The reader with obsessive-compulsive disorder who wrote before about the possibility of selling one’s soul writes:
Thank you very much for the prompt and logical
response.
My pleasure.
Unfortunately, I also read some of the combox, and the
doubting disease kicked in.
Yes, I was aghast when I discovered that–despite the fact this was a Rule 20 post–not only had the rule been violated in the combox but it had been immediately violated by the very first commenter. By the point I discovered it, there was an extensive (over 20 posts) discussion underway, and I couldn’t untangle it all and thus had to simply shut off the combox.
Rule 20 exists precisely in order to not have pastoral answers I’m giving undermined and add to the burden of the people I’m trying to help. I was livid when I discovered this blatant violation of the rule because of the pain it could inflict on the original reader, and I would have banned the commenter who did it immediately except that I don’t think he did it intentionally.
I also have to share some blame myself in that I should have better foreseen that this would happen and not have left the combox open on that post in the first place. At least one can argue that this was a case which was too sensitive to risk handling it under Rule 20.
So my apologies for all that.
One person mentions the
possibility of a pact with the devil — i.e. if I get
the thing that I want, I agree to go to hell. I think
that’s pretty close to my conception of "selling my
soul" — more as a metaphor: I’d still be "me", but
I’ve agreed to spend eternity in hell.I don’t want to take much more of your time on this
subject, but could you address the question from this
perspective?
Sure. The above is a metaphorical (not literal) understanding of "selling one’s soul" that is not subject to it being ontologically impossible (the way literally transferring your soul to someone else is). It would be at least possible to agree to go to hell in order to obtain some temporal good, and doing so would be gravely sinful because it is placing some temporal good above one’s eternal destiny.
So what if one did mentally choose this, giving it the full and deliberate cooperation needed to make it a fully human act?
Well, the devil isn’t omniscient, and merely thinking about striking a bargain with him doesn’t mean that you did.
Further, no such bargain would be binding.
You can’t morally obligate yourself to do something immoral, and willfully going to hell is immoral. Any "contract" of this nature would be automatically invalid. It would have no binding force before God. Therefore, all someone would need to do to get right with God–supposing he had done such a thing as a fully human act and thus been responsible for it–would be to turn to God and repent.
However, merely having a thought along these lines would not be the
same as committing this sin. Having the thought is just a temptation.
It isn’t a sin. You’ve got to engage the will in order for sin to take
place. Thus if a person with OCD has thoughts along these lines, he
should remember that they are not sins and put them out of his mind.
But what if the person with OCD feels that he has given some sort of
cooperation of the will to the thoughts (i.e., endorsed them). Here he
is to remember two things:
1) In order to actually commit a mortal sin
one must give deliberate consent to the thought. You haven’t committed
a mortal sin if you just feel some kind of partial cooperation of the
will, so don’t worry about it and think of something else.
2) The goal of obsessive-compulsive disorder is to try to inflict pain
on people by throwing thoughts and feelings at them that they don’t
want. It will try to trick them into thinking they are sinning mortally when they are either sinning venially or not sinning at all but just having a temptation. Therefore, an OCD-sufferer needs to follow the advice given to scrupulous people by sound pastoral theology
and assume that they have not given deliberate cooperation to the thoughts and thus have not mortally sinned.
The fact that the reader mentioned in his original e-mail
that he has a strong urge to resist these thoughts shows that he is in
this category and should ignore them.
20
Seems dangerous to me to leave the combox open like this again. I didn’t see the other combox but I worry that something similar might happen.
Re: selling one’s soul.
The devil would not pay for something that he can get for free, so all these ‘pacts with the devil’ nonsense are just that – nonsense. Jimmy is right; we are not our own, we are bought with a price. We can’t ‘sell’ our souls, but we can give them away.
Now, you don’t sound like you intend to or want to do this, so I really don’t think you’re in danger of selling your soul. A morbid psychological compulsion is not the same thing as free, uncoerced, rational decision of the will to indulge in sin for the sake of momentary benefit or pleasure regardless of the ultimate cost to one’s soul.
Besides, if one *could* sell one’s soul, it’d be like that “Simpsons” episode where Homer tries to sell his soul, the Devil (in the form of Ned Flanders!) pops up, and Bart spends the rest of the time teasing the devil by saying “If I could only get X, I’d sell my soul” – the devil pops up with the contract – Bart says “Sorry, changed my mind” – the devil retreats, foiled – Bart gets a big laugh out of it.
Now, I ask you – does that sound feasible? So the next time you feel this compulsion, do the Bart, man!
“do the Bart, man!”
Wonderful.
+J.M.J+
The first time I heard about “selling ones soul,” I was a child and the idea really scared me. No one told me that it was bunk; in fact it was presented as something very real, and I believed that it was true for most of my life – up until maybe 15 years ago or so.
I think the scariest part of the concept is that the person is supposedly trapped. The thought that one could, perhaps in a moment of weakness or under duress, agree to damn oneself and then be held to it even if one later regrets it – hey, you gotta admit that’s pretty scary! Of course it’s not true, as Jimmy explained quite well. Yet I’ll bet there are plenty of people out there who believe it is possible to sell ones soul to the devil and find the thought terrifying.
