Becket

Some critics may say that this movie and indeed the true story of Crown-Church discord, is only a ancient subject mired and consigned to the dry pages of Middle Ages history, yet the struggle is as relevant to us today as it was back in the 1200’s AD, the battle between a person and his/her ambitions and that of a greater unworldly devotion that is greater than the self. The chasm between Church and State have have been tempered in western civilization to a large degree, but not that between the individual and the state and society. Perhaps Sir Winston Churchill best summed the Henry II-Thomas Becket feud as being most relevant to modern society when he quoted the conflict in his history work ‘A History of the English Speaking Peoples’ with this remark: “What claim have we to vaunt a superior civilization to Henry II’s time? We are sunk in a barbarism all the deeper because it is tolerated by a moral (and spiritual) lethargy and covered in a veneer of scientific conveniences”, A History of the English Speaking People”, , p. 212. Winston Churchill circa 1934.