The Last Letters of Thomas More, edited by Alvaro de Silva, Eerdmans, 2000, 208 pp.; $20

Five years after the beheading of Thomas More in 1535, his sometime royal friend and ultimate executioner bought a grisaille painting by Girolamo da Trevisa the Younger. The Four Evangelists Stoning the Pope is the only work of art still found in the Royal Collection the original location of which can be identified with one of the many (mostly expropriated) houses of King Henry VIII. The famously appetitive monarch, it seems, had an uncharacteristically narrow taste in the visual arts.

In most other spheres his appetite was of legendary capacity. Leaving aside the matter of his tremendous girth, Henry's joint sexual and ecclesiastical ambitions have combined to make him the butt of many a posthumous joke. One of the most succinct is Brendan Behan's polemical quatrain:

Beware the Protestant minister,
his false reason, false creed and false faith:
the foundation stones of his temple
are the b***s of Henry the Eighth.

This pub-rhyme, an epitome of Irish Catholic humor, was written in a place where the consequences of conflict and conscience during "the birth of the English Reformation" are still most painfully being worked out. But the jest works more widely because at bottom it bares so well a broad truth.

Thomas More, Behan's co-religionist, would certainly have seen Behan's theological point, so to speak, but he would not have found it funny. For a Christian willing to die rather than betray his conscience, the oppression of a self-proclaimed Supreme Head of the Church who seemed, as Alvaro de Silva puts it, to have his own conscience more or less between his legs, was doubly embarrassing. Lesser but not dissimilar grotesqueries still discomfit, after all, as a certain Bishop of Newark's post-retirement career as sex columnist for the dot-com branch of Penthouse magazine may serve to illustrate. Henry VIII has always had offspring ready to offer high theological rationalizations for low carnal appetites.

The fact that many Anglicans today identify much more with Thomas than with Henry is only one of many ironies concerning conscience in this unfinished story. Another is that Catholics themselves have had to repress the fact that among their sometime heroes of the faith one finds listed none other than this same Henry VIII. For writing (with More's help, no less) a defense of the seven sacraments directed against Martin Luther, Pope Leo X granted Henry almost immediately the title "Defender of the Faith" (1521). And Henry, who took pains to show zeal in the outward practices of religion, died (to his own reckoning at least) some sort of Catholic, deeply suspicious of the form of Protestantism he more than any made possible. Henry's unchecked appetites, nonetheless, helped establish politics rather than prayer as the determining force in the English Church as an institution. Hard as it may be for contemporary Anglicans to stomach the symbolism, barring legislative change, on his accession to the throne Prince Charles simultaneously accedes to headship of the Anglican Church and the inherited title "Defender of the Faith."

This beautifully prepared, richly annotated edition of The Last Letters of Thomas More effectively contextualizes some of these ironies in Henry's conflict with More, even as it foregrounds the outworkings of a celebrated saintly conscience. In these respects Alvaro de Silva's book offers a worthy vantage point from which to reconsider the portraits offered by assessments as diverse as R.J. Schoeck's The Achievement of Thomas More (1975) and Peter Ackroyd's more recent popular biography (1998). In all cases, it proves impossible to take the measure of the saint without coming to terms with the big sinner: predictably banal, predictably venal, even offstage Henry is in every sense the foil and adversary of Christian fidelity.

Yet in the light of history, as we like to say, so contrarious a character as Thomas More appears the greater anomaly. This, political defeat notwithstanding, is precisely what makes him of enduring pertinence, a "man for all seasons" as Erasmus, unwittingly prophetic, once said. Erasmus, who in his Greek New Testament text had been mentor to the Reformer Tyndale and in his humanistic learning a good friend to Tyndale's enemy More, acknowledged what many a Christian scholar with less candor might not, that he was not himself "strong enough" to be a martyr, that his own expedient was rather to "yield safely" to bad decrees whether papal or imperial, on the principle that "such a course is allowed. … if there is no hope of success" (Epist. 538).

At the time it would have been hard to predict from More's political eminence and humanistically and materially enriched lifestyle that he was cut from much different cloth. The secret hair shirt of More's last days notwithstanding, he was no natural ascetic. More liked his creature comforts. In one of his many useful footnotes, de Silva records how Erasmus wrote in 1519 that if More "sees anything outlandish or otherwise remarkable, he buys it greedily, and has his house stocked with such things from all sources, so that everywhere you may see something to attract the eyes of the visitor; and when he sees other people pleased, his own pleasure begins anew."

Assessing the consequences of his refusal to declare publicly for Henry's usurpation of the Church, More wrote to his daughter Margaret:

I found myself (I cry God mercy) very sensual and my flesh much more shrinking from pains and from death, than me thought it the part of a faithful Christian man, in such a case as my conscience gave me, that in the saving of my body should stand the loss of my soul, yet I thank the Lord, that in that conflict the Spirit hath in conclusion the mastery, and reason with the help of faith finally concluded, that for to be put to death for doing well … is a case in which a man may lose his head and yet have none harm, but instead of harm in inestimable good at the hand of God.

