In today’s On the Square feature , Gabriel Torretta uses an example from Shakespeare to show what happens when the state tries to be church for its people:
“Law is framed as a rule or measure of human acts,” says Thomas Aquinas, and “different things are measured by different measures.” Human “measures” or laws direct men to the common good; the divine law undergirds it, indicating what it means to be and to be good.
Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure is about what happens when the human measure usurps the role of the divine measure, when the state tries to be church for its people. The result is a darkly comic vision that eerily mirrors the swelling governmental bureaucracies of the Western world.
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