At The Sign of the Dove and Serpent

Neil Forsyth

Figures

If ever man combined within himself all the mild qualities of the lamb with a considerable touch of the dove, and not a dash of the crocodile, or the least possible suggestion of the very mildest seasoning of the serpent, that man was he.

--Pecksniff, in Martin Chuzzlewit 106.

So many things are happening in the first few lines of Paradise Lost that we are in danger of missing the wood for the trees. That may indeed be part of Milton's purpose, though a subsidiary one. Thus we may miss the fact, obvious when we think about it, that the poem places two animals close to the beginning. First, as the conclusion to the invocation of the Muse, comes the dove-like Spirit which inaugurates the many parallels between God and Milton--modesty in such matters not being Milton's strong suit. ¹ And then a few lines later comes the serpent, the answer to the first question posed to that Muse: "Say first what cause . . . " Here are the relevant lines.

And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th'upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumin, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justifie the wayes of God to men.
Say first, for Heav'n hides nothing from thy view
Nor the deep Tract of Hell, say first what cause
Mov'd our Grand Parents in that happy State,
Favour'd of Heav'n so highly, to fall off
From thir Creator, and transgress his Will
For one restraint, Lords of the World besides?
Who first seduc'd them to that foul revolt?
Th'infernal Serpent; he it was . . . (I 17-34)²

Both animals are fraught with symbolic implications that recur and accumulate throughout the poem. The dove links with "the surer messenger," as Milton calls it (XI 856), which announces with an olive branch the re-appearance of dry land following the Bible's second creation myth (the flood), from Genesis 8, and also with the dove that descends at the Jordan baptism to represent God's identification of Christ as his son: "This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased." ³ Indeed the typological connecting of these two doves was a feature of early Christian Bible commentary, and Milton thus enters and evokes this ancient tradition. But the Miltonic dove is neither of these. Not satisfied with merely reminding us of those biblical doves, Milton adds to and complicates them. For this dove, unlike his biblical prototypes, is androgynous, a widespread idea in the Hermetic and alchemical traditions, but rare among Protestants. ⁴ It broods on its young but it also impreg nates, functions which are normally--or at least in nature among the higher animals--distributed between the two sexes separately. Obviously this is not a natural dove. It is above and beyond the natural world, both temporally, in that it precedes creation, and symbolically, in that it transcends the normal process of reproduction within this vale of making.

The serpent too is by no means natural. Not only is he "the infernal serpent" when we first meet him, but gradually fabulous sets of implications are added unto [End Page 57] him. He is quickly identified as Satan, and that figure in turn is eventually represented as an angel. ⁵ Thus not only is he immediately seen to be beyond nature but, like the dove, he both precedes it temporally and symbolically. And he quickly becomes, as we all know, an immensely complex character, taking on serpent skin for the temptation scene and then having it thrust upon him and his followers at the punishment in Book X, so becoming in fact that infernal serpent who opens the poem.

Of course there are many other factors which complicate our experience of the serpent, and all of us are familiar with them: Satan enters the serpent by a process that Milton does not make quite clear, but which implies something like the horticultural grafting of imp onto different stock (IX 89, where the word imp obviously has two meanings); he is sexily upright and appealing as he undulates toward Eve (erect at IX 501); he is powerfully persuasive at the tree itself (i.e. he is "speakable," which is what Eve likes most); indeed the serpent is cunning even before Satan comes near him, suggesting like the etymology of the word cunning itself that he has a special relationship to knowledge; and those other serpents in the poem are also terrifying and attractive--I mean the one that makes up the bottom half of Sin, and that typical Miltonic list of classical serpents at IX 505-10, from Hermione and Cadmus to various forms of Jupiter.

Once we add together all those resonant but conflicting meanings, we may well feel the need to return to that straightforward contrast between serpent and dove with which the poem opens, in order to recover our bearings. But when we put these two introductory animals into the same frame in this way, are the implications so simple?

