The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (6 page)

From Augustine to Luther, and from Luther to the Italian Protestant-in-exile Jacobus Acontius, theologians had no doubt that the Devil’s greatest ploy was to tempt man away from God’s Word. If God’s prohibition against eating from the Tree of Knowledge was clear, the Devil’s lie could be nothing except an intentional misinterpretation of God’s command. As a result, the Devil’s
lie would become the very emblem of heresy and false preaching. The Devil changes God’s Word to tempt our pride, and our only defense against such malignant exegesis is to cling to the original in all its purity. Sound advice when there was one official Church and at least some, if not complete, agreement about the meaning of God’s Word, perhaps still sound when there were only two churches, as during those first brief years of the Reformation, each accusing the other of having colluded with Antichrist, but what if there are many churches, each claiming to possess its own unique and perfect interpretation of scripture? The Devil may have been the first exegete, but in deceiving Adam and Eve, he transformed them and all their descendants into exegetes. Fallen, with crippled wills and weakened faculties, he left them to make sense of a world made confusing, in which disagreements could only proliferate and finding a way to tolerate disagreement the only way to undo Satan’s stratagems.

M
AKING
S
ENSE OF
G
ENESIS
1, 2,
AND
3

The Temptation story is brief, even absurdly so. It is also problematic, raising as many questions as it answers. The story as most every Christian from at least the late fourth century knew it, indeed, the story as most people know it even today, is really an attempt to resolve those questions into some sort of coherent narrative. In other words, it is an interpretation, a gloss on the biblical story. The original narrative, for example, offers no explanation for why the serpent approaches the Woman, nor how it could speak and, most significantly, it makes no mention at all of the Devil. These were expansions to the story that found nearly universal approval among all Christians, not only in the early Church but throughout the Middle Ages and even across the ever-multiplying confessional divides of the Reformation. Complicating matters even further, the narrative challenges posed in the first chapters of Genesis were not limited to the Temptation story. When that story was set within the broader context of the first
three chapters of Genesis, biblical exegetes needed to exert a fair amount of effort to fit everything together.

The most striking challenge that readers faced was the apparent presence of two Creation narratives within the first three chapters of Genesis. The seven-day Creation narrative, the one in which God announces, “Let us make humankind in our image according to our likeness,” runs from Genesis 1:1 to 2:3. A second narrative immediately follows, beginning at Genesis 2:4 with the words “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.” This second narrative includes the creation of the Garden of Eden, the fabrication of Adam out of dust, of the Woman out of Adam’s rib and, of course, the story of the Temptation, the Fall, and the Exile. Although religious writers had long noted this curiously twice-told telling of the Creation, the French Protestant-turned-Catholic professor of medicine Jean Astruc was the first to argue seriously that these two narratives derived from distinct sources. In 1753, he anonymously published his
Conjectures on the Original Notes which It Seems Moses Used to Compose the Book of Genesis
, in which he argued that Moses did not write these stories. Rather, Moses acted as an editor who stitched the two stories together from preexisting sources.
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Modern scholarly consensus now assumes these two stories are truly distinct, the product of different authors, composed at different times, deriving from different Jewish traditions. The seven-day story derives from a priestly tradition dating somewhere between 550 and 450
B.C
. The second narrative, beginning at Genesis 2:4, dates from some four hundred years earlier, having been composed sometime between 960 and 930
B.C
., during the “Davidic/Solomon kingdom.”
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Before Astruc (and long after him, for that matter), Moses was almost universally accepted as the author of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. Since one author implied one coherent narrative, it was believed that these two Creation stories must somehow constitute a single narrative, a single account of the world’s Creation. If this solved one problem, it raised others. Specifically, how did they fit together to form one story, the story of a single Creation?

