As I read the latest accusations against Art Schlichter — a swindler whose latest alleged con is said to have led a 68-year-old widow to the brink of suicide — I find myself wondering what particular area of hell is appropriate for the former Ohio State quarterback.
In The Inferno, Dante reserves the eighth circle of perdition for practitioners of various types of fraud. Those guilty of theft — of stealing other people’s substance in life — are not only bitten by snakes, they find that the bites cost them their humanity.
They are transformed into serpents.
Reptilian is as good a word as any to describe Schlichter’s character in the here-and-now.
To feed his longstanding gambling addiction, the 50-year-old former jock — whom a prosecutor called “the best con man I’ve ever seen” — has committed more than 20 felonies, stealing an estimated $1.5 million from both friends and strangers.
That doesn’t include the $1 million Schlichter is formally charged with stealing from Anita Barney, who befriended Schlichter after his latest release from prison when he spoke at a church to peddle both his book and his tale of contrition.
“I listened to his story in church, and I felt sad for him,” Barney told the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch. “I read his book and thought he was serious about helping people. I was a Christian, and I felt sorry for him.”
Sorry enough to loan Schlichter $100,000. Not only did he not pay her back but, according to Barney, he soon pressured her into giving him more money. Then, when her funds ran low, she says, he intimidated her into asking friends for “loans” under various pretexts. Many friends gave her money, which reportedly went to Schlichter.
Former friends suing her, her life in chaos, a distraught Barney drove to her husband’s grave with a loaded handgun. A call from her son — “That guy is not worth killing yourself over, Mom” — kept her from pulling the trigger, according to the Dispatch.
Which brings us back to hell — and another question.
Edward T. Oakes, an expert on the controversial theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, defended Balthasar’s provocative idea that sinners in hell might still have a repentant encounter with God and thus be saved. But Oakes wrote that in assessing that notion, one must consider the accumulation of sin in a person’s lifetime — he uses Hitler as an example — acting like a force at death “so that one is hurled, so to speak, into defiance” — even in the face of an encounter with the Almighty.
If I understand Oakes, he’s saying Balthasar’s theology may leave open the possibility of a sinner exiting hell, but the way a particular person lives his or her life could make such an exit very unlikely, nearly impossible.
Which sounds to me like an interesting long-shot gamble, action that would attract the interest of a certain former quarterback seemingly headed back to prison.
Schlichter being Schlichter, if he could lay a wager on the fate of his own soul in hell, I have no doubt that he would.
But which way, I wonder, would he bet?
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