The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (7 page)

Accepted or not, commentators readily admitted it was a confusing narrative tack for Moses to have taken in what, for Christians at least, was a decidedly crucial moment in human history. Calvin found the suppression of Satan’s role in this episode to be “scarcely consonant with reason.” Still, he agreed it was an interpretation that could not be denied. “The testimonies of Scripture are sufficiently numerous,” he writes, “in which it is plainly asserted that the serpent was only the mouth of the devil; for not the serpent but the devil is declared to be the ‘father of lies,’ the fabricator or imposture and the author of death.” Moses’s oblique storytelling, “his homely and uncultivated” style, were suited to his primitive audience, “for not only had he to instruct an untaught race of men, but the existing age of the Church was so puerile, that it was unable to receive higher instruction.”
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It was through these sorts of interpretive accommodations and cross-referencings, not to mention fudgings and blurrings, that religious writers across the centuries, as well as across a multitude of theological and denominational divides, reached a fair degree of unanimity on the general narrative outline of the Temptation, and how it fit within the larger narrative of Creation and Salvation. The mainstream of interpreters understood it to be a literal story, a narrative of events that had really happened, and that had most
likely happened on either the sixth or seventh day of Creation. It was a story crucial for understanding the world’s current lamentable condition, but it was a story so slimly told that questions about it could only multiply. Potential solutions to those questions multiplied even more quickly, solutions whose ever-changing details reveal something like a history of the Devil, his lie, and the world he transformed.

T
HE
D
EVIL’S
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IE FROM
L
ATE
A
NTIQUITY TO THE
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IDDLE
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GES

No other biblical commentary from the later Middle Ages achieved greater popularity than Nicholas of Lyra’s
Postilla super totam bibliam
. Born in Vieille-Lyre, Normandy, around 1270, Nicholas had joined the Franciscan Order by the time he was about thirty. He became Franciscan provincial master of France no later than 1319 and of Burgundy in 1324. He died in 1349. Educated at the Sorbonne, he became interested in Jewish sources, especially Jewish postbiblical interpretations of scripture, and it was his use of them that differentiated his commentary from most of its medieval competitors. Perhaps Jews, as standard Christian teaching held, were blind to the deeper secrets hidden within what Christians had come to call the Old Testament, blind to its moral, mystical, and allegorical senses, but they could certainly shed light on its all-important literal interpretation. Nicholas’s knowledge of Hebrew and his use of rabbinic sources was unparalleled, earning him the nickname “The Second Jerome” to go along with another that made his intellectual virtues clear, “The Plain and Useful Doctor.”
⁴⁰
His influence remained great even beyond the Middle Ages. Martin Luther relied heavily on Nicholas’s commentary when he composed his own, sometimes agreeing, often disagreeing, but reminding his readers nonetheless that he had no doubt Nicolas was a good man.
⁴¹
Precisely because of its vast popularity and continuing influence, its clarity and emphasis on the literal sense of scripture, Nicholas’s commentary on Genesis provides a particularly
valuable way into the specific questions that religious writers asked themselves when considering the Devil’s sudden appearance in the Garden on the sixth or seventh day of Creation.