Theologians would offer a wide variety of answers to this question. At one extreme, Augustine suspected that the second Creation story made it clear that God did not create the world in six days. Rejecting the idea that the second Creation story was a mere recapitulation and retelling of the first, he stressed the final words of Genesis 2:4, “when day was made” (“This is the story of the creation of heaven and earth when day was made”), and argued that God had created the world in a single day, in a single instant, as a sort of embryonic whole full of the seeds of its future development. The first Creation story presented that single instant as a series of discrete temporal steps so that human beings could better understand the structure and complexity of God’s work.
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The second Creation story, including Adam’s formation from dust and the Woman’s formation from Adam’s rib, represented the later blossoming and divinely ordered maturation of these primordial seeds. Not surprisingly, Reformation writers stood at the other extreme. Calvin had little patience for what he took to be the North African bishop’s byzantine interpretive maneuvers. Although God could have created the world in an instant, Calvin countered, he chose to create it over the course of six days so that men could appreciate the structure and complexity of his work.
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In his 1554 commentary on Genesis, he argued that Moses doubled up his narratives in order to stress God’s creation of the world out of nothingness, repetition serving to hammer this point into the recalcitrant reader’s mind. “For there have always been ungrateful and malignant men,” Calvin wrote, “who either by feigning that the world was eternal or by obliterating the memory of the creation would attempt to obscure the glory of God.”
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Despite these differences over time and across the religious spectrum, Augustine and most every subsequent Catholic commentator, as well as every Reformation theologian, argued that, insofar as possible, the events described in the second Creation narrative needed to be taken seriously and understood as real events. If there were any place for allegory (and, of course, Reformation writers doubted there was much room for it), it must be reined in, rooted to and built upon a foundation of literal and
historical interpretation. More to the point, both Catholic and Protestant writers agreed that the second Creation narrative told a story that formed a historical sequence of events that must be respected, no matter how strange that story might seem. And the story certainly could seem strange. The influential first-century Jewish exegete Philo of Alexandria, for example, argued that little or nothing in the second Creation story could be literally true. Assuming the likeness of past and present as a basic interpretive approach, Philo contended that “no trees of life or understanding have ever appeared on earth in the past or are ever likely to appear in the future.” He likewise found it difficult to believe “that the venomous and earthborn reptile, the snake, could project a human voice.” Of course, he quickly added that Moses is no liar and these things “are not the fabrications of myth, in which the race of poets and sophists rejoice, but indications of character types which invite allegorical interpretation through the explanation of hidden meanings.” Given these peculiarities, Philo believed the entire temptation scene had to be read as a sort of psychological drama played out within the human soul symbolized by the Garden of Eden itself, the actors in the Temptation drama representing the soul’s basic powers or inner forces. The serpent was a symbol for base desire, the Woman a symbol for the senses, and the man, naturally enough, filling in for reason.
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Philo’s allegorical reading influenced a number of early Christians, including Origen and Ambrose of Milan, and would continue to shape Catholic allegorical readings throughout the Middle Ages.

