The Life of Thomas More, by Peter Ackroyd, Anchor, 480 pp.; $17.50

Hanging over my fireplace is a print of Holbein's portrait of Thomas More, purchased at the Tower of London, the place of his execution. Five feet away, on an angled wall, hangs a watercolor of Samuel Beckett, purchased at Kenny's bookstore in Galway, Ireland. More is looking to his left; Beckett is looking, hawklike, straight ahead. Their gazes cross, but do not meet. At the crossing of their equally fierce gazes sit you and I, lesser men and women no doubt, but equally responsible to make a life.

More and Beckett do not represent opposite poles, sharing as they do some things in common—such as uncommon integrity. But they do represent different visions of reality and of human possibilities, neither of which can be ignored by a reflective person at the opening of the twenty-first century. More stands at the beginning of modernity, a last defender of a medieval understanding of life, and Beckett stands at the end of modernity, a first prophet of the postmodern. If we ignore Beckett, we will be ignorant of our time. If we ignore More, we risk losing our souls.

There are many Thomas Mores, of course. In A Man for All Seasons, the play and the subsequent film that have most shaped the image of More in our time, Robert Bolt dramatized the story of a rugged individualist dying for conscience in a battle against the coercive state. That was a view congenial to the spirit of the 1960s, but it also represents a genuine aspect of More's legacy. And if some more recent biographers have labored to deconstruct More's saintly image and replace it with that of an intolerant, ambitious ideologue, that is not only a testimony to a common academic suspicion of heroes, but also to aspects of More's life which we can no longer admire.

Peter Ackroyd's Thomas More is the last great medieval Englishman, with a Renaissance love of learning and a heart dedicated to God. He is a practical man, involved with sewers and merchant guilds as much as with kings and theology; a loving family man who doted on his children, educated his daughters, and made family piety not only central but also attractive; a man of great friendships known for his generosity and loyalty; a man of legendary intelligence and rhetorical skills who also possessed keen wit, a sometimes biting tongue, and a saving sense of humor. He was a man who fed the poor, prayed for the safety of neighbor women when they went into labor, sang in the choir when it was beneath his station, and wore a hair shirt under his rich, official robes. He also engaged in fierce polemics against Protestant reformers, happily sending some of them to a fiery death and, he had no doubt, to an eternity in hell.

More's world-view and values grew out of a nexus of related concepts—order, tradition, authority, duty, virtue, loyalty, faith—that are most comprehensively subsumed under the concept of Law. In our time physicists have long sought a single, unified theory to account for all physical phenomenoan from the subatomic to the cosmic. More's version of that, an inheritance of both classical and medieval thought, is Law.

Law is born deep within the character of God. It is essential not only to God's justice but also to God's creativity. Law manifests itself in the ordering of matter into the myriad forms of creation. Law makes possible both human consciousness and conscience. Because it is at the heart of our being, we organize ourselves into societies with intricate patterns of hierarchy and obligation, rights and responsibilities—each an expression of law. Family structure mirrors these patterns, as do civil and canon courts, parliaments and kings, music, and formal gardens.

It is not nearly enough to say that More respects the law. He sees it as the sine qua non of all good things, the chief legacy of being made in the image of God, and, therefore, the thing most to be protected from all that is lawless (hence his opposition to Protestantism, which he believed would lead to anarchy). If you understand this about More, then you can understand actions of his that not only postmodernity cannot understand, but which his own family sometimes did not understand.

You understand, for instance, that it is not mere rhetorical flourish when More says, "A man who takes an oath holds his soul in his hands." An oath, a promise, is a voluntary decision to place one's self, even one's eternal self, at risk as a sign to another of the certainty that one will fulfill one's sworn obligations. It means something only when one has a high view of law and duty; otherwise, it means precious little.

In Samuel Beckett's world by contrast, there is no knowable, dependable, underlying order to the universe, divine or natural. Lacking meaningful order, human beings create time-passing parodies of order in the form of pointless routines, like the Beckett character who labors to perfect an elaborate logical system to govern the movement of 16 sucking stones from pocket to pocket to mouth to pocket of his overcoat and pants so as not ever to suck one stone twice before he has sucked them all once, only to decide when he finally succeeds that he is tired of sucking stones altogether.

If Beckett's view seems absurd, that is precisely his point. But it is not actually that far from common views of order and law that come to us from universities and White House press releases and talk shows and judicial chambers. We learn from these that law is at best pragmatic and at worst evil. Laws are human inventions for human purposes. They are not rooted in the very nature of things, least of all in transcendence, nor are they permanent. Changing societies create changing laws for changing purposes, the main purpose (and here's where the evil comes in) being the prolongation of the status quo through which the powerful can continue their exploitation of the powerless.

