A Book for All Readers

National Review, Dec 21, 1998 by Florence King

The Life of Thomas More, by Peter Ackroyd (Doubleday, 447 pp., $30)

ERASMUS addressed him as mellitissime Thoma and famously proclaimed that his sweetest Thomas was omnium horarum-a man for all seasons, whose affability remained constant through fair weather and foul. It's true that Thomas More joked even on the scaffold, but Erasmus, who liked puns and double meanings, may also have alluded to the many people who had no idea what made him tick.

Foremost among them was the upfront Dame Alice More, whose letter to Henry VIII pleading for her husband's life made it clear that she considered him a little touched. Even Erasmus, who probably understood him as much as anyone could, was reduced in the end to throwing up his hands and crying, "If only he had left theology to the theologians!"

The philosopher's outburst highlights More's greatest contradiction: he was an ascetic man of the world. Grandson of a rich merchant, son of a King's Bench judge, exposed while a page in the household of the Archbishop of Canterbury to the highest gloss of savoir faire, he was the master mold of urbanity and the very glass of sophisticated social ease, yet underneath his silks and velvets he wore a hair shirt.

A perplexing duality marked his every thought and deed. He died in defense of papal authority and always bowed to his father, even in adulthood when he outranked him, but he himself was a permissive father who spanked his children with feathers. His attitude toward women was almost schizoid. More the dominant male married his first wife solely to avoid the sin of fornication; when she died giving birth to their fifth child, he remarried a month later solely because he needed a housekeeper. Yet More the feminist was the first Englishman to champion education for women and personally instructed his daughter Margaret in Latin and Greek, fashioning her into the most erudite woman of her time.

The King himself was caught short by his contradictions. More's detached, ironic personality seemed ideally suited to the divorce situation. Surely this easily amused courtier would not scruple to tinker with the law for the sake of Henry's pressing marital needs, nor would the author of Utopia be one to object to reforming society along more progressive lines. Yet when Henry made More his Lord Chancellor with this purpose in mind, he found he had acquired a Nathan.

More's latest biographer, Peter Ackroyd, does not fully understand him either-many of his conclusions are prefaced with, "It is possible that . . ."-but he presents More in a way that invites readers, especially conservatives, to identify with him. Born in 1478 as the Middle Ages were turning into the Renaissance, More "embodied the old order of hierarchy and authority at the very moment when it began to collapse." Anxiety is the unavoidable fate of people who bridge two epochs. Those who today live with an ever-present gnawing sense of dislocation brought on by the Sixties' assault on traditional values can easily understand how Thomas More must have felt.

Like today's neo-cons, he was for a time part of what he later fought. His friendship with Erasmus grew out of their mutual enthusiasm for the "new learning," a movement opposed to priestly control over education. For centuries, the medieval church had maintained that the Bible, Aristotle, and the canon law of Justinian comprised the totality of knowledge and obviated the need for more. These three sources being finite, however, learning had turned back in on itself and descended into "Scholasticism," which flirted with lunacy. The famous story of monks debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin may be apocryphal, but Scholastics did argue the difference between vinum bibi bis (wine I drank twice) and bis vinum bibi (twice wine I drank).

Thomas More called this stultissima solertia (foolish ingenuity) and promoted the teaching of Greek and Roman literature and rhetoric on grounds that the precision logic and lucid eloquence of classicism would infuse piety with clarity and hence strengthen faith.

Because the New Learning extolled human reason over church authority, it was called "Humanism." Erasmus was in the vanguard, writing (in seven days during a stay at More's home) In Praise of Folly, a satirical look at greedy churchmen and lazy mendicant friars that became the most famous secular work of the sixteenth century. Thomas More took a leaf from Plato's Republic and described a perfect society called "Utopia." The word was his coinage, taken from the Greek elements meaning "no place," but this subtlety was lost on many. Like all liberal movements, Humanism got hijacked and all hell broke loose.

Thomas More and Martin Luther never met, but "the battle between the two men is like an internalized conflict between the warring selves of sixteenth-century civilization." More, now a member of the King's Council, wrote a scathing response to Luther. Luther was a dishonest liar (improbe mendax), an ape (simium), he deserved to have someone defecate (incacere) in his mouth, he celebrated Mass on the toilet (super foricam), and he wriggled his bum (clunem agitat) when preaching. In his reply, Luther compared the Catholic world to a gigantic anus and himself to an incipient bowel movement and predicted, "We will probably let go of each other soon."