The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment

by Dallas G. Denery II

  Unfortunately, neither Eve nor the catechumen heed this advice. Desiring something more, a desire that itself signals the first stirrings of pride, they listen to voices that claim to offer it. Both the Devil and the heretical teacher present themselves as possessing a secret reservoir of knowledge. They present themselves as authorities more trustworthy than scripture itself. Ambrose stresses the line of communication that allows false authority to assume a legitimacy it should never possess. Adam received his instruction from God, whereas Eve only received it from Adam, never herself speaking directly with God, and this allows the Devil to present himself as someone who knows things Adam does not. Moving from the scene in the Garden to our continuing tribulations in this post-Edenic world, Ambrose offers an even more vivid picture of the Devil’s deceits, presenting him in the classic guise of the sophist, the morally bankrupt rhetorician. “In addition to this,” he warns his audience, “there are other occasions when many other kinds of temptations are in store for us. Some of these come from the Prince of this world, who has vomited into this world what might be called poisonous wisdom, so that men believe the false to be true and are emotionally carried away by mere appearance.” Matching character to disguise, Ambrose adds, “The temptations of the Devil, then, are manifold. For that reason he is believed to be a deadly, double-tongued serpent, doing the Devil’s work by saying one thing with the tongue and by harboring other thoughts in his mind.”64

  Ambrose had no doubt the Devil’s every word was a lie. For example, the serpent promised the woman that she would not die. “Here we have one falsehood,” Ambrose writes, “for man, who followed the promises of the serpent is subject to death.” Even the serpent’s claim that the Woman’s eyes would be open if she ate the fruit was full of guile and dishonesty. Yes, Ambrose admits, her eyes and then Adam’s were opened, but this was not the good thing the serpent made it out to be: “the truth is that as a result of this act harm followed.” Just as damning, the serpent immediately followed this ill-intentioned truth with another lie when he next promised that “they would be like gods, knowing good from evil.”65 More significant than the lies themselves were their sudden effect on the Woman. Already afflicted with the stirrings of pride, wanting to believe the false promises of the serpent, the Woman turned to the tree, looked at it, and decided “that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes and beautiful to gaze upon.” The Devil’s words confuse the Woman, playing on her desires and inherent weaknesses, causing her “to pass judgment on what she had not tasted.”66 Augustine would build on this scenario, suggesting that the Devil’s words awaken a desire that prompts the Woman to look at the tree. “Not content with the words of the serpent, she also gazed on the tree and saw that ‘it was good for food and a delight to behold.’ ” Like Ambrose, Augustine suggests that the Devil’s words had confused the Woman, leading her to make false judgments. “Since she did not believe that eating it could bring about her death, I think she assumed that God was using figurative language when he said, ‘If you eat of it, you shall die.’ ”67

  While Ambrose and Augustine both present the Devil as a corrupt and corrupting rhetorician, they are equally clear that he uses his rhetorical skills to corrupt God’s Word, offering tendentious and false interpretations of God’s commands. Ambrose explicitly compares the Devil to a heretical spiritual guide. For his part, Augustine stresses how Eve, after listening to the Devil, begins to doubt the literal truth of God’s words, wonders if they contain some hidden and deeper meaning, a figurative meaning. Eve was not alone in hoping to find such meanings in the biblical text. Ambrose, influenced by earlier exegetes such as Philo and Origen, was quite partial to figurative and symbolic readings of Genesis, and even Augustine had written a book in which he advanced symbolic interpretations of the Creation story. For all that, Augustine stressed the literal and historical nature of the story, giving it prominence over any other form of interpretation. Augustine believed this stress on literal interpretation provided him with something like a paradigm for proper religious behavior. Straightforward literal interpretation went hand in hand with an obedience to the strict letter of God’s commands. The prohibition was straightforward. If nothing else, the Temptation narrative made it clear that Adam and Eve both understood the command and understood that God, who had given them everything, deserved obedience or, as Ambrose put it, Adam was “conscious of the fact that deference should be paid to the person of the Commander.”68 For his part, Augustine modeled all right religious practice on obedience to this rule, suggesting that obedience is the virtue by which we please God. “I can truthfully say,” Augustine concluded, “that [obedience] is the only virtue of every rational creature who lives his life under God’s rule, and that the fundamental and greatest vice is the overweening pride by which one wishes to have independence to his ruin, and the name of this vice is disobedience.”69

  The Devil succeeds through a perverse eloquence, adding and subtracting words from God’s commands, turning assertions into questions, and lies into assertions. If God offers his Word, the Devil offers words, and words can only obscure, seduce, proliferate. After the Devil’s first question, Eve amends God’s command, adding the prohibition against touch. The Devil speaks more words. After Eve eats from the apple, she seduces Adam into disobedience. While Genesis does not indicate what Eve did or said to convince Adam to eat the apple, theologians were clear she must have done something. Aware of both her sin and that it would be wrong to condemn her husband to a similar fate, Ambrose contends that Eve “sinned … with forethought and knowingly made her husband a participant in her own wrong-doing.”70 Augustine, writing with an overt sense of disgust, adds, “And so she took some of the fruit and ate and gave some to her husband who was with her, using perhaps some persuasive words, which Scripture does not record but leaves to our intelligence to supply.”71 Having fallen to the Devil’s linguistic seductions, Eve suddenly finds herself able to make use of them, turning the Devil’s stratagems against Adam.