1 Irenaeus

In one sense, yes. The spirit moves in the world above, the infernal serpent below. The contrast between these two symbolic animals (even if creatures is not the right word for them) is clearly felt and articulated early on in the Christian tradition. Milton had read Irenaeus, we know, ⁶ and Irenaeus makes a straightforward contrast between the two. Indeed it may be this symbolic contrast which underlies Milton's decision to begin his poem with this pair. Satan as serpent may have been forced upon him, given his obvious need to follow the Virgilian model of question for the Muse about causes, but there was no particular reason why the narrative or theological traditions required the poem to open with this pair. The broody dove at least is a gratuitous addition, and involved following (as Leonard points out) the Tremellius-Junius Bible reading incubabat for Genesis 1.2 rather than the A- V, where the spirit "moved" on the face of the waters.

Here is what Irenaeus says. He is talking about the re demptive and typological implications of Christ's sacrifice.

Then was the sin of the first-formed man healed by the virtue of the First-Begotten, the wisdom of the serpent was conquered by the simplicity of the dove, and the chains were broken by which we were in bondage to death.⁷

The relationship of dove and serpent is articulated in the terms that control the basic Christian narrative, the combat myth, as it was elaborated by the early fathers of the Church (Forsyth 345-7). Among other things, this means that what came to be called the protevangelion, the verse at Genesis 3.15 about enmity between seed of woman and serpent, has been reinterpreted in a long-term, indeed cosmic perspective, to prophesy the coming of Christ (confirmed by the dove) and the ultimate overthrow of Satan (not mentioned in Genesis). It was taken to be the first cryptic announcement in the Old Testament of the Christian gospel revealed in the New. The serpent eventually yields to the dove.

The new idea picked up several other logia (sayings) of Christ, including the ones at Luke 10.19, a crucial group for the identification of Satan: "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven. See, I have given you the ability (exousi an) to tread upon serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy (tou echthrou)." Irenaeus was devel oping his theory of recapitulation, in which the gospel events are seen to pick up and reverse the events of Genesis 2-3 (Adam/Christ, Tree/Cross, Eve/Mary). Thus he takes Jesus to be referring to the Eden story when he promises power over serpents: indeed Irenaeus' Latin translator uses the same word for both his Old and New Testament texts, calcare. And Irenaeus had good reason to link serpents and Satan, since Christ's words in Luke 10.19 bring Satan and serpent into the same framework of the enemy, and that textual link was vital in building the general Christian picture of the devil. Indeed the combat myth reading of scripture and Christ's words was almost certainly present already in (the author of) Luke's mind, since his Christ in that passage is responding immediately to the seventy apostles returning "with joy" from their mission, saying "Lord, even the demons are subject to us in thy name." Exorcisms, Eden and old enemy are all part of the same story--or are all being understood together. [End Page 58]

2 The Wisdom of the Serpent

So the opposition of dove and serpent in Irenaeus' perspective is ambitious and all inclusive. It takes in most of cosmic history in so far as that history is understood as the stage for a combat of hero and villain in the Christian myth--and that is the basic narrative of the New Testament. But the opposition of dove and serpent, useful as it clearly was for Milton's plot, is not the only perspective in which the foundational texts imagine these two symbolic animals. The early church tended to, needed to, oversimplify the story it was telling itself and its converts, but Milton was quite capable of seeing the complexity beneath the simplicity of the myth. In particular, once we check Irenaeus' version against the words that appear in the New Testament, we can see how much he simplified. In Matthew 10.16, Christ says to the disciples, "Behold I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be ye wise as serpents and innocent as doves." ⁸ Irenaeus recon structed this striking doctrine so that "the wisdom of the serpent was conquered by the simplicity of the dove." ⁹

The saying may go back even earlier in the textual transmission, even to Paul himself, whose letters are the earliest Christian documents. There are no animals here, it is true, but Paul writes to the Romans (16.19) that "I would have you be wise as to the good, guileless (akeraious) as to evil." In both Matthew and Romans the context is a warning about the opposition to be expected by the faithful. And Paul's next words reiterate the promise that "God will soon crush Satan under your feet," in which commentators see an allusion to the protevangelion of Genesis 3.15 about enmity between woman's seed and serpents, and the crushing of the serpent head under foot. ¹⁰ If so, then Satanic enmity, Genesis serpent, and unpleasant treatment of the new Christian communities, are all being linked.