The notion of a “pact with the devil” is pretty pervasive: Faust, The Devil and Daniel Webster, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” the film “Bedazzled,” rumors about blues singer Robert Johnson, episodes of the Simpsons (as mentioned above) and Futurama, and some Chick tracts all present the idea as though it were quite true and possible. Yet how many voices are out there widely debunking the notion, pointing out that it’s mere folklore? Like I said, I spent most of my life believing it was true, and there are probably some Christians who spend their whole lives believing it. We need more people like Jimmy Akin to point out that, while it may be fun to listen to “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” that kind of thing should not be taken literally.
In Jesu et Maria,
Absolutely — in fact, not only are they not sins, very often they don’t even rise to the level of temptations. They are just ego-dystonic thoughts generated by the obsessive-compulsive tendency to confront oneself with whatever is most distressing or anxiety-producing.
Ego-dystonic thoughts are usually not temptations because the sufferer is not meaningfully tempted to go in the direction of the ego-dystonic thought. On the contrary, ego-dystonic thoughts are a cross to bear, not a temptation to sin. The sufferer may even force himself to think about being tempted to go in that direction, precisely because this ramps up the discomfort factor. Yet this is all part of the sufferer’s cross.
Having OCD is a little like playing chess against your own subconscious; your mind is trying to checkmate you, to counter every move you make and make it impossible for you to move. Learning to deal with it is very largely learning to bracket or disregard obsessive-compulsive thoughts and tendencies as irrelevant to oneself, learning to say “That is not me, that is not who I am. This is a cross I must bear.” Obsessive-compulsive thoughts are events that occur in one’s mind, but far from revealing actual desires or volitions, they actually reflect what is most contrary to one’s self-understanding.
Once the sufferer learns to think of such thoughts as a cross to bear rather than a temptation to sin, the thoughts may lose a great deal of their dystonic power, and cause less distress. Once that happens, the sufferer may even find himself less likely to have such thoughts in the first place.
Hope that’s helpful.
Jimmy,
I’m a longtime reader of your blog, so I know what it means when you put “20” at the end of a post. However, I think that most new readers probably have no idea what the “20” means. I humbly suggest that instead of just putting “20”, you put a short one-sentence explanation at the end of the post. For example, it could simply say, “Rule 20 applies to this post,” with a hyperlink to your “Da Rulz” post where the reader could find out exactly what “Rule 20” is.
Otherwise, if you continue to put just “20”, I suspect that you may continue to have this problem with future posts. But this is just friendly advice — it’s your blog, not mine. 🙂
Well said SDG!
— An OCD sufferer
Hopefully this is not a violation of Rule 20: Previously there was a lengthy discussion about angels and their existence. Considering the concept of angels is based on pagan scriptures, it might be concluded that there are no such spirits. With no angels then there are no devils to sell your soul to. Case solved?
Glory be to God! Even with a Rule 20 designation, the boor can’t resist spewing his venom. How immature and self-centered can one be?
Realist, your comment reminds me of something Thomas Howard wrote in Chance or the Dance, about how with the Enlightenment men “were freed from worry about getting their souls into God’s heaven by the discovery that they had no souls and that God had no heaven.”
Of course you wish to go only halfway down the slippery slope — you deny angels, but for some reason allow for God, and, apparently, the soul, which it seems to me your atheist cousin, Real Realist, could debunk just as easily.
In any case, I don’t think it’s helpful to address a pastoral question by attempting to engender a crisis of faith. The issue can be addressed quite satisfactorally within the bounds of orthodox Christian belief.
Well, you would have to have an eternal soul to sell, too, Realist. And then there would have to be a Hell to go to. And if there can be a real Hell, then that makes a real Heaven hard to deny.
But we know that your superior intellect has taken you beyond the need to believe in nursery tales like Heaven and Hell. I suppose a lot of perplexing spiritual questions would go away if one could be persuaded to believe in practically nothing.
What need of apologetics? From your perspective, is not every statement about our eternal destiny equally true and false? Seems to me like – in the end – there is not much you could say on the subject, except to say that there is no subject really there.
As usual.
Realist:
Hopefully this is not a violation of Rule 20: Previously there was a lengthy discussion about angels and their existence. Considering the concept of angels is based on pagan scriptures, it might be concluded that there are no such spirits.
So since the bible contains various passages citing angels, it is, thus, pagan scriptures!?!?
With no angels then there are no devils to sell your soul to. Case solved?
Your very existence, Realist, testifies to the fact that there are such things as devils and, further, it is more than likely that you had engaged in such Faustian arrangements; you who’s had the gall and impertinence of replacing the One True God with one that you made in your image!
The goal of obsessive-compulsive disorder is to try to inflict pain on people by throwing thoughts and feelings at them that they don’t want
I like that description. OCD is also one of the anxiety disorders. Anxiety is a form of fear so an additional suggestion is to pray for healing of fearfulness. Today’s gospel is perfect for this: “Lord, I do believe. Help my unbelief.”
The logic of “if no angels, then no devil” assumes that the devil must be a fallen angel (as Christianity teaches), but if we’re throwing Christianity out anyway, why make this assumption?
