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St. Thomas More
00:24:49
Many people know Saint Thomas More's story, at least from the outside, but what was going on within the heart and soul of this brilliant Renaissance man who was executed for staying true to his principles? Join Dr. Christopher Blum and Dr. Elizabeth Klein to begin to find out. Dr. Christopher Blum is a professor of history and philosophy at the Augustine Institute Graduate School of Theology. Learn more at Augustine.edu.
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- [00:00]
A
Hello and welcome to Catholic Saints, the podcast about the lives of the saints and their legacy for the church and for us. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Klein, and I'm joined today by my colleague, Dr. Christopher Bloom to talk about St. Thomas More. Thank you so much for joining me, Dr. Bloom.
- [00:15]
B
What a delight.
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A
Dr. Klein, I think this is the first time Dr. Bloom has been on the show. He is distinguished by being a philosopher, historian, and theologian. And so what is it that you are teaching this term?
- [00:29]
B
Oh, well, Dr. Klein, I'm teaching a course called Nature and God. Small topics.
- [00:35]
A
Yes, very small. Like being in time.
- [00:37]
B
Exactly.
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A
Wonderful.
- [00:38]
B
Exactly. So this is, of course, based on Aquinas five Ways for Demonstrating God's Existence and putting them in dialogue with some of the findings of contemporary science.
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A
Wonderful.
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B
It's a lot of fun.
- [00:49]
A
Well, thank you for joining me to talk about St. Thomas More, a saint that's probably at least known by name to many of the listeners. Maybe you've seen the movie A Man for all seasons, but Dr. Bloom's gonna give us sort of overview of his life, and we'll reflect a bit upon his legacy for us and maybe how he can be an example for us in our spiritual lives.
- [01:10]
B
Thank you. Yes, St. Thomas More is a great personal favorite of mine. It's been a long time since I first got to know him. When I was a college undergraduate, in a used bookstore, I picked up a little devotional book, which was simply little snippets from Thomas More's writings. And I was a Protestant at the time. I had no idea what I was looking at, but proved to be very meaningful to me. I ended up giving it away as a gift to somebody who named his son Thomas in honor of Thomas Morris. So this seemed like the right thing to do. I had profited a lot from him. What I couldn't have told you at the time, when I was carrying it around with me and reading was like something you read after communion at Mass, these little sayings. And what I couldn't have told you then, but I know now, is that most of what's in the book was from his Tower writings from when he was a prisoner for 14 months in the Tower of London. And that's where I sort of want our conversation today to end up, you know, because this. This episode in his life is really the. The most impressive feature of his life. And it's the place where we can find sort of the most help from him and the most light and encouragement from. From him.
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A
We can get the most light and
- [02:32]
B
encouragement from the Tower from the Tower of London. Yes. No, there's a bit of a paradox here. We are recording this during Lent, so I suppose it's appropriate.
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A
Yeah, Well, I mean, that's an interesting comment in and of itself. That sort of his best nuggets of wisdom to pass on was in that circumstance. It's so often the case that such experiences can be very clarifying and can sort of bring out the goods that are already there, but in an even more beautiful way.
- [03:02]
B
Yes, and that's certainly the case in his life. So how do you get there? I think most people basically know the outward story of Thomas More. Born in London, 1478, died on Tyburn Hill in London, 1535, under Henry VIII's axeman. So a pretty. Pretty short life. 57 years for the bulk of it. He's a lawyer, an attorney, and a public servant like his father before him. And he did very, very well as still a very young man in his 20s. He's noticed by the king and he's able to sort of evade the call to royal service for a little while, but eventually, it's just too. It's too much. He's too talented. And London and the court is just way too small a place. And so a man of his talents was needed. He was used for diplomatic work initially and then subsequently for administrative work. And rose, I think, as most people know, to the position of Lord Chancellor. That's tough. His predecessor was Cardinal Wolsey, who had been removed from the office of Lord Chancellor precisely because he couldn't deliver the divorce from Anne Boleyn that Henry VIII wanted.
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A
So this isn't a bad job. Could you say a little bit about what the job of Lord Chancellor is?
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B
Yeah, Lord Chancellor. It means you. You do all the king's dirty work. Yeah.
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A
Okay.
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B
You just are the head of the royal administration. And so you've. You've got legal authority that's deputed from. From the king.
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A
So you were like the CEO to the president?
