Media headlines today will regularly announce that a politician or business leader has “sold their soul” when they abandon their principles, cooperate with an opponent, or pursue self-interested goals at the expense of the social good. J.D. Vance, for instance, was repeatedly accused of “selling his soul” as he publicly transformed from the celebrated author of Hillbilly Elegy (2016), which Democratic Party faithful Ron Howard adapted on film, into President Trump’s running mate and a MAGA loyalist. But how did this phrase—which once literally implied that a deal had been done with the Devil—come to be a metaphor for social corruption?
There have, of course, always been competing theological ideas about the nature of the soul, with debates playing out, often across centuries, among early interpreters of scripture as well as among medieval scholars of Plato and Aristotle. Even the words that have been used to capture this idea—“nephesh” in Hebrew, “psyche” in Ancient Greek, “sawel/sawol” in Old English—can cause scholars headaches. Nonetheless, all the varied traditions in the West seem to agree about one key property of the soul: it cannot be exchanged. Whatever other attributes people may assign it, the soul is by definition unique, bound up in the individual human being—and so it can only be contaminated by the sort of transactions that occur in the marketplace.
Several passages in the Bible distinguish the soul’s spiritual existence from the body’s material existence, as in Ecclesiastes 12:6-7: “the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it.” Others further emphasize how the soul is more essential than, and must be untouched by, any commercial activity. In Mark 8:36-37, for instance, Jesus asks “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” Revelation 13:17 proclaims that “no man might buy or sell” on the Day of Judgment, “save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast.”
The Christian “taboo on selling the soul,” explains historian David Hawkes, drew upon a “deep rooted fear of slavery” that was a constant threat for peoples of the ancient world. Subjugation under slavery turned a person into a commodity that could be bought and sold. The Israelites, who escaped slavery in Egypt and Babylon, developed an especially strong identification between enslavement and having one’s soul, or nephesh, “translated into financial terms, as in Exodus 21:21,” Hawkes notes, “where a master is allowed to inflict a fatal beating on his slave on the grounds that ‘he is his money (keceph).’” Slavery, in other words, provided a horrific—and all-too common—illustration of souls being sold.
Money came to seem corruptive to early Christians, then, not just because it distracted people from love and charity, but because money made possible exchanges between goods, and such exchanges were essentially antithetical to the unique, non-transferable nature of the soul. Several iconic episodes from Scripture illustrate this antithesis between money and morality. Judas infamously betrays Jesus for his “thirty pieces of silver,” which he later casts down in the temple in repentance before hanging himself. Even the priests who condemn Jesus to death refuse to put those pieces “into the treasury, because it is the price of blood” (Matt. 27:3-6). Abraham’s son Esau, coming home hungry one day, also famously sells his “birthright” to his brother Jacob for mere “pottage,” (Genesis 25:24-34), a phrase that later writers such as Henry David Thoreau and James Weldon Johnson repurposed in their books on self-formation.
A less famous—but no less influential—Biblical passage invokes a similar warning with the tale of Simon of Magus, a sorcerer in Samaria. Converted and baptized by Philip, Simon beholds the “power” of the apostles channeling the Holy Spirit and covets it for himself (Acts 8:9-24). When “he offered them money” to teach him this power, the apostle Peter rebukes Simon for thinking “that the gift of God may be purchased with money.” From this episode comes the term “simony,” paying for religious position or spiritual status, which was to become a controversial topic for early modern Christians. Over time, moreover, “Simon the Sorcerer” came to be associated not just with immoral use of money, but with desiring unlawful, even Satanic power, and his story fueled popular folk tales about making dubious deals with the devil.
Folk tales like these eventually coalesced around one genuine historical personage: Johan Georg Faust. His name soon became the basis for one of the most durable, influential myths in Western writing. But the meaning of the “Faust myth”—a phrase coined by historian Jacob Burckhardt in 1855—has notably changed over time, and this process provides a way to see how “selling your soul” at last shifted from a literal bargain with the devil to a secular metaphor.
Faust first appears in the historical record around 1507, where he is described by his contemporaries as a corrupt scholar pursuing knowledge through illicit or dangerous means. After his death, his legend began to grow. In 1587, Johann Spies published a Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587), which scholars suggest may have been the most popular printed book in Germany after the Bible. In The Sources of the Faust Tradition, Philip Mason Palmer explains how Faust came to embody a longstanding “belief that power and erudition were often acquired with the aid of fiendish powers.” Even Martin Luther believed that Faust had “worked with the devil.” Christopher Marlowe famously turned this story into his play Doctor Faustus (1604), in which Mephistopheles grants Faust twenty years to enjoy every imaginable pleasure on earth in exchange for his mortal soul. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, “selling your soul” still more or less meant what it had for early Christians a thousand years before.
By the time Germany’s most cherished writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, completed his masterpiece Faust in 1832, however, this legend’s significance had unmistakably shifted. Sixteenth century readers had seen Faust as a sorcerer whose power came from having literally collaborated with Satan, but the seventeenth century had brought on Enlightenment ideals, which prioritized empirical observation and rational calculation. In the sociologist Max Weber’s famous words, Enlightenment thinkers believed that people had been living in an “enchanted garden,” where objects, animals, and places all contain spiritual powers. Insisting that humanity should be understood in wholly rational terms, however, the Enlightenment led to what Weber famously called a “disenchantment” of the world, a denial of spiritual powers and a loss of the shared meaning they had added to people’s lives. With this slow but steady shift toward secularization, concludes Hawkes, fewer and fewer educated people “believed in the literal existence of the devil, and the idea of selling one’s soul to him seemed impossibly far-fetched.”
But ideas do not simply vanish. Even if many people lost belief in the idea of a literal Satanic contract, “selling your soul” lived on as a metaphor, which people now began to use to evoke moral concerns about the experience of alienation under modern capitalism. Goethe’s German contemporaries were living through the early industrial revolution, and they saw the idea of “selling your soul” as a powerful metaphor for commercialism–the reorganizing of modern society, and our own lives, around the profit-motive. Karl Marx himself quotes from Faust at length in his early economic writings; in his eyes, Faust’s deal with the Devil was not really about spiritual life, but rather an allegory for the way that capitalism alienated laborers everywhere from their inner selves, from one another, and from what they produce. Forced to sell their labor, Marx concludes, every worker must “sell his birthright for a mess of pottage.”
For more than two thousand years, the idea of “selling your soul” has generated a moral shock in the Western world. Only by recognizing the long history of “selling your soul” can we understand why a famously anti-religious thinker like Marx would end up quoting from Genesis in this manner. By the end of the nineteenth century, intellectuals like Oswald Spengler, in his The Decline of the West, were describing modern Western civilization as “Faustian” to its core, with Human beings trying to control technological and financial powers that would end up enslaving them. Faust’s bargain, like Adam and Eve eating the fruit, and Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, has become one of the Western world’s great stories about the corruptive desire for power, about the way that our thirst for knowledge, experience, and profit can often lead us to tragedy. And while many people may hear “selling your soul” only as a metaphor, we should not forget its long spiritual history, which gave this idea the moral force that it still carries today.
Ian Afflerbach is Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of North Georgia, where he is working on his book “Sellouts! The Story of an American Insult.”
Image Credit: Rembrandt van Rijn, Faust, c. 1652. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.
