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One of the oldest and most oft-used archetypes in western story-telling is that of the Faustian bargain. A deal with the devil, in which one offers up their soul as payment for something they desire deeply.

It started as a German folk tale about a Dr. Faustus, whom the villagers believed had sold his soul for eternal, or at the very least, renewed youth. In most versions of the story, Faust falls in love with a beautiful woman but knows that she will never return his affections because he is old and ugly. After calling out to God several times to no avail, in desperation Faust calls out to the devil, and much to his surprise, Mephistopheles appears before him and offers him all that he wishes for: the beauty of youth restored to him, and will even aid him in seducing the beautiful woman. And there is only one catch: when Faust dies, Mephistopheles will take his soul to hell for eternity. But with his youth restored, that's a lifetime away, and seems like such a small price to pay to live a life he has always wanted.

Of course, everything is dandy for a while, but it all goes to hell in the end (pun intended). Exactly how our Faustian anti-hero meets his demise varies from version to version, but as they say, the devil always gets his due.

There have been many re-tellings of this basic formula throughout the years. Works of poetry and fiction called Dr. Faustus by, among others, Goethe, Christopher Marlowe, and Thomas Mann, as well as works such as The Devil and Tom Walker by Washington Irving and The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Plays, operas, ballets, films, even puppet shows...any form of story-telling media you can imagine has dipped into the Faustian archetype at least once, probably much more than once.

So why is this such a popular theme? It's because it's something that most human beings can relate to. The idea of instant gratification given in exchange for a price that's collection date is a lifetime away. It's easy to brush off thoughts of souls and hell and eternity when they are mere concepts, and what's being offered to you is real, material, and tangible to you right then, and right there. As for the devil getting your soul...well, you have a whole lifetime to find a loophole, there's no need to worry about that now. You have the life you've always dreamed of to start living and enjoying right in the here and now!

But the question I'd like to pose to you is a little less direct, and a little more realistic. Of course it seems silly not to take the devil seriously when the Prince of Darkness is standing right in front of you. To me, at least, that would make hell and eternity feel real enough not to literally sign away my soul, but as we know, evil comes in many guises. Now, whether or not this "evil" is literally the devil is something I'll let you decide, but mankind is also capable of creating evils of its own making.

So when I say "sell you soul," I'm not necessarily asking you what it would take for you to literally sign away your soul to a literal Satan. I mean what would it take for you to do something that goes so against what you believe in that doing so would make your stomach churn. Is there anything that would make you able to justify doing something like that?

I realise that's vague, so I'll throw out some examples.

Let's say that you're a pharmaceutical chemist, and quite a brilliant one at that. A company offers you a job that will allow you to further your research beyond your wildest dreams. With the money and equipment and manpower and freedom that this company would give you, there is no doubt in your mind that you could cure cancer, develop a vaccination and a cure for HIV and AIDS...the things this job would allow you to do could allow you to make lethal disease a thing of the past. But here's the catch: this company deals in black market human trafficking to procure human test subjects. These people they kidnap have no consented to be part of any medical trials, and they're treated no better than lab rats. Most of them will not survive the experiments they're used in, and the ones that do are executed so they be autopsied to learn more about why they responded to any given experimental treatment. You would be required to not just work for a company that does these things, but to play an active role in these atrocities, all in the name of making the future better for humanity as a whole. Would you take the job?

Let's throw in a little twist to the above scenario: let's say that the person you love most in the world, whether that be your spouse, your parent, your sibling, your child, your best friend, whatever. This person is suffering from a terminal disease and only has a few months to live. If you accept this job and have access to all the resources that come with it, you're confident that you could cure your loved one. Would that have any effect on your decision?

Here's another scenario: You are a single parent. Single mum, single dad, doesn't really matter. Let's say that you were wrongfully accused of a terrible crime, and your trial got a great deal of press coverage. Even though you were found not to be guilty of this crime, everyone knows who you are, and while you were not convicted in a court of law, you've been condemned in the court of public opinion. As a result, it's impossible for you to find a job. You're broke, if you don't pay your rent soon you and your family will be out on the street, your children are starving. You have no friends or family who could help you. For a while you were able to get by with selling anything of value that you owned, but that's all gone now. What would you do? Would you resort to theft, be it food, money, or valuables? Would you prostitute yourself? How far would you go?



Now, it's always easy to say that you wouldn't compromise your integrity when you're not facing a desperate situation that has a solution, no matter how high the price. We all have loved ones, we all have goals and dreams and things we've wanted to badly we could taste it. How far would you go to to save someone you love? What price is too high for you to turn your back on the opportunity to do something extraordinary?

They say that everyone has a price. What's yours?

Ha, I posted this right before running out the door to play pit for the closing night of a production of the Gounod opera Faust. Which is epic.

In case there's someone here who hasn't picked up on this yet, my discussion topics are almost always closely related to something going on in my real life. Real life gives me way more interesting things to talk about than anything I could just make up on the spot. Not really sure what that says about my life. Or my imagination, for that matter.

My answer is basically the same as yours. If Satan literally popped up from my sofa cushions, unfurled some long contract with lots of small print, and told me to sign my name in blood on the dotted line, I don't think I'd be buying.