(Letter 16)

It is notable that a majority of More's last letters were, like this one, written to women. Margaret Roper, More's eldest daughter, was a close confidant. A woman of pith and good wit as well as compassion, she is the recipient of the most interesting and, spiritually speaking, most valuable of the letters. But More wrote also to Alice Alington, his stepdaughter. His affection and honor for each of the two women he married is as well apparent in his letters. It is clear that he liked women and enjoyed their company. In his final requests to Margaret on the eve of his execution, he provided little keepsakes for his other daughters and even two of the maids, women for whom More had provided a worthy education in the remarkable domestic school he ran in his home in Chelsea.

More was not invulnerable to lesser women if they appeared to possess holiness; to his dangerous cost, briefly he was taken in by the charismatic and self-promoting fraud known as the "Holy Maid of Kent." But he could speak as plainly of women's faults as men's—as in his eventual references to this nun as the "wicked woman of Canterbury" attest—and the overwhelming evidence of his dealings with women is that he treated them with kindness and courtesy as spiritual equals and, when opportunity presented itself, as intellectual equals. They returned his respect. However counter-intuitively for postmodern prejudices, More the hairshirt Catholic fundamentalist turns out to have been as exemplary in the quality of his relationship with women as Henry the modernizing emancipator was monstrous. More looked "to find mind in women" and so made of them friends; Henry's libidinous ego sought only bodies to work his will, and so made of women frightened slaves and disposable chattel.

It may seem odd to apply the derogatory f-word of our own time to More, almost in the way it is so casually now used in the secular press. That it is not unwarranted may be seen from the briefest of reflections upon how such a one as Thomas More would find himself labeled a "fundamentalist." There are and have always been conflicts between those who insist that religious and moral truth derives from a projection of social consciousness (or, as in the case of Henry, the projection of a political agenda) and those who believe that in the essentials such truths are "given," that is, are an expression of divine revelation and its faithful tradition. One problem people in the first group typically have with those in the second is that they tend to think, as the first do not, that fundamental truths have eventual consequences. To the first, this is a superstition as dangerous to effective social consensus as literal belief in divine law.

"Fundamentalism," opprobriously employed as a term to express this fear, has in our time quickly become an irrational but effective term of dismissal for religious orthodoxies of any kind. In the popular press, Dr. Laura Schlessinger is a "Jewish fundamentalist" and Peter Kreeft a "Catholic fundamentalist": evidently, fundamentalist now pretty much means anyone intemperate enough actually to believe what his or her religion teaches. This new usage, accordingly, articulates a denial of religious freedom. In some contexts it creates indiscriminate fear. It marginalizes voices of conscience, even promotes hatred. What does it mean to call someone who believes in the good of sexual self-restraint, or who believes that there are some principles worth dying for, a "fundamentalist"? Increasingly it means, I think, that they are to be regarded as a clear and present danger to society, as "enemies of the people." And what gets overlooked in the flurry of alarmist polemic is that sense in which people on both sides are fundamentalists. (They just disagree on the fundamentals.)

Thomas More thought there were certain mind-independent truths, of a moral as well as physical nature, and that they did have consequences. He also thought some of these truths were divinely revealed and apprehended by faith, but that they also could be tested by reason. He thought further that once understood in this way moral verities were binding upon the conscience. Accordingly, he was by today's usage a "fundamentalist." For him the universe could be lived in accountably not merely in observance of what we call truths of nature, but in observance of what religious people call the "truths of God." He thought rational examination not to be a matter of individual prerogative alone, but that the intellectually honest individual must hear also the reasons of a "host of witnesses" diachronically, particularly where the obligations of faith were concerned. Not even a Pope was exempt: "never thought I the Pope above the general council," he wrote to Thomas Cromwell (Letter 5). Pressures of the moment, however powerful politically, should not trump the obligation of Christian conscience to revealed truth and the weight of historical witness to that truth.

This last point is crucial if we are to understand properly what More meant when he spoke of being "bound by conscience" not to sign the oath required by Henry. More did not mean merely that he was going to stick to his opinion, or defend to the death a private point of view. For him conscience was not in this narrow and subjective sense an individual matter but rather a matter of common science, the knowing in common of the historic community of faith. Thus he could write: "I am not then bounden to change my conscience, and confirm it to the council of one realm against the general council of Christendom" (Letter 6) and again, "sith all Christendom is one corps [body], I cannot perceive how any member thereof may without the common assent of the body depart from the common head" (Letter 5).

For More conscience was not remotely a dictate of fashion, or of appetite, but rather the product of an intensive pursuit of understanding, "wherein I had not informed my conscience neither suddenly nor slightly, but by long leisure and diligent search" (Letter 6). In his discipline of mind and spirit he was not in the older American sense (teetotalling, literalist, and anti-intellectual) a fundamentalist. Yet Henry had him killed because he refused to compromise on some common fundamentals.

The language of religious conflict remains for us no less than for the polemicist of More's day notoriously imprecise. Perhaps this is because an abuse of language is necessarily propaedeutic to the abuse of persons. Good conscience prompts scrupulous speech; it sets a limit upon rhetoric. More knew this, and almost every letter in de Silva's collection bears careful witness to it.

