Jeffrey Epstein died in his jail cell yesterday. It was apparently a suicide, although there are already internet speculations of something more sinister, involving powerful people that wanted Epstein and his story buried. Certainly it was not a peaceful death.

Epstein’s sorry history will be researched, rehashed, and reenacted for years, in continued criminal investigations into his associates, in civil suits seeking compensation for his victims, in newspaper articles and books recounting the tale, and (no doubt) in true life, semi-fictionalized, and fictionalized retellings on television and in the movies. The truth is, however, that Epstein’s life is the latest, real-life example of one of literature’s archetypes: Faust. Originally a German legend (based, it is said, on a real person), Faust, who is learned and wealthy but nonetheless dissatisfied with the limits of human existence, sells his soul to the Devil in exchange for a lifetime of unlimited knowledge (and the wealth, power, and worldly pleasures that come along with it.) The English playwright Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s contemporary, wrote a play, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, in the first decade of the 17th Century. The great German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote a massive two-part play simply titled Faust in the early 19th Century. Faust was one of German literature’s greatest works, and Goethe worked on it for decades, the second part not being published until after Goethe’s death. There have been retellings ever since. Stephen Vincent Benet’s short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster” is an American version. (More on that shortly.)

Each author puts his own stamp on the story. Marlowe’s play has long been thought to be based on the  Puritan debates about predestination (although scholars disagree about whether Marlowe intends to endorse or criticize Calvinist predestination theology.) Marlowe’s Faustus is not redeemed. Goethe’s Faust, however, is, because he is forgiven by Gretchen, one of his victims. In each case, however, one thing is clear: evil, as embodied in the Devil, is real. It is both an external force that works on Faust, and an internal disposition — call if ambition, pride, hubris, or whatever — that makes Faust susceptible to the Devil’s advances. The Devil doesn’t make Faust do it, as Fred Sanford used to say, but he certainly opens the door through which Faust walks.

In classic Romantic fashion, Goethe’s Dr. Faust is something of a Byronic antihero. It’s hard not to have some sort of grudging admiration for him, and he is redeemed at the end. There is nothing remotely heroic, even ironically, about Jeffrey Epstein. He was a despicable human being. Yet, his story follows the Faust legend almost to a T. He weaseled his way into a plum teaching job at a fancy New York private school, even though he was a college dropout. He went from there to the investment firm Bear Stearns, but left amidst rumors of both an affair with his secretary and inappropriate loans of company funds. He started his own investment firm, and then, in partnership with one Stephen Hoffenberg, started a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme that cost hundreds of thousands of ordinary folk their life savings, but made Hoffenberg and Epstein wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of avarice. When it all collapsed, Hoffenberg went to prison for eighteen years. Epstein, for reasons that we don’t know (but have prosecutors getting calls from newspaper reporters today) wasn’t even indicted. In 2008 Epstein was charged with aggravated sexual assault of minors, which should have landed him in jail for decades, but instead resulted in a plea bargain of only 13 months in state prison, with work release privileges. His sordid treatment of young women continued, and stories even emerge that he planned to start some sort of master race, genetically seeded by himself, that would give him a ghoulish mortality. Now, facing similar charges but this time without hope of spitting the hook, he dies in his jail cell. We may never know all the facts about Jeffrey Epstein, and so everything we read about him, even this, is largely speculation. However, for the moment at least, the idea that the Devil called in his debt yesterday is, to my mind, as good as any.

There are things we can learn from this story. Among them is what our legal system can do for us. Many of Epstein’s victims issue anguished cries that his death denies them “justice.” Those feelings are understandable, to the extent that any of us can truly understand what they have been through.  But what do they mean by “justice?” One way that theologians look at justice is as a restoration of the right order of things, as a return to the stage of affairs before the wrong took place. This, sadly, the “justice” system can never do. This kind of justice would make it as if Jeffrey Epstein had never entered these people’s lives. The law cannot do that. On the other hand, perhaps what they mean by justice is monetary compensation for their suffering. Perhaps the law can do that, and one hopes it can, although typically people like Epstein are good at building walls around their wealth. Perhaps, they mean simply that they now will never see Epstein punished. The Faust legend tells us that perhaps we don’t see it, but the punishment commences apace.

Or perhaps what they mean is that they’ve been denied the chance to tell their stories. We owe it to them to offer them that chance. One of the functions that the law does serve is to declare where the boundaries are between right and wrong behavior. That happens in courtrooms every day. It is a way of defining who we are as human beings. That is why unlimited forgiveness in the justice system, whatever its merits as a theological concept of God, is inappropriate. In the justice system, forgiveness can be appropriate, because of all sorts of mitigating circumstances. However, those are exceptions to the general rule that the purpose of the justice system is to declare certain behavior as wrong. We should allow Epstein’s victims the chance to do that.

The other thing the justice system can do is take malefactors out of circulation, so that they can’t do any more harm. Twice, the federal legal system had Jeffrey Epstein in its sights, and twice it let him get away: once without charging him at all, and the second time by giving him a sweetheart deal. Today, we should all contemplate the damage that caused. In Benet’s story, a good lawyer (the title character) gets Jabez Stone, Benet’s version of Faust, out of his compact with the Devil. There’s something typically American about that. But Jabez Stone is not a megalomaniac scholar as was Marlowe and Goethe’s versions of Faust. Stone was simply a farmer down on his luck. In other words, Daniel Webster doesn’t get a monster off the hook. Can Epstein’s lawyers say the same?

We don’t talk about evil much anymore, and we certainly don’t talk about the devil. But the persistence of the Faust legend tells us that there is truth in it. Anyone that spends much time in a courtroom knows that evil is real; sometimes you can feel it. And there’s no need to believe in a red-skinned demon with a pitchfork and a spiked tail. (Think about Peter Cook and Elizabeth Hurley in the Bedazzled movies.) Evil doesn’t even have to be personified. Walter Wink’s “Powers” books help us spot evil in the practices, organizations, and systems of everyday life. As the lurid details of Epstein’s sorry life emerge, thinking about the powers at work in it will be instructive.