But the people I love are my biggest moral weakness without a doubt, and I would gladly sacrifice everything that I have, am, will be, or believe in to save them. I know that according to Christian theology, that is a character flaw. We're supposed to love God above all else, and if we sin to save someone else, we hurt God. I'm under no delusions that committing a sin to save another human being is some sort of "get out of hell free" card, or makes one's actions any less sinful in the eyes of God (although I suppose it's possible that God would see it that way; there's just no evidence I can think of that would support that theory). I just couldn't live with myself, either in this world or the next, if someone I loved was harmed or died and I sat idly by when there was something I could have done to save them. I'd accept any and all repercussions for my actions, in life or in the afterlife. I'm not looking to be a hero and reap the rewards of acting in a heroic fashion. But whenever someone I care for is suffering, I always wish that I could shoulder their burdens for them, so if presented with an opportunity to literally do just that, I don't think I could turn it down, regardless of the cost to me personally.

This one is actually really interesting, because I've had a situation, actually a very lengthy series of situations, where I was offered what seemed to me a grand deal, in exchange for the corrupting of my soul (more literally, sexual sin). I found that Satan paints a pretty picture, but it's only pretty from far away. Closer up it smells terrible, so how pretty it looks becomes quite irrelevant.
All that extended analogy to say that my forays into sin have at least taught me that, should I stumble into deals with the Devil again, I know that they will turn out much worse than I was deceived into thinking. But, I would say, from my own experience, we don't often have the luxury of a full deal presented to us. Satan instead tries to suck us in with little compromises, things we would be able to explain away, albeit with some effort. Then the pot gets less sweet as the consequences start to heap up, but at that point it's "too late," and the further temptation is to just accept all of it, because God would never take us back anyway (so we think).
To answer your more direct question about the medical scenario, the Holy Spirit within me would immediately reject that proposition, knowing it to be false. However, I know that, should I subject myself to enough coaxing, I might try to go along with the plan, only to regret it later, much like that doctor lady in V For Vendetta. On the flip side, I think if I found myself giving in to the demands, and had my senses about me, I would try to get away at that point, and make recompense for what damage I had caused so far.

It reminds me of Les Mis, where Jean Valjean (or however you spell it) stole some bread for his niece, and was thrown in prison for 19 years. He technically did break the law. But morally, he didn't exactly do wrong, because he was saving his sister and niece's lives, and he didn't hurt anyone. The world definitely isn't "black and white" like many people seem to believe, and this is one of those examples. Because 24601 stole the bread, he is seen as a villain for the rest of his life (in the eyes of policemen anyway). I think I'd do the same, break the law if it meant saving someone's life, when it came to food and homelessness and stuff. But it's also hard to know what I'd really do until I was put in that type of situation. I don't know how far I'd go though, like I would never put someone's life in danger by making them test subjects or experimenting on them, because I think each person's lives are valuable. However, if I were a scientist (like Dr. Frankenstein type of scientist) and lost a loved one, I would be tempted to experiment on that body to bring them back...but does this last one even count as a "high price" since it's just a lifeless body? But I guess that would be us not accepting them as dead and trying to bring them back from heaven/hell and pretty much playing God.

Technically, Valjean was sentenced to five years for stealing the bread, but because he kept trying to escape, he had more years tacked on to his sentence. (I'm actually named after a character from Les Miserables, so....yeah).

I actually have stolen food because I was broke and starving. It's regrettable that I found myself in such a desperate situation, of course, but when you haven't eaten in a week and you have no money...what else can you really be expected to do? It's generally easy to stick to a rigid moral code when you're not facing any sort of extreme crisis, but desperate people do desperate things, things they normally wouldn't even consider doing, things they know full well are wrong.

I think that my ability to have a clear eternal perspective is because my church (LDS) believes and teaches about the after life in much more clear terms than most Christian denominations. And my ability to value my concept of eternity so much higher than my concept of mortality is largely because of the precise nature of what my church teaches about the eternities. For example, we believe that families can be sealed for eternity, so I know that even if a loved member of my family dies, I will be able to be together wit him or her again in the afterlife. If I sell away my soul, so to speak, breaking the commandments so that I can cure their cancer or something, I am knowingly leading my life in such a way that I will not be able to reach the highest degree of heaven where I can live with my heavenly father and the rest of my family for eternity. So in light of my beliefs it comes down to extending my time with my loved ones for a few decades at the most, versus living my life in such a way that I can be with them for eternity. To me the choice is easy.

Which movie version? There have been several over the years, in addition to one or two television adaptations, as well as a musical. Wasn't there a film that came out fairly recently? I haven't seen that. I've only seen the 1958 film by Jean-Paul Le Chanois and the 1998 film with Liam Neeson and Geoffrey Rush. I've also seen a couple productions of the musical and played pit for two productions.

The novel is...long. Long and extremely tedious.

The world most certainly is not black and white, although I'm not sure if I agree that most people perceive it as such. In my experience, most people seem to recognise moral shades of grey. The ones who don't generally seem to be very young and/or very sheltered.

I struggled financially for the first few years of university. Especially the first year. It just took a little time and some trial-and-error for me to figure out how to take care of myself. My family cut me off completely several weeks before I left for university, so I basically went from having everything I could ever need or want to having almost nothing over night. It took some time for me to adjust.

Sure. We believe there are three degrees, or glories, of heaven. The Celestial, Terrestrial, and Telestial Kingdoms. The main difference between these kingdoms is that God the Father and Jesus Christ will reside in the Celestial Kingdom, Jesus Christ will sometimes visit the Terrestrial Kingdom but not His Father, and those in the Telestial Kingdom will be cut off from the presence of the Father and the Son forever. Those who are righteous and live by God's gospel will return to live with God. Those who are wicked and reject God's gospel will be separated from God for eternity. To someone who loves God, this separation would feel like hell, but for those who do not care if God is in their lives, the Telestial Kingdom will be a comfortable place to live. The only eternal destination that is truly miserable is outer darkness--the place where the devil resides--is reserved for those who know undeniably that God does exist, yet deny and rebel against him nonetheless.