The words of Paul may imply turning the enemy's weapon, guile, against him. Nonetheless Paul makes no explicit reference here to a serpent, Genesis or otherwise. Rather the allusion seems to be to the enemies in Psalm 110.1, a popular verse in early Christian circles (Hay), where the victor is told to "Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool." And it is not obvious why Paul "clarifies" the saying by adding that the faithful should be wise as to the good, and guileless as to evil. At any rate, we can surely see that the implications of doves and serpents, and the innocence and wisdom for which they stand, once we follow them back to the foundational texts, are by no means easy to understand, and no doubt many an enterprising clergyman has preached on the problems they pose. In Paul's words to the Romans, or in Christ's words in Matthew we can certainly find the rhetorical figure of antithesis, even the logical device of paradox, but not what we saw in Irenaeus, the metaphysical or transcendent combat. It is probable in fact that the opposition is proverbial, since there is a Midrash of Canticles 2.14 that says: "God saith of the Israelites: Towards me they are as sincere as doves, but towards the Gentiles they are as serpents." ¹¹ Apparently the Christian version deliberately adapts the proverb. So it looks as if the proverb could break in two directions, towards antithesis, but in regard of the same object, or towards opposition. In any case, in all the biblical citations it proves to be a good thing to behave like a snake.

3 Image

Renaissance images sometimes reproduce the dove-serpent relation. The best known is probably the sign of Johannes Frobenius, the Basel printer of Erasmus' early works, which is reproduced as the head piece to this essay (Fig. 1). The motto that goes with it is "Prudens simplicitas, amorque recti." ¹² A similar image, with two intertwined but aggressive snakes climbing a staff, on the top of which sits a dove, is repeated in the later (1618) collection of emblems of Gabriel Rollenhagen (Henkel and Schöne 649, Fig. 2).

And there are interesting variations: in an engraving by Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617; Hollstein 8: 22), a woman sits allegorically holding two snakes in one hand, two doves on her lap (Fig. 3), while in another, this time from a sacred emblem book (Cramer 1994[1624]), the cross itself is being climbed by a serpent, while the dove sits atop looking anxiously down (Fig. 4).

In each case the reference is clearly Matthew 10.16, which is usually quoted on the same page, but the ambiguity of the serpent-image is hard to ignore. In fact Erasmus himself, discussing his publisher's emblem (361; Volkmann 73), contrasts its success unfavourably with that of the dolphin image of the Aldine press, and recommends to him, as well as the rectitude of the staff in which he takes such pride, a bit more of the serpent's commercial cunning. [End Page 59]

4 Paradise Lost

What are we to make of these complex reverberations of the Biblical texts for a reading of Paradise Lost? On the one hand we find that the basic structure of the poem is embodied in the Irenaean opposition of symbolic animals at the beginning: eventually the serpent is to yield to the dove, God's representative, the victor in the cosmic struggle. But on the other hand, that opposition is undermined by the words of Christ, frequently illustrated as we have just seen, likening himself to a serpent and recommending that his followers imitate not only doves but snakes. We have a typically paradoxical situation.

For the serpent in Paradise Lost, the situation is desperate. Despite his cunning and Christ's recommendation, he cannot remain innocent, once he becomes the bodysuit for Satan. He is condemned, but mysteriously--and Satan tells us so. So does the narrator, in case we doubt the word of the fiend: at X 169, he is "justly then accurst,/ As vitiated in Nature." There follows immediately the prophecy about bruises and crushed [End Page 60] heads contained in the protevangelion (X 172-191). This was an insoluble problem for theologians, as Flannagan's note on the passage explains. Once we take the subtext seriously, however, another more interesting possibility emerges, that the combat myth on which Christianity and the poem is constructed is not the final truth, as it were--though we may need the wisdom of the serpent to see it. Instead of eternal warfare, the religion offers another possibility, that of reconciliation and redemption, even of the serpent. Origen, it is true, was condemned as a heretic for his belief that the devil himself might be saved. And clearly Paradise Lost holds out that enticing prospect only to have it rejected through the magnificent soliloquy on Mt Niphates. Satan imagines repentance ("Oh then at last relent: is there no place/ Left for Repentance, none for Pardon left?" IV 79-80), but then rejects it himself because of "disdain" and his "dread of shame." But perhaps the poem itself redeems Satan and serpent through a process similar to the one Blake divined in the true poet, except that, being in this sense of the devil's party, everyone comes to know it--as Milton obviously did. The source of energy in the poem is Satan, it is he who drives the poem into motion and whose plot provides the motor of the action. With every reading we revive and reactivate that energy. But the energy is not random or indiscriminate, even in its moments of most intense hatred. It is always held within a structure that ultimately leads toward understanding and so redemption.

