a marginal comment of some reader or copyist which later crept into the text: "moving its
Book XI 449 all, that we direct our lives, being created anew by the grace he has given us as promised. As for anything that can be said about why God created the devil when he foreknew what he was going to be like, and why being almighty he did not divert his will to good ends, possible answers may be found in what we said when asking similar questions about evil human beings37—whether you under stand these answers, or just believe them, or can find better ones.
The devil and the serpent
27, 34. So then, the one who wields supreme authority over all the things he has created only gave the devil permission to tempt the woman through the serpent and the man through the woman. But it was the devil himself who spoke in the serpent, using it like an organ, and moving its nature38 to give expression to the verbal sounds and bodily gestures by which the woman would be made to understand what he wished to persuade her to do. ln the woman herself though, because she was a rational creature and could use her vocal chords to make words, he did not speak himself, but he was acting on her inwardly by a hidden, persuasive impulse, as he had done outwardly by means of the serpent.
He could have produced the same result, indeed, in a soul already wrapped in a proud love of its own power, had he acted by such hidden impulse alone, as he did in Judas, prompting him to betray Christ.39 But as I have said already, the devil has the will to tempt, but does not have it independently in his power either to do so or to decide how to do so. lt was because he was permitted to, therefore, that he tempted the woman, and he did so in the way he was permitted to. What kind of human beings, though, would profit from what he was doing he did not know, and would not have wished it ifhe had; and that is how he was being made fun of by the angels.
28, 35. And so the serpent did not understand the sounds of the words which were being uttered from it to the woman. Nor is it to be supposed that its soul was turned into one of a rational nature, seeing that not even human beings, who are rational by nature, know what they are saying when a demon is speaking in them in that condition for which an exorcist is required. How much less would that creature have understood the sounds of the words which the devil was producing through it and out of it! After all, it would not understand a human being
37. See above, vi,8—xi,15. 38. Here 1 omit a phrase which is hard to fit into the run of the sentence, and could easily have been a marginal comment of some reader or copyist which later crept into the text: "moving its nature eo modo quo movere Me et moveri illa potuit, in that way in which it (or he) could move and she could be moved." When he says the devil used the serpent like an organ, 1 think he has a musical organ in mind, not an organ of the body. What 1 am treating as a marginal gloss may be seen as a comment on such serpentine organ music. 39. See Jn 13:2.