A Good Life
NOVAK, MICHAEL
A GOOD LIFE Peter Ackroyd's New Biography of Thomas More By Michael Novak Over the years, I have read at least four biographies of the sixteenth-century politician, scholar, lawyer, writer,...
...After months of imprisonment, More was beheaded on July 6, 1535, at age fifty-seven—declaring himself "the King's good servant, but God's first...
...The English also admire bravery...
...But in 1532, More himself was replaced, and his fate was sealed when he refused to subscribe to the 1534 Act of Supremacy by which Henry VIII declared himself protector and supreme head of an independent, antipapal Church of England...
...There are a few places in The Life of Thomas More where Ackroyd goes wrong...
...The extent to which Ackroyd has dwelt with and sympathized with the living, breathing More is exhilarating...
...Then—in 1529, when Cardinal Wolsey failed to secure the pope's approval of the king's divorce from Catherine of Aragon—Henry named More to succeed Wolsey as lord chancellor, the highest political position in the realm...
...Most comforting in Ackroyd's loving Life of Thomas More is the low-key recounting of More's faults—for since (as Leon Bloy once put it) "the only tragedy in life is not to have been a saint," it is helpful to see that even saints are not exempt from petty human failings...
...Practicing as a lawyer in London, he attracted the attention of Henry VIII, who initially used him as a diplomat...
...And somehow, along the way, he manages to put his readers in place as well...
...More's mind hews closer than his biographer's to the concrete texture of things...
...An individual Christian does not need "pillars," if he has Christ...
...But, in fact, he seems to have been often impatient, driving, severe, and a perfectionist...
...Together with such companions as the English scholar John Colet and the Dutch priest Erasmus (who stayed with More on his visits to England), More championed a perennially new movement in the West: the renewal of Christian humanism, the call to a new beginning in a higher, fresher wave of learning...
...More has been called the greatest of all Englishmen, an amazing encomium for a papist of his time— and ours, given the antipathy to Roman Catholicism that exists even today in England...
...His ability to read, write, and frame an argument was already far advanced, and he was soon studying Greek as well as Latin and composing Latin poetry and dramatic passages...
...Ackroyd also brings to life the finely wrought, tough-minded, and highly personal Catholic faith of his subject, despite the fact that (it appears) he doesn't share that faith...
...That is why he feared the unleashing of demons taking place on all sides during the Reformation, and why he saw the need for thousands of small acts of dramatic fidelity across Europe if civilization were to advance or even survive...
...More was acutely aware of the cauldron beneath the surfaces of things...
...When Ackroyd writes of law, he seems to think of geometry...
...A GOOD LIFE Peter Ackroyd's New Biography of Thomas More By Michael Novak Over the years, I have read at least four biographies of the sixteenth-century politician, scholar, lawyer, writer, diplomat, and saint, Sir Thomas More...
...And he went to his death for a quiet, understated principle, having sought by all means to spare the King the disgrace of killing him...
...But he did see the talent of his daughter Margaret and pushed her until she became easily the most learned woman in England (perhaps in Europe) and a public figure in her own right...
...When More himself wrote of law, he thought of the wild tergiversations of English common law, rooted in unique human experiences...
...Michael Novak holds the George Jewett chair in religion and public policy at the American Enterprise Institute...
...Every time Ack-royd discusses law—the law of reason, or of God, or of the Church—he paints a picture of narrow inflexibility...
...Holding that the gospels are best understood with a grasp of language, history, and a variety of methods of thought, these Christian humanists worked diligently at establishing critical texts and accurate translations...
...I would, if I could, give this book to every lawyer I know, and to every serious person who aspires to the nobility and wit of human greatness...
...Ackroyd makes us smell the sewage on the roads, hear the bustle and shouts, wend our way through the street life...
...Thomas More was born on February 7, 1478, the son of a successful London lawyer...
...It is true that More loved order, tradition, and law, and equally true that he had an unusually strong sense of piety toward his father...
...At More's christening, he makes us taste the salt, receive the cold shock of the baptismal water, start at the ritual slap...
