Thomas More/Statesman and Saint:
Herr, Dan
Books: THE REAL THOMAS MORE A REASSESSMENT of Thomas More as humanist, statesman, scholar, and saint should have been expected. Except for the most reactionary of English critics, More has always...
...Fox, I submit, must be taken seriously, but Ridley I find contemptible, worth as much serious attention as any other spitballer venting his hatred of his betters...
...But even assuming Fox's findings are unassailable - what does that do to More's reputation...
...So he wrestled with the basic problems of existence - surely this is a struggle twentieth-century men and women can appreciate...
...In the course of these early works [the English poems, Life of John Picus, Epigrammata and translations of the second-century Greek satirist, Lucian] we see it swing from one extreme point to the other: from manichean pessimism to undiluted optimism...
...As his careful study shows, "the early works reflect a capacity for severe melancholy in More, and suggest that he may have been extremely perturbed by a tragic sense of the apparent futility, injustice, and absurdity of the world, the victim of conflicts within his own presonality, and highly unresolved as to whether he should laugh or cry at the world, repudiate or join it...
...Scholars have also discovered unresolved problems not only in his doctrinal convictions, but also in his personality...
...Unfortunately, his kind of vicious biography will always find a sympathetic press (Publishers Weekly, for example) and a certain kind of avid reader...
...Dan Herr ceived myths will any longer do...
...He argues that if More's literary output had ended when he was imprisoned in the Tower, "posterity would have been left with the cautionary exemplum of a man whose life had been an unmitigated tragedy - More is not remembered today for his controversial writings or his behavior during the years when he wrote them...
...In his preface, he charges that "More's love for his family is largely a myth...
...In brief, I confess that I prefer the new version of More to the old one...
...Those were not tolerant days, it is safe to say...
...But with both men - More was "in many respects very much like Luther," Fox claims - it is necessary to judge, but not excuse them in the context of their times...
...Fox proceeds to offer further insights into the "inner" More by a detailed analysis of his other works - including The Four Last Things, Responsio ad Lutherum and A Dialogue Concerning Heresies - and the political and religious controversies in which More became embroiled...
...Furthermore, his popularity in our day must have been a strong force in making possible the definitive Yale edition of his complete works which in turn has made it easier for both his friends and enemies to research and attempt to interpret his voluminous writings...
...This mid-point was marked by the writing of Utopia...
...Moreover, had he not undergone it, he could never have attained the remarkable recovery to which his subsequent Tower works testify...
...Do we no longer find him an admirable man...
...In a sense More has only himself to blame that scholars are coming up with-more information on his thoughts and beliefs than is available on most fifteenth-century Englishmen...
...Fox states his thesis this way: "Both More the saint and More the humanist as scholarship has so far presented them are fictions: convenient, yet increasingly unsatisfying...
...Is he worthy of sainthood...
...This is not to excuse his convictions on censorship and his damnable inclination, to flog and burn herertics just as we cannot excuse Martin Luther's virulent anti-Semitism...
...Thus it was certain that both scholars and icon-smashers would be tempted to take another look and offer a less glorified portrait...
...He admits to preferring Wolsey ("a great statesman, a man of natural dignity with a generous temperament, who preserved a relatively tolerant regime until he fell from power") to More and would like us to do the same...
...While there may be those who would be disillusioned, I would submit that this "new" More is a fascinating character worthier than ever of our respect and filled with the stuff that saints should be made of...
...And Robert Bolt, in his effective play and movie, A Man for All Seasons, insured that an idealized More would become our most popular saint next to Francis of Assisi...
...Why should Thomas More escape...
...Other scholars, of course, will have their say and it is certain that the controversy over More is far from ended...
...unique among the communion of saints...
...So he was "immoderate in controversy," used bad language and dabbled in pornography - who would condemn him, certainly not I. So he was guilty of unsaintly actions - we no longer demand perfection from our saints as in the days when we were expected to believe that baby Aloysius Gonzaga refused his mother's milk on Wednesdays and Fridays during Lent...
...Alistair Fox's probings and Jaspar Ridley's biography have this much in common: they agree that the Thomas More many of us have admired is not the real Thomas More and that the poular image is badly in need of revision...
...The recent findings of historians, in particular, suggest that the saintly image that so impressed More's own family masked a deeply involved political activism of which they were barely aware...
...Despite the attention that has been paid to this classic by literary critics, political theorists, and historians, the unresolved problems inherent in it, Fox submits, can be helped only by approaching it from the direction of More's previous works - an approach which few have chosen to pursue...
...like Luther," Fox claims - it is necessary to judge, but not excuse them in the context of their times...
...So he was a complex, inconsistent, enigmatic human being - far easier for moderns to relate to than the simple, verging on simple-minded, More we have known...
...the study of More must find some way of freeing itself from the impasse into which it has wandered...
...He tells us that the portrait of young More, for which we have Erasmus to thank - a natural genius, delightfully affable, quick-witted, enthusiastic, "in the world without really being of it" - is, at the very least, incomplete...
...Those were not tolerant days, it is safe to say...
...We learn that Thomas More regretted Utopia after it was too late to stop publication and that it represented "the last occasion on which More succumbed to the temptation of airing the innermost complexities of his private thought in public...
...And one last word: I am happy to note that the revisionists have not tried to take from Thomas More his wit and his sense of humor, traits which I suspect make him unique among the communion of saints...
...However, this period marks the nadir of his life and works, not the summit of their achievement...
...but it is not the image of Thomas More we have been accustomed to, certainly not an all-seasons man...
...In the opinion of Fox, "there was, to speak metaphorically, a pendulum swinging throughout More's life...
...In brief, I confess that I prefer the new version of More to the old one...
...It is only when the pendulum swings back to its mid-position that More was able to constrain all the aspects of his personality, his intellect and his impulses into an inclusive synthesis...
...He was a prolific writer and, like most writers, told more about himself than he realized...
...And one last word: I am happy to note that the revisionists have not tried to take from Thomas More his wit and his sense of humor, traits which I suspect make him unique among the communion of saints...
...He gave vent to sentiments history has tended not to remember in him: bellicose, chauvinistic patriotism . . . often vindictive, sometimes petty, pornographic voyeurism...
...STATESMAN AND SAINT CARDINAL WOLSEY, SIR THOMAS MORE AND THE POLITICS OF HENRY VIII Jasper Ridley Viking Press, $20.75, 338 pp...
...Except for the most reactionary of English critics, More has always had a good press...
...After all, hagiog-raphy is not a valued art form in our day and we have seen revisionist biographers trim the images of Gandhi, Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Martin Luther King...
...the saint was the worst kind of intolerant fanatic, an idealist gone astray, who began as a brilliant intellectual but developed first into a sycophantic courtier and then into a persecuting bigot, before he redeemed himself, at the eleventh hour, by a brave if muted stand for his principles which cost him his life...
...Fox has attempted a balanced critique (unlike Ridley, the More-baiter, who even when describing the night before his execution calls him "this strange, tortured, cruel man...
...Ridley takes an ever tougher stand - and understatement is not his forte...
...Fox has uncovered what he considers the real More by minutely analyzing More's well-known works (Utopia and The Four Last Things, among others) as well as such obscure writings as Letters to Bugenhagen and Debellation of Salem and Bizance...
...In short, the mounting evidence means that neither of the reTHOMAS MORE HISTORY AND PROVIDENCE Alistair Fox Yale University Press, $19.95, 271 pp...
...and antifeminist cynicism...
Vol. 110 • April 1983 • No. 7
