The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (5 page)

P
ART
O
NE

Theologians Ask the Question

C
HAPTER
O
NE

The Devil

S
IX
D
AYS AND
T
WO
S
ENTENCES
L
ATER

It took God six days to create the world and the Devil two sentences to undo it.

Until sometime in the seventeenth century, most every European, Catholic and Protestant alike, agreed that Moses had recorded these events in the first three chapters of Genesis. They also agreed on the general outline of Moses’s narrative, filling in missing details to transform it into the first step in the increasingly drawn-out history of human salvation. According to this story, God speaks the world into existence. “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ ” we read at Genesis 1:3, “and there was light.” On the sixth day, after creating Adam and placing him in the Garden of Eden, God sets forth one final command, a rule to be followed. “You may freely eat of every tree in the garden,” he tells Adam, “but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” God’s words are powerful, they are creative, and they are absolute. The Devil’s words are by no means as powerful as God’s, but they are efficient, and their efficiency carries its own type of unsettling power. If God’s words create order and goodness out of nothingness, the Devil’s words create disorder out of what is good. Appearing in the guise of a serpent before the Woman in the Garden of Eden, the Devil asks, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the Garden?’ ” The Woman responds, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall
die.’ ” Moses never explains how the Woman learned this command, nor does he tell us why she adds the prohibition against touching the tree. With a maximum of narrative simplicity, he simply records the Devil’s second sentence: “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

After this everything changes. The Woman sees that the tree is “good for food and a delight to the eyes.” She eats some of its fruit, offers it to Adam, who is “with her,” and he eats as well. Suddenly, their eyes opened, they recognize their nakedness and cover themselves with fig leaves. When God calls for them, they hide, fearful because they are not dressed. There follow more words—questions, answers, defenses, curses, punishments. Adam blames the Woman for giving him the fruit to eat. The Woman blames the serpent. These words engender further transformations. God announces that the Woman will suffer pains in childbirth and that her husband will rule over her. Adam will now toil for his food, gathering plants from the fields of a newly cursed earth that will bring forth little more than “thorns and thistles.” Adam names the woman “Eve,” and God drives the two of them out of Eden, placing angels and a flaming sword at its entrance to prevent them from ever approaching the Tree of Life.

Throughout all this, the serpent, now condemned to crawl on its belly, to live on dust and in constant enmity with the Woman, remains silent. Of course, the Devil, having achieved everything he had hoped to achieve, has no reason to say anything else. And he did it all with a few simple words, one or two sentences, a question and a statement. “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden?’ ” he asks. “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil,” he states.

T
HE
D
EVIL AND THE
L
IE

Surprisingly, especially given their prominent role in the opening chapters of Genesis, Adam and Eve soon vanish from the Hebrew
Bible, never to be mentioned again after Genesis 5:3–5, when we learn that Adam lived for 800 years after the birth of his son Seth, dying, finally, at the age of 930.
¹
By contrast, Adam is mentioned several times in the New Testament. While Luke traces Jesus’s lineage, albeit through Joseph, all the way back to “Seth, son of Adam, son of God,”
²
it is in Paul’s epistles to the Romans and Corinthians that Adam achieves his singular importance for Christian theology as “a type of the one who was to come.”
³
“[S]in,” Paul writes, “came into the world through one man, and death came from sin.” He immediately puts names to deeds when he adds, “Yet death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam.”
⁴
For Paul, Jesus’s crucifixion makes sense only in the light of Adam’s violation of God’s prohibition against eating from the Tree of Knowledge. “Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all,” he adds, “so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all.” And, just in case the notion of trespass might prove too subtle and vague a specification of the crime committed, Paul clarifies: “For just as by one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.”
⁵

Given the weight Paul placed on Adam’s sin, it is hardly surprising that subsequent Christian writers would return again and again to the frustratingly brief story of the Temptation, to Adam and to Eve and, especially, to the serpent.
⁶
Already in the early fifth century, the North African bishop Augustine, summarizing a tradition that had built up around Paul’s letters while giving it a form that would influence every subsequent religious writer, would lament the catastrophic consequences of the Fall. “For because of [Adam and Eve’s] sin,” he writes in
The City of God
, “human nature was made subject to all the great corruption that we see and feel, and so to death also … and so [mankind] became very different from what he had been when he dwelt in Paradise before his sin.”
⁷
Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, the early sixth-century bishop of Gaul and the first Christian to rewrite the Creation story as a pastoral poem, was, if anything, more blunt and certainly more to the
point. “To you Adam, our first father,” he writes at the very beginning of his poem
The Beginning of the World
, “I shall attribute the cause of mankind’s various sufferings, to you the reason why our mortal life possesses so brief a span.”
⁸
Things looked no better nearly a millennium later. When Martin Luther, during the decade leading up to his death in 1545, considered the Temptation and Fall in his
Lectures on Genesis
, he stressed their enormous and continuing consequences, consequences that can be appreciated only if “we look back at that image of the state of innocence … in which the will was upright and the reason was sound.” We must, in other words, return to the first chapters of Genesis and compare what life was like for Adam and Eve before the Fall with what it is like now. Luther assured his readers that it was a contrast horrible in its implications. As a result of the Fall, we had lost “a most beautifully enlightened reason,” and our will had lost its natural concord with God. The Fall had extinguished the body’s glory “so that now it is a matter of the utmost disgrace to be seen naked,” and left our flesh burning with passions that have turned us into enemies of God.
⁹
None of this had been the case when Adam and Eve lived in innocence, when they were naked together without shame, without lust.