  While both Ambrose and Augustine assumed the Woman’s words seduced Adam to sin, scripture made this somewhat difficult to explain. Nicholas of Lyra agreed, for example, that Adam assented to the Woman’s persuasive words, but he found it inconceivable that Adam believed either her words or the Devil’s lies. Citing Paul’s first letter to Timothy—“For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor”72—he asserts that only the woman was deceived.73 Hugh of St. Victor suggested that Adam assented “lest by resisting [the woman’s will] and petition he might offend the heart of the woman who had been associated with him through the affection of love.” Indeed, Hugh suspects, Adam may well have done his own amending of scripture, adding his own words, thinking “that he could both yield to the woman and afterwards through repentance and supplication for pardon please the Creator.”74 Bonaventure picked up on this line of thought later in the thirteenth century, noting that Adam and the Woman both broke God’s law, but for different reasons. The Woman hoped to be like God, something Adam could never believe would happen. For his part, Adam fell victim to pride, avarice, and a sort of virginal yearning. Pride convinced him that God would punish him lightly. Avarice manifested itself in a curiosity to know what would happen if he ate the fruit. Lasciviousness—felt not so much as carnal desire, for there was none in paradise, but as a certain amicable affection for the Woman—impelled him not to scold and upset her but to follow her lead. Whatever the precise reasons for Adam’s own transgression, the Woman’s words played a central role. God himself made this clear, Bonaventure noted, citing Genesis 3:17: Adam “listened to the woman’s voice and through this had been led into disobedience and transgression of God’s mandate.”75

  The first lie traveled from the serpent’s mouth to Eve’s ear, and from there it multiplied and spread, from Eve to Adam and from their union to all of their descendants. It infected not only everything they would say but everything they would do, everything they would
make. Whereas the first couple once enjoyed the fruit of the trees, after their lies and transgressions they now make use of leaves to cover themselves. Ambrose was quick to highlight the deceptive nature of any covering, verbal or vegetal. “Whoever, therefore, violates the command of God has become naked and despoiled, a reproach to himself,” he writes. “He wants to cover himself and hide his genitals with fig leaves, make use, as it were of empty and idle talk which the sinner interweaves word after word with fallacies for the purpose of shielding himself from the awareness of his guilty deed.”76

  We cover ourselves with dissembling clothes and our souls with lying words.

  THE DEVIL’S LIE FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE REFORMATION

  “At long last we have passed over that expanse of text on which all expositors have toiled exceedingly,” Luther writes, having just completed his own commentary on the Temptation and Fall, “and to some degree so have we ourselves, although its entire content was rather clear to us because we did not concern ourselves with allegories, but adhered to the historical and strict meaning.” Of course, clarity need not imply brevity, and adherence to the strict letter of the text did little to keep Luther’s commentary on Adam and Eve’s misadventure with the serpent from doubling the length of Augustine’s own commentary on those same passages. Lengthy or not, Luther had no doubt that he had steered clear of the allegorical shoals that had sunk “the majority of interpreters,” all those who had attached greater importance to “Origen, Dionysius, and others than to Moses himself.”77 While not an entirely fair characterization of his exegetical forebears, Luther’s brief reflection certainly highlights his own interpretive predilections. More important, his reading of Genesis, of the serpent’s temptation of Eve, underwrites and validates his focus on the literal and the historic meaning of the text. For Luther, and for any number of reformed commentators who followed him, the story of the Temptation and Fall is a story about the perils of failing to interpret literally God’s Word, of amending and adding to his Word, of listening to the Devil’s lies and succumbing to the seductions of misinterpretation.78

  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.”79 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.”80

  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.81 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.”82 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.”83

  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.”84 Bonaventure gave precision to this multifaceted account when he explicitly linked the Devil’s sophistry, his “sophistical persuasions,” with the temptations of the flesh.85

  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 h
eretics 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.86

  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.87 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.”88 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.”89 As Eve is drawn into conversation and drawn away from the Word, simple faith transforms into doubt, and doubt quickly becomes rejection.