The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (12 page)

These facts about the lion could be found in ancient and venerable sources. Pliny’s
Natural Histories
provided a rich source of information on the lion, and the sixth-century encyclopedist Isidore of Seville had passed on the information about the lion’s devious tail.
¹²
Bestiaries were not simply compendia of data drawn from natural historians. Taking inspiration and content from the
Physiologus
, a second-century Christian treatise that went on to become one of the most popular and influential books of the Middle Ages, bestiaries were primarily concerned with uncovering the allegorical mysteries hidden within the book of nature. And there were powerful mysteries hidden within the brave form of the lion, the king of the animals, the first to be described in the
Physiologus
.
¹³
Just as a lion, pursued by hunters, erases its tracks, so it is that “our savior, a spiritual lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of Jesse, the son of David, concealed the traces of his love in heaven until, sent by his father, he descended into the womb of the Virgin and redeemed mankind that was lost.” As it turns out, his love was not the only thing the savior chose to hide. “Not knowing of his divine nature,” the bestiary continues, “the Devil, the enemy of mankind, dared to tempt him like an ordinary man. Even the angels on high did not know of his divinity and said to those who were with them when he ascended to his father, ‘Who is this king of glory?’ ”
¹⁴

The idea that Christ concealed his divinity from the Devil was hardly limited to the bestiary tradition. Augustine had done much
to popularize the idea, mentioning it in any number of works, in any number of contexts. “How was the Devil conquered?” Augustine asks in
On the Trinity
. “Because, although he found nothing in Christ worthy of death, yet he slew Him.”
¹⁵
According to Augustine, the story of Christ’s incarnation, life, and crucifixion is that of an extended ruse, a well-thought-out plot to trick the Devil into abusing his power and dominion over mankind. Perhaps the Devil had rightful possession over Adam’s sinful descendants, but he lost that right when he overreached and crucified a manifestly guiltless Jesus. As Augustine made clear in a sermon preached for the Feast of Ascension, the Devil would never have abused his power if Christ had not concealed his divinity, “ ‘For had they known,’ ” Augustine writes, quoting and then glossing the apostle Paul, “ ‘they would never have crucified the Lord of Glory.’ But if he had not been put to death, death would not have died.” Christ’s spotless and holy life, his divinity hidden beneath an all too human exterior, was the bait that lured the Devil to his own self-destruction. “The Devil exulted when Christ died,” Augustine adds, “and by that very death of Christ the Devil was overcome: he took food, as it were, from a trap. He gloated over the death as if he were appointed a deputy of death; that in which he rejoiced became a prison for him. The cross of the Lord became a trap for the Devil; the death of the Lord was the food by which he was ensnared.”
¹⁶
Augustine put it even more succinctly in another sermon when he stated, “The Lord’s cross was the devil’s mousetrap: the bait which caught him was the death of the Lord Christ.”
¹⁷

Augustine’s older contemporary, Gregory of Nyssa, used different imagery to similar effect to describe Christ’s deception of the Devil. “The divine nature,” Gregory writes, “was concealed under the veil of our human nature so that, as with a greedy fish, the hook of divinity might be swallowed along with the bait of flesh.” According to Gregory, this sort of deception was perfectly fitting, perfectly just, for human beings themselves had long since fallen prey to a different sort of allegorically baited false food. “The heathen fable,” Gregory writes, “tells of a dog who caught sight of the reflection in the water of the food he was carrying in
his mouth. He opened his mouth wide to swallow the reflection, and dropped the real food; and so went hungry.” Likewise, the Devil, “that advocate and inventor of wickedness,” had persuaded mankind to “the good with its opposite.” He covered the “hook of his wickedness” with “the false semblance of good,” and mankind, deceived and caught, became the captives of their worst enemy.
¹⁸

