The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (10 page)

In certain respects, Luther’s reading of the Temptation differed very little from those that had come before him. Ambrose and Augustine had explicitly linked the Devil’s lying conversation to the seductive and self-serving babble of sophists and the false wisdom and pompous posturing of heretical teachers. Likewise, Luther traced contemporary rhetorical practice and the insane rants of the Anabaptists and “Papists” to the Devil’s oratorical skills. All parties agreed that Eve’s fatal mistake occurred when she responded to the Devil’s opening gambit, when she allowed herself to be drawn into conversation about the meaning of God’s words and by stages came to stray from the precise strictures of God’s simple command. Misleading questions, false speech, and verbosity were at the heart of the first couple’s Fall and, therefore, were the very source of our current deplorable condition. Death and disease, violence and theft, hunger, old age, despair, everything that characterized our current state of painful exile from God found its origin in the possibility of the lie, in the possibility that interpretations could misrepresent the truth, misrepresent reality, misrepresent God himself. But Luther narrowed his focus on Satan’s lie like no one before him, and in narrowing that focus he sharpened it, achieving a clarity that necessarily revealed any and all disagreement to be diabolical.

While the Temptation story made clear the tragic consequences of straying from the exact Word of God, the controversialist position of the reformers also demanded that interpretation of scripture be literal and that those literal interpretations be clear and self-evident expositions of the text. In debates with Catholics and fellow reformers, no other evidence could compel one’s opponents except the explicit and unambiguous text of the Bible itself.
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As a result, reformed exegetical practice found itself intensified under the necessities of religious polemic. The logic of
sola scriptura
suggested a world in which there was only one proper, correct, and holy interpretation of scripture, beyond which lay an entire universe of damning heretical and demonically inspired error. If scripture were clear, then only obstinacy, a refusal to accept a truth that was plain for one and all to see, could explain exegetical discord.
Of course, discord is exactly what the Devil desired and seemed to have secured. As the Calvinist minister John Dury put it in a letter appended to the front of Jacobus Acontius’s
Satans Strategems or the Devils Cabinet-Council Discovered
: “As it was then, so it is now, at every
Period
of our
Reformation
; he doth make every Truth a Matter of Strife; and what he cannot suppress by the power of ignorance, he endeavors to pervert by the evil use that men make of knowledge, to disappoint them of the end for which God has given it.” And it was Acontius, Dury believed, who had uncovered not only “the grand adversary’s design” against the faithful but also the remedy for it.
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F
ROM
S
ATAN’S
S
TRATAGEMS TO
H
UMAN
N
ATURE

“The best way to find out the devil’s stratagems,” writes Acontius in
Satans Strategems
, “is to take into serious consideration, what is the end at which all his consultations aim, which is not very hard to tell. For seeing that he is defined in Scripture a man-slayer from the very beginning, what can we think he should rather aim at than the death of
MAN
and that
ETERNAL
.”
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While hardly a surprising assertion taken on its own, the first sentences of Acontius’s treatise assume added meaning when framed against his personal biography. Born Catholic in 1500, he fled Italy for Basle in 1557, a Protestant convert. In Basle, and then Zurich, Acontius associated with a number of Italian Protestant exiles, freethinkers, and humanists, as well as the great early proponent of religious toleration Sebastien Castellio. Acontius, again under pressure of religious persecution for his views on the Trinity, left Switzerland in 1559, arriving later that same year in England, where he would spend the remainder of his life. It was in England that he finally felt safe enough to publish
Satans Strategems
, a work he had composed while still in Italy. The book, which first appeared in 1565 in Basle, was reprinted numerous times on the Continent and eventually translated into English in 1648.
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In its very first pages, Acontius assures his readers that Satan’s stratagems are as
straightforward as they are effective. Salvation depends on obeying God, and the Devil knows this. The Devil targets and exploits our weaknesses, using fallen human nature against itself in order to foster disobedience.

