Reading The Life of a Saint - Sir Thomas More
Reading The Li
Daniel J. Morrissey
Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/tcl Part of the Catholic Studies Commons Recommended Citation
-
Article 8
Reading the lives of the saints is a revered Catholic practice.
But the stories of martyrs can be particularly unsettling, even
more so since their blood has incontrovertibly been the seed of
the church. One that I find personally quite troubling, as the
father of a one year old, is the death of St. Perpetua. She was a
noble Roman woman of the early third century, a recent convert,
who was still nursing a child. Despite the anguished entreaties
of her pagan father she refused to acknowledge the deity of the
Emperor and her judgment was swift. She is reported to have
kissed her baby, given him to her family, and gone bravely to
meet the wild beasts.
Narratives like that remind one that the Catholic religion
makes serious demands. And any of us fallible humans who have
tried to practice it can't help but be impressed by the witness of
those special people who have put it all on the line for their faith.
Peter Ackroyd's acclaimed new biography of Sir Thomas More
makes a mighty contribution to that tradition.
Ackroyd's book however raises two questions about More
that have profound implications. Looking at More from our
ecumenical age, can we truly say that he died for something
worthwhile? And was it right, as Ackroyd reports, for More at
his tragic end to rue all the worldly success that he had achieved?
Sir Thomas, in his famous self-description, was the King's
good servant, but God's first. He refused to recognize Henry VIII
as the supreme head of the Church in England, objecting that
Henry's actions destroyed not just the unity of the church, but its
freedom as well. It may be a bit much to call More a precursorof
* Daniel J. Morrissey is Dean of the Law School at St. Thomas University.
These remarks were delivered at a meeting of the Catholic Lawyers of Miami.
the separation of church and state. (As Chancellor, after all, he
had sent several Protestants to the stake as heretics) Yet his
actions, like Perpetua's, affirmed that religious faith cannot be
true if it is subservient to totalitarian political power.
At an even deeper level, however, I believe More was taking
a stand against the destruction of a way of life which saw this
world as part of a divinely-ordered universe that manifested its
Creator's love in every way. Some would be saved and some
damned from all eternity in the coming Protestant dispensation.
And the secular order that would follow would be similarly
arbitrary and punitive, stripping away the great sacramental
and communal comforts to human existence that medieval
Catholicism afforded. More died, I believe, in protest against this
harsh, new world of which we are now all too familiar with.
On the second issue, it was disturbing to read that More,
while awaiting his execution in the tower, regretted that he had
not lived his life in monastic seclusion. In my days in Catholic
schools, More was just about the only saint I heard of who was
not a priest or nun. You almost had to go back to Perpetua to
find a saint who had a child. More's canonization seemed at least
one recognition by the Church that a Catholic could be fully
committed to this world and still lead a life pleasing to God.
In his early years More had lived for some time with a
monastic community. Throughout his life he remained devoutly
prayerful, but he was also very much a married man and a loving
father. And of course he was totally involved in the affairs of this
world, rising in the legal profession to become Lord Chancellor of
the Realm. In addition, he was one of the leading scholars of the
Northern Renaissance and author of the political classic Utopia,
a humanistic statement about how people might live together in
equality and harmony.
The aspirations of the Utopians were the exact opposite of
what our contemporary society seems to consider the "good life."
They were non-materialistic hedonists, people who believed that
the highest pleasures of life come not from the enjoyment of
consumer goods, but from loving interactions with one another
and from the cultivation of knowledge and the arts. And More
himself lived just such a life, not only with his family, but in his
associations with business, political, and scholarly colleagues.
In fact, others so enjoyed his companionship and charm that his
renowned friend and Renaissance collaborator Erasmus called
More "the man for all seasons."
Perhaps it should be no surprise that More, awaiting
execution, would turn his attention from this world. But it seems
to me that the author of Utopia could just as well have
envisioned heaven as a continuation of the wonderful joys he had
found on earth. The book of Revelations seems to hold out just
that possibility when it describes the New Jerusalem as God
coming to earth to live in eternal happiness with humans, wiping
away every tear fro (...truncated)