...It is likely that during his life More heard, spoke, read, and wrote more Latin than English, and his reputation as a Latin stylist allowed only one or two rivals in all of Europe...
...A talent for witty extemporaneous retort, a self-contained countenance, and an ability to write with an elegant brevity of language have always been prized by the English, and More is said in all these to have had no equal...
...Such lapses are rare in The Life of Thomas More, but they do appear in one context...
...The secret to Ackroyd's success lies in his power to recreate, chapter by chapter, the surroundings of his sub-ject—the smells, sights, sounds, tempo, hardships, disciplines: from the scene of More's birth to the street where he grew up, his house, his school, his daily service for Wolsey, his studies at Oxford, his typical day in the Inns of Court, and all the other settings of his life...
...It may be, quite simply, the most satisfying biography I have ever read...
...But then, More went to Oxford, and there has always been at the English universities an insistent tug toward Platonic metaphysics and mysticism...
...As an antidote to our sour season, it is a perfect book...
...Although shrouded in privacy, More's attitude toward his two wives (the first died young) also seems not to have reached the ideal of marital Mores mind hEws cioser thaN his biogRApheR's to the concrete texture of things...
...But Peter Ackroyd's new biography, The Life of Thomas More, is the first that I wanted to start again as soon as I finished...
...In the midst of all the lavish details of sixteenth-century daily life, our senses and our sensibilities are lifted back into a radically different time and place—until at last the biographer convinces us that we can share More's own way of seeing his world...
...This preference is a little surprising, since the Latin Fathers, with their Roman love for law and practicality and common sense, seem more "English" than the Greek Fathers, with their cosmo-logical speculations and poetic forms...
...Almost effortlessly, Ackroyd manages to put in place the things upon which More's attention fell, year by year...
...But the reader is given more than enough information to override the biographer's occasional lapses...
...Secular writers sometimes have the annoying tic of projecting upon Catholics an icy mantle of eternal verities uncomfortably at odds with their turbulent times...
...The fact is rather that the imagination of the Middle Ages was filled with a sense of contingency, fragility, disorder, discontinuity, and even terror...
...His most recent book, co-written with Jana Novak, is Tell Me Why: A Father Answers His Daughter's Questions About God...
...In the dangerous political world in which he lived, More quickly rose to the heights...
...They sought a new mastery of the ancient biblical languages, and they struggled to bring back into common knowledge the commentaries and reflections of the Fathers of the Church, especially the Greeks...
...It is not the cry of a man who believes in order...
...friendship...
...It is instead—as More saw—civilization that needs pillars and order...
...Taken up and favored by powerful men—Archbishop Morton, and later Cardinal Wolsey—the precocious More was sent to Oxford in the autumn of 1492 at the age of fourteen...
...The biographer doesn't quite understand the Catholic sense of the fleshiness of things, the incarnateness of God, the sacramentality of the singular and the particular...
...More had a reputation for warmth and humor, and his daughter testified that she saw him angry only twice...
...This is the warning More kept uttering, even in his famous 1516 political essay, Utopia...
...it is the cry of a man impressed with the ever-present power of disorder...
...But in trying to contrast the modern with the premodern (of which he makes More the exemplar), Ackroyd makes his subject seem rigid and narrow: "Thomas More," he declares, "was one who needed pillars and the security of an ordered world...
...More faced the madness, bloodlust, and chaos of martyrdom with amazing equanimity...
...He forces us through the early grammar books, the prayers, the principles of rhetoric, even the sound and feel of Latin poetry...
...One does not have to live in modern times to feel such things...
...Against Martin Luther—the wrecker of Christian unity, disdainer of law, and unleasher of disorder (as More saw him)—More practiced a degree of vituperation unmatched until our own time, coloring his prose with every word for excrement and baboonery the rawness of sixteenth-century life could suggest...
...So too is the extent to which he allows us to enter an inner world like More's and grasp its universal appeal...
Vol. 4 • December 1998 • No. 15
