The Lesson of Thomas More by Quentin Skinner - The New York Review of Books

7/6/2016
The Lesson of Thomas More by Quentin Skinner | The New York Review of Books
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The Lesson of Thomas More

Quentin Skinner
OCTOBER 12, 1978 ISSUE
The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, Volume 2: The History of King Richard III
edited by Richard S. Sylvester
Yale University Press, 312 pp., $27.59
The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, Volume 3 (Part I): Translations of Lucian
edited by Craig R. Thompson
The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, Volume 4: Utopia
edited by Edward Surtz, edited by S. J. and J. H. Hexter
The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, Volume 5: Responsio ad Lutherum
edited by John M. Headley, translated by Sister Scholastica Mandeville
Yale University Press, 1,036 pp., 2-vol. set $52.50
The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, Volume 8: The Confutation of Tyndale's Answer
edited by Louis A. Schuster, edited by Richard C. Marius, edited by James P. Lusardi, edited by Richard J.
Schoeck
The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, Volume 12: A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation
edited by Louis L. Martz, edited by Frank Manley
The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, Volume 13: Treatise on the Passion; Treatise on the Blessed Body;
Instructions and Prayers
edited by Garry E. Haupt
The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, Volume 14 (Parts I and I): De Tristitia Christi
edited by Clarence H. Miller
Utopia
by Thomas More, translated and edited by Robert M. Adams
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1978/10/12/the-lesson-of-thomas-more/?pagination=false&printpage=true
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Norton, 239 pp., $2.95 (paper)
This is the five-hundredth anniversary of Sir

