I am repeatedly visited by the thought that the greatest temptation is the temptation to see the world as nothing but a system of finitudes and relativities with nothing beyond it or behind it. To see it as just a play of phenomena of no ultimate significance. It is the temptation to sink into a placid nihilism: nothing finite finally matters; there is nothing that is not finite; and that this is so does not matter. And since nothing finite finally matters, there is nothing to get hung up about:
Let me take you down
'Cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
Strawberry Fields forever.
This is not an angry nihilism, but something closer to the nihilism of Nietzsche's Last Man.
How does this greatest temptation connect to ordinary temptation?
Before long spring will be here, a time of enhanced sexual temptation. One's resistance to sexual temptation today is resistance without yesteryear's assurance of the evil of acquiescence. Is there really a soul about whose care one ought to be concerned? Perhaps we die utterly and it just does not matter, finally or ultimately, whether we resist or indulge these paltry temptations. Pleasure is here and now. It is concretely and undeniably real even if fleeting, unlike endlessly debatable speculations and scruples about God and the soul and the moral law.
You're able and she's willing. It's consensual. In a while you will both be dead and it won't matter to anyone that you found an hour's pleasure in this way in violation of a monastic vow, or a marital vow, or a philosopher's vow to eschew the blandishments of the flesh the better to secure insight into the really real by keeping undimmed the eyes of the soul.
So you indulge, but not with the settled knowledge or firm belief that the act is wrong, but in a state of doubt whether it is wrong, or more radically, like a Pyrrhonist, in a state of aporia as to whether or not the whole moral question matters or even makes sense.
The greatest temptation, I said, is the temptation to think that nothing finite finally matters; that there is nothing that is not finite; and that this is so does not itself matter. My suggestion is that acquiescence in this greatest of all temptations mightily aids and abets acquiescence in ordinary temptation.
The greatest temptation is a temptation so deep that I am 'tempted' to say that, compared to it, the temptation to which Adam and Eve succumbed is an ordinary temptation, a temptation that presupposes but does not question Ultimate Mattering and the nonrelative opposition of good and evil.
Resist it.