Adam and Eve, as Gregory relates the story of our Fall, had sold themselves into bondage. They had handed over their freedom and willingly become Satan’s slaves in exchange for his false promises. God’s response to Satan’s double-dealing, Gregory contends, makes sense only within this dramatic narrative. We know that God is good and wise, that he is just and powerful. God feels pity for our fallen state, and through his wisdom he knows how best to rescue us. God could simply liberate mankind, but this would be an action fitting only for a tyrant. Justice requires that man’s freedom be purchased or ransomed from its current owner. Christ’s incarnation, his wondrous birth, and his miraculous life are all aspects of an extended charade to convince the Devil that the value of a sinless Christ exceeds that of all other sinful men combined. Christ’s excellent life is the bait, while Christ’s divinity, the hook, is hidden within the bait of his human flesh. As Gregory puts it, “It was beyond the Devil’s power to look upon the unveiled appearance of God; he would see only in Christ a part of the fleshly nature which he had of old subdued through wickedness.” This was, Gregory assures his readers, the only way the Devil would have handed over mankind. Had Christ appeared in his divinity, had he not hid himself behind a veil of flesh, the Devil would have been too fearful to make the exchange. Summarizing the story, Gregory praises each and every aspect of God’s plan, especially the deceptive ruse on which everything hinges. “His choosing to save man,” Gregory writes, “is evidence of his goodness; his making the ransoming of the captive a matter of exchange displays his justice; while his pre-eminent wisdom is demonstrated by the device by which something was accessible to the Enemy which had been beyond his grasp.”
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Whatever differences might exist between Augustine’s mousetrap and Gregory’s fishhook, both writers treat Christ’s incarnation, life, and crucifixion as part of a decades-long exchange, even dialogue, with the Devil.
²⁰
When God deceives the Devil, God is justified because both the specific circumstances of man’s Fall and God’s intentions warrant and justify such deception. Like an immoral sophist, the Devil convinced Eve willingly to give up her freedom, persuading her that evil was good and good was evil. Reciprocity, fairness, even justice, demand that mankind’s freedom be secured in some similar manner, and so it is that Christ engages in a series of negotiations with the Devil as he attempts to persuade the Devil to accept his life in exchange for the rest of mankind’s freedom. Christ can succeed in this drawn out exchange only if he conceals key facts. And so Christ, just like the sophist, must make a bad deal appear good, must make himself appear incomparably better than all other human beings combined, and yet conceal the divinity that makes this absolute superiority possible.
²¹

Christ’s deceptions may well have extended beyond a good disguise and entered into the realm acting. At one point during Christ’s forty days of fasting in the desert, the Devil tempts him: “If you are the Son of God, bid this stone to become bread.” Cyril, the Patriarch of Alexandria who died in 444, avoiding all talk of deception, praises the Lord’s honest response. “And therefore it was that Christ, knowing the monster’s artifice, neither made the change nor said that he was either unable or unwilling to make it, but rather shakes him off as importunate and officious, saying, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone.’ ”
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Augustine’s mentor Ambrose, by contrast, suggested the entire forty days constituted a sort of pious fraud. Christ’s apparent hunger, his weakness and thirst, were all part of a plot to convince the Devil that the fragile and sickly looking creature before him was a mere man. How else could the Devil be lured into making his fatal deal? Christ’s response to the Devil is purposefully deceptive, even if not exactly false. “The devil tempts that he may test,” Ambrose explains. “He tests that he may tempt. In contrast, the Lord deceives that he may conquer. He conquers that he may deceive. For if he had changed
his nature, he would have betrayed its creator. Thus he responded neutrally, saying, ‘It is written, “That man does not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.” ’ ”
²³

