5 - Demonic Teaching and the Fall in the Old English Genesis

Summary

As the Junius 11 poems recount the Genesis story, it revolves around the primal use of the verbal arts to deceive. In these texts’ distinctive account of the origins of the world, its creation, and the making of human beings, the verbal arts are introduced through their misuse, resulting in the direst possible epistemological and ontological consequences. While many critical analyses of these poems focus on rhetoric and reading, the encounter of Adam and Eve with their demonic tempter actually emphasizes neither of these activities so strongly as it foregrounds the dialogue, the face-toface debate over epistemology on whose outcome human ontology itself depends. The informal logic of the Old English Genesis therefore places the dialectical art, with its emphasis on distinguishing between truth and lies, at the center of the pedagogical encounter. In Genesis B, Eden itself becomes a topos, the primordial ‘place’ in which Adam and Eve must find arguments to refute or resist the serpent who ‘teaches’ them, an endeavor in which they are ultimately unsuccessful.

Though Adam's voice has traditionally been considered more significant, the voices of Eve and Satan's demonic messenger in Eden come to the foreground when demonic pedagogy is placed at the center of the poem. The demon and his pupil, Eve, who teaches Adam following her own instruction, voice narratives that amount to a dispute over the events of the Fall, events in which both human and non-human agents – the trees, the fruit, Eden itself – participate to change the ontology of humanity and to transform Eden into a significant ‘place’ through both its loss and the eternal spiritual, physical, and mental longings that loss inspires. The material and immaterial changes resulting from the Fall emerge directly from the informal logic of the debate of the demon, Eve, and Adam. By approaching first Adam and then Eve, the demon instigates a dispute about their own human nature and their affiliation with God. The demonic magister poses quaestiones, raising a res dubia (‘a thing in doubt’) that demands arguments in response. Adam and Eve, however, unlearned in the arts of argumentation, are ultimately unable to defend themselves, accepting the demon's teachings as truths.

The Genesis poet emphasizes the demon's intellectual appeals to Eve’s mind, the epistemological means to enact ontological change. Eve and then Adam choose the demon's account over God’s, accepting the demon as magister and auctor.