The Long Spoon
What motivates the
devil? That is the question I found myself asking as I spent New Years
watching the Sci-Fi Channel’s semi-annual Twilight Zone marathon (as
I always do!). There are several episodes which pick up the traditional (but
never tired) mytheme of the devil’s bargain. To me it is obvious that
the basic feature of human moral existence that the myth enshrines is the
constant danger to sell out, to sacrifice one’s integrity, trading it for
some unworthy but attractive good which one cannot obtain in a legitimate
manner or with a clear conscience. One does it anyway only to discover
(sooner or later, and provided one is not too far gone) that, if one has
indeed gained the whole world, one has lost one’s… soul or self or life, all
three being good translations of the Greek psuche (Mark 8:36). To me,
the key is that the word can easily, naturally mean “self,” because this
gives us the “cash value” (as William James used to say) of the term soul,
and of selling it. It is no ectoplasmic spook but rather one’s integrity.
That exists. That may be sold. And it is sold when one violates one’s own
code in order to gain some tempting end. Stephen Vincent Benet’s character
Jabez Stone in “The Devil and Daniel Webster” makes his point beautifully:
Stone was not a bad man until a compromise (=a deal with Satan) made him
one, by exposing him to moral corruptions newly available to him along with
success.
Why would a devil want you to do that? Of
course, the devil is but the narrative personification of the tempting
object itself: “Come on, big boy!” There need be no seducer; seduction is
enough by itself, the seduction radiated by the seductive option. And it has
no selfhood, no motivation, no subjective existence, unlike us. Here is
where the myth wears thin. Picture the various devils of literature and
folklore, of TV and cinema. Why should they be interested in swindling your
soul from you? What benefit do they gain? And where did they gain the
omnipotent control of reality that enables them to grant every wish,
including immortality and world domination, to their hapless clients?
First, they would seem to have nothing to
gain. What joy can it give them to see a mortal roasting in hell? Ancient
legends of Lucifer’s fall ascribe to him and his servants the desire to
demonstrate to the Creator that Lucifer was right when he refused to bow
before the newly-created flesh-puppet Adam (Hebrews 1:6). Henceforth, their
palace revolution having failed, the rebellious demons are trying to
vindicate their ancient actions by proving to God how worthless are his
mud-sculpted-creatures. “See? Told you they were unworthy!”) But
hasn’t that lesson been taught quite sufficiently by now? If one wishes to
imagine devils as real persons, this motivation makes them the biggest
neurotics of all. Haven’t they got anything better to do?
C.S. Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters,
pictures the devils as devouring the souls of the damned and presumably
deriving nourishment from them, but that hardly comports with the damned
undergoing conscious torment in hell’s torture chambers. It’s you who suffer
heartburn, not the food you ate.
Second, no devil could be as powerful as
God, granting the very world, changing the past, etc. Or, let me put it this
way: if you believe in such a powerful devil, you are a Manichean, one who
believes there are two co-equal powers of good and evil, light and darkness.
They are engaged in a genuine conflict, theoretically an open-ended one.
Third, the very idea of risking one’s
soul in a deal with Satan—you mean, such a person would probably have
deserved to go to heaven otherwise? Think of the spiteful, hate-spewing,
totally self-absorbed Walter Bedeker on the Twilight Zone. He is a
spoiled hypochondriac to whom the devil appears waving a contract that will
guarantee him, like Superman’s ancient foe Vandal Savage, both immortality
and invulnerability. Or take William Feathersmith, the fat old business man
with the bad bald wig whom devilish Julie Newmar persuades to part with his
soul for a trip back into his past. This merciless creep had been cruel and
contemptuous with his underlings, whom he would as soon fire as look at. You
mean these gents would have been headed for heaven if they hadn’t made a
deal with Satan? Madman cartoon evangelist Jack Chick had a rare moment of
clarity when he was writing his terrific cartoon booklet The Contract
in which a man goes through the standard “deal with the devil” drill and
winds up terrified on his deathbed. His cousin informs him he has been
deceived. The truth is not that you are okay until and unless you sell your
soul to Satan, but rather that you automatically belong to him until and
unless you make a “transaction” with Christ to believe in him for salvation.
Good point, given the larger religious context of devil’s bargain stories,
which inhabit the world of Christian theology as surely as Vampire stories
do: you have to “get saved,” not “get unsaved.” So what is the point of a
deal with the devil?
Does the devil’s bargain story imply
Universalism? That is, the doctrine that Jesus Christ died for everyone and
it worked? On that reading, these stories would depict acts of apostasy, a
special step taken to remove oneself again from the sphere of salvation
after Christ had taken considerable trouble to get you there (Hebrews
6:4-8). But that seems to be too much back-story. Nothing like that is ever
hinted in these tales. Rather, what they seem to presuppose is a naively
optimistic view of salvation by works: you may be a sinner, buddy, but
you’ve got to do something really bad to persuade God to send you to
hell. But not even that works, because there is nothing in these stories
about God’s judgment! You are making a deal with Satan. God is totally
extraneous to the proceedings!
And this makes me wonder if possibly, as
a piece of folklore, the devil’s bargain stories grew out of popular heresy
long ago, perhaps popular (and it was very popular) Marcionism. In this type
of Christianity, there were two Gods. The Creator who gave the Torah to his
chosen people by Moses was the Hebrew God, righteous but unforgiving. The
Father of Jesus Christ was an alien God who judged no one, because he was
all Love and had given no Law. This God sent his Son Jesus to issue an offer
to the creatures of the Old Testament God to jump ship, abandon Jehovah, and
swim over to his side. Hence all the “adoption” language in the Pauline
Epistles: Christians would be adopted children, not natural children,
because the Father of Jesus Christ had not created anyone. Well, it was easy
for both types of Christians, Catholics (forbears of all of today’s
churches) and Marcionites, to vilify the God the other faction believed in.
We know the Marcionite Apelles, for example, identified the Jewish and
Catholic deity as Satan. For Catholics, this dubious “second God” of the
Marcionites must seem to be a Satanic counterfeit, hence presumably Satan
himself. Thus any bargain one made with him to join his side was to opt out
of the salvation one had previously enjoyed as an orthodox Christian and to
plunge into eternal peril. That the entity with whom you would be dealing
was originally the Marcionite deity explains why the deal-making devil is
henceforth imagined to be practically all-powerful: he was, since he started
out as God, not as some crummy fallen angel.
There’s our pattern: you start out in the
clear—because as a Catholic you were baptized as an infant. And then you
make a bargain whereby your soul goes over to a new owner. You think you are
making a good bargain: Marcionite salvation. But in fact you are handing
your soul over to a counterfeit God, namely Satan.
So that would be my guess as to the
(forgotten) origin of the mytheme. But the evaluation? I’ve already said it
is a powerful and important metaphor for squandering your integrity through
moral compromise. The real danger is not getting dropped down the chute into
a lake of flames. That’s not going to happen. The danger is making peace
with the moral violations you have committed, learning to get along with
them and with the creep who made them (you). Moral frostbite has set in, and
you are no longer the man or woman you once were. You have forfeited your
life, your integrity, your soul.
So says Zarathustra.