Given this general concept of law, how can the notion that we hold our souls in our hands when we make an oath be anything but quaint? If I have sworn an oath of office, or of marriage, or a contractual oath in business, or an academic oath of honor, and it develops that at least my short-term self-interest seems to lie in evading that oath, it is incumbent on me—as a matter of simple self-interest and intelligence—to do so. If law is a pragmatic invention for pragmatic and transient ends, what could be more pragmatic than my self-interest at this moment, and what more transient than my original commitment? And if need be, I will hire a lawyer whose professional expertise is not in ascertaining and defending the truth, but in achieving a desired outcome for a client in return for a sum of money. And if you have a low view of lawyers, you shouldn't, because lawyers only do what we all insist, systemically and individually, that they do.

More was a lawyer himself. Education in More's time was, as Ackroyd makes clear, primarily for producing a class of people with the skills to do the intellectual and administrative work of running a country. The required skills were primarily rhetorical, that is, rooted in the art of persuasion. More was born not long after the very first books were printed in England. His education at Oxford consisted primarily of the hearing of texts, not of reading them, and then of honing the rhetorical skills of marshalling, defending, and demolishing arguments. Sound argument was thought to be rooted in natural reason, which was itself rooted in God and God's creation. Bad reasoning, in court or in parliament or in theology or at the dinner table, was a threat to order and to the common good, and therefore something that needed squashing, sometimes with a smile.

The forms of reasoning in which More was trained were still largely those of medieval Scholasticism. At the heart of Scholastic reasoning lay the concept of authority. Authority, rightly understood and elaborated, guaranteed truth. The great authorities of the medieval period—the Vulgate Bible, Aristotle, canon law—were being called into question in More's time, but the concept of authority itself he never doubted. He found congenial the Scholastic mindset in which, in Ackroyd's words, "the need for elaboration is matched only by the passion for lucidity, where clarity and complexity are not considered to be irreconcilable virtues."

Here, as elsewhere, More is far from Beckett and the spirit of our own age. It is not just our bumper sticker rebelliousness—"Question Authority"—but our fundamental loss of confidence in objective, knowable, and unchanging truth. In the spirit of the reformers whom More opposed (though he very much favored purifying the church), we have moved the tests of truth inward—not only "what do I think" but "how do I feel about it."

Essentially romantics, we see each individual as both the source and authenticator of truth. In contrast, the scholastic spirit is essentially classical, seeing as its goal the uncovering of permanently existing truth rather than the creation of it. Ackroyd goes so far as to claim that "More had no 'ideas' as such." This hyperbole points to More's determination to align his thoughts and deeds with reality as God had already created it, rather than to be a little god himself.

Ackroyd's emphasis on More's continuity with a medieval Christian understanding of the world is intended to counter a common view of More as Renaissance humanist embracing all things modern. But, as Ackroyd well understands, Thomas More's world was in some respects radically different from that of Thomas Aquinas. More was highly critical of Scholastic holdovers in education, for example, not because of the methods but because of the subject matter. He ridiculed the trivial uses to which the powerful engine of Scholastic logic was put. Instead of being wasted on theological minutiae and argument for its own sake, he wanted education focused on issues relevant to everyday life.

More was indeed a central figure among the so-called London humanists. He participated in the spreading desire to rediscover the ancients texts, not only of Greece and Rome but also of the early church. His long and very personal relationship with Erasmus is symptomatic. Erasmus wrote In Praise of Folly while staying in More's house. They conversed in Latin, the only language they shared in common. The tenor of their relationship and what was close to their hearts can be seen in the words Erasmus used to describe another friendship: "We talk of letters til we fall asleep, our dreams are dreams of letters, and literature awakens us to begin the new day."

More loved the new learning, but he would never have considered himself a scholar or a man of literature as the terms are used today. He was first and foremost a lawyer—as a young man representing the interests of tradesmen, later as a representative for and councilor to Henry VIII, as a respected judge, and even as a polemicist for Catholic England. His Utopia, still taught in literature classes today, was written to kill time on a foreign trade mission and was not followed by any similar works of the imagination.

It is, in fact, More's manner of engagement with the everyday world, not his place in intellectual or literary history, that is most attractive. More's learning and piety and essential humaneness shine forth from every corner of his life.

Every biographer, for instance, has lingered over More's home life. He was enough of a traditionalist to believe he was the head of his house, and that in itself is enough to make him suspect in our time. But who cannot warm to a man who tried so hard to make that home a place of love and challenge and affirmation? In a time of harsh paternal discipline, More never beat his children except with a peacock feather. He taught them the alphabet by making archery targets out of letters so they could learn while having fun. He educated his daughters to the highest level—his beloved Margaret became the most learned woman in England, easily able to hold her own with the learned men who passed constantly through their home.