Given our current deplorable condition, Acontius doubts the Devil’s work is all that difficult. “Though
MAN
at first was created of a good, right and every ways perfect Nature and disposition,” he writes, “yet breaking the command of God, he became of another nature quite contrary, exceedingly corrupt and liable to all manner of vice.” As a result, we love ourselves immoderately, and this causes us to forget our true nature and dependence on God. Like our “first parents,” we easily imagine ourselves to be “little deities” as we lust after carnal and temporal pleasures with the “strange weakness of mind that made the Sovereignty of the whole world seem too-too little for
Alexander
the great.” Worst of all, these flaws turn us from God and blind us to the truth. Our judgment corrupted, we take “truth for falsehood, and falsehood for truth itself.” Not only do we find it difficult to discover the truth, even when we do find it, it is almost impossible for us to maintain it in its purity. While we are quick to notice these flaws in others, we are utterly blind to them in ourselves. In fact, should anyone disagree with us, we are “exceeding prone to wrath and hatred,” ready to attack our opponents with cruel violence and bloody persecutions. “In a word,” Acontius contends, “the nature of man, such as now it is, is not much unlike the Nature of the unclean spirits.”
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Human nature has become so corrupt, Acontius adds, that even the literal interpretation of scripture can become a source of discord, error, and sin. “It may fall out,” he warns, “that while you think to express that Doctrine which you hold for truth, with more significant and clear expressions, than it is in Scripture expressed, and better to shun occasion of cavil (for the wit of man will ever be more wary and wiser than God) thou wilt use such words or forms of expression, as from whence another less true and godly tenet may sometimes be collected.”
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Opponents attack each other with scripture, distorting it and themselves in the process. Outraged pride grabs hold of every disagreement, every perceived insult and
injury, magnifying them so that “new controversies arise, and new errors in like manner without end.”
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Nowhere, Acontius contends, has Satan’s success at manipulating man’s fallen nature been so spectacularly successful than in the “long and very Tragical controversy about the interpretation of those words,
Take, this is my Body
,” the sacrament of the Eucharist.
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While it cannot be denied that what appears “plain and clear” to one person in this debate appears differently to another, Acontius reminds his readers that all who are involved profess themselves to be good Christians. No one doubts the truth of Christ’s words, no one ever imagines Christ to be a liar, and yet, Acontius adds, “how far doth hatred, springing from our differences, transport us?” For Acontius, this situation reveals a distinction that is central to overcoming Satan’s schemes. “Wherefore of necessity thus much must be granted,” Acontius writes, “that the difference is only about the meaning, not the Truth of the words.”
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All Christians accept the Bible as the true Word of God, even if they do not all agree on how God’s Word should be interpreted. Satan exploits the difference between meaning and truth, between different interpretations of scripture and scripture’s true, if hidden, revelation, in order to swell each man’s pride, and through pride, Satan sows discord. Unlike Luther, unlike so many of the reformers and Catholics engaged in religious debate, Acontius is suspicious of any claim to exegetical certainty. Perhaps Luther could claim a divinely and subjectively inspired justification for his interpretations of scripture, but Acontius is too aware of our fallen state—a state that has left our reason dimmed, our will broken, and our pride burning—to have much confidence in our individual ability to understand each and every one of scripture’s intricacies. Corrupt reason and prideful passion too easily deceive us into thinking our personal interpretations of scripture coincide with its actual truth. If the Devil exploits our passions, we must do everything possible to quell them, to set them aside when attempting to discriminate between God’s truth and human interpretation. As a result, much of
Satans Strategems
reads like a rhetorical manual, offering advice to those engaged in religious debate. Since people
cling to their beliefs and take offense when told they are wrong, we must not absurdly simplify our opponents’ positions, angering them even as we misrepresent their ideas. We must understand them, take them seriously, and refute them with the appropriate arguments. Of course, we are no different from our opponents, and Acontius advises us to be wary of our own pride, our own passions, even our own propensity to error: “Forasmuch as for the most part, those that are judged to excel others in wisdom, are at difference among themselves; it must be concluded that many also of those who are accounted wise, do err.” Only the most arrogant think they are free from arrogance, and everyone, Acontius advises, ought to heed Solomon, who observed, “A fool is pleased with his own reasoning, but a wise man seeks councel.”
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If Acontius is too much the realist, too much the victim of religious persecution, to trust entirely in human reason, he is too much the humanist to despair of it completely. Doubt, as the first stage in the intellectual pursuit of truth, plays a foundational role in the individual’s quest for faith. Even those few principles that every Christian must accept should be subjected to temporary scrutiny and skeptical inquiry. Beyond those truths, disagreement is no sign of obstinacy, much less of heresy. “Those who accept the necessary things,” Acontius adds, “[should] forbear one another and discuss their controversies lovingly and kindly as brothers.”
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Perhaps we cannot help having a personal stake in what we believe to be true, but we must always attempt to contain our passions through an awareness that others can have good reasons to disagree with us. We can accomplish this only through rational discourse and calm discussion. Where disagreements become irresolvable, we continue to discuss, or we leave things be. To do otherwise is to allow the unclean spirit we are to become the Devil we fear.

