The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (9 page)

The temptation to misinterpret is everywhere, Luther assures his readers, and it is ever present. The serpent impugns God’s good will when it speaks to Eve. “With a word,” Luther writes, “it attacks the Word.” The serpent questions, misstates, rephrases, asserts, contradicts, and lies. Eve listens and in listening wavers and in wavering departs from God’s Word. “For when the Gospel is preached in its purity,” Luther observes, “men have a sure guide for their faith and are able to avoid adultery. But then Satan makes various efforts and trials in an effort either to draw away men
from the Word or to corrupt it.”
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Heresies arose early on in the Greek Church, Luther notes, when people strayed from the letter of the text, when, for example, Basil denied that the Holy Spirit was God. What happened in the past, Luther then adds while specifically citing the Anabaptists, serves as warning for the present that “our age, too, has instances like these before its eyes, when, after the purer doctrine of the Gospel came to light, several kinds of assailers of the works and the Word of God arose.” Luther is quick to admit that Satan has many weapons in his arsenal, inciting us to “fornication, adultery, and similar infamous deeds. But this temptation—when Satan attacks the Word and the works of God—is far more serious and more dangerous.”
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Luther was hardly the first person to warn against adding to, subtracting from, or misinterpreting scripture. It had been a constant refrain throughout the history of the Church. Concerning these very passages in Genesis, Ambrose had made similar warnings and predicted similarly dire consequences for those who strayed from God’s word. Nicholas of Lyra, whose commentary Luther returned to again and again, almost always let the strict letter of the text guide his interpretation. For example, when considering why the Woman included the prohibition against touch when responding to the serpent, Nicholas rejects those who claim that God had probably included this along with the prohibition against eating from the tree. Why? Because it is not found in the text.
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For all that, Luther’s attention to the strict letter of the text went beyond anything even the most literal of Catholic commentators had proposed. If this is hardly surprising given Luther’s proud proclamations concerning
sola scriptura
, it nonetheless profoundly shaped the sorts of questions Luther posed and the answers he found when reading the text, especially when he considers the nature of Satan’s assault on the first couple.