The obvious instance is in Adam's savage denunciation of Eve, "Out of my sight thou serpent . . . ," which he utters, it seems, while still "On the Ground/ Outstrecht he lay, on the cold ground, and oft/ Cursed his creation" (X 850-1, 862); that is in the same posture in which we first find the infernal serpent (one of several reminiscences of Satan in Adam's speeches in X). This leads through the series of emotional transformations at the heart of the regeneration sequence in Book X to the recovered memory of what is known as "the promise," that Adam and Eve have heard but not understood until their emotional condition is right to receive it. And that promise of course is the fuzzy language about the crushing of the serpent's head.

        Then let us seek
Some safer resolution, which methinks
I have in view, calling to minde with heed
Part of our Sentence, that thy Seed shall bruise
The Serpents head; piteous amends, unless
Be meant, whom I conjecture, our grand Foe
Satan, who in the Serpent hath contriv'd
Against us this deceit: to crush his head
Would be revenge indeed. (X 1028-37)

Revenge is not exactly the point, of course. It takes Adam and reader another two books to understand it (Christopher 185-6), and then Adam gets it wrong at first: he recalls the promise at XII 383, "Needs must the serpent now his capital bruise/ Expect with mortal pain," but immediately wants tickets for the fight: "Say where and when /Their fight." Even when he finally gets it, he is full of doubt about the appropriate emotional reaction, whether to repent or rejoice (XII 474-6). But he does finally grasp the distinction between the eventual defeat of Satan, and of "his works /In thee and in thy seed" (XII 394-5). He recovers in effect the wisdom he was deprived of at the Fall, which is to distinguish clearly in theological and metaphorical ways the symbolic meanings of a saying from the literal, the Paradise within from the earthly garden and the inner from the infernal serpent.

Similarly, the final (?) meaning of the poem is not the combat that informs it but the subsumption of serpent within dove that begins it. For if we return to that initial passage now, we will note what few have realized, that the words "The infernal serpent, he it was . . . " are spoken not by the narrator but by the dove-like spirit. They are the Muse-spirit's answer to the poet-narrator's question: "Say first what cause . . . " So the first words of the dove are to identify the serpent. Follow that logic and you find that the whole poem, as indeed the classical convention of the inspiring muse requires, is the work of that same dove-like spirit. And that same spirit is also the answer to Adam's final question to the angel: "who then shall guide/ His people, who defend?," to which Michael replies: "from Heaven/ Hee to his own a Comforter will send" (XII 485-6). This Comforter, the Paraklete, had long been understood as a variant of the dove-like Spirit. ¹³ The operations of that Spirit are the climax of the sequence of revelations made to Adam about the meaning of the history he is living in and initiating.

5 Christ and Serpent

Did Milton know that according to a Gnostic tradition, Christ, not Satan, was the serpent of Genesis, the bringer of Gnosis or spiritual knowledge? (Augustine explains this Ophite belief clearly enough in his De haeresibus ¹⁴ ) More likely Milton simply exploits the ambiguities of the traditional equations. The Gnostics were, in many ways, the most sophisticated readers of scripture in the ancient world, steadily finding the hidden meaning beneath the [End Page 61] surface text, and Milton was certainly capable of taking the same route to his beliefs. Christ as the "general serpent" (one form of the Gnostic belief) could be reinforced by his own words about being lifted up like the serpent at John 3.14-15,¹⁵ as well as the recommendation he makes to be wise as serpents. Indeed that is probably why Irenaeus, writing to combat the rival Gnostic readings of scripture, gave his own version of the gospel saying, carefully separating the serpent from the dove in his typological scheme: "Then was the sin of the first-formed man healed by the virtue of the First-Begotten (Christ), the wisdom of the serpent was conquered by the simplicity of the dove, and the chains were broken by which we were in bondage to death." Thus did the struggle with rival interpretations produce the sharp oppositions and simplifications of orthodoxy.

