Christian's Corner: You Saucy Devil

Faust. According to the legend, Faust was a 16th century German alchemist who sold his soul to the devil. Exactly what made him sell it is somewhat disputed, and there are several versions. In some, Faust wants to penetrate the mysterious laws of the universe. In others, he is unsatisfied with scientific knowledge and desires a deeper, religious knowledge. In still others, he yearns for love. In all, however, Faust finds what the devil has to offer simply irresistible.

If you look up "soul" or "my human soul" or "selling souls" on eBay, you will find several entries. Most souls go for somewhere between $1 and $5. And for that you can purchase your own slave soul who will haunt for you and perform other useful duties. That seems to me to be a bargain, but admittedly it would be difficult to check whether the soul is actually in the mason jar that comes in the mail. I am not sure whether I should be surprised by this practice of selling souls (since you can also find cheese sandwiches and jelly beans with images of Jesus for sale) or worried (since it doesn't seem conducive to human flourishing that we have a place where human souls can be bought and sold).

But perhaps the fact that souls are traded on eBay makes it too easy to think that souls aren't traded elsewhere. The very existence of eBay, and Disneyland for that matter, makes it too easy to think that the rest of our world is not in the grips of market capitalism and entertainment. They are places that we can visit while surfing on the web or while on vacation, but while elsewhere we are by virtue of our location outside their grasp. But "are we making money?" and "are we having fun?" seem to be the two questions around which our world irresistibly orbits. (I should briefly say, for sake of clarification, that there is nothing inherently wrong with making money or having fun. I try to do both. The trouble comes when all other matters drop out of sight).

If we were to read the legend of Faust not on the personal level but instead as a critical commentary on the effects of the Enlightenment and modern technological society, then its message is quite clear. Humankind is in danger of selling its soul to the devil in order to get unimaginable wealth and power with no "God" in its way to place any boundaries on what to think or how to act. Worse, the language of God is even co-opted and used to legitimate that sometimes coercive, sometimes violent, but always demonic grasping after wealth and power. (Here it is useful to believe in the trinity: because we know that Jesus was not like that, we also know that God is not like that).

Reading it this way, I fear that the legend of Faust is no legend at all. I fear that it is descriptive of the world in which we live. (Certainly it seems characteristic of America's foreign policy, which is little more than the heady rush, with its accompanying hangover, of what Augustine called "libido dominandi" or the desire to dominate.) And if that is so, then EMU is not immune to the pressures of that "Faustian" world but must negotiate its way within it. And for this task I prefer to follow the markings on the map provided by Goethe's Faust because Goethe posits the possibility of repentance in the as-of-yet-unwritten third act. And this is perhaps nearer the truth of our situation. Perhaps we never had a soul to lose, for it is long since gone. What we have, instead, is a soul to gain through repentance.