The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (11 page)

In Milton’s grand concluding contribution to the interpretation of the Fall, it takes less than a day for the first couple, left to themselves, to begin to question and interpret God’s Word, as they naturally acquire the subtle skill of accommodating God’s commands to their own desires. Milton makes explicit a line of thought implicit in Acontius’s treatise. The Devil was never needed for the Fall, and the Fall was something always imminent, if not always already accomplished. Perhaps the Devil’s lie led Eve down one path of false interpretation, but Adam had already charted its contours when he allowed her to go off on her own, rationalizing his decision to let the inferior dictate to the superior with what would become forever after one of love’s great laments: “Go; for thy stay, not free, absents thee more.”
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Eve is little different from Adam at this point, and even before meeting the serpent, she has rebelled against the strictures of her superiors, reinterpreting her state, while desiring something new and dangerous in the groves of paradise.

Milton’s rendering of Genesis 3 suggests that the Devil did not so much cause the Fall as perform a service. He made a hidden fallen nature visible for all to see, and visibility, as it turns out, has its uses. “And I venture to say,” Augustine had long before written
in the
City of God
, “that it is of benefit to the proud that they should fall into some open and manifest sin, which can cause them to be displeased with themselves even after they have already fallen through being pleased with themselves.”
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Useful, no doubt, as both Acontius and Milton would agree, because it set in motion the redemption of fallen man through Christ. But it was useful for another reason as well. As Augustine suggests, Adam and Eve, caught up in their own desires, their own prideful interpretations, were unaware that they had deviated from God’s Word. Milton depicts them no differently. Adam blithely ignores Raphael’s warnings, and Eve unreflectively convinces herself to give up perfect obedience. The Devil strips them of this ignorance about themselves and their nature. The Devil’s lie is the gift of self-knowledge, and this is the real insight hidden within Acontius’s treatise. Forever caught between truth and meaning, too often mistaking the lie for the truth, we are forever caught up in interpretation.

Interpretation may well be the source of our bondage. It is also the source of our freedom and, more, our peaceful coexistence.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

God

C
AN
G
OD
L
IE?

What if God, like the Devil, could lie?

In his
Sermon on the Creed
, Augustine rejects the very possibility that God could lie. Speaking to an audience of religious novices, Augustine draws their attention to the Nicean Creed’s opening words: “We believe in God the Father Almighty.” These are words, Augustine tells them, that every Christian must accept, understand, and hold fast. “Since God is omnipotent,” he explains, “he is not able to die, he is not able to be deceived, nor is he able to lie for as the Apostle says, ‘He cannot deny himself.’ ” While it may seem surprising that there are things an all-powerful being cannot do, Augustine argues that these sorts of actions would be proof of impotence, not omnipotence. A being that can die is not all-powerful, nor for that matter is a being that can be deceived. But why can’t an omnipotent being lie? Augustine offers a different sort of reason to account for this divine inability, one rooted in something like God’s moral standing and dignity. “If God could lie or be deceived, if he could deceive or act in any sort of unkind way, God would not be omnipotent because this sort of behavior is not worthy of an omnipotent being.” In fact, Augustine continues, God cannot sin, cannot even wish to do evil things. Everything God does God does well, and whatever God does well he does justly.
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Some twelve hundred years later, the French philosopher René Descartes would reach a seemingly similar conclusion. “There is fixed in my mind the idea of a God who can do all things,”
Descartes writes in the first of his
Meditations on First Philosophy
, “and by whom I, such as I exist, have been created.” Well and good, but Descartes famously raises an unsettling, if rather extreme, possibility. What if God had never created the earth or the heavens, had never created any of the things I see or think about and “yet all these things would seem to me to exist no differently than they do now?”
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Simply put, what if God has deceived and tricked me into believing that a nonexistent world really exists? Later, in the “Third Meditation,” Descartes will reject the possibility that God is a deceiver and liar for reasons that bear at least a superficial resemblance to Augustine’s reasons. If God really is all-powerful, if God possesses all possible perfections, then it is impossible for God to be a deceiver. “For it is clear by the natural light,” Descartes argues, “that all fraud and deception depend on some defect.”
³
Like Augustine, Descartes contends that deceptive, fraudulent, and mendacious actions are utterly incompatible with an all-powerful being. A truly omnipotent being not only would never do such things, it would not even be capable of doing such things. God cannot lie, because God is God.

And so the matter might seem settled except, of course, that Descartes would have agreed with Augustine on something else as well. Nothing happens in this world without God’s direct involvement, without God’s approval and control. As Augustine put it just a few lines later in his
Sermon on the Creed
, “There is no resisting the omnipotent, such that what he wishes does not happen.”
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Nothing that God wishes to happen fails to happen and, it follows, nothing happens that God does not wish to happen. For theologians who thought about the early chapters of Genesis, about the story of Adam and Eve and their exile from Eden, God’s wishes and power raised a very specific type of problem, a problem that did not sit comfortably with Augustine’s and Descartes’s confident conclusions about what God can and cannot do.

