In Gregory the Great's Dialogues, there is a story of a nun who ate a lettuce from a garden, but who forgot to make the sign of the cross over it before she did so. As a result she was seized by the devil. The abbot Equitus was called to pray over her, but when the holy man appeared, the devil, sitting on the nun's tongue, started to complain: ‘What have I done? What have I done? I was sitting on the lettuce, and she came and ate me.’Footnote 1 In spite of the devil's protest that he did not, in fact, do anything, the abbot commanded him to leave the woman; this he immediately did.
This story is frequently chosen by historians to illustrate the comical, trivial or innocuous nature of the devil in the Dialogues.Footnote 2 Its devil has been called an imp,Footnote 3 a buffoonFootnote 4 and a goblin,Footnote 5 whilst the devil's speech has been described as ‘whimpering’Footnote 6 and ‘almost childish’ in tone.Footnote 7 The tale of the nun and lettuce is often called naïve or interpreted as evidence of Gregory's superstition.Footnote 8 In the most extreme interpretation of this tenor, the supposed ‘ludicrous’ nature of the story is cited as part of the ostensible evidence for the Dialogues’ non-Gregorian origin.Footnote 9 In answer to the devil's question ‘What have I done? What have I done?’, historians appear to have been almost unanimous in their answer: not much.
These interpretations are part of a larger phenomenon. The Dialogues were long viewed as ‘the joker in Gregory's pack’ and seen as different to his other works;Footnote 10 even now the Dialogues tend to be studied separately from Gregory's other writings.Footnote 11 It was more than a century ago that Dudden described the devil in the Dialogues as ‘a spirit of petty malice, more irritating than awful, playing all manner of mischievous pranks’,Footnote 12 arguing that he is ‘comparatively innocuous’ and not the ‘portentous power of darkness’ that he is in the Moralia.Footnote 13 At a similar time, Harnack argued that in his doctrine of angels in the Dialogues Gregory sanctioned the ‘most inferior’ parts of Graeco-Roman culture.Footnote 14 Since then Peter Brown's seminal Cult of the saints has transformed the study of early medieval saints’ cults, and the kind of judgements that plagued earlier research are no longer as pervasive as they once were.Footnote 15 However, the story of the nun and lettuce has proved remarkably resistant to reinterpretation, and the vocabulary used to discuss this tale and the devil within it has barely changed since the first decade of the twentieth century. Discussions of this story – the example par excellence (it would seem) of the Dialogues’ mischievous devil – continue to circle the concepts of naïveté, triviality and humour which were set down as relevant to this story more than a century ago. Indeed, the acceptance of these older interpretations is so pervasive that it is quicker to note works which have begun to unpick the nature of this story than to list those which have not.Footnote 16
Dudden's interpretation is sometimes explicitly accepted in works that are otherwise extremely perceptive and hard to fault:
The devil may be the terrible enemy, but he is also the trickster of the Dialogues, the forerunner, as F. Homes Dudden observes, of the comical medieval devil who flung a stone at Dominic and got splattered by Luther's ink. The devil's games can be humorous: he teases Benedict by calling him ‘Maledict’…The devil taunts man and plays impish tricks on him, and sometimes man seems more than his match.Footnote 17
Agreement with the idea that such stories are naïve, trivial or comical tends to be more subtle, however, and is usually betrayed by the (perhaps unthinking) use of a particular – and rather predictable – vocabulary. Thus the spirit of Dudden's interpretation is discernable in the odd, throwaway remark, such as in the fleeting sentence dismissing the tale as ‘naïve’Footnote 18 or in the passing reference to the devil's role in ‘trivial anecdotes’.Footnote 19 Now that older criticisms of saints’ Lives have been eradicated (or at least blunted) by a greater appreciation of the genre, it is rare to find language as strong as that used by Francis Clark, who, referring to this tale and several others, argued that
In their fantastic and often ludicrous quality, and in their triviality and lack of serious moral purpose, the Dialogist's tales are not only religiously inferior but different in kind. They are alien from the gravity, reverence and pastoral wisdom of St Gregory himself, who writes at a higher level of spiritual and moral sensitivity which the Dialogist cannot match. Justly may they be called sub-Christian.Footnote 20
Whilst the kind of assumptions underlying Clark's argument would not be accepted by most scholars, some of his interpretations – such as that regarding triviality – are not radically dissimilar from those which view this story's devil as somewhat underwhelming. When it comes to this story, differences in interpretation have tended to be of degree, and not of type.