Perhaps we can see how the paradoxical wisdom of the serpent works in Paradise Lost if we recast the Satan- serpent figure not only as the embodiment of the old enemy but as the Judeo-Christian version of that fundamental figure of the world's mythologies, the trickster, he who teaches (often inadvertently) the basic truths about the universe even as he tries (or seems) himself to subvert those truths (Radin). That may be what the reconciliation of dove and serpent is supposed to mean in those enigmatic words of Christ in Matthew 10.16. That is the personal drama that Milton fully explored when he turned Satan into the trickster-teacher of Christ in Paradise Re gained. Thus the Satan of the myth may well be damned for his unrelenting hostility to God, but the Satan of the poems is redeemed by his benign but unconscious relation to the reader. It is Satan's fate, while he tempts and teaches the Son, to join him on the temple pinnacle and momentarily substitute for him as the angels come to rescue him from his fall. Or so generations of readers must have thought as they read those words near the end:

So Satan fell and strait a fiery Globe
Of Angels on full sail of wing flew nigh
Who on their plumy Vans receiv'd him soft.(PR 4. 581-3)

We have to go back at that point to realize that Christ rather than Satan must be the referent of the pronoun (Kerrigan 90), as the rest of the narrative continues to describe how these angels set him down in "a flowery valley on a green bank" and serve him a meal of celestial food divine. Briefly the pronoun him, like the pinnacle, is inhabited by both Satan and Christ. Far from dismissing Satan, as John Carey's note suggests, so that "he ceases to count even as a grammatical referent," the effect of the momentary confusion is to replace Christ with Satan, and in the inevitable correction of this reading, to reverse the substitution. Satan's role has been inadvertently to bring Christ to be himself, and it is a delicate irony that at the climactic moment, he should also be the ultimate other. Once again, the text of the poem, if not the doctrine, has redeemed Satan. And it is almost certainly no accident that, if the dove is the one to identify the infernal serpent in Paradise Lost, the reverse happens in Paradise Regained. The phrase "A perfect Dove" quoted earlier is actually part of Satan's opening description of the baptism in the Jordan:

        I saw
The Prophet do him reverence, on him rising
Out of the water, Heav'n above the Clouds
Unfold her Crystal Dores, thence on his head
A perfect Dove descend, what e'er it meant,
And out of Heav'n the Sov'raign voice I heard
This is my Son belov'd, in him am pleas'd. (PR I 80-85)

In view of the complexity we have uncovered in the identification of this pair of symbols, it is surely appropriate that Satan should say he doesn't understand it.

Université de Lausanne

Notes

1. Strictly speaking the analogy is between divine and poetic creation, a commonplace of Western philosophy, though a trifle risky for a Protestant, as Riggs capably shows.

2. Citations of Paradise Lost are from Roy Flannagan's recent edition in The Riverside Milton.

3. The dove is identified in Milton's De Doctrina Christiana with "the actual person of the Holy Spirit, or its symbol," 6, 285, and this in spite of Milton's anti-Trinitarian contention a few pages later at 6.295 that the Holy Spirit is never invoked in the Bible. He becomes "A perfect Dove" in Paradise Regained 1.83, on which see below. Matthew 3:16-17, Mark 1:10, Luke 3:22, and John 1:32-33 all record that the Holy Spirit descended at the baptism in the form of a dove. See also Piero della Francesca's depiction of The Baptism (1442), and El Greco's Baptism (1608), as Luxon suggests.

4. See Mollenkott, Hardison, and Hunter and Davies.

5. Where exactly he is first clearly an angel again, rather than the infernal serpent, is an open question. Line 125 identifies him as an apostate angel, but that may be his status not his appearance; he gets wings at 225 (but of course dragons have wings), he gets shoulders at 287, he walks at 295 and stands and calls at 300; his legions are angels at 301, and bad angels at 344; at 358 he is "their great commander," at 589 "their dread commander" and only with the introduction to the great sun simile at 591 is his "form" mentioned and he finally is seen as an archangel ruined (593).