The revered late medieval biblical scholar Nicholas of Lyra broaches this problem at the very beginning of his commentary on the Temptation. “And first,” he writes, “we must consider whether it was appropriate for God to allow man to be tempted, especially
since He knew what would happen.”
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Nicholas’s question depends on an absolutely central assumption, an assumption that might well seem to involve God directly in the deception of Adam and Eve and the Fall, not to mention the entire subsequent history of human suffering. Nicholas’s question assumes that the Devil, for all the trouble and havoc he causes, does nothing that God does not allow him to do. Not only does God know forever in advance what the Devil will do in Eden, it is God himself who orchestrates and stages the entire scene. It is God who decides that the Devil, in the false guise of a serpent, will first approach Eve, just as it is God who composes the lying words with which the Devil seduces her. For medieval and Reformation theologians, these were entirely obvious, if potentially troubling, ideas. Perhaps the Devil occupied center stage in those all too brief and tragic moments leading up to the Fall, but God had ordained everything that had transpired. It was God who wrote the script, staged the scene, directed the actors. Given all that, who really is the father of lies?

For all his confidence before the novices, Augustine himself had experienced the power of these problems firsthand. Before his conversion to Catholicism, Augustine had accepted the spiritual teachings of Faustus and the Manicheans precisely because they seemed to offer a theology that liberated God from the responsibility of having created evil, of lying to and deceiving the very creatures he had created in his image and likeness. “Commentators are accustomed to consider very carefully the nature of the Devil,” Augustine would write many years after he had turned his back on the Manicheans, “since certain heretics, scandalized by his evil will, want to remove him entirely from the creatures made by the true sovereign God and to attribute him to another principle which in their account is opposed to God.” Having raised the possibility that the Devil exists independently of God, Augustine wastes no time rejecting it out of hand. Everything that exists depends on God for its existence, he reminds his readers.
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This might seem to make things all the worse for God, hinting as it does at his immediate involvement in the Devil’s deceptions and lies. Augustine,
however, invokes a subtle distinction to free God from personal involvement in sin. “God is not the author of the malice or wickedness of sinners,” he argues. Rather, God knows in advance, before he even creates them, which creatures are “going to be wicked by their own perverse will.” He allows them to sin, permits them to sin, because their evil actions somehow contribute to the salvation of the good.
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Writing in the twelfth century, Peter Lombard did his part to ensure the longevity of Augustine’s distinction when he included it in his
Sentences
. “Evil things are not done with God willing or unwilling, but with him not willing,” Peter writes, “because it is not subject to God’s will that an evil be done or not done, but that he allows it to be done, because it is good to allow evil things to be done; and he allows it entirely willingly, not willing evil things, but willing to allow that they be done, because evil things are not good, nor is it good for them to be or be done.”
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Whether or not the metaphysical, moral, and psychological intricacies among what God wills, willingly allows, or inactively permits could bear the conceptual weight these constructs were meant to support, they comprise a solution that clearly demonstrates the challenges theologians faced. No one wanted to deny that God was all-powerful, that God was good and just, but there was evidence, seemingly irrefutable and scattered throughout the Bible, that God did more than merely permit evil things to transpire. In the sixteenth century, Calvin rejected Augustine’s subtle distinction. Invoking the Manicheans (who had long since become a favorite theological whipping post), Calvin writes, “[Some people] have imagined that Satan, not being in subjection to God, laid snares for man in opposition to the divine will, and was superior not to man only, but also to God himself.” Any pious and reverent person, Calvin immediately adds, would recognize the folly of this belief and would have to admit that evil does not occur except “by God’s permission.” Pausing to reflect on the word “permission,” Calvin adds, “It offends the ears of some, when it is said God willed the Fall, but what else, I pray, is the permission of Him, who
has the power of preventing, and in whose hand the whole matter was placed, but his will?”
⁹

Calvin would return to this problem in his
Institutes
, his great summa of reformed theology, refuting all attempts to absolve God from direct oversight of and involvement in the evil that men do. Running through a litany of Old Testament witnesses, Calvin argues that scripture speaks with one voice on the subject. God directs Satan to drive Job to despair and madness, and it is God who “wills that the false king Ahab be deceived,” sending the Devil to fulfill this wish “with a definite command to be a lying spirit in the mouth of all the prophets.” Perhaps God acts through Satan, Calvin concludes, but there can be no doubt “that Satan performs his part by God’s impulsion.” Confronted with this unequivocal biblical evidence, one might be tempted to think that “God has two contrary wills,” violating secretly the laws he openly commands. God may well have proclaimed through Moses that all lies are strictly prohibited, but this does little to prevent God from instructing others to lie for him. Calvin’s response both acknowledges and accepts this apparent contradiction because God’s ways are mysterious and unknowable to sinners like us. “When we do not grasp how God wills to take place what he forbids to be done,” Calvin writes, “let us recall our mental incapacity, and at the same time consider that the light in which God dwells is not without reason called unapproachable.”
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The history of God’s lies is the history of the unbearable tension between two different ways of conceiving God, one rooted in philosophy, the other rooted in the unfolding narrative of scripture. Philosophers, not to mention theologians when thinking philosophically, asserted an honest, just, infinitely wise, and utterly transcendent God, perfect and immutable. By contrast, the God of scripture is a historical figure, involved with and interacting in the world, mutable, prone to anger, and seemingly all too willing to lie and deceive should the circumstances demand it. Something had to give, and when it did, scripture gave way to philosophy, and God would find himself exiled from the Bible.

O
N
L
IONS
, F
ISHHOOKS, AND
M
OUSETRAPS

Medieval bestiaries have quite a lot to say about lions. While the lion is a mighty and courageous beast, unwilling to back down from even the most terrifying of foes, it fears the sound of rumbling wheels and the flames of fire even more. The lion is a noble creature and “disdains the company of large numbers.” It is also clever. When it discovers that hunters are chasing it, when it picks up their scent among the mountain heights where it loves to roam, the lion uses its tail to sweep away its tracks, obliterating any clues to its presence.
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