The Life of Thomas More (20 page)

The