Augustine understood the challenges that could motivate such allegorical readings. He was also absolutely clear it was a tendency that needed to be held in check. “[I]n Genesis, since there are matters beyond the ken of readers who focus their gaze on the familiar course of nature, they are unwilling to have these matters taken in the literal sense,” he wrote in his own commentary, “but prefer to understand them in a figurative sense.”
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At least one advantage of allegorical readings was their ability to explain away the more fantastic elements in the Creation narrative, like talking snakes and magical trees, elements that, taken literally, might seem unworthy
to serve as the basis for a real religion. The third-century theologian Origen noted that pagan critics of Christianity, such as Celsus, made fun of just these fairy-tale-like aspects of the story, suggesting it read like the sort of legend “told to old women.”
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As far as Augustine was concerned, resorting to allegory to counter such critics created more problems than it solved. If we interpret Adam and Eve allegorically, Augustine asks, then “who begot Cain, Abel and Seth?” More important, the standard of interpreting the past in terms of the present would undermine the literal truth of both Creation accounts. Genesis describes the creation of a new world and new creatures. “Surely,” Augustine asks, “we are not to believe that God did not make the world because He does not make worlds today?”
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Luther, who complained frequently about what he perceived as Augustine’s own allegorical flights of fancy and needless probing of problematic passages better left alone, put the matter simply near the very beginning of his commentary: “[L]et us turn to Moses,” he advised, “as the better teacher. We can follow him with greater safety than the philosophers, who, without benefit of the Word, debate about unknown matters.”
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Even for those exegetes ready to tackle the story of the Temptation literally, there was no shortage of problems to resolve. When, for example, did the Fall occur? While combining the two Creation stories into a single narrative provided some chronological clues, even here there was room for disagreement. Augustine suggested that it had occurred on the sixth day, no more than six hours after the creation of Adam and Eve. Luther extended the first couple’s paradisiacal stay another twenty-four hours, arguing it had occurred on the seventh day. He had little difficulty imagining something of the day’s events leading up to the Fall. “Early on the following Sabbath,” he writes, “Adam preached to Eve concerning God’s will,” told her about the glories of paradise and about the Tree of Life, “through the use of which the powers of the body would be refreshed and perpetual youth would be maintained.” He also told her about “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, from which it was not permitted to eat—was forbidden; and that in this respect they should obey so gracious a
creator.” Luther described Adam leading Eve on a brief tour of paradise, highlighting its beauties and pointing out the two trees. “But then, alas,” Luther finishes, “Satan interfered and within a few hours ruined all this.”
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In “The Second Week,” the second part of the sixteenth-century French writer Guillaume de Saluste Sieur du Bartas’s lengthy verse account of Creation’s earliest days and weeks,
The Divine Weeks
, Adam and Eve enjoy the seventh day in peace. According to Du Bartas, the Fall occurred on the eighth day, the first day of the second week.
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Of course, Du Bartas’s 1584 poem eventually found itself eclipsed when John Milton published
Paradise Lost
in 1667, narrating a Temptation and Fall that began on the morning of the seventh day, soon after Adam and Eve (at Eve’s urging) had separated for the day to ensure they did not waste time staring into each other’s eyes, whispering sweet nothings into each other’s ears. As Eve warns her husband: “For while so near each other thus all day / Our task we choose, what if so near / Looks intervene and smile, or object new / Casual discourse draw on, which intermits / Our day’s work brought to little, though begun / Early, and th’ hour of Supper comes unearn’d.”
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As it turned out, issues of importance hinged on correctly identifying the day Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, but an even more pressing problem faced anyone who hoped to make sense of the story. The story narrated in Genesis 3 makes no mention whatsoever of the Devil. It refers only to the “serpent” and does so with a minimum of background: “Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made.”
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Between the excesses of hyperbolic allegory and a literalism that verged on transforming the story into an overly terse Aesop’s fable, Jewish exegetes first and then early Christian writers gradually came to invoke the Devil as the real behind-the-scene actor.
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John Chrysostom seems to have been the first to identify precisely the relation between the serpent and the Devil, and he did so recognizing that animals do not now, and did not then, have the power of speech. Noting, and noting something that would exercise much attention among future exegetes, that Eve did not fear a talking serpent, Chrysostom writes: “Consider from this … how
in the beginning none of the wild beasts then existing caused fear either to the man or the woman; on the contrary, they recognized human direction and dominion…. But perhaps in this case some may raise a difficulty and seek to find out if the wild animals also shared the power of speech. Not so—perish the thought; rather people, following Scripture, need to consider the fact that the words came from the devil, who was spurred to this deception by his own ill-will.”
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The Devil used the serpent as a tool, a costume, speaking through it as he tempted Eve. “This serpent,” Augustine would write, condensing and passing on what would become accepted as indisputable, “could be called the wisest of all the beasts not by reason of its irrational soul, but rather because of another spirit—that of the Devil—dwelling in it.”
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