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B
Something like that, or Chief justice at the same time. Yeah. So it's, you know, this is. This is at a time when the division into executive, legislative, judicial is not a thing so much. Right. So, yeah, he's doing the king's work. So it's. Yeah, he's the most important person in England other than the king and more was, I think, if I'm not mistaken, the first layman to hold the position, first Chancellor. So it had always been an archbishop or a bishop prior to him. And, yeah, he comes to the job at a tough time. Right. And it's not as though he said, oh, yeah, I'll get you that divorce. Right. He was not a fan of what was going on with what was called the king's proceedings. Right. Thomas More knew Catherine of Aragon. His own private opinion, again, as I'm sure all of our listeners know, is that the king's marriage to Catherine Aragon was a legitimate marriage. Right. And that the Pope had ratified that. And so what the king was about was unlawful and. And wrong. And, of course, it was apparent to someone like Thomas More, situated where he was at court, that the king was pursuing this end, you know, from disordered passion.
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A
Right.
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B
Because he had a. Had a. You know, he was amidst a love affair with Anne Boleyn. So, you know, bad situation. But again, it's one of these jobs that you can't say no to. Right. Although Henry was a large enough man, a magnanimous enough man, to allow More to resign from the office when things got really tense. And then More was at home for better part of a year. And then when the controversy over the king's divorce and remarriage became very acute, More was hauled off to the Tower of London, subsequently falsely accused of treason, and, as we all know, executed.
- [06:53]
A
So what is the accusation of treason, then, against More? Wasn't strictly about his refusal to sort of approve of the king's divorce and remarriage. It was another false accusation on top of that. Or how did that kind of work out?
- [07:07]
B
No, that's. Yeah. One of the tyrannical laws here was that you had to swear that the illegitimate daughter, Elizabeth was the right heir to the throne. And one of the governing laws of all of Western Europe at the time is that illegitimate children can't inherit a brass farthing, let alone a kingdom. So, okay, yeah, so that was. That was the problem. And there were some other laws besides that one that More was held to be, you know, contra.
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A
Controverting.
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B
Yeah, exactly. But, yeah, Sir Richard Rich perjured himself and said that he had heard More say that Elizabeth was not his rightful daughter, that Anne was not his rightful wife, and on the strength of that perjury, he was.
- [07:58]
A
You've led us quite speedily to the Tower of London. Yeah. So would you say a word about More's time there, or is there a particular spiritual inflection point while he is there? And maybe is there something to say about the witness of the time spent there, both in England and then beyond in Europe?
- [08:17]
B
Yeah, I'd be happy to. I'd like to very much. What I'd like to do is to sort of step back and look at his interior journey, right? So if the sort of exterior journey, the resume, as it were, is all this public service that is crowned with success and then lands him in very hot water, the interior journey is also very interesting. He, as a young man was sort of swept away by what is conventionally called Renaissance humanism, which in effect for Thomas More meant that he was reading texts in Greek, okay, Which was kind of a new thing to be doing, especially in Northern Europe circa 1500, to read both the New Testament in Greek and also the Fathers of the Church. And he was pursuing these studies in the Greek language and of these ancient texts together with a set of very sort of well educated but also zealous clergymen who are interested in reforming the Catholic Church in England by bringing to bear on the life of the Church writings of the Church Fathers, for instance. So More himself, for a period of time was thinking about a religious vocation. He lived with the Carthusians in London for a spell. He gave public lectures on Augustine's Confessions. So there's this to Moore from his young age of being kind of a religious reformer, which, however, is coexisting with his tremendous talents and his being sort of thrust forward, you know, by his father and by his father's friends into sort of public. Public sphere. And what this interesting twofold feature of Moore's life, right, this inward, a lot of inward reflection and a lot of deep reading together with these very impressive outward powers of speech. And he was famous for his sense of humor and his ability to keep people laughing and to interact in a very diplomatic way in all kinds of settings and so forth. This, this very complex feature or this very complex life of his has led one scholar, Stephen Greenblatt, to, I guess you could say, accuse More of being a kind of archetype of Renaissance self fashioning, right? He's. Thomas More is the ultimate Novus Homo. He's the new man who is not born to station or wealth and is creating a career and a life for himself and fashioning a life for himself on his talent alone. Okay? And it's an interesting. I think ultimately Greenblatt pushes his thesis way, way, way too far. But he does have something to work with because Moore just was more talented than most people around him. And he was more sort of deeply reflective about what he was doing, right? We can see this in a work, his famous work from 1516, the Utopia, which is this very clever, self conscious bit of satire about English society that holds English society up to this imaginary island kingdom which is ruled by this zany collection of customs and laws, some of which are very sort of rational and easy to understand, and others of which are very, very strange. Right. And so is it funny? It's extremely funny. It's extremely funny. And what more, you know, Moore, as author of