But good conscience sets also a constraint upon a certain kind of politics. More, indebted to Augustine more than to any other theologian or commentator upon Scripture, adhered to Augustine's principle that "no man can possibly judge another's conscience" (i 5.11). Having delivered himself of what he felt his duty to declare (and refuse) he did not, as the paranoid Henry might have wished to believe, politically organize against the king: "Howbeit," he writes, "(as help me God), as touching the whole oath, I never withdrew any man from it, nor never advised any to refuse it, nor never put, nor never will, any scruple in any man's head, but leave every man to his own conscience. And methinks in good faith that so were it good reason that every man should leave me to mine." If for More the development of conscience is a communal science, the exercise of that conscience applies its obligation strictly to the self.

Here we see why, for a Christian thus faithfully committed to the fundamentals of faith, religious toleration ought to be axiomatic. In More's Utopia the inhabitants of that fabled island "count this principle among their most ancient institutions, that no one should suffer for his religion." Confronted by conflict, one is not obligated (quite the contrary) to renounce conscience concerning acknowledged moral truth. One is obligated to bear witness, and is then further obligated not to resist the consequences—even to turn the other cheek. More's is not an advocacy of public civil disobedience, but simply of refusal to give personal assent to what is known in one's conscience to be morally wrong for a Christian to approve. Only once did he give public voice to his personal view that the Act of Supremacy was "directly oppugnant to the laws of God and his holy Church"—and that was after final sentence was pronounced against him in the Court at Westminster.

Alas, it is in the nature of a bad conscience—conscience that privately suspects itself to be in the wrong—to demand not mere toleration but open approval, even public approbation under oath. To this tyranny More fell victim. Nor ought we to see his fate as entirely unprecedented by his own earlier practices. His own active prosecution to the death of Protestants who spoke to their convictions had already most sharply transgressed his Utopian high principles. It seems clear enough that in his spiritual intensity he was capable of intemperance with others as well as himself.

Indeed, earlier in his life he had been a polemicist. But More later came to think of self-restraint as a consequence of good conscience, if for no other reason than that good conscience could never be purely personal, hence never a matter of purely personal judgment. This conclusion seems to have followed naturally from the older Catholic notion that the Church is really the body of Christ, an extension of Christ in time and space. "Ye must," More writes, "in all these things. … believe and obey the Church which is, as I say, the person whom Christ sendeth you to for the sure solution of all such doubts, as [if] to the man in whose mouth he speaketh himself and the Holy Spirit of his Father in heaven" (Complete Works 6.166; cf. Letter 5). The later Protestant tendency to claim that an individual conscience was itself a divine lawgiver (Whichcote, Norris, Locke) would lead inexorably to the secularist caveat that different persons necessarily acknowledge different inner laws. It led also to flamboyant and vituperative rhetoric, as John Locke among others observed, that is, to ad hominem "personal" attacks.

These last letters of More, like his other great prison texts, the Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation and De tristitia … Christi (a commentary on the gospel account of Christ in Gethsemane), are without illusion concerning the implacability of his adversary. But there is in them no ad hominem polemic. In irenic rather than angry language (of which More was so capable), all of these texts serve rather to make as precise as possible an examination of the writer's own conscience. In them, More clearly hoped as well to aid the developing conscience of others who must face a similar conflict. He is here squarely within the tradition of texts such as Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy and Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison. What such works teach their careful readers is to lift their minds above the merely immanent, the impress of political power. Prison literature of this order of self-restraint achieves clarity precisely because it knows whose authority is final. It reveals the spiritual focus of a soul already convinced that, spiritually viewed, this very world is itself a kind of prison.

All this suggests inter alia that the world may have less to fear from the true fundamentalist than it thinks. The true Christian fundamentalist, after all, has no choice but to be nonviolent, no choice but to bear witness when asked and then rest silent. Moreover, in order to prove faithful to the teaching authority of Jesus, such a one must be a servant, even a suffering servant, examining himself daily in the light of Scripture to ensure that in all he does he imitates, imitatio Christi, the one king who sought no worldly power. Clearly it is much too difficult a thing to be a Christian fundamentalist for it to interest many people. Equally obviously, the people who choose it will be of small political consequence and, even if a bit troubling to bad conscience, easily overcome.

On the other hand, there is a perspective—an enduring perspective—in which political demise is not the end of the story. King Henry VIII, his feet placed firmly astride the political world, could almost always count on power to eliminate unsettling voices of conscience. He overcame many such consciences, beginning with his own. But what he could not eliminate was the unsettling witness of just one uncompromised good conscience both in and beyond its own time. In the end it is that good conscience, hair-shirt fundamentalist or not, which has had the most fruitful progeny.

David Lyle Jeffrey is Distinguished Professor of Literature and Humanities at Baylor University. He is the author most recently of The People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture (Eerdmans) and general editor of A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (Eerdmans).

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

• The Last Letters of Thomas More, edited by Alvaro de Silva

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