In typical Scholastic fashion, Nicholas approaches the story of the Temptation with a kind of analytical mania, searching for meaning in its most discrete narrative moments. “After [Moses] describes the formation and state of the first man,” Nicholas writes, “he goes on to describe his transgression or fall. First, he describes the transgression, second the infliction of the penalty and third the spread of their misery.” In a process that seeks something like the atomic and indivisible elements that make up the story, it is hardly surprising that he subjects these three divisions to still further subdivision. “Concerning the first division,” Nicholas continues, “he first describes the tempter, second he describes the stages of the temptation, and third the act of the transgression.” Having isolated the story’s most basic elements, Nicholas asks a series of questions designed to illuminate each of those elements. Beginning with the tempter, for example, Nicholas will consider whether it was reasonable for God, who must have known in advance what would happen, to have allowed it to occur at all, and what sorts of powers over mankind the Devil possessed during those brief hours of human innocence. Similarly, when Nicholas moves to his second subdivision concerning the Temptation itself, he will consider why the Devil approached Eve first, why the Devil selected the words he did, Eve’s response with its curious addition concerning the prohibition against touch, and how this conversation worked to move Eve against God.
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These questions were hardly original with Nicholas. They had been asked for centuries and would continue to be asked for centuries to come. While the story’s dramatic tension could easily slip through the cracks of these divisions and subdivisions that so appealed to medieval scholars, the story’s importance was never far from their mind. Certainly the need, in short order, to address the punishments God would level against the drama’s three (or four) actors would force this recognition. But the contrast between the Devil’s powers then and now needed always to be kept in mind.
“During the time of innocence,” Nicholas notes, “the Devil did not have the power to tempt man from within, by directly stirring up his passions with forbidden yearnings or by imposing illicit images directly upon his intellect.” These sorts of limits on the Devil’s powers had much to do with the first couple’s uncorrupt nature, a nature in which the body was not yet at war with reason, in which the flesh did not yet have its own eruptive motions and guilty pleasures. In the state of innocence, “nothing disorderly could happen to man’s inferior parts, unless something were first to upset his reason,” and so, Nicholas reasons, “man could only be tempted from without, by things presented to his senses.”
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The Devil had little choice, in other words, than to tempt Adam and Eve in some sensible guise, with appearances and sounds, with touch and odors, entering through the senses and, finally, beguiling and deceiving the intellect.

The distinction between exterior and interior temptation went at least as far back as the early twelfth-century Augustinian canon Hugh of St. Victor and was assured universal Scholastic dissemination when Peter Lombard invoked it in his twelfth-century theology textbook,
The Sentences
. “Exterior temptation,” Peter writes, “occurs when evil is visibly suggested to us from without in words or any sort of sign in order that it bends a person towards consent to sin.”
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This twelfth-century distinction merely formalized ideas that had dominated interpretations of the Devil’s actions in the Garden of Eden for centuries. In his homily on the Temptation, John Chrysostom had already made it clear that the Devil used both words and signs, questions and costumes, to lead Eve astray. “[The Devil] made use of the [serpent] like some instrument,” Chrysostom writes, “and through it inveigled that naive and weaker vessel, namely, woman, into his deception by means of conversation.”
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In Chrysostom’s reading of the story, the Devil selects the serpent because its cunning and supremacy over the other animals makes it the ideal weapon to use against the woman. Had the Devil appeared as himself, he would have been easily identified, his original beauty now utterly ruined beneath a facade seething with moral depravity. Of course, the use of the serpent
also provided powerful metaphorical associations that Chrysostom quickly exploited. The Devil’s words were like a serpent’s venom. “Do you see how he uses the words like a bait to inject his poison?” Chrysostom asks.
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If the Devil’s disguise allows him to approach Eve, his words constitute the exterior temptation that will ultimately bring her down. And he chooses his words with care. The Devil knows about the prohibition against eating from the tree, Chrysostom suggests, but he does not know why God has instituted it, nor does he know the penalty for violating it. Believing that this could be valuable knowledge, knowledge that, if acquired, could be used against the first couple, the Devil’s initial verbal assault seeks to pry it from the unsuspecting woman.
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He begins by incorrectly quoting God’s prohibition, pretending that he cares for the woman’s well-being, expressing concern that not being allowed to eat from any of the trees of the Garden must be a harsh rule to follow. “Why is it that God said, Do not eat of any tree in the Garden?” Chrysostom explains, “As if the evil demon were saying, Why did he deprive you of such enjoyment?”
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Included in the
Glossa Ordinaria
, Chrysostom’s analysis of the serpent’s opening question would become quite influential. No less influential and no less effective is the serpent’s question itself. Evidently its small fraction of false concern is enough to convince Eve of the serpent’s good intentions. She becomes “involved in conversation with the serpent and through him as through an instrument she took in the devil’s deadly words,” Chrysostom writes, “[and] so it ensued that she learnt from the devil’s speech the very opposite of the words’ real sense, and that whereas the Creator gave one set of directions, the devil said the opposite to the Creator about avoiding them.”
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Hearing God quoted falsely, she should have fled. Instead, she is enticed into conversation. She corrects the serpent, after which the serpent contradicts God’s warning, telling her she will not die, that God knows she and Adam will be like gods knowing good and evil should they eat it. “See all the bait he offered,” Chrysostom writes. “[H]e filled the cup with a harmful drug and gave it to the woman, who did not want to
recognize its deadly character. She could have known from the outset, had she wanted; instead she listened to his words, that God forbade their tasting the fruit for that reason—‘He knows that your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good from evil’—puffed up as she was with the hope of being equal to God and evidently dreaming of greatness.”
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Caught between God’s command and the Devil’s lies, Eve allows herself to be persuaded.