However, when re-read through the lens of Gregory's exegesis and his ideas about language and sin, it emerges that far from being innocent, it is the devil's manipulation of language and appearance of harmlessness that make him dangerous. This raises interesting questions as to why scholars have been so ready to take the devil at his word.
Gregory's exegesis of the serpent's deception of Eve in Genesis iii provides the key to understanding this story. Gregory's hagiography was informed by his work as an exegete, and that he interpreted at least some saints’ Lives in accordance with the exegesis of similar biblical stories is in little doubt.Footnote 21 In the Dialogues Gregory interpreted saints’ Lives which had similarities to biblical stories in accordance with his (or patristic) exegesis of the biblical stories which they echoed: thus in a Dialogues’ story which possessed several points of similarity with Christ's expulsion of the devil into a herd of pigs, Gregory's interpretation was strikingly similar to his own and patristic exegesis of Matthew viii.31.Footnote 22
It is fair to assume that this principle – that traditional exegesis should guide the interpretation of saints’ Lives that are similar to Scripture – applied to the story of the nun and the lettuce. This story parallels Genesis iii: the garden is an allusion to paradise; the lettuce is a reference to the forbidden fruit; and the devil's excuses are reminiscent of those of Adam and Eve. The existence of this parallel has been noted but its significance remains unappreciated:Footnote 23 as this story echoes Genesis iii, it is above all Gregory's exegesis of Genesis iii that should guide its interpretation.
It is in his exegesis of this passage that one finds Gregory's oft-quoted multi-stage method of temptation in which the actions of the serpent, Adam and Eve provided the archetype on which all subsequent acts of sin were modelled: ‘For in the heart it is committed by suggestion, pleasure, consent, and the boldness to defend. For the suggestion comes by means of the enemy; pleasure, through the flesh; consent through the spirit, and the boldness to defend, through pride.’Footnote 24 Genesis iii therefore provided Gregory with the model in which self-justification was the final stage in any act of sin, and the scriptural story that the tale of the nun parodies is therefore the very one which contains the set-piece for all human wrongdoing in which sin is completed by a verbal act of self-justification. Variations of this model can be found in Gregory's letters, homilies and in the Moralia, and it was not a passing idea but one which directed Gregory's thinking across a long period of time.Footnote 25 Re-reading the Dialogues story through the lens of patristic and Gregorian understanding of Genesis transforms the devil's words to Equitus into something rather more sinister than apolegetic whimpering.Footnote 26 Offering a defence in place of what should be a confession is a recapitulation of the first parents’ failure to confess and is also the culmination and completion of the devil's initial sinful act against the nun. The devil's words of self-defence should be regarded as an example of this fourth stage of sin, and the devil's words of feigned innocence do not exonerate him but condemn him further.
Furthermore, Gregory's exegesis of Genesis iii indicates that when the devil claimed that ‘She came and ate me’, he should not be taken at his word and understood as lacking guilt, but as compounding the guilt that he already possessed.Footnote 27 Just as Adam and Eve were not exonerated by their words but were condemned even further by them, so too is the devil when he implicates the nun. By each implicating the other, Adam and Eve increased their guilt;Footnote 28 likewise, sinners who deny their guilt increase it.Footnote 29 Thus, by attempting to implicate the nun, the devil's culpability was compounded. The use and position of ego in this passage was to make it clear that the devil was not claiming that no wrong had been done: he was merely, in the spirit of the first parents, emphasising that he was not at fault. The devil's use of ego (when commented upon at all) has usually been interpreted as reflective of the folkloric origin of the story or the result of the ‘everyday’ nature of the devil's speech.Footnote 30 However, such interpretations fail to realise that the devil's use of ego was intended to make a connection between the devil's words and those of Eve. Furthermore, any simplicity in the devil's speech ought to be considered a feigned simplicity: the devil was pretending to be harmless, just as he was pretending to be innocent.
