Judge Robert Bork on St. Thomas More

From Judge Robert Bork - Thomas More for Our Season:

"The continuing contemporary interest in Thomas More (1478-1535) is hardly to be accounted for by popular fascination with sixteenth-century English politics or even by admiration for a martyr to a religious cause no longer universally popular.

"More lived, as we live today, in a time of rapid social and cultural unraveling. The meaning of his life, at least for us, is not so much his worldly success and religious piety, extraordinary as both of these were, but rather the courage and consistency with which he opposed the force of disintegration.

"The culture war of the early sixteenth century was fought over the breaking apart of Christianity, its loss of central authority, and the consequent fragmentation of European civilization. Our war rages about the collapse of traditional virtues across all of the West and the rise of moral indifference and cheerful nihilism. Many parallels between the two eras could be drawn, but a crucial similarity lies in the central role played by law in each. Though More was a profoundly religious man, it should not be forgotten that he was also a preeminent lawyer and judge. The law, quite as much as Catholicism, is crucial to an understanding of the man and the martyr. Law and its institutions were, of course, major forces of cohesion in More’s age, and are perhaps the primary symbols in ours of stability and continuity as well as justice. When moral consensus fades, as it did in More’s time and does in ours, we turn to law; when law falters, as it must when morality is no longer widely shared, society and culture teeter on the brink of chaos.

 . . .

"An Elizabethan play, probably written by Shakespeare, has More attempt to quell rioters against aliens in London:

Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise 

Hath chid down all the majesty of England.

Imagine . . .

Authority quite silenced by your brawl. . . .

What had you got? I’ll tell you. You had taught

How insolence and strong hand should prevail,

How order should be quelled; and by this pattern

Not one of you should live an aged man;

For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought

With self same hand, self reasons and self right

Would shark on you; and men like ravenous fishes

Would feed on one another."

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