But who needs the Devil if we ourselves are already unclean? Reducing Satan’s stratagems to manipulations of the mostly manageable play of human emotion effectively reduces Satan himself to little more than those emotions. It is impossible to know whether Acontius intended to blur so fully the division between ourselves and the Devil, to blur the division between our own intemperate
passions and those the Devil inspires within us, but blur them he does. Acontius’s own recommended techniques for tamping down human pride are the same regardless of their cause, and this, functionally at least, renders the Devil entirely superfluous in explanations of human discord.
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For all intents and purposes, Acontius’s account of Satan’s efforts to ruin mankind returns us to the problem that so concerned Augustine, precisely because it calls into question the Devil’s role in man’s Fall. How was Eve so easily deceived into disobedience? Augustine thought there was nothing for it but to imagine that some sort of propensity toward pride was in her already, ripe for the serpent’s exploitation. Thomas Aquinas, Nicholas of Lyra, and Luther all rejected this possibility, as it suggested that God’s creatures were less than good, perhaps even predisposed to evil. But, of course, our original propensity to sin is already presupposed in the writings of every exegete who claimed that the first Temptation is a model for all future temptations and that every subsequent one is a replay of the first. For the first to be a model for the rest, it must already contain the structural elements, the forces and leanings, of every future transgression.

All of which suggests something different about the Fall, about the serpent and the Temptation. In
Paradise Lost
, first published in 1667, John Milton sets the Temptation and Fall on the seventh day of Creation. An important narrative decision, this means that Adam and Eve have already spent much of the sixth day together, all of that night, and the beginning of the next day before Eve makes her fateful decision. They have eaten together and spoken to each other, wandered through paradise together, and spent a night in each other’s arms and, it would seem, they have fallen. Adam already adores his wife too much, claiming her to be the “fairest of Creation, last and best / Of all God’s Works,” and this despite the angel Raphael’s warning that he must not attribute “overmuch to things / less excellent.” There are dangers, Raphael adds, if he should subject himself to his inferior.
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Of course, this is exactly what Adam does, not only when he eats the fruit Eve hands him on the seventh day, but even earlier on the morning of that same day, when Eve disagrees with him. Eve asks to work at
some distance from Adam, who at first refuses, pointing out the dangers of separation given the rumored existence of a possibly lurking “malicious Foe.”
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After lengthy discussion, Adam succumbs to her request against his better judgment. “Seek not temptation then,” he tells her, “which to avoid / Were better, and most likely if from me / Though sever not: Trial will come unsought.”
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For her part, Eve knowingly lays herself open to this temptation, disagreeing with Adam whom, only the previous day, she had promised never to question in obedience to God’s will. “Unargu’d I obey,” she had vowed to Adam, “so God ordains, / God is thy law, thou mine: to know no more / Is woman’s happiest knowledge and her praise.”
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But on the morning of the seventh day, in response to Adam’s initial entreaties to remain by his side, Eve complains, “If this be our condition, thus to dwell / In narrow circuit strait’n’d by a Foe / Subtle or violent, we not endu’d / Single with like defence, wherever met / How are we happy, still in fear of harm?”
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