Brother Leo heard Francis of Assisi’s voice and his prayer. “Who are you, God?! And who am I?” 

We are capable of knowing what is right while simultaneously bending that knowledge toward self-interest, approval, pleasure, or self-preservation. Romans 2:15

TOLSTOY  

Nekhlyudov visits his aunts over summer when an innocent 19 year old. He has a crush on a servant Katusha. He returns 3 years later, having served in the army. He wonders about Katusha the servant girl. But now he is sophisticated and worldly, and his thoughts are lascivious. He rapes her. Tolstoy expounds a reality of human nature in this passage:

“And all this terrible change had come about because he had ceased to believe himself and had taken to believing others. This he had done because it was too difficult to live believing one’s self; believing one’s self, one had to decide every question not in favour of one’s own animal life, which is always seeking for easy gratifications, but almost in every case against it. Believing others there was nothing to decide; everything had been decided already, and decided always in favour of the animal I and against the spiritual. Nor was this all. Believing in his own self he was always exposing himself to the censure of those around him; believing others he had their approval. So, when Nekhlyudov had talked of the serious matters of life, of God, truth, riches, and poverty, all round him thought it out of place and even rather funny, and his mother and aunts called him, with kindly irony, notre cher philo-sophe. But when he read novels, told improper anecdotes, went to see funny vaudevilles in the French theatre and gaily repeated the jokes, everybody admired and encouraged him. When he considered it right to limit his needs, wore an old overcoat, took no wine, everybody thought it strange and looked upon it as a kind of showing off; but when he spent large sums on hunting, or on furnishing a peculiar and luxurious study for himself, everybody admired his taste and gave him expensive presents to encourage his hobby. While he kept pure and meant to remain so till he married his friends prayed for his health, and even his mother was not grieved but rather pleased when she found out that he had become a real man and had gained over some French woman from his friend.“ (Resurrection)

Exquisite Irony – Skalnik the Snitch

For more than three decades, Paul Sklanick roamed the Gulf Coast, passing himself off as a fighter pilot, a high-rolling oil man, a criminal defence attorney,and undercover agent, and a terminal cancer patient. In those guises he forged checks, embezzled money, and seduced and wed nine women, some at the same time. When Skalnik got caught, he ran a different con. Locked up with other men, awaiting trial he became  a prolific jailhouse snitch, glad to exaggerate men’s wrongdoings or implicate the innocent to help prosecutors with convictions. In return, the state rewarded him with his freedom, fueling his growing sense of invincibility. Soon he he was not just committing fraud; he was preying on girls in their teens or barely into adolescence. But he continued to cycle in and out of jail, too useful for courts to punish. (Catch the Devil, by Pamela Colloff)

In 1988 he tried to bargain with prosecutors, who balked at his demands. “On August 7, Sklanick filed a motion with the judge presiding over his case in which he claimed to have been a party to extensive prosecutorial conduct. He alleged that in numerous cases he was “coached in testimony, wherein alleged facts were supplied, instructions given, and answers supplied to refute any assertions that any agreement for a deal was made by the state.” This testimony gave jurors the false impression he was “acting alone”, and had actually heard all these ‘confessions’, and had no agreement with the state for a reward. 

Prosecutors, had a dilemma to resolve. Skalnik had not just accused them of serious ethical violations; he had also thrown their hard won convictions into jeopardy, claiming to have tainted more than fifty cases into jeopardy.  Colloff concludes: “The irony was exquisite. The same office that had previously instructed judges and juries to take Skalnik at his word, that had spent years defending his incredible stories as gospel truth, was now asking the court to treat his accusations as fantasy. It dismissed all his allegations as “innuendos rather than specific factual assertions” and “the fabrications of a frustrated criminal. (Pamela Colloff, “Catch the Devil” P 152f)

Trustworthy? Self Interest!

“Most humans can be trusted, it seems – not because they are genuinely good, but because it is in their interests to be trustworthy.”

– Economist Renaud Foucart in his article Judas and the economics of betrayal

Conscience can rise as a witness, alternately accusing us of wrongdoing and defending us …. (Romans 2:15)

The heart is deceitful above all things

    and beyond cure.

    Who can understand it? (Jeremiah 17:9)art

C.S. Lewis.