More also led his family in an active life of faith, as seen in Holbein's famous drawing of the More household during daily devotions. At one point, he kept one hundred poor people fed every day from his own pocket, a work Margaret continued when he was sent to prison. And, lest we think learning and piety a bit grim, the home was filled with animals—birds, fox, ferret, weasel, rabbits, and monkey. More even kept a fool, Henry Patenson. Strange, even demeaning to us, it was not so to More, for fools were considered touched by God. More provided Patenson a home, and Patenson offered the household and its guests an example of universal human folly, in which More knew himself to be included. The fool served as a reminder to remain humble in a world where wisdom and foolishness were often inverted and prestige and position (and heads) could quickly be snatched away.

This balance in More's life—man of the university, of commerce, of church, of law court and king's court, of family and friendships—provides a clue to the phrase famously associated with him. Erasmus was the one who described him as a man "omnium horarum," a man for all seasons. Ackroyd says Erasmus had in mind More's "affability and sweetness of nature," which made him a fit companion under any circumstances, grave or gay. But one can rightly expand the term to include More's relevance to all times and all societies, including our own.

What most attracts us to More, and at the same time makes him most strange and even threatening, is his unwavering commitment to principle. We admire a man who argues that virtue cannot be inherited, only lived, who defines piety as the practical attempt to be a channel of God's love and compassion into a hurting world, who for all our modern suspicion of humility seems genuinely humble, who can laugh with others and at himself, and who, when falsely accused just before his execution of causing others to suffer by his refusal to compromise, can say, "I do nobody harme, I say none harme, I thynke none harme, but wysh euerye bodye good. And yf thys be not ynough to kepe a man alyue [alive], in good fayth I long not to lyue."

This we can understand even in More's unmodernized English. What the age of Beckett cannot understand, and in fact wishes to defuse, is the More who holds to principle even when it is harmful to him. In his battle of wills with Henry VIII over the king's divorce and then the king's claim to supremacy over the church, More appeals not to his individual conscience, as we would prefer, but to the shared conscience of Christendom over the centuries and throughout the western world. Henry, the autocrat we moderns know to boo, is actually much nearer to us in his desire to shape the law, temporal and divine, to suit his own private understanding for his own private ends.

But even Henry the autocrat needs More, the man of principle. He needs his approval, however grudging. If Henry is to be seen now as the head of the church, he must not himself appear a heretic, as his attacks on papal authority could be interpreted. He needs the approval of a man held in such high esteem as Thomas More, even after More has resigned from office and even when he is in prison. Henry needs More to compromise his integrity so that Henry's own compromises will be acceptable.

And we, today, need the same. Notice how desperately we search for fatal flaws in anyone who seems too virtuous and therefore too threatening. And the most satisfying flaw of all is hypocrisy, real or imagined, because that is the flaw which lets the rest of us off the hook. We are more comfortable today with a Clinton than a Lincoln, not to mention a Thomas More. It is a great relief to learn that More, this man who claimed to "do nobody harme," wrote religious polemics of the most vitriolic kind and helped lead some men to the stake. Perhaps we can group him with those zealots—terrorists, fundamentalists, the intolerant—who put abstract principle ahead of the compromises needed for everyday living.

Ackroyd does a masterful job of laying out the last weeks and hours of More's life. Increasingly hemmed in by ever more precisely worded parliamentary acts designed to trap him and defeat his strategy of silent noncompliance, More is brought down at last by an outright lie against him from Richard Rich, a man who would be very comfortable in our time, perhaps as the host of a cable talk show.

More returns by boat from that final trial back to the Tower of London, where he will be executed within the week. His grown children are waiting for him at the point where the boat will dock at the foot of the short street leading to the Tower gates. Many people are there to see him one last time, including some knowing that they would be condemned with More had they his courage. His son John kneels down in the street to receive his father's blessing, just as Thomas had always done when he met his own father in public years before. His daughter Margaret, whom More probably loved more than anyone on earth, breaks through the surrounding soldiers, embraces him, and kisses him again and again. She begins to walk away but turns back and embraces and kisses him once more, he all the time blessing and comforting her.

Nothing so becomes Thomas More—Renaissance humanist, Lord Chancellor of England, friend and advisor to the great, exemplum of principle and conscience, Christian martyr—as that he died loved and respected by his children.

Perhaps it is just as well that in the Holbein portrait More does not look us straight in the eye. Even the averted gaze makes us uncomfortable enough. At any rate, our question is not whether we prefer the world of More or that of Beckett. We cannot re-create More's world even if we tried, and we should not try. The question for us is to what degree and in what ways can the virtues More embodied, which he believed to be timeless, shape our lives today—and whether we really want them to.

For the integrity of a Thomas More is not possible as a solitary choice at a particular moment on a particular issue. It is only possible as one expression of a lifelong commitment to virtuous living. And it is only possible in a society in which such a life is believable for today, not just as a nostalgic memory.

Daniel Taylor is professor of English at Bethel College in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is the author most recently of

Before Their Time: Lessons in Living from Those Born Too Soon, with Ronald Hoekstra

(InterVarsity).

NOTE: For your convenience, the following book, which was mentioned above, is available for purchase:

• The Life of Thomas More, by Peter Ackroyd

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