Thomas Mores birth. Anniversaries are
traditionally a time for taking stock, so it seems an
appropriate moment to ask what reasons there may
be for continuing to think about Mores life and
writings so many centuries after his death.
To a historian there are of course many reasons for
paying attention to More. In the first place his
political career is of considerable significance.
More turned to politics in earnest in his early
forties, after making his name and fortune as a
Sir Thomas More; drawing by David Levine
lawyer in the city of London. He only entered the
kings service after prolonged and apparently
agonized reflectiona process he describes and dramatizes in the opening book of his
Utopia. But once embarked on his new career he quickly rose to the top. He became
speaker of the House of Commons in 1523, served as a royal secretary and roving
ambassador throughout the 1520s, and in 1529 he attained the highest office of state,
the lord chancellorship.
O ne crucial contribution More made to the English system of government at this time
has long been recognized. It was he who, in his capacity as speaker of the Commons,
first secured the right of its members to enjoy complete freedom of speech in debating
any issue submitted to them. In addition, Professor J.J. Scarisbrick has recently argued
that More was no less innovative in his work as lord chancellor. He sees More as the
moving spirit behind an ambitious series of reform proposals drawn up in 1530, which
included a plan to curb the growing rate of inflation as well as a scheme for a statefinanced system of poor relief, the first proposal of its kind ever put forward in
England.1
More is also of interest to historians as a leading humanist, an outstanding exponent of
the new classical learning associated with the Renaissance. While still in his twenties he
translated four of Lucians satirical dialogues from Greek into Latin, publishing them in
association with his friend Erasmus in 1506. And later he somehow found time in the
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midst of his busy legal practice to compose two of the most influential works of
English humanism. First he produced, in 1516, his celebrated account of the imaginary
island of Utopia, a book which has given its name to a whole genre of subsequent
social criticism. And between 1514 and 1518 he completed the Latin as well as English
versions of his History of King Richard III. This book has had an influence vastly
beyond its actual readership, for Shakespeare is known to have studied it closely, and it
forms the basis for his ineradicable portrait of Richard as a hunchbacked villain, a
tyrannous usurper and the murderer of his own nephews.
Finally, More remains of interest to theologians as well as historians for his religious
treatises, both his anti-Protestant polemics and his devotional works. As a young man
More was a sharp criticno less than Erasmusof the vices and follies of the Catholic
Church. But he was deeply shocked when the opposition of the humanists to the
Churchs shortcomings passed over into heresy and schism with Luthers
epochmaking outburst against the papacy in 1517. Soon after this Mores religious
outlook began to undergo a marked change. In 1516, in Utopia, he had pleaded for a
remarkably wide measure of religious toleration. But by the end of the 1520s, acting as
lord chancellor, he was calling for a fierce campaign of persecution against Englands
earliest Protestants, several of whom he caused to be burned. At the same time he
began to publish a series of diatribes against Luther and his English disciples, all of
which are unfortunately distinguished by exhausting prolixity as well as a brutal violence
of tone. The first to appear was his Dialogue Concerning Heresies in 1528, while the
fullest attack was mounted in his Confutation of 1532-1533, a work which runs in its
modern edition to over a thousand pages.
More spent the last year of his life as a prisoner in the Tower of London, awaiting trial
and execution on a charge of high treason. At this point his religious writings took on a
different and more reflective tone, bringing back into the foreground many of the most
sympathetic aspects of his complex personality. As well as a treatise on the Passion of
Christ, he wrote a poignant Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, a work of
consolation in which he even succeeds in viewing his own desperate predicament with
the detached humor that never deserted him. He also wrote a meditation in Latin on The
Sadness of Christ, using the story of Christs agony in the garden to help him reach the
last and most important decision of his own life: that a martyrs death is not to be
evaded if one feels it to be required by faith.
All these scholarly interests in Mores life and writings are currently being splendidly
served by the Yale University Press, which has so far issued eight of the proposed
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sixteen volumes of its Complete Works of St. Thomas More. The series already stands
as a monument of exemplary book production as well as dedicated scholarship. An
exceptional degree of organizational and editorial skill has gone into the planning of the
whole project. And the volumes so far published have been definitive in their
presentation of Mores texts. All the known manuscripts have been consulted, all the
variants in all the early editions have been collated, and in each case the original format
including even the most tortured spelling and punctuationhas been reproduced
with scrupulous exactitude.
When the Yale edition first began to appear in the early 1960s, the editors wisely chose
to concentrate on the appealing figure of More the humanist. The first volume to be
issued was Professor Richard Sylvesters edition of The History of King Richard III in
1963. This was followed in 1965 by Professors Edward Surtz and J.H. Hexters edition
of Utopia, which has already been reprinted. And in 1974 came Professor Craig
Thompsons volume of Mores youthful translations from Lucian.
Recently the editors have shifted the focus of their attention to More the champion of
the Catholic Church. We still await the edition (now promised for next year) of Mores
first and greatest denunciation of the Protestants, his Dialogue Concerning Heresies.
But the volume containing his Latin Response to Luther appeared in 1969, while the
huge edition of his Confutation (requiring three volumes to itself) came out in 1973.
Finally, last year saw the almost simultaneous publication of all the major devotional
treatises More composed while awaiting his death in the Tower.
It must of course be admitted that a project on this scale can scarcely hope to be free
from editorial blemishes. It is unfortunate, for example, that the edition of the
Confutation has appeared before the Dialogue. Much of Professor Louis Schusters
admirable introduction to the former work would have served much better as an
introduction to the latter, and much of what he says will presumably have to be repeated
if the editors of the Dialogue are to place it in its appropriate intellectual context. It is
even more unfortunate that the translation of Utopia, as originally issued, contained
such a large number of mistakes, especially since the paperback edition of 1964
appears to have gone into extensive use as a school and college text. Sometimes the
translator leaves out whole sentences, and even when he only mistranslates a single
word this occasionally affects the sense of a whole passagefor example, when he
renders felicitas as philosophy instead of happiness or charitas as freedom
instead of charity.
It is true that all translators of Utopia begin with an unfortunate disadvantage. The first
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English version of Mores textissued by Ralph Robinson in 1551is a work of art in