6. The reference in Areopagitica is surely decisive (Flannagan 1007).

7. Adversus Haereses 5.19.1, 5/2: 250. For the translation see 5/1: 304-5.

8. The Greek has phronimoi, French rusé, the same word as in Genesis 2 for the cunning serpent, and akeraioi (unmixed) for the innocent doves, Latin simplices. Ignatius, Polycarp 2.2, seems to quote this saying, but generalized, no longer part of the disciples' mission (no wolves): "Be wise as the serpent in all things and innocent always as the dove."

9. It is possible that Irenaeus knew these words as an independent logion from the oral tradition (he revered his boyhood memories of Polycarp, and was probably a student of Justin Martyr). But in view of the similarity to the Matthew logion, commentators think Irenaeus has merely distorted the saying of Jesus in the direction of his burgeoning myth.

10. See Vawter, "Paul and Christian Apocalypse," and On Genesis: 39-45; Käsemann 418.

11. See Davies and Allison 2:180-1. The verse in Canticles is famous: it opposes the dove to the little foxes who spoil the vine.

12. Irenaeus's book, curiously enough, was first published by Erasmus in 1526, and indeed printed by that same Johannes Frobenius of Basel.

13. John 15.26. The subtitle of Charles Williams' classic The Descent of the Dove is A History of the Holy Spirit in the Church.

14. Augustine, De Haeresibus xvii, in Corpus Christianorum, vol xlvi, 297: Ophitae a colubro nominati sunt: coluber enim Graece ophis dicitur. Hunc autem Christum arbitrantur. Epiphanius, Panarion xxxviii (Book I, sections 1-4), also says the Ophites exalted the serpent by identifying him with Christ. Compare the Nag Hammadi version in Testi mony of Truth 47.4-49.9 in Robinson 411-12; and Stone 457. Jonas 93 says that "more than one Gnostic sect derived its name from the cult of the serpent ('Ophites' from the Gk. ophis; 'Naasenes' from the Heb. nahas--the group as a whole being termed 'ophitic')." Irenaeus, I 30. 7, says that, once Adam and Eve had eaten, "they knew the power from beyond and turned away from their creators" (ie the Demiurge, Ialdabaoth). See Forsyth 330-31. For Milton's general and favourable comment on heresy in Areopagitica, see Flannagan 1007.

15. The most common representation of a serpent in Renaissance art, according to Roberts 815-6, is not the Eden serpent but the "brazen serpent" that Moses fashions and "lifts up" in the wilderness (Numbers 21.4-9), although there was some overlap between the two. The story goes that as they wandered in the desert the Israelites railed against Moses and God who therefore "sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died." Recognizing their sin, the people begged Moses to pray for relief: "And the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live." So Moses made a serpent of brass, and it had the predicted effect. In the early modern period, this subject was used as a typological reference to Christ on the cross, who had himself declared, "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life" (John 3.14-15). In a fifteenth century woodcut, the brazen serpent flanks the crucifixion, while a sixteenth century German gold thaler has the crucifixion on one side and the serpent entwined about a tree-cross on the other. Michelangelo's fresco in the Sistine Chapel influenced Maerten van Heemskerck's 1549 painting of the subject (to be seen in the Princeton Museum). There are versions by Cranach, in paintings called The Allegory of Law and Grace (1529-39), and by Van Dyck (1620), as well as the well-known Rubens in the Courtauld (1609-10). Both sides of the Reformation controversy made use of the brazen serpent story. Catholics saw it as proof of the legitimacy of image-making, and Pope Leo X compared Lutherans to fiery serpents poi soning Christians with their doctrines. Luther, however, used it as a metaphor for justification by faith, distinguishing symbolic revelation from idolatry. By choosing an image of the same object that afflicted the people, God shows that the object itself could not possibly be the source of the healing power: only faith in God's word will heal. "Genesis, therefore, is made up almost entirely of illustrations of faith and unbelief, and the fruits that faith and unbelief bear. It is an exceedingly evangelical book" (25.237). In his commentary on Genesis 3.23-24 (1.170), Luther discusses the tree of life and the brazen serpent, and expands in the "Excursus on Allegory" (1.368), as well as in his commentary on John (22.205). See Christopher 137; Roberts 816. The ambivalence of the serpent, in these controversies both poisoner and sign of faith, could not be more clearly demonstrated.

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