Finally, the devil in this story is guilty because he had presumed to speak at all. God asked the first parents what they had done in order that they might confess, but he cursed the serpent immediately, saying that the serpent is not asked because his repentance is not sought.Footnote 31 Likewise, the saint in the Dialogues story does not ask the devil what he has done; the devil, however, presumes to ask this question of himself when he asks ‘What have I done? What have I done?’Footnote 32 Gregory argued that it is pride that motivates one to defend oneself, and the devil's presumption is therefore a recapitulation of Lucifer's attempt to rise above himself.Footnote 33
When this story is read in conjunction with Gregory's exegesis of Genesis iii, it is clear that the devil is neither a comic nor a trivial character. From Genesis iii Gregory drew the lessons that the devil was not given the opportunity to speak as he is not offered salvation; that Adam and Eve compounded their guilt by implicating another; and that the whole episode formed the multi-stage model of sin of which all subsequent ones were a recapitulation. All of the devil's words correspond with one of these lessons: first the devil reaches above his station by claiming for himself the right to speak; he then compounds his guilt by using this speech to implicate the nun; and he then completes his sin by not using this speech to confess his sin but instead uses it to offer excuses of self-justification. He was certainly not innocent.
The idea that the devil was a verbal deceiver had its roots in Genesis, where the serpent deceived Eve using language.Footnote 34 These verses had a profound influence on late antique perceptions of diabolical temptation:
Eloquence had played a key role in the temptation leading to the Fall. Eve had been seduced by the Serpent's crafty words and she in turn (the text hinted, and interpreters assumed) had imitated her tempter by similarly seducing Adam … On a more practical level, the Fall was the original scenario for verbal seduction, whether as practised by heretics urging their false doctrines on the faithful, or by men and women deceiving or manipulating each other.Footnote 35
The story of the nun, devil and lettuce – a parody of the fall of man – features a devil misusing language just as he had done in paradise. The devil is a false exegete who wilfully misrepresented his interactions with the nun just as he had deliberately repeated the command of God in misshapen form to Eve.
It would be a serious oversight to view the devil's words in this story as separate from Gregory's ideas about the devil, sin and language, even without these correspondences with Gregory's exegesis. Gregory was clear that the devil is a liar and the father of lies, in whom the truth cannot not be found.Footnote 36 The danger of speech was a central concern of his works. A significant part of his Pastoral care concerns the correct use of speech.Footnote 37 The Dialogues also abound with stories which emphasise the virtue of silence: in one such story, Gregory comments that if an unbaptised baby who cannot speak dies he will go to heaven, whereas one who can speak will not. The lesson is clear: it is the ability to speak that condemns the unbaptised child, as a baby who cannot speak cannot sin.Footnote 38 Given the devil's lying nature and Gregory's mistrust of speech, it is with an attitude of scepticism that Gregory would have expected his audience to approach the devil's words. The devil may not have succeeded in deceiving Equitus, but a not insignificant number of historians have been all too willing to take the devil at his word: thus the devil was not really doing anything; he is all a bit harmless really; perhaps he is even a bit funny. However, when viewed in the light of Gregory's exegesis, not only is the devil a liar and his speech dangerous, but in his abuse of language and manipulation of Scripture the devil does not excuse himself but descends even further into iniquity.
