pew helas helas. A common error, a common problem. Not finally that the great and good God of Jo Osbourne fame does lead people into temptation, that is something left to the Dark Side if not the ever appealing Far Side.
