A poor role model but an excellent symbol

A long time ago, I read A Man For All Seasons, (and later saw the star-studded movie of the same name) the classic dramatic portrayal of Sir Thomas More and his moral struggle with his friend and political patron, King Henry VIII.

In the play, More is depicted as refusing to obey the King’s commands to sever England from the Church and secure a divorce from his wife, is dismissed from his position of power, is then asked to swear an oath of loyalty to the King which includes a reference to the King as the head of the Church of England, and again refuses to do so. With sadness, More’s former friend the King has him executed for this act of disobedience; More, however, is at peace and bravely welcomes his fate, for he knows that he is in the moral right.

It is a difficult and saddening story, made all the more so because the basic events are 100% true. I stood at the very spot in the Tower of London where More was executed and imagined that I could see the blood dripping from the scaffold onto the pavement. Besides that, A Man For All Seasons is very good piece of dramatic writing, and its sympathetic portrayal of Sir Thomas More, a complex man who unflinchingly made the right choice when asked to choose between his friendship and his morality, his patriotism and his faith, and ultimately his life or his conscience, is a deeply moving one. This portrayal of More makes it easy to understand why the Roman Catholic Church canonized More.

But now, I’ve done a little more looking into the historical man. Historically, it's true that More was an extraordinarily intelligent man, easily the best lawyer of his day, the second-most powerful man in the realm and a personal friend of the King. A cursory glance of history reveals that More was trained as a young man in the humanistic school of thought; his associates as a young man, budding scholar, and new lawyer were some of the greatest thinkers of the early North European Renaissance. It is certainly true that More helped Henry draft Henry’s response to Martin Luther, which ironically still stands today as a great defense of the unified Roman Catholic Church and earned Henry the title “Defender of the Faith.” He was very close to the influential thinker and rekindler of scientific inquiry Erasmus – a man called by some the first truly modern thinker. The cursory look at history suggests that More, a contemporary of Erasmus, Mirandola, and other great thinkers of his day who laid the foundations for modernism, belongs in the same category as do they.

And in one sense, that is true. More accepted that Parliament could make Anne Boleyn Henry's Queen, but he insisted that only the Pope could make Katherine of Aragon not Henry's wife. In this, he drew a clear distinction between church and state -- and sided with the church, at the expense not only of his career but also of his life. This represented a break from traditional medieval thinking, and More deserves praise for being ahead of his time in that respect.

But while A Man For All Seasons is indeed moving, I no longer believe its veracity. The truth is that More had little difficulty severing effective political control of the Church in England from the Vatican; he argued to the Pope that Henry should have final say over who became bishops and cardinals in England. He helped the King tax and later seize the monasteries. Ultimately, Sir Thomas voiced few profound moral objections to Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon (although he was no fan of Anne Boleyn); rather, he objected to Henry’s assertion that the Church could be fragmented into separate entities altogether and that Henry, not the Pope could be its head.

Contrary to his plentiful good press in the passing centuries, More was no humanist. A humanist believes in the ultimate perfectability of mankind, he believes that man is ultimately good and beautiful and praiseworthy. More believed quite the contrary -- More was slavishly devoted to the medieval conception of human existence as vile, wretched, hopeless, and utterly unredeemable without the intervention of Divine Grace.

Indeed, More's career demonstrates that he definitely turned his back on the spirit of new thinking and learning of his age much more often than he embraced it. He was deeply opposed to the printing and publication of the Bible in the English language; he wanted to reserve the study of the Bible only to the elites. He willingly colluded with governmental manipulation of religious doctrine to serve the political needs of his friend and master the King. He fused, rather than severed, church and state. In his scholarship, he attacked substantial study of Jesus’ humanity, arguing that to emphasize Jesus as a man was disparaging to Jesus as God Incarnate. (This was going a little far even for King Henry, as it turns out.) He led teams of police to seize smuggled shipments of English-language Bibles and other books from Holland, and held public ceremonies burning those books as a demonstration of the King’s (and his) power to censor material.

Perhaps most disturbingly, More helped prosecute cases in the Star Chamber, the British equivalent of the Holy Inquisition. The Star Chamber was a treason tribunal which had members of the secret police seize suspected enemies of the King without warning, warrant, or evidence, and extracted confessions of treason from them – whether by taking evidence from unsworn witnesses or by torturing the defendant. Needless to say, there was no jury of the accused’s peers; the defendant had no right to counsel (indeed, speaking on behalf of the accused before the Star Chamber was a good way to find yourself a defendant there), and no right to hear evidence against himself, much less cross-examine witnesses against him. The nature of the crimes that the Star Chamber prosecuted were varied, malleable, and vague; the only true commonality they had was that the defendants were all deemed to be political enemies of the King. Tens, if not hundreds, of men died because of More’s disregard for England’s great, but politically inexpedient, legacy of legal due process – a legacy inherited from the Romans and thankfully one that survived Sir Thomas More’s shameful trampling to be passed on to the modern family of liberal democracies. More was a lawyer himself. He should have known better.

More is not one of history’s great heroes of morality. Quite the contrary, he ranks as one of history’s villains. Certainly not the greatest villain of all, but a bad guy nonetheless:

1. Heroes amongst scholars do not burn books.
2. Heroes amongst humanists do not hide the truth from the people, especially when they profess to fervently believe that truth to be the road to humanity's moral and spiritual salvation.
3. Heroes amongst public men do not betray their friendships and political patrons by splitting theological hairs with them.
4. Heroes amongst moral men also do not betray their families and loved ones by throwing their lives away over such insignificancies.
5. Most of all, heroes amongst lawyers do not condone and participate in attacks on their own country’s legal institutions and help the state commit judicial murder.

Some of you Loyal Readers may wonder at all this rancor directed at a figure from history. First of all, let me be clear, my opinion of More is negative but not 100% so. He did apply reason and logic to the law, he did use the law as a buttress of the state and as a beacon of morality, and as I mentioned above, he did make the leap of reasoning and observation to distinguish between church and state. He wrote Utopia, an amazingly subversive case study of society and the impact of both the state and of religion on the individual. Like many historical figures, the truth is ambiguous and gray, not black and white. He's not Hitler or Stalin and there are things about More that I can admire. But that takes me away from the question of why should anyone care about Thomas More today?

I was inspired to write about More after seeing an article recently about an entity called the Thomas More Law Center. It is the driving intellectual force behind the defense in the currently-pending case of Kitzmiller et. al. v. Dover Area School District, which involves parents suing a local school board that is attempting to replace its standard biology textbook with one that teaches intelligent design theory. The plaintiffs’ theory is that intelligent design is a thinly-veiled form of creationism and the textbook effectively constitutes the unconstitutional teaching of religion in public schools.

That those who would give sanction, aid, and the patina of respectability to the critics of science and reason -- and that they should do so in the name of religious belief -- should choose Thomas More as their namesake and role model is unsurprising. These people have picked a perfect symbol for themselves: a self-righteous reactionary, swaddled in the clothes of moral superiority and not above politically convenient hypocricy, perverting the true intent of religion and self-deluded into believing that his career was somehow in the public interest rather than against it. More's career and achievements were ultimately about thwarting the progress and power of reason rather than promoting or celebrating the human capacity for acquiring and sharing knowledge. So he is a marvellously symbolic figure, indeed.