The great past instructs the contemporary conscience. Obviously, playwright Robert Bolt was aware of the persecutions going on in fascist and communist regimes, and his Thomas More sees into the 20th century future and its need for martyrs. His More also anticipates the “wokeism” of the 21st century when the thoughts of our hearts increasingly come under the pressure of political regulation.
In 1509, the renowned scholar Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam stayed for a week at the London home of his friend and peer, Sir Thomas More, during which time he wrote his most famous and influential book, Encomium Moriae or In Praise of Folly. The title could also be translated In Praise of More, and throughout the book, Erasmus puns on More’s name (morus, fool) in good scholarly fun. A few years later, More published Utopia, one of the most influential books of the past millennium: the word and the idea entered the world’s languages. Deeply involved in English politics, he engaged in the controversies between the Roman Catholic Church and the thinkers of the early Protestant Reformation. It was a time when loyalties were tested. Despite helping Henry VIII write the book for which the king was named Defender of the Faith, More was beheaded for treason in 1535 because he would not acknowledge his former friend as the head of the English church.
What did his death mean? On Tuesday of this week (George Washington’s actual birthday), this year’s seniors led fifteen different sections of faculty, students, and staff of Wyoming Catholic College in an All-College Seminar on Robert Bolt’s play about More, A Man for All Seasons. The play centers on the difference between conscience, that inner measure, and what the cynical Thomas Cromwell calls “administrative convenience. The normal aim of administration is to keep steady this factor of convenience.” It’s hard not to see “administrative convenience” in the way Western governments are responding to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine by threatening him with everything but actual military intervention.
More’s problems center on Henry VIII’s desire to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. It is a complicated issue, now obscure but of intense importance not only to England but to the whole of Europe at the time. Henry had secured a papal dispensation to marry his brother’s widow in the first place, but she was aging, their only son had died, and he needed an heir. He was already having an affair with Anne Boleyn, whom he wanted to marry, and More’s opposition was a delicate matter. The play covers More’s elevation to Chancellor of England in 1529, the loss of his position because he cannot approve Henry’s second marriage, his subsequent poverty, and his imprisonment for the year before his execution in 1535. Is he wrong to oppose Henry when everyone else goes along? His gesture — as even his beloved daughter Margaret calls it, to his dismay — does nothing to change the reality of English politics, nor does it restore England to the Catholic world.
As the play demonstrates, More does everything in his power both to follow his conscience (indeed, to be a conscience for his king) and, at the same time, to use the legal provisions for silence to protect himself and his family. He concentrates on hard-won English law and examines the exact wording of the oath, because it might allow him some leeway. More makes no statement, public or private, about the marriage to Catherine or about Henry’s break with Rome. Some of our spirited students, very much like More’s mercurial son-in-law Edward Roper, said on Tuesday that More should simply have spoken out boldly against Henry’s tyranny. But even his silence spoke. As Thomas Cromwell puts it in the play, “This ‘silence’ of his is bellowing up and down Europe!”
The sober More saw the complexities of what it meant to be obedient to a king—as opposed, say, to an elected official with bad poll numbers. England had already faced almost a century of civil wars over succession (the War of the Roses). More knew that a legitimate heir would secure political stability, not to say, “administrative convenience.” Henry’s desire for a son was no small matter—but neither was the quiet opposition of one of the most respected men in Europe. Ultimately, More was condemned to death because Richard Rich (who later became Chancellor) perjured himself to bring the charge of treason against him.
Was Erasmus right that the praise of More is the praise of folly? Perhaps in the sense that he was a holy fool. “I die the king’s good servant,” he said on the scaffold, “and God’s first.” Both Bishop John Fisher and Thomas More were canonized in 1935 as various forms of totalitarianism were rising throughout Europe. T.S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral also appeared in 1935, and its depiction of Thomas Becket’s defiance of Henry II clearly anticipates what Bolt does in his play. Like Becket, More recognizes that “The last temptation is the greatest treason:/To do the right deed for the wrong reason.” But Bolt’s character might also owe part of his insight to George Orwell’s 1984, which appeared (with Big Brother and the “thought police”) in 1948, twelve years before Bolt’s first stage version in 1960. More says to his arch-enemy Cromwell, “What you have hunted me for is not my actions, but the thoughts of my heart. It is a long road you have opened. For first men will disclaim their hearts and presently they will have no hearts. God help the people whose Statesmen walk your road.”
The great past instructs the contemporary conscience. Obviously, playwright Robert Bolt was aware of the persecutions going on in fascist and communist regimes, and his Thomas More sees into the 20th century future and its need for martyrs. His More also anticipates the “wokeism” of the 21st century when the thoughts of our hearts increasingly come under the pressure of political regulation. Does being accused of being racist or sexist or phobic (in various novel ways) really and truly promote charity and justice? The question led to some lively discussion at Wyoming Catholic College on Tuesday, where hearts have not been disclaimed.
Hearts will be needed in the world of war that we enter today. I doubt that Putin has paused to ascertain the preferred pronouns of the Ukrainians. In fact, looking at a civilization where such sensitivities occupy central public concern must make him confident that his overt outrage against Ukraine will be largely unopposed. We are hereby put on notice. We need to remember the truths of God and to affirm without cynicism the great promise of freedom from tyranny that Thomas More embodied and that America represents.
Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College.
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John Ruskin gives us a clue about conscience when he writes about truth in art and architecture. Regarding falsehood, he writes:
“It is not calumny nor treachery that does the largest sum of mischief in the world; they are continually crushed, and are felt only in being conquered. But it is the glistening and softly spoken lie; the amiable fallacy; the patriotic lie of the historian, the provident lie of the politician, the zealous lie of the partisan, the merciful lie of the friend, and the careless lie of each man to himself, that cast that black mystery over humanity. . . .” ( “The Lamp of Truth,” The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1849).
In addition to wokeism in the political world, one can also wonder about the downsizing of “justice” and its decapitation from charity (“charity and justice”), in the thin gruel spoon fed to us by too many in the ecclesial world.