When Augustine pondered her predicament, he imagined Eve confronting a choice between two different kinds of perception. Perhaps we don’t possess the ability to determine what we perceive, Augustine argues, but we do have it in our power to accept or reject those perceptions. “Thus we must grant,” he writes, “that the spirit is affected by higher and lower perceptions. Hence it is that the rational substance selects from both classes what it wills, and by virtue of its selection achieves misery or blessedness. In the Garden of Eden, for example, the command of God was visible in the higher goods; the suggestion of the serpent through the lower.”
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God had offered one sort of good, the Devil another, and Eve, forced to choose, chooses the Devil because she stayed to listen to his lies, lies that somehow convinced her to make the wrong choice. Hugh of St. Victor captured this moment in a saying that would find itself endlessly repeated throughout the later Middle Ages: “God affirmed, woman doubted, the devil denied.”
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God affirmed that should they violate the prohibition, they would die. The Devil denies this punishment, suggests there are other reasons why God has prohibited them from eating from the tree. And Eve expresses doubt. At least this is how virtually every commentator would come to understand what happened next. Repeating God’s prohibition to the serpent, Eve adds a critical pause, a moment’s hesitation. “Concerning the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of Garden,” she responds, “God has commanded us not to eat, nor to touch,
lest perhaps
we will die [
ne forte moriamur
].” This doubt became crucial for understanding the Devil’s strategy. Initially fearful of directly contradicting God, Hugh writes, it was Eve’s expression of doubt that emboldened the Devil to lie.
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Nicholas of Lyra would also highlight this moment in his commentary, writing
that Eve “inserts
forte
on her own, an adverb expressing doubt, although God had simply asserted his prohibition.”
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While Chrysostom points to false concern, a feigned empathy for the woman’s well-being as key to the Devil’s success in finally convincing her to violate God’s prohibition, Augustine is less clear about how the Temptation succeeds. Ignoring, as does Chrysostom, the additional prohibition against touch, Augustine contends that her initial response to the serpent’s questions simply demonstrates that she knew and understood the command. “The serpent, then, first asked the question, and the woman replied, so that her transgression would be inexcusable … the sin is more evident when the command is retained in memory and God as present in his command is despised.”
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In the
City of God
, Augustine would repeat and extend this line of reasoning and argue that Adam and Eve’s disobedience was all the worse given the simplicity of God’s command, how easy it was to follow given the abundance of food in the Garden and especially because human nature itself was not, at that time, corrupt. All of which simply returns Augustine to the problem of how Eve and then Adam were so easily deceived into trespass. In both his
Literal Meaning of Genesis
and
The City of God
, Augustine pushes that first key moment of disobedience back into some undisclosed and hidden past. “It was in secret,” he writes, “that Adam and Eve began to be evil; and it was because of this that they were able to fall into overt disobedience.”
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The sheer blasphemy of the serpent’s words could convince, he argues, only if there were already in Eve’s “heart a love of her own independence and proud presumption of self.”
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Pride was at the root of the Fall. Here Augustine agreed with Chrysostom, but for the North African bishop when and how those initial stirrings of self-love developed were not at all clear. For Augustine, the Devil’s lie operates like the final argument and justification for transforming a private pride into public action.