the Utopia, sort of shows us a youngish man, you know, he's about 40 years old at the time, who's just got more talent than he knows what to do with. And he's almost too smart for his own good, you might say. Right. And it's that kind of thing that allows Greenblatt to sort of push his thesis. Right. And so if we then fast forward through the years of difficult royal service and he's into the tower, then we could ask the question, well, what do we see in those last 14 months of his life? What we see is we still see the brilliant intellect and the deep reflection, but now what we see is this beautiful resignation to God's providence and a beautiful determination to take spiritual benefit from the quite objective suffering that he's experiencing at the time. And we know this from letters and snippets of conversation, but also from a couple of things that he wrote, a couple of books that he wrote during this time. One of them he wrote in English, if you call it that. It's a very old English, and it's called A Dialogue of Comfort in Tribulation. And the other he wrote in Latin subsequently. The first was the Dialogue of Comfort. And then the last thing that he wrote, he wrote in Latin called De Tristitia Christi on the Sadness of Christ. And the themes of the. Both works deal with suffering, and they show him working through the problem of evil and the problem of suffering and so forth. But they're very different works in that they have completely different audiences. The English work, the Dialogue of Comfort, was manifestly written for his children and for his friends.
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A
Right.
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B
And so it is a dialogue. There's a certain kind of dramatic character to it, the older character and a younger character who are in conversation. And the sort of takeaway for the reader is it has to do with the equanimity and the sort of holy resignation that one sees in both characters ultimately. Okay, that More is portraying as a kind of gift to his children and his friends so that they know that he's ready to die. Right. And that he's giving them this chance to prepare with him. You know, the De Tristitia Christi is a very different sort of thing because it seems as though the Audience is God alone. Right. It's sort of Thomas More's soliloquy in the presence of God. He wrote it in Latin because he prayed in Latin and he read scripture in Latin. And so Latin was actually a more intimate language for him than English. And in De Trustizio Christi, what we particularly see, there's an incredibly long reflection on the person of Judas. Very curious. Yeah. The whole thing is about the passion of Christ, the sadness of Christ in his passion with this long discussion of Judas. And it's the mystery of iniquity that More is. Is looking at. And he is clearly processing the, you know, to say from the outside. Right. This sort of fall from grace of his former friend Henry viii. Right. Who's the Judas?
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A
Right. Interesting.
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B
And then he, More is clearly engaged in a labor of forgiveness.
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A
Right.
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B
He's trying. He's working out his own troubles interiorly so that he can give full forgiveness to those who put him to death.
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A
Well, that's so beautiful. I mean, when you mentioned the long reflection on Judas, my first thought was him working through his decision not to recant. But he's actually way past that.
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B
No, he's way past that. Yeah. And Henry VIII is not the only Jew. I mean, Henry viii, of course, is not named.
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A
Yes, of course.
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B
Right. The whole thing is figurative. It's just a reflection on Judas. But there are suggestions in the text that he thinks that there are lots of Judases at the time. Right. Because any of these bishops or any of these royal advisors who've gone along with the divorce, who've gone along with the break from Rome, they are so many Judases.
- [16:37]
A
Yeah, that's very interesting. One thing that always capped me to be about More is, you know, the clarity with which he saw this decision as abandoning Christ when it can be very complicated when you're making a decision like this, when you have a public facing life or even within your family, compromises can be made and can't. And how to sort of save face or protect your loved ones. And for him to just have such clarity about this, to make the decision so firmly, to me, that's just so the most remarkable part about his life. And so it's so interesting to me that he would have that interior life to reflect on the others who didn't make that decision. And it's almost like a full step beyond where I was, which is just like, would I really. Would I really stand my ground on this? Or would I find some way to kind of square the circle or look the other way or get out of it somehow. Which he doesn't appear to have wanted to do.
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B
No, that's right. And of course, he's in good company. Right. John Fisher is just down the hall. They weren't allowed to speak to one another when they were in the Tower. They were executed about two weeks apart. But Fisher, same thing. And in fact, there was a third, because the former Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, had privately held the exact same judgment about the divorce case. But he died in 1533 before he would have gotten in hot water. And it was precisely his death that allowed Henry to bring Thomas Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury and then do the divorce and the remarriage and the rest of it. And what's interesting about Wharam together with Fisher and more is that, yes, these three, they saw through, as it were, the thicket of canon law all the way to the clearing, if you will, of our lord's promise to St. Peter recorded in Matthew 16.