The devil's words to St Benedict in the second dialogue provide the second key to understanding this story. The Life of Benedict contains the only other example in the Dialogues of the devil speaking to a saint directly rather than via a person whom he has possessed. As in the first example, the devil uses this speech to protest that he is innocent;Footnote 39 and, also similarly, the devil's language in this story has been described as a ‘humorous’ game and a taunting pun.Footnote 40
This protest comes at the end of a series of conflicts between Benedict and the devil, which together illustrate the manner in which Gregory intended that diabolical speech should be understood. First, the devil attacked the bell which was in place to inform Benedict that food had been left for him. In his second attack, the devil appeared as a small black bird which circled Benedict's face. In the devil's third direct attack on Benedict, the saint was seized by an evil spirit which filled his mind with the image of a woman.
The devil's attacks therefore increased in sophistication and threat the more that Benedict overcame him: first he is not seen, then he is seen, and then he enters Benedict's mind. This is in agreement with Gregory's frequent refrain that the devil increases the severity of his attacks the more that he is defeated.Footnote 41 Indeed, it is for this reason that it has been correctly identified that the form of attack that the devil takes acts as a ‘gauge’ of the saint's holiness, indicating his stage in hagiogenesis.Footnote 42 In other words, you can tell how holy a saint is by the devil's form of attack.
After these attacks the devil appeared visibly before Benedict, and, inflamed by Benedict's silence, insulted him further:
First he [the devil] called Benedict by name. When the man of God did not respond, he [the devil] soon broke out insults against him. For when he shouted, he said: ‘Benedicte, Benedicte!’, and seeing him not replying, he immediately added ‘Maledicte, non Benedicte! What do you want with me? Why do you persecute me?’Footnote 43
Gregory described this attack as more violent than the previous ones, an attack that was neither hidden (‘occulte’) nor in a dream (‘per somnium’).Footnote 44 The devil's words were an escalation on the devil's visible appearance before Benedict with flaming eyes. Yet the devil's words are usually passed over in silence or their significance downplayed. The incident has been described as a humorous game and an example of the devil ‘teasing Benedict’;Footnote 45 again, these are not very different from older interpretations that the devil was ‘condescending to make a pun on the name of a saint’,Footnote 46 and neither are they dissimilar from interpretations of the devil's words in the story of the nun and lettuce. However, these interpretations do not do justice to the place of the incident within the sequence, the manner in which the devil is given a more distinct form in this attack, and, above all, Gregory's own words on the severity of it.
Far from being a ‘condescension’ or an example of ‘teasing’, this outburst was an extremely dangerous attack. In the Moralia, Gregory identified words as a means of diabolical attack: the devil attacks from the front with wounds and from the side with words.Footnote 47 Of the devil's attacks on Job, Gregory wrote ‘for he inflicted the words after the wounds’.Footnote 48 It is the same for Benedict: the devil only resorts to words once other attacks had failed. The devil's words form the culmination of the devil's series of attacks on Benedict and ought to be considered the most sophisticated and threatening.
The devil began by proclaiming Benedict (‘Benedicte, Benedicte’) and ended by cursing him in a pun on his name (‘Maledicte, non Benedicte’). The devil spoke these words because he could not bear Benedict's actions – his destruction of pagan temples – in silence.Footnote 49 In contrast, Benedict responded to the devil's insults with silence.Footnote 50 It was this silence that caused the devil to break forth in insults.Footnote 51 Thus the devil manipulated language in order to curse and lie, whilst the saint bore insults in patience and silence. Thus, on its simplest level, the devil represents vice (speech) whilst the saint represents virtue (silence). The devil's pun – a manipulation of language – exacerbated the sinfulness of his speech in contrast to the saint's silence.
The significance of the devil's words becomes most apparent when they are considered in light of Scripture. The question ‘why do you persecute me?’ that the devil asks of Benedict is identical to that which Christ asks of Saul.Footnote 52 In the Acts of the Apostles, Saul, a persecutor of Christians, was blinded by a light from Heaven on the road to Damascus. A voice called out to him, asking ‘Saule, Saule, quid me persequeris?’ After this Saul was converted, becoming known as Paul.
