The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (8 page)

Whatever the reason, the Devil’s words were effective in moving Eve’s will toward sin. Augustine’s mentor, the bishop Ambrose of Milan, had already, around 389, imagined a basis for these initial stirrings of pride in Eve’s soul when he composed his own
series of homilies on the events in paradise. A fallen Devil, filled with rage and hate and envy, plots to bring man down. “Will this inferior acquire what I was unable to keep?” the Devil thinks to himself and reflecting on his own experience realizes that he has “many ways and means by which to deceive man…. Although of superior nature, [man’s] soul is nevertheless subject to temptation, since it exists in the prison house of the body—witness my own experience in being unable to avoid sin.” The Devil contrives a two-step strategy for deceiving and ruining the first couple. First, he will deceive them, exploiting the tension inherent in their mixed condition, arousing their ambition to be better than they are. Second, he will tempt the flesh with promises to sate their newly awakened pride. “How else can I appear wiser than all men,” the Devil concludes, “if not by the exercise of cunning and fraud in my warfare of entrenchment against all men.”
⁵⁸

If our mixed nature reveals the weakness in our defenses, Ambrose suggests there was something else that gave the Devil’s attack its peculiar advantage. Religious writers often asked why the serpent first approached Eve instead of Adam. In the mid-thirteenth century, the Franciscan theologian Bonaventure summed up this bit of puzzlement when he pointed out that there really isn’t all that much glory to be gained in conquering a woman. If the Devil sought to recover some of his lost majesty, it would have made more sense first to deceive and conquer the man.
⁵⁹
God had decreed and allowed things to proceed otherwise, and so it was that explanations for this order of temptation had to be found. Ambrose had already offered at least one answer to this question when he observed that the Devil does not accost the man, who had received the prohibition from God, but rather “her who had learned of it from her husband…. There is no statement that God spoke to the woman. We know that he spoke to Adam. Hence we must conclude that the command was communicated through Adam to the woman.”
⁶⁰
There is a lesson to be learned from this, Ambrose suggests, and he immediately compares Eve’s conversation with the serpent to someone recently converted to the faith, full of newfound enthusiasm and eager for a “greater fullness of
doctrine.” The new catechumen must always beware of allowing his desire for a more robust faith to lead him into error, sin, and heresy. The catechumen must beware, Ambrose notes, that he does not hand himself over to heretics like Photinus, Arius, or Sabellus, teachers “who would attract him by their airs of authority, so that his untrained mind, impressed by the weight of such august prestige, will be unable to discriminate right from wrong.”
⁶¹
Like Ambrose’s imagined catechumen, Eve desires something more. She signals this in her response to the serpent when she adds an additional prohibition to God’s command. She tells the serpent they are allowed neither to eat from, nor even to touch, the tree. Both Eve and the catechumen are guilty of a superficial understanding of God’s Word. They do not stop to consider why God had not included a prohibition against touch, why scripture does not include something seemingly more robust and demanding. They do not ask what they could learn about God’s commands “if they had first touched and handled it, as it were, with the hands of the mind.” Instead, they seek to add to it, to make it say more than it does. Comparing this behavior to testimony given in court, Ambrose adds, “It frequently happens that a witness adds something of himself to a relation of facts. In this way, by the injection of an untruth, confidence in his testimony is shattered.”
⁶²
No additions to scripture are ever called for, and Ambrose recalls the warnings concerning the sanctity of God’s Word from the book of Revelation: “If anyone shall add to them, God will add unto him the plagues that are written in this book. And if anyone shall take away from these words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his portion from the tree of life.”
⁶³

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.

T
HE
D
EVIL’S
L
IE FROM THE
M
IDDLE
A
GES TO THE
R
EFORMATION

“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