Neither saint nor sinner: An analysis of Richard Marius as biographer of Thomas More

Southern Quarterly, Summer 2003 by Bowman, Glen

It may seem odd that a biography of a saint would include a discussion of that person's sexuality. Then again, Marius was no ordinary biographer. Although other writers barely mention More's love life, he builds his own study around it. In particular, he concludes that it was the basis of the "ruling drama" of his life (Thomas More xxiii). Marius argues that More's heart belonged not in the cut-throat world of political intrigue, but in the cloister, taking vows and honoring God and the Church. More's sexual urges, though, kept him from his true love. As a young man he longed for the ability to control his desires so he could meet the Church's requirement of celibacy and therefore become a monk. But he could not, and that failure tortured him. When he married, he did not do so out of love, but out of necessity, for he did not want to be in a position in which he would lose control of himself and commit sexual sin. Marius posits that More considered his sexual desire as a primitive impulse not to be enjoyed but to be suppressed. As one might expect, More's sex life was bizarre. It is not certain that More ever consummated his second marriage, and he seems to have been more interested in abusing his body out of religious fervor (wearing a hair shirt, using a log as a pillow on a bed of boards) than in sleeping with his spouse (220). His first marriage to his beloved Margaret was largely sexless as well, as More believed that intercourse "threatened the salvation of his soul" (228).

More, we know, certainly had literary urges, as anyone who has seen the multi-volume Yale edition of his writings can testify. Many scholars of the English Renaissance consider him to have been sixteenth-century England's greatest humanist, and his Utopia, the era's personification of literary brilliance. The essay, to some a "masterpiece" (Utopia [1964] xiii), has been praised for its "artistic vitality" (Utopia [1988] 7). Before the 1939 publication of Douglas Bush's The Renaissance and English Humanism, it was believed that More was so important to the humanist movement that his execution essentially killed it.

Marius took a position that could scarcely be more contradictory, asserting that More was not really a humanist at all. He concluded that Utopia thematically belongs in medieval times, since it reveals not More's brilliance, but rather his "heavy-handed" and "puritanical" ways (Thomas More 167). His controlling persona comes out as he forces the inhabitants of Utopia to believe in the reality of Providence and immortality. Marius takes issue with those scholars who say that because the inhabitants of Utopia were required to be tolerant of other religions, More himself had this same attitude. On the contrary, More was not interested in religious liberty at all. The Utopians became Christians because they were led by their reason; if they had been intolerant, their reason would have been clouded, and they never could have reached an understanding of God. To Marius, the book Utopia may well represent a window into More's hatred of heresy. The Utopians came to an understanding of God through their human consciousness, and so did Christians. Throughout history God has worked in the world through the lives of faithful believers. Their work, collectively, is the Church. By challenging the authority of the Church, Protestants are going against this natural, God-given source of knowledge. They say that they reject the authority of the Church in favor of the authority of Scripture, but who provided the Scripture in the first place? The Church, of course!