Genesis not only explained what we had been, what we had become, and what we continue to be, it also explained how that transformation occurred. It placed our current state of misery within the context of God’s Creation of the universe, while tracing it to a specific series of events. A grand cosmological narrative set the stage for a seemingly simple story involving a tree, a snake, two human beings, and God, a story that began with the prohibition against eating from the Tree of Knowledge, and from there proceeded as if inexorably to the serpent’s temptation of the Woman, to the eating of the forbidden fruit and, finally, to human exile from paradise. For early Christian, medieval, and Reformation writers, the specific details of how the first couple fell were no less important than knowledge of what that Fall had cost the human race. Those details may have been even more important, more relevant. Eve may have been the first person to be tempted, but she
certainly was not the last. “Some people are puzzled by this temptation of the first man,” Augustine writes in his extended commentary,
The Literal Meaning of Genesis
, a work he began in 401, “wondering why God allowed it to happen, as if they do not see that in our days the whole human race is unceasingly tempted by the snares of the devil.”
¹⁰
The first temptation offered Christians something like a prototype and modus operandi for all future temptations, what the sixteenth-century Italian Protestant convert and religious exile Jacobus Acontius referred to as the
stratagematvm satanae
, an alliteration that found its way into the 1648 English translation of his book
Satans Strategems or the Devils Cabinet-Counsel Discovered
.
¹¹

Predictably, it was the apostle Paul who had set the stage for the continuing relevance of these details. In his second letter to the faithful at Corinth, he warned, “But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by its cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ.”
¹²
What the Devil had first done to Eve, he continues to do to each and every one of us, and what he continues to do is lie. The Gospels made it clear that lying was, for all intents and purposes, the Devil’s unique contribution to God’s Creation. The Gospel of John records a confrontation “in the treasury of the temple” between Jesus and the Pharisees, in which Jesus accuses them of having strayed from the faith of Abraham, from faith in God. “Why do you not understand what I say?” Jesus asks them. “It is because you cannot accept my word. You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”
¹³
An important passage: it not only would provide the Devil with his most famous sobriquet, it also cemented a number of defining contrasts between God and the Devil, between God’s creative truth and the Devil’s destructive falsehoods. Luther captured these contrasts succinctly when, commenting on Genesis, he noted that “Moses expresses himself very carefully and says: ‘The serpent
said
,’ that is, with a word it attacks the Word.”
¹⁴

The Devil is a liar, and he is the father of lies. He uses words as traps and snares, as weapons to lure and to harm, to attack and to murder his victims. There was never any doubt about this, never any question about the very real connection between falsehood and violence. In his
Commentary on John
, the thirteenth-century Franciscan theologian Bonaventure wrote: “
He was a murderer from the beginning
, that is after the beginning of the human race; because he led the first man to death by promising life and denying death. ‘You will not die,’ he said at Genesis 3.”
¹⁵
Just as there was universal agreement that the Devil had lied to Eve when he said “You will not die,” religious writers were convinced that deception even tainted his initial question. John Chrysostom, who died in
A.D
. 407, had already noted this in his sixteenth homily on Genesis. “So [the Devil] employs this irrational animal for laying his plan,” Chrysostom preached, “and by means of it he speaks to the woman in these words: ‘Why is it that God said, Do not eat of any tree in the Garden?’ Notice in this case the extreme subtlety of his malice: in the unfolding of his planning and inquiry he introduces words not spoken by God and acts as though motivated by care.”
¹⁶
Falsehood, deception, and lies permeate every aspect of the two sentences the Devil speaks to Eve, and they permeate more than just his words. Chrysostom suggests that the Devil planned this line of discussion in advance, put on a costume and staged a performance in order to convince Eve that he had her best interests at heart. Nicholas of Lyra, perhaps the most revered biblical commentator of the Middle Ages, had precisely these sorts of considerations in mind when he explained what it means to call the Devil “the father of lies.” “That he is called a liar and the father of lies does not only refer to [spoken] lies,” Nicholas writes, “but to those things he pretends. For this reason the Devil is called the father of lies because he invents the first lie when he said to the woman, ‘You will not die.’ ”
¹⁷

The Devil invented the lie, and it is an invention that defines and mars his very essence and existence. More, it is an invention whose effects seem to define and mar Creation itself, a creation God cursed and punished, that God transformed because the
Devil’s lie had proven so successful. The sixteenth-century reformer John Calvin stressed the damage done when he noted that the Devil “knew that with the ruin of man the most dreadful confusion would be produced throughout the world.”
¹⁸
And the Devil’s strategy was no less popular than it was harmful, at least according to Psalm 116, which announced that “[e]veryman is a liar,” a sentiment concerning the universal dissemination of evil that Paul was more than happy to pass on to the Romans as being at the very heart of our sad distance from God.
¹⁹
“Although everyman is a liar,” Paul writes, “let God be proved true.”
²⁰
Proving God true, not to mention specifying the exact dogmatic details of that truth, no doubt motivated religious writers as they burrowed into the details of the Temptation narrative, but they were no less concerned with uncovering the precise nature of the Devil’s weapon, the lie, a weapon whose secrets were hidden in the text of Moses’s story. In fact, given the Temptation’s place within the broader narrative of divine Creation beginning at Genesis 1:1 and, even more broadly, as the starting point for Christian providential and eschatological histories, the Devil’s first two sentences were crucial to uncovering God’s truth. Making sense of the Devil’s actions required fitting them into more general conceptions of God and Christ and the nature of a true Christian faith. If we were to understand our own earthly predicament, the Devil’s lie had to have its place as part of the very fabric of creation. Augustine’s spiritual mentor Ambrose, writing in Milan late in the fourth century, stressed the practical necessity of this knowledge: “We read in the oracular words of Scripture of the wiles of the Devil, so that we learn how we can escape his arts. We should be aware of his temptations, not that we may follow his lead, but that by instruction we may avoid these pitfalls.”
²¹