Individual Beliefs and Life

The ethical issue raised is the difficulty of choice between personal and other-directed priorities. In each text considered for this research, individual conscience, which is connected to faith, is in tension with institutional authority, and each text explores the consequences of such tension from a different angle.

In 2 Maccabees, two institutions at war, and individual conscience as an expression of faith is in crisis over loyalty to one institution or another. The choice in Jerusalem in the first century B.C. is control of the city by Syria or by the majority Jewish population. The text makes clear that the choice is also between a pagan or an observant Jewish culture, and that to the degree the Jews abdicate their religious law, which is what judges individual conscience, they are bound to suffer. The story that 2 Maccabees tells is of palace intrigues in Syria and Jewish collaborators in Judea working together to suppress Jewish ritual and conscience. To the degree such suppression is abetted by Jews, they violate their conscience

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uating death with belief. This suggests that any decision for life is an abandonment of belief; in the Greek version, that is in the background of her considering the martyrdoms she has witnessed to be "a call from heaven" (29). In the Latin version, in which Agathonice is obliged to confront the proconsul, her embrace of death is no less decisive: "But this is what I have come for, and this is what I am prepared for, to die for Christ's name" (Musurillo 35). In the case of the Christian martyrs, it appears that choosing life over belief is a moral failure, while choosing belief over life transcends life. As the Latin version has Papylus saying: "But looking toward God's true judgement we prefer to endure this [death] and to despise the commands of perishable judges than to fall against that true and eternal judgement, where there will be no mercy" (Musurillo 33). By the time covered in A Man for All Seasons, the church as spiritual authority and institution confronts the state as institution, which means that in the play the dilemma faced by Thomas More as individual is multilayered. Morels refusal to support Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon and marriage to Anne Boleyn, as well as Henry's hegemony over the Church
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2664
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)