its own right, a remarkably close rendering of the original with a beauty of cadence
which has left its mark on many generations of readers. For those who want something
more up-to-date, however, it is arguable that the best answer is to turn not to the Yale
edition, but rather to the version produced by Professor Robert M. Adams for the
Norton Critical Edition of Utopia in 1975. This is naturally far more idiomatic than
Robinsons archaic prose, but it is also far more readable than the Yale translation,
which is based on a scholarly but labored attempt to reproduce as much as possible of
Mores winding and elaborate Latin syntax.
Whatever criticisms one may have of the Yale edition, however, most of them become
mere quibbles when compared with the immense scholarly achievement represented by
these volumes as a whole. They not only present Mores texts with unrivaled precision,
but in each case surround them with explanatory notes and introductions of a
consistently impressive quality. Furthermore, several editors are able to report important
discoveries about individual texts for the first time. In his introduction to Richard III,
Professor Sylvester has finally been able to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the
work is indeed by More, and not by his early patron Cardinal Morton as had often been
alleged. In his introduction to the Dialogue of Comfort, Professor Louis Martz has
succeeded in showing that the earliest known manuscripts are actually copies taken
from Mores own holograph, corrected by his original editor William Rastell. He is thus
able to furnish the first fully authentic text of this most attractive of Mores so-called
Tower works. Most dramatically of all, Professor Miller has been able to base his
superb edition of The Sadness of Christ on Mores own autograph manuscript, the
unique copy of which was deposited during the sixteenth century in a reliquary closet in
Valencia, and only came to light again in 1963. Once more, the result is a wholly new
and definitive edition of Mores text.
Although the Yale edition is greatly to be welcomed as well as admired, the fact is that
for most of us the new learning of the Renaissance and the interminable polemics of
the Reformation are somewhat remote subjects. Are there no more immediate lessons
to be learned from a study of Mores life and works? I think there undoubtedly are, and
that two of them at least deserve our most serious attention.
First there is the matter of Mores death, a death for which he is venerated as a saint
and martyr by the Catholic Church. More was beheaded in 1535, having refused to
swear the oath attached to the Act of Succession which Thomas Cromwell had piloted
through Parliament in the previous year. The purpose of this act was to establish that
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the infant princess Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth I) should be regarded as Henry
VIIIs legitimate heir. Since Elizabeth was the daughter of Anne Boleyn, however, this
presupposed accepting the validity of the kings divorce from his first wife, Catherine
of Aragon. But this divorce had been refused by the pope, and had only been granted
by a special court presided over by the schismatic archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas
Cranmer. To accept the divorce and Elizabeths legitimacy was thus to repudiate the
authority of the pope. And for More this was an impossibility. As he told the judges at
his trial, he believed the indictment against him to be grounded upon an Act of
Parliament directly repugnant to the laws of God and his Holy Church.2
These may still seem very remote issues, but in fact a general principle of enduring
importance lies behind Mores confrontation with Thomas Cromwell and his other
judges. On one side of the debate stands the view that if a given enactment passes all
the legal tests of validityif it is promulgated in due form by a recognized legislative
authoritythen it is the law and must be obeyed, even if it seems to offend against
some moral or religious principle we may happen to cherish. This thesis, generally
known as legal positivism, is classically stated in Book II of Hobbess Leviathan,
where it is roundly declared that no law can be unjust, because the law itself acts as
the public conscience, and in this way serves to establish and guarantee the rules of
just and unjust in society. The same concept of law clearly underpins the legislation
used by Thomas Cromwell to bring More and his friend Bishop John Fisher to the
block in 1535. As Cromwell expresses it in a letter sent to Fisher before his trial, the
law must define whether you ought to utter any reflections on such high matters as the
relationship of the king to the Church. If the law says you may not speak, it follows that
you must remain silent.
Against this view stands the claim that even if a given enactment passes all the legal tests
of validity, we can still refuse to accept it as legal and binding if it seems to us, when we
consult our conscience, to violate some higher principle of religion or morality. One
way of defending this positioninfluentially revived by Ronald Dworkin in Taking
Rights Seriouslyis based on treating each citizen as the bearer of certain
background rights against the state which are claimed to be prior to any rights
conferred by the state itself. The same conclusion can also be reached by a different
routeas Michael Walzer has argued in Obligationsif we begin by assuming that
each of us, at least potentially, has a range of duties higher than our duty to obey the
law. We may for example feel an overriding obligation to help a certain person, or to
further a particular cause. And we may take these obligations so seriously that, if they
come into conflict with our obligation to obey the law, we may feel that we not only
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have a right but a positive duty to disregard the law in their name.
Which of these opposing views about law and obligation ought we to accept? The
significance of Sir Thomas Mores trial is that he aims to leave us in no conceivable