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A
Right.
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B
That they just had this very sort of spare and economical look at the Church, whereas a lot of their contemporaries, as you're suggesting here, are kind of caught in the complexity of the Church and allowing themselves to not see the forest through the trees.
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A
Yeah. Just to not see the issue clearly, because there's so much at stake for themselves, but for more, perhaps even more than these others, because, as you said, he's a layman, he has a family, there's all kinds of extenuating circumstances where we might be willing to kind of forgive him for maybe being a little softer, but he just wasn't.
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B
No, no. Yeah.
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A
Right.
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B
Because he had this clear theological mind. And ultimately part of what it all came down to, finally, was a question of. Of law or jurisprudence or governance, if you will. Right. And the actual document, the act of Supremacy that declared Henry to be the head of the Church in England was a very crisp and direct assertion of the primacy of the temporal ruler over the spiritual realm. Right. And you know, that was to, in effect, deny that Christ had constituted, Christ himself, had created the Church.
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A
Right. Yeah. He didn't pencil Henry's name in there.
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B
No.
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A
Just Peters.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Oh, well, this is very wonderful. Do you have some maybe thoughts about sort of the saint's legacy for the Church today? And then also maybe sort of on a more personal note, what people might take to prayer or to meditation from his life?
- [20:49]
B
Yeah, well, you know, I think that. Let me just read from Thomas More's last words. Okay. And then reflect upon them a little bit here, because I think that'll help us More I have not to say, my lords, but that like The Blessed Apostle St. Paul, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, was present and consented to the death of St Stephen and kept their clothes that stoned him to death, and yet be they now both twain, holy saints in heaven, and shall continue their friends forever. So I verily trust and shall therefore write heartily pray that though your lordships have now here in earth been judges to my condemnation, we may yet hereafter in heaven merrily all meet together to our everlasting salvation.
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A
Right.
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B
So it's very. This very beautiful prayer in which he's expressing his forgiveness for those who are wronging him, for those who are putting him to death. Right. And telling them that in the next, you know, 48 hours of his life, all that's going to be left. Right. That maybe five days actually. So he had five days after this that over those next five days he's going to be praying for them that they be reunited in heaven. Now, how would they be reunited in heaven? Well, only if these people repent. Right. Which presumably he doesn't think they're likely to do in the next five days.
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A
Right.
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B
So he's praying for the them that later in their lives they will re examine this error of theirs and the much broader error upon which it was based and that they would come to repentance. Right. And I just think this is a great. This is such a beautiful example. Right. How do we know that Thomas More died? Well, because he died forgiving those who had injured him. Right. And this is where, you know, we are today, you know, in the spring of the year of our Lord 2025. Right. We're in a world in America, America's public culture. Right. Which is characterized by a lack of forgiveness. That is really what characterizes our culture. Right. It's an angry culture. It's a culture of defamation and mutual recrimination and this sort of thing. Lack of forgiveness.
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A
A lack of forgiveness, put another way, a lack of desire for reconciliation. Because he wants to love these people.
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B
He does.
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A
And he loves them first by calling them to repentance, but hopefully by rejoicing with them in heaven.
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B
Amen.
- [23:32]
A
That's such a beautiful gift. And I love that you told the story about the two texts he wrote while contemplating this because he's such a reflective and saintly example. But it's also encouraging to know it did take him some time to get there.
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B
Yes, it did.
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A
Even though he is very holy and learned. And so to put it as he did before the Lord in prayer contemplating people who betrayed him as our Lord was betrayed seems like a beautiful approach for ourselves if we are in a situation where we have someone we ought to forgive be it the person next to us or even what we might regard as a faceless crowd of people. I mean I'm sure, well, I don't know if Moore knew every single person in the crowd who was condemning him but that's often kind of the case for us today I think.
- [24:22]
B
Yes, I think that's exactly right. So it's a beautiful example of being we know with certitude that he was true to his principles all the way to the executioner's block. Right. But at the same time he was willing the salvation of those who were injuring him and praying for it and from his heart forgiving them. And that's a great example for us, truly is.
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A
Well, thank you so much and St Thomas more pray for us.