The phrase ‘quid me persequeris’ occurs five times in Gregory's corpus.Footnote 53 On four of these five occasions the phrase is placed in the mouth of Christ (quoting Acts): it is only this once that it is uttered by anyone other than Christ. Gregory was therefore aware that these words belonged to Christ (and it would be silly to think otherwise); his decision to place them in the devil's mouth should be considered deliberate. Just as Christ called out Saul's name twice (‘Saule, Saule’), so the devil calls out Benedict's name twice (‘Benedicite, Benedicite’). This repetition was included to make the connection with the conversion of Saul explicit. This is also the first time that Benedict sees the devil in his true form, just as in Acts it is the first time that Saul sees Christ. In Scripture Christ is surrounded by light whereas in the Dialogues the devil is engulfed by fire. The three biblical accounts of Saul's conversion are not entirely consistent, but whilst there is a contrast between what Saul and those around him see and hear, there is also a contrast in the Dialogues between what Benedict and those around him see and hear; finally, both stories feature the themes of persecution and conversion. It is therefore clear that this conflict between Benedict and the devil was modelled on the conversion of Saul.
This was not a ‘humorous game’ or mere ‘taunting’: it was a complex attack in which the devil used the weapon of language in an attempt to overthrow Benedict's allegiance to Christ. Benedict/Maledict is a parallel of Paul/Saul: Christ renames Saul, who converts from bad to good, and the devil renames Benedict, who (so the devil hoped) would convert from good to bad. In this inversion of Saul's conversion, the devil positioned himself as a persecuted innocent trying to make a disciple of his persecutor. Christ converted Saul by appearing in a blaze of light, crying ‘quid me persequeris’ and, later, renaming his enemy; the devil attempted to convert Benedict by appearing in a blaze of fire, crying ‘quid me persequeris’, and renaming his enemy. As with the story of the nun and lettuce, it is the devil's words that hold the key to the interpretation of the story: he is claiming that Benedict is cursed when he is not; he is claiming Christ's innocence as his own; and he is attempting to convert Benedict. Thus by his speech the devil is revealed to be a liar, a blasphemer and a recruiter who was trying to make Benedict truly Maledict.
The devil's cry of ‘Benedict, Benedict!’ and subsequent protests of innocence resemble the stories in the Synoptic Gospels in which demons proclaim Christ and then ask him what he wants with them.Footnote 54 This is a frequent topos in saints’ Lives and consequently it would be very easy to dismiss the devil's excuses – like those in the story of the nun and the lettuce – as mere hagiographic topoi. Certainly, this scriptural allusion would have been evident to the original audiences of the Dialogues. However, it should not be considered as either/or, as neither the connection with Acts nor that with Matthew is perfect, for the very simple reason that Gregory was intending that the devil bring about a garbled version of both stories. The devil is pretending to speak within the parameters allowed to him by Scripture whilst in fact presuming to utter the words of Christ; he is presenting himself as an Angel of Light whilst recapitulating the deliberate miscommunication of God's word that occurred in Eden. The ambition of the devil is always to confuse and deceive, and the purpose behind this mingling of two biblical stories (Matthew and Acts) is the re-enactment of a third: the devil's corruption of language in order to bring about the fall of humankind.
In his words to Eve, the serpent had spoken enough truth for his lie to sound like God's word.Footnote 55 The devil had pretended to utter the word of God, but by making an addition to God's command, all veracity in his repetition was lost.Footnote 56 Indeed, the devil pretends to be an angel of the light,Footnote 57 not lying outright, but poisoning truth with lie.Footnote 58 Gregory created an approximation of this type of deception by giving the devil's words to Benedict multiple resonances with Scripture. Thus, as the devil's speech confuses by evoking the words of both Christ and the devil, it is a re-enactment of the ‘archetypal seduction through language’Footnote 59 that one finds in Genesis.
