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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.
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