doubt about the right answer. Facing his accusers after the indictment against him had
been read, he told them that ye must understand that, in things touching conscience,
every true and good subject is more bound to have respect to his said conscience than
to any other thing in all the world. After judgment had been pronounced against him,
he continued to insist that very and pure necessity, for the discharge of my
conscience served to justify his stand. His basic argument was that, since no one has a
duty to obey an unlawful laweven though it may have been sanctioned by the
highest council in the realmeach citizen may be said in such a case to have a right of
disobedience. Therefore am I not bounden, he assured the lord chancellor, to
conform my conscience to the Council of one Realm against the General Council of
Christendom. At an earlier stage, however, he had also hinted at the more stringent
doctrine that in such circumstances a citizen not only has a right but a positive duty to
disobey. When Archbishop Cranmer asked him during his first interrogation why he
would not swear the oath required of him, he answered that he felt this to be one of the
causes in which he was bound not to obey his Prince.
There is a sense in which one can still witness the confrontation between More and his
leading judge, Thomas Cromwell. If one visits the Frick collection in New York, one
comes upon two magnificent portraits by Holbein, one of Cromwell, the other of More.
They face each other across the fireplace, with More looking somewhat apprehensive,
as well he might from the expression on Cromwells face. Conceptually as well as
aesthetically, the effect is an intensely dramatic one. What we are seeing is not merely a
confrontation between two great statesmen, but something far more: a confrontation
between two incompatible views about the duties of citizens and the rights of
governments.
Mores other main claim on our attention is, I think, as the author of Utopia.
Although the book is so brief, it offers an analysis of the relationship between private
property and the public interest which is no less challenging today than when it was first
written.
What then is Mores view about this relationship? Admittedly it is extremely difficult to
say. Utopia is not only presented in a deliberately evasive style as the description of an
imaginary island, but it is also a work so suffused with irony that over the centuries it
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has acquired almost as many interpreters as readers.

If we turn to the modern critical literature which has grown up around the book, we
encounter two main answers to the question of what More may have meant by his
apparent satire on the rich and aristocratic leaders of his own society. (Both these
approaches are usefully discussed, with extracts from the relevant authorities, in
Professor Adamss Norton edition of the text.) According to one school of thought
represented, for example, by Professor Russell AmesMores intention in attacking
the landowning aristocracy was to indicate his support for the eventual inheritors of
their power, the new bourgeoisie. For Ames, an understanding of Utopia thus depends
on seeing it as a product of capitalisms attack on feudalism. By contrast, R.W.
Chambers and a number of Catholic scholars have insisted that Mores polemics
against his contemporaries derive from an essentially medieval perspective. As
Chambers puts it in his classic biography of More, Utopia must be seen as a reaction
against the progressive elements in Mores society, a last attempt to breathe life into
the dying ideal of medieval collectivism.
There are obvious difficulties with both these approaches to Mores text. Although
Chambers certainly captures much of its spirit, he hardly does justice to the significance
of Mores humanism, the relevance of his attachment to an intellectual movement which
was far more confident and fashionable than backward-looking in character. As for
Amess interpretation, this appears to be based, as Professor Hexter points out in his
brilliant introduction to the Yale edition of Utopia, on a rather simple non sequitur. It
scarcely follows from the fact that More saw himself as an enemy of the hereditary
aristocracy that he must have seen himself as a friend of the lawyers and merchants who
often opposed them, especially as these allegedly bourgeois groups are treated with
unrelieved irony and disdain throughout his book.
In the face of these difficulties it seems worth asking what alternative approaches might
be tried in an attempt to recover Mores meaning. One possible answer, as Professor