Similarly, the devil's protests of innocence to both Equitus and Benedict resemble the ‘patched-together excuses’ that the first parents offered in explanation for their disobedience. Adam and Eve's clothing of themselves has been interpreted as the first parents taking ‘leaves’ from Scripture and using them as ‘coverings’ for their sin;Footnote 60 likewise, the devil quotes from Scripture (either directly or in sentiment) in order to defend himself. In his words to Equitus, the devil claimed for himself the right to answer God (or the saint) that was denied to him in Eden, thus placing himself in the more elevated position of humanity; in his words to Benedict, he claimed for himself the innocence of Christ, thus claiming that he is God himself. In both his protests of innocence, therefore, the devil is not only patching together excuses from Scripture, but also re-enacting Lucifer's attempt to be greater than he is.
The devil's words to Benedict and the sequence leading up to them demonstrate that speech is one of the most powerful weapons in the devil's arsenal. When the story of the nun and lettuce is viewed in light of this second story, the devil's words to Equitus are revealed as an attack and not just an excuse. As the devil's form of attack acts as a ‘gauge’ of holiness, the devil's attack on the nun for eating the lettuce is analogous to the devil's attack on Benedict's attempt to control his appetite, whilst his words to St Equitus are equivalent to his words to St Benedict. It is in light of this that the devil's words of ‘What have I done? What have I done?’ should be understood: they are a diabolical attack of the most grave kind. The devil is a false exegete whose interpretation of events cannot be trusted: his suggestion that he was a passive participant in either of these stories should not be given any credence.
How, therefore, should the devil's attack on the nun be understood? It is Gregory's words and not the devil's that provide an answer. In the third dialogue Gregory used the dialogue form to provide explanations for many of his stories. One such story concerned a priest called Stephen who, struggling to untie his boots, called out to his servant ‘Come, devil, untie my boots!’Footnote 61 Suddenly, his boots began to untie themselves, and he realised that it was the devil who was untying them. Terrified, Stephen ordered him to leave, saying that he had been speaking to his servant; the devil left him.Footnote 62
This story is similar to that of the nun and lettuce in its ostensible triviality and the two are often discussed together: the devil is not, it has been said, presented in all the tales as as harmless as he is in these.Footnote 63 These are also the two – and only two – stories singled out from the Dialogues during a discussion of early medieval humour.Footnote 64 If the story of the nun and lettuce contains the example par excellence of Gregory's harmless devil, the story of Stephen and his laces comes a close second.
This story is contained on either side by dialogue between the two characters. Immediately prior to the story, Gregory said that the devil always watches for anything in our thoughts (‘cogitatio’), words (‘locutio’) or deeds (‘opera’) in case he should find anything with which to accuse us before God.Footnote 65 He is also always standing nearby ready to deceive us.Footnote 66 Immediately after the story Peter replies that it is very laborious to stand continually as though in battle.Footnote 67 The lesson of this story was not, therefore, that the devil is harmless, but that the devil is always present and ready to attack at any opportunity. The devil had been lying in wait for Stephen, and it was a careless couple of words – ‘Come, devil’ – that gave the devil the opportunity to approach him. Gregory frequently warned – particularly in his letters – that sin could make a person or the Church vulnerable to the devil by creating a hole (‘foramen’), entrance (‘aditus’) or place (‘locum’) through which he could enter;Footnote 68 and in his words to Peter in the Dialogues, Gregory indicated that the devil is always waiting for us to make a mistake in thought, word or deed.
This modus operandi can also be found in the story of the nun and lettuce. The devil's first sentence – ‘I was sitting on the lettuce’ – indicates that the devil was lurking (with intent) near the nun and corresponds with Gregory's constant reiterations that the devil is a prowling lion.Footnote 69 The devil's second sentence – ‘She came and ate me’ – reveals the circumstances that allowed the devil to enter the nun: her greedy consumption of the lettuce without the sign of the cross. Reading these two stories in light of Gregory's exegesis, homilies and letters demonstrates that they are hagiographic manifestations of the moral found across Gregory's corpus that one must exercise constant vigilance against a very cunning devil.