The consequences of Luther’s literalism show up clearly when he considers a problem that had long bothered interpreters. How was it that the Woman was so easily swayed? Eve’s sudden willingness to touch and eat the fruit of the tree confounded Augustine who, as we have seen, found it inconceivable that a mere question
could turn her against God and everything he had promised and given to her and Adam. The stirrings of pride must already have made themselves felt within her soul, Augustine concluded, making her susceptible to such bogus questioning. It was a dangerous position to take, verging on a sort of Manichaeism, suggesting that the Woman possessed an inner inclination toward sin even before the serpent’s well-timed arrival. Although Augustine had labored over this problem, subsequent writers made sure to elaborate on his concerns in ways that exonerated God from having instilled destructive and rebellious impulses in his creations. Citing Augustine’s assertion, the thirteenth-century Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas categorically denied that “pride preceded the promptings of the serpent.” The serpent’s words—and Thomas asserts that this was Augustine’s real point, however ambiguously put—were the source of the Woman’s first prideful feelings. “As soon as the serpent had spoken his words of persuasion, her mind was puffed up, the result being that she believed the demon to have spoken truly.”
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Nicholas of Lyra would stress this same interpretation of Augustine’s words some fifty years later when he wrote that Augustine by no means had meant to imply that “pride preceded the serpent’s persuasions.”
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The psychological intricacies of the Fall fascinated interpreters prior to Luther. Medieval theologians believed that the various cardinal sins, beginning with pride, could be invoked to explain the hidden workings of a soul that, having heard the serpent’s initial words, gradually came to accept and then act on them. According to Hugh of St. Victor the initial swellings of pride were followed in quick succession by avarice and gluttony, each building on the other, finally moving Eve to eat the fruit. “For first she sought the promised excellence through pride,” Hugh writes, “then through avarice she desired to possess that promised wealth and all the excellent things that went along with it.” Finally, she fell to gluttony and “consented to eat the forbidden fruit.” Hugh’s analysis of these inner movements, borrowed from Gregory the Great and included in Peter Lombard’s
Sentences
, shaped later accounts of this process. The serpent’s words stirred up desires that were
finally unleashed when the Woman, looking at the tree and seeing that it was good and beautiful, that its fruit was sweet, began to burn “with the desire of gluttony; lastly overcome by desire she took and ate.”
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Bonaventure gave precision to this multifaceted account when he explicitly linked the Devil’s sophistry, his “sophistical persuasions,” with the temptations of the flesh.
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For Luther, all this subtle reasoning and investigation amounted to a thousand years of ingenuity wasted and rebellion redoubled. “The sophists,” Luther writes, and by sophists he means everyone who had written about these matters before himself, “discuss the nature of this temptation, namely, what sort it was. Was [the first couple’s] sin idolatry, pride, unconcern or just the simple eating of the fruit?” Seeking something more from the text, amending it and altering it, adding to Moses’s simple narrative, inventing explanations and psychological theories to fit their own passing intellectual fancies, these interpreters mimic the serpent himself, mimic the Woman’s transgression. They assault God’s Word just as the serpent did when it improperly rephrased God’s prohibition as a question, just as Eve did when she added the prohibition against touch, just as all heretics do when “under the appearance of something good they rob men of God and of His Word … and fabricate for them another, new god, who exists nowhere.” Satan’s assault begins with imitation, with speech. Just as God preached to Adam, Satan preaches to Eve. But it is a very different kind of preaching, for “just as from the true word of God salvation results, so also from the corrupt word of God damnation results.” Everything hinges on language, whether spoken or merely thought. Any doubt that occurs within the soul, any inner conviction or opinion that departs from God’s Word, is a sign of corruption and future damnation.
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The temptation in the Garden, Luther contends, begins and ends with the demands of obedience. Luther imagines the prohibition against eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil as the only precept of Adam’s religion. “For Adam this Word was Gospel and Law; it was his worship; it was his service and the obedience he could offer God in this state of innocence.” Right
worship required only one thing, strict adherence and “outward obedience” to the letter of this one command.
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Satan’s attack was “the greatest and severest of all temptations,” he adds, because he “makes it his business to prove from the prohibition of the tree that God’s will towards man is not good.”
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Luther simply sidesteps the subtle psychological ponderings of his Scholastic predecessors and reduces everything to language and to the doubt that corrupt language creates in the soul of the person who listens and begins to think and ask, Why? Luther is very clear about this and makes it the centerpiece of Satan’s rhetorical strategy. Satan recognizes that Adam and Eve are incapable of understanding why God has prohibited them from eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. He recognizes that their one duty is to believe and to obey what God tells them. Exploiting this gap between knowledge and faith, Satan confuses Eve with an incorrect restatement of God’s prohibition, practically forcing her to respond to and to correct his error. “For the first and foremost temptation occurs when God’s counsels are discussed,” Luther warns. Satan begins that discussion with his well-chosen question, “Did God say: ‘You shall not eat from every tree of garden?’ ” Evidently ignorant of the irony, Luther amply embellishes on the words of scripture, drawing out the hidden power of the serpent’s “satanic oratory.” “It is as if Satan were saying: ‘Surely you are very silly if you think God did not want you to eat from this tree, you whom he appointed lords over all the trees of Paradise.”
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As Eve is drawn into conversation and drawn away from the Word, simple faith transforms into doubt, and doubt quickly becomes rejection.