Hexter has already suggested, might take the form of laying a far greater stress on
Mores essentially humanist allegiances. One theme that all Renaissance moralists were
greatly concerned to emphasize was the importance of honor, especially the need to
give honor only where honor is due. And when they asked what members of society are
in fact deserving of honor, respect, and status from their fellow citizens, they invariably
answered that honor should only be accorded to those who possess virtueby which
they chiefly meant a sense of public spirit, a willingness to devote oneself to the good
of the community as a whole. It is arguable that More is basically concerned to point
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out in Utopia the very radical implications of taking this doctrine seriously.3
More begins with the sad but undoubted fact that in his own society the rewards of
status and respect were normally not paid to those who cared about the welfare of the
community, but rather to those who happened to be nobly born or rich. He observes
with great bitterness that nowadays the only nobility and merit are taken to reside in
lineage and wealth. This means that people believe some extra worth attaches to them
merely because they happen to be born of certain ancestors who were rich in landed
estates.The outcome of this strange and sweet madness is that such people are
treated with almost divine honors simply because of their social position and their
wealth.
More is fiercely insistent, however, that the rich are usually the least rather than the most
deserving of our respect, since their anxiety to protect and add to their possessions
generally means that they worry only about their own self-interest, not about the
interests of society as a whole. The rich can thus be relied upon, he thinks, to be
greedy, unscrupulous, and useless, while the poor are generally well-behaved,
simple people whose labor is essential to the community, but whose habits of
deference serve to ensure that they are always cheated of their just deserts.
F or More the main question of social justice is thus a very simple one: what enables
the rich and selfish to dominate society, thereby preventing the best and most publicspirited citizens form receiving the honor and respect which is their due? He thinks the
answer is obvious: it is the grossly unequal distribution of money and private property
which serves to sustain this lamentable state of affairs. As the traveler to the island of
Utopia is made to declare at the beginning of his narrative,
It appears to me that wherever you have private property and all men measure all
things by cash values, there it is scarcely possible for a commonwealth to have
justice or prosperityunless you think justice exists where all the best things flow
into the hands of the worst citizens or prosperity prevails where all is divided
among very few.
If this is the sickness, then the cure according to More is no less obvious. Having
stated the problem, the traveler Having stated the problem, the traveler is made to state
the solution with equal force. I am fully persuaded, he goes on,
that no just and even distribution of goods can be made and that no happiness can
be found in human affairs unless private property is utterly abolished. While it
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lasts, there will always remain a heavy and inescapable burden of poverty and
misfortunes for by far the greatest and by far the best part of mankind.
The solution More proposes to the evil consequences of an uncaring individualism is of
course the one the extremely wise and holy Utopians on their remote island have
already adopted. They have seen that the root cause of social injustice lies in our failure
to concern ourselves directly with the public good. They have also seen that the reason
for this lack of concern derives from our selfish desire to protect our own private
interests and goods. And they have fearlessly drawn the obvious moral: they have
outlawed the use of money and the institution of private property altogether.
In describing this imaginary community, More speaks of it as the best state of a
commonwealth. However, most of his commentators have been anxious to show that
this must be taken as a further instance of his irony, or else that he is merely dramatizing
the rival claims of public and private ownership without taking sides himself. This latter
interpretation is the one put forward by Professor Surtz in his introduction to the Yale
edition of Utopia. It is a comforting thought, of course, but it is not what More says.
And it may be that what more intended to leave us with was a very different thought,
and one which is naught for our comfort. For it may be that what he said at this crucial
moment was precisely what he meant.
1 On these proposed reforms, and on the reasons for dating them to 1530 and ascribing them to M ore, see the fascinating article by J.J.
Scarisbrick, Thomas M ore: The Kings Good Servant, Thought 52 (1977), pp. 249-268.
2 Both here and below, all quotations from M ores speeches are taken from Nicholas Harpsfield, The Life and Death of Sir Thomas
More, Knight, in Lives of Saint Thomas More, edited by E.E. Reynolds (Dutton, 1963). Harpsfields biography was written less
than a generation after M ores death.
3 Here I sketch an interpretation which is developed more fully in my forthcoming book, The Foundations of Modern Political
Thought (Cambridge, 1978), Vol. I, pp. 213-262.
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7/6/2016

The Lesson of Thomas More

OCTOBER 12, 1978 ISSUE

Norton, 239 pp., $2.95 (paper)

This is the five-hundredth anniversary of Sir

English version of Mores textissued by Ralph Robinson in 1551is a work of art in

significance of Sir Thomas Mores trial is that he aims to leave us in no conceivable

has acquired almost as many interpreters as readers.

be tried in an attempt to recover Mores meaning. One possible answer, as Professor

1963-2016 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved.

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