From the Church fathers and allegorical works like the
Physiologus
, the narrative of Christ’s deception of the Devil, including the imagery of secretive lions and divinely baited hooks and mousetraps, passed on to later generations of the faithful. It appears in commentaries on the Apostles’ Creed that were taught in churches as well as in the widely disseminated writings of both Leo and Gregory the Great.
²⁴
Even after Anselm reconceived the entire nature of Christ’s sacrifice, rejecting the notion that Christ ransomed or purchased human freedom from a Devil who claimed right of possession over mankind, basic tenets of this narrative of divine deception survived and flourished in both popular and learned religious works. It made its way into sermon handbooks and from there into sermons themselves.
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It would even become a ubiquitous feature in both German and English Corpus Christi plays. The Chester plays, for example, which were performed throughout the fifteenth century, include a telling summary reflection concerning Christ’s victory over the Devil in the desert. Adam fell through his trespass, we are told, but Jesus withstood his tempter through grace and, as a result, Satan was “completely deceived” regarding his “godhead.”
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If medieval theologians proved a bit less enthusiastic about Christ’s various deceptions than did the playwrights, they still discussed and accepted them. For example, Thomas Aquinas interpreted the story of Christ’s desert temptations as examples for the holy to follow. Even when directly quoting from Ambrose’s decidedly fraud-friendly reading of those same events, he explicitly removed all hints that Christ had engaged in any sort of false, misleading, or deceptive behavior.
²⁷
Still, in other places, Thomas has no problem claiming that it was necessary for Christ to conceal his true identity from the demons. “For had they fully known that he was the Son of God and the effect of His passion,” Thomas writes, “they would never have procured the crucifixion of the Lord in Glory.”
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Thomas includes yet another trick played on the Devil that enjoyed wide currency in popular religious literature. Why did Jesus’s virgin mother need to marry? Thomas offers up a variety of reasons, reasons having to do with the insurmountable social and cultural challenges that an unwed mother would have faced in turn-of-the-millennium Palestine and with the need for young boys to have father figures, but he offers another one as well. Citing the church father Ignatius, Thomas argues that Joseph, Mary’s husband, was a decoy, a beard, employed so “that the manner of our Lord’s birth might be hidden from the devil.” Eventually, Thomas contends, the Devil and his minions would know full well just who and what Christ was, but during his infancy and childhood, “it behooved the malice of the devil to be withheld, lest he should persecute Him too severely: for Christ did not wish to suffer such things then, nor to make His power known, but to show himself to be in all things like other infants.”
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Early in the fifteenth century, the chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean Gerson, would support Joseph’s role in this divine plot, adding for good measure that this is how we know that Joseph, contrary to popular opinion, must have been young and virile. Had the ancient enemy recognized in Joseph an impotent old man, he would all to easily have uncovered the true “mystery of the incarnation.”
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Many of these ideas come together in the Flemish painter Roger Campin’s famous
Merode Altarpiece
. Completed in the late 1420s, the triptych depicts the Annunciation, the moment when the angel announces to Mary that she will be the virgin mother of God. On the center panel, Mary, not yet aware of the angel’s presence, leans against a bench, her attention entirely given over to the religious book in her hands. On the right panel, two people, most likely the painting’s donors, stare across this scene to the left panel, where an admittedly older Joseph sits on a bench, working a piece of wood. On the table near him sits a mousetrap.
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Whether deceptive or misleading, there was no question in anyone’s mind, no doubt whatsoever, that Christ’s behavior was of a wholly different moral standing than the Devil’s deceptive and misleading behavior. The thirteenth-century Franciscan theologian
Bonaventure frames this difference with great clarity. As part of his
Sentences
commentary, he offers four reasons why Christ’s offering on the cross was the ideal means for humanity to render satisfaction to God. First, Bonaventure explains, it was the most acceptable form of satisfaction to God because a man can offer nothing greater than his very life. Second, it was the most harmonious form of satisfaction because it undid the tangle of sins at the root of the first couple’s Fall. Just as Adam and Eve fell through pride, gluttony, and disobedience, Christ on the cross cured those sins through their contraries, through abasement, humiliation, and obedience to the divine will. Third, it was the most effective form of satisfaction because it was the best means of uplifting the human race. God asks for nothing but our love, and there is no better way of attracting the beloved than by demonstrating your own love, and so Christ willingly endured the gibbet of the cross for mankind. Finally, Bonaventure concludes, it was the most prudent form of satisfaction. “It is fitting that Christ conquered the devil with his prudence [
prudentia
],” he explains, “for the devil deceived the first man with his cunning [
astutia
].” Prudence, Bonaventure remarks, beats back pride, and then, as if exemplifying the truth of that maxim, he quotes Peter Lombard, himself harking back to Augustine: “The Redeemer arrives and the deceiver is destroyed, he stretches himself across the mousetrap of the cross, and sets out for the deceiver the food of his blood.”
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Between Christ and the Devil stands the difference between prudence and cunning.