In other words, “if no angels, then no devil” seems to suffer some serious logical problems. I’m not swift enough with rhetorical logic to sort it all out, but I imagine the majority of you other commenters are.
Good point, Rosemarie. The concept of the unbreakable, legally and morally binding pact with the Devil is a powerful literary motif, but it belongs firmly in the genre of fantasy, not mainstream or realistic literature. Just because Goethe, or Steven Vincent Benet, or Kenny Rogers can make a compelling work of art from the concept does not mean that it could actually happen here in the Primary World, any more than a person could actually turn into a wolf when the moon becomes full, or corpses really turn into shambling monstrosities hungry for human brains, just because authors and filmmakers have made powerful art from the motif of the werewolf and the zombie.
(In fact, the “deal with the devil” motif is so compelling that many fantasy markets have included in their guidelines comments about seeing too many stories based on it, simply because it seems that almost every writer feels the need to write one when starting out. Most of them end up being rehashes of territory already thoroughally covered, although I have actually seen a very small number that are innovative and well done. But slushpiles tend to be full of badly-done rehash-of-Goethe-in-modern-dress ones, so editors become necessarily hard to convince).
Leigh,
About your comment:
The concept of the unbreakable, legally and morally binding pact with the Devil is a powerful literary motif, but it belongs firmly in the genre of fantasy, not mainstream or realistic literature.
Does that mean then that the following passages in Scripture wreaks of fantasy and unrealistic literature?
Matthew 4:8-9
8 Again the devil took him up into a very high mountain, and shewed him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them,
9 And said to him: All these will I give thee, if falling down thou wilt adore me.
Didn’t you just violate rule 20, Esau, by suggesting that a legally and morally binding pact with the devil is possible?
Esau:
In the first place, it is one thing for the Devil to make a show of “promising” something quid pro quo, and another to (mistakenly) believe either that the Devil can hold you to something you have promised him, or that you can hold him to something he has promised.
Leigh was correct in saying that this is impossible; in fact, he was simply reiterating and reinforcing the point of Jimmy’s rule 20 posts on this subject.
In challenging Leigh on precisely this point, not only were you wrong on point, you were also in flagrant violation of rule 20, and are being extremely unhelpful to people like the original question writer.
Jimmy already indicated how strongly displeased he was with a previous poster who made this mistake in the earlier post, and how unhelpful this was to the question writer. Now you are making precisely the same mistake, and could be causing the weak to stumble.
If Jimmy’s plea at the top of this very post is insufficient to ward off flagrant rule 20 violations, I can’t see that he has any choice but to disable the combox for such posts. That would be a shame, since some users may have helpful things to post.
SDG:
That wasn’t the point at all of my comment.
Further, I wasn’t suggesting as the anon poster said that I was actually suggesting that a legally and morally binding pact with the devil is possible.
However, since my post was interpreted in a manner other than what it originally intended to say, then I regret having said it.
Esau:
Reread the snippet of Leigh’s post you were responding to. Were you questioning what Leigh wrote, or not?
Leigh said — correctly, and in keeping with Jimmy’s posts — that “the concept of the unbreakable, legally and morally binding pact with the Devil” was pure fiction. You seemed to challenge this notion on the basis of the temptation of Jesus pericope.
If you didn’t mean to question Leigh’s point, I don’t think you can blame others for interpreting you that way. You need to think about how what you write is going to come across.
The point I was attempting to make in the following:
Does that mean then that the following passages in Scripture wreaks of fantasy and unrealistic literature?
Matthew 4:8-9
8 Again the devil took him up into a very high mountain, and shewed him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them,
9 And said to him: All these will I give thee, if falling down thou wilt adore me.
That is, the fact that the devil does attempt to make such bargains with us; not that it would actually be something legally and morally binding or, what’s more, that the devil would actually live up to such bargains (as in the case of what he had promised to Jesus).
In terms of instances of the devil actually making bargains with us, I cannot actually see that (although Scripture does not explicitly say) Judas’ betraying Jesus for 30 pieces of silver is not, in fact, a bargain he had made with the Devil (at least, figuratively) and goes on to illustrate that there can be a selling of one’s soul.
Esau, I agree with SDG, and I think you violated Rule 20 again in the above last paragraph.
Again:
In terms of instances of the devil actually making bargains with us, I cannot actually see that (although Scripture does not explicitly say) Judas’ betraying Jesus for 30 pieces of silver is not, in fact, a bargain he had made with the Devil (at least, figuratively) and goes on to illustrate that there can be a selling of one’s soul.
Then, I apologize, bill912, as that was not my intention.
Please proceed to ban me accordingly.
off please
bill912:
One last thought:
From what Jimmy had mentioned:
1) In order to actually commit a mortal sin one must give deliberate consent to the thought. You haven’t committed a mortal sin if you just feel some kind of partial cooperation of the will, so don’t worry about it and think of something else.
Now, in the case of Judas, it was definitely deliberate consent.
off please
“Rule 20 exists precisely in order to *not* have pastoral answers I’m giving undermined and add to the burden of the people I’m trying to help.”–Jimmy, above.
itals off?