Summary: In his autobiography Samuel Clemens, the beloved humorist known as Mark Twain, wrote words akin to the Gospel of Mark's briefest description of Jesus' forty days and nights in the wilderness: With the going down of the sun my faith failed and the clammy fears gathered about my heart. Those were awful nights, nights of despair, nights charged with the bitterness of death. In my age as in my youth, night brings me many a deep remorse. None of us is ever quite sane in the night. Sometimes our faith fails. The clammy fears gather about our hearts. Despair descends. It is into this primitive night of the soul that Jesus enters when Mark describes Jesus' wilderness temptation with one line: "He was with the wild beasts, and angels ministered to him." In Mark's Gospel, there is none of the later Gospel's three temptations. There is only this perplexing description. "He was with the wild beasts..." Jesus enters that frightening solitude Gerard Manley Hopkins described as a miserable soul "gnawing and feeding on its own miserable self." The wild beasts of Mark and of Hebrew Scripture are symbolic figures representing the violence and arrogance of nations and empires: the lion that threatened David's sheep; the lion with wings and a bear gnawing insanely on its own ribs in Daniel's dream; a leopard and a dragon with great iron teeth destroying everything in its way. The beasts of Daniel and Hebrew Scripture symbolize the deepest threats, threats to human wellbeing and existence itself. In Daniel's dream, when the Ancient of Days takes his judgment seat and gathers the nations (the wild beasts), they are as nothing before him, but "of his kingdom there shall be no end." Like Samuel Clemens, with the going down of the sun [our] faith fails and the clammy fears gather about our hearts.