Calvin would follow Luther, stressing the snares latent in the simple question Why? He contends that it is the greatest of temptations to believe that God should be obeyed only if “the reason of his command is apparent to us. The true rule of obedience,” Calvin states, “is that we being content with a bare command, should persuade ourselves that whatever he enjoins is just and right.”
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And just as Luther did before him, as Catholic theologians had done before Luther, Calvin notes how quickly false language proliferates once the mind is seduced into interpretation. Both have no doubt
that Eve entangles Adam in sin through the very same language that entangled her, repeating her prior conversation with the serpent, reasserting its fallacies. Luther suggests she had, in those few short sentences, become Satan’s pupil, and soon Adam becomes his pupil as well, lying to God as he defends himself.
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Like Ambrose before them, Luther and Calvin draw analogies between the first couple’s shame, their newfound desire to cover themselves with fig leaves, and the lying excuses they use to cover their disobedience. “Nor is it here to be omitted,” Calvin notes, “that he, who had found a few leaves to be unavailing, fled to whole trees; for so we are accustomed, when shut out from frivolous cavils, to frame new excuses, which may hide us as under a denser shade.”
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Reviewing the language of Adam’s self-defense, Luther compares it to the “well-known teaching in the schools of the rhetoricians that if one has been charged with a crime, he should either deny it or defend it as having been committed legally. Adam does both.”
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Sin and lies multiply endlessly, and we must not think, Luther adds, “that this happened to Adam alone. We, each one of us, do the same thing, our nature does not permit us to act otherwise after we have become guilty of sin.”
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And we are all guilty of sin.

T
HE
P
RINCE OF
T
HIS
W
ORLD

If God created the world in six days and the Devil undid it with two sentences, in whose world do we live now?

At John 14:30, Jesus famously calls the Devil the “prince of this world.” Certainly the world bears the Devil’s imprint. Luther looked around him and saw signs and indications everywhere of the Devil’s dominion. The Devil’s lies were propounded in every book of the Catholic Church, in nearly every word spoken by every Catholic priest, by every monk and every mendicant, by every bishop and every cardinal, in every word spoken by the pope himself. And the Devil didn’t limit his mouthpieces to Catholics. He spoke through all those reformers who dared disagree with Luther, through Thomas Müntzer, Andreas Carlstadt, Huldrych
Zwingli, through Anabaptists and peasant protesters.
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Luther’s rejection of allegorical interpretation, his emphasis on the literal and historical sense of scripture, had the potential to transform the simplest of exegetical disagreements into confrontations between good and evil, between truth and falsehood, into a confrontation with the Devil himself. The proliferation of treatises on the Devil and Antichrist throughout the sixteenth and well into the seventeenth century testified to his ubiquity and the deafening cacophony of his lies. The Puritan preacher George Gyfford had little doubt that “wicked and abominable errors” were proof enough that the Devil or some demon was speaking. If anyone were to dare doubt that a “devil” could talk, Gyfford warned in his 1587 treatise,
A Discourse on the subtill Practices of Devilles by Witches and Sorcerers
, they should look to Genesis, where Moses shows how the Devil used a serpent to lie to Eve. “If he could then immediately after his fall use speech, shall we doubt he cannot now?” Gyfford asks his readers. “I conclude therefore out of these places of Scripture that Devils can take a bodily shape, and use speech.”
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The implications terrified. Luther would return again and again to Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, where the apostle “warns us most earnestly to beware of the appearance of goodness, so that the satanic angel,
disguised as an angel of light
does not seduce us by his cunning.”
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Distinguishing the true Word of God from its heretical imposter was no easy feat, because the imposter often appears bathed in a false glow of sanctity as it mimics, apes, and competes with the Word. “Wherever the light of truth arises,” Luther warns, “the devil is present and raises up new teachers.”
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If God builds a church, the Devil builds “a chapel or a tabernacle” right next to it and populates it with men who “give such a beautiful impression and appearance that no one can say anything except that they are true, pious preachers, interested in everyone’s salvation.”
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Surrounded by illusions, Luther often compared himself to Noah, the lone righteous man in a world unable to perceive its own depravity, in the Devil’s world in which evil paraded beneath the appearance of the good and God’s will remained hidden and incomprehensible.
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