Peter Brown spoke of the period between Augustine and Gregory as one in which there was ‘a new interest in the peccata levia, in the “sinfulness of everyday life”’.Footnote 70 This idea can be seen alongside Robert Markus’ argument for an ‘ascetic invasion’ in which the secular was enveloped by the sacred, and ascetic values were increasingly adopted in the towns and cities.Footnote 71 Markus ended his work with the observation that ‘The massive secularity of John Chrysostom's and of Augustine's world had drained out of Gregory's. There was little room for the secular in it. The devil was close, always ready to swallow up the world and the flesh.’Footnote 72
The stories of the nun and the priest support these arguments insofar as they are themselves arguments that ascetic values need to be adhered to at all times and by everyone: the devil lies in wait for all, not just those in the desert; and hell is the destination for those guilty not only of crimina, but also those who have indulged in an angry word here or greedy bite there. The observation that the tale of the priest's laces is an example of ‘something ordinary observed – only the ordinary has gone sour’Footnote 73 is accurate. The ordinary has become sour because it is now judged as severely as one would judge a monk in the desert, and is found to be wanting. The devil in these stories is neither harmless nor comic, but extremely dangerous and terrifying, and is given an entrance by what may appear to be the slightest sins. If one were to answer the devil's question ‘What have I done? What have I done?’ – a question on which the original audience may have been meant to reflectFootnote 74 – the answer would certainly not be ‘nothing’.
Scholarship on the Dialogues was for a long time dictated by the perception that the work differed from and was somewhat inferior to Gregory's other writings. There was surprise that the author of the Moralia could also be the author of the Dialogues, and this led some to question whether Gregory believed the stories that he wrote or if something else was at play.Footnote 75 Whilst many of these questions are now considered irrelevant, scholarship on the Dialogues has not progressed in a linear fashion but has continued to return to older questions even whilst new discoveries have been made. Thus in 2003 John Moorhead believed it necessary to argue that the Dialogues should be understood within the context of early medieval hagiography, even though several commendable works had already done just that.Footnote 76 This haphazard progress is in part due to the distorting effect of Francis Clark's arguments on the scholarship; it is also the result of the vast number of works written on Gregory and the varied genres in which he wrote.Footnote 77
However, the manner in which the story of the nun and the lettuce continues to be interpreted suggests that there may be an additional explanation for the Dialogues’ complicated and somewhat anomalous historiography. The story is in many ways the epitome of all that was once seen as different or problematic about the Dialogues: whilst the Dialogues are no longer dismissed as the ‘joker in Gregory's pack’, their devil continues to be seen as humorous or comical; and whilst the Dialogues are now rarely criticised as naïve, retellings of this story continue to attract this particular adjective. This story is rarely met with the ridicule of a century ago, but as was the case then, some modern reactions may say more about modern sensibilities than Gregory's own understanding of the devil in everyday life. The recurrent portrayal of the devil as an underwhelming figure may point to the low-key, perhaps unconscious endurance of the kinds of assumptions about the devil and the miraculous that led to the Dialogues being viewed as different and problematic in the first place: this lack of a complete sea-change in approaches to medieval saints’ Lives may in turn explain the Dialogues’ tortuous historiography. Gregory's story presents a world-view very far removed from that of many people in the modern day, and, as a monk and exegete, his most natural reaction would have been to understand it using the tools of Scripture and exegesis; yet it could be said that it is the devil's interpretation – that the devil was not really doing anything – that fits most easily with modern sensibilities. As the Dialogues are frequently studied separately from Gregory's other writings, there has been little to counter this under-appreciation of the influence of Scripture and exegesis on this story.Footnote 78
Interpretations of this story have for too long circled the concepts of humour, harmlessness and naïveté, whereas instead the story should be read in conjunction with Gregory's exegesis of Genesis iii and his warnings regarding the dangers of diabolical speech. The story is a lesson on sin, language and the ubiquity of the devil in which the devil is extremely dangerous and the story is not trivial but profoundly disturbing. John Moorhead has argued that we should take the Dialogues seriously: in order to do this, we must also take the devil seriously.
