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| Chapter X. The answer about the beginning of the devil's fall.
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Chapter X.
The answer about the beginning of the devil’s
fall.
Serenus: The passage in Genesis
shows that that was not the beginning of his fall and
ruin, as before their deception it takes
the view that he had already been branded with the ignominy of the name
of the serpent, where it says: “But the serpent was wiser”
or as the Hebrew copies express it, “more subtle than all the
beasts of the earth, which the Lord God had made.”1535
You see then that he had fallen away from
his angelic holiness even before he deceived the first man, so that he
not only deserved to be stamped with the ignominy of this title, but
actually excelled all other beasts of the earth in the subterfuges of
wickedness. For Holy Scripture would not have designated a good angel
by such a term, nor would it say of those who were still continuing in
that state of bliss: “But the serpent was wiser than all the
beasts of the earth.” For this title could not possibly be
applied I say not to Gabriel or Michæl, but it would not even be
suitable to any good man. And so the title of serpent and the
comparison to beasts most clearly suggests not the dignity of an angel
but the infamy of an apostate. Finally the occasion of the envy and
seduction, which led him to deceive man, arose from the ground of his
previous fall, in that he saw that man, who had but recently been
formed out of the dust of the ground, was to be called to that glory,
from which he remembered that he himself, while still one of the
princes, had fallen. And so that first fall of his, which was due to
pride, and which obtained for him the name of the serpent, was followed
by a second owing to envy: and as this one found him still in the
possession of something upright so that he could enjoy some interchange
of conference and counsel with man, by the Lord’s sentence he was
very properly cast down to the lowest depth, that he might no longer
walk as before erect, and looking up on high, but should cleave to the
ground and creep along, and be brought low upon his belly and feed upon
the earthly food and works of sins, and henceforward proclaim his
secret hostility, and put between himself and man an enmity that is to
our advantage, and a discord that is to our profit, so that while men
are on their guard against him as a dangerous enemy, he can no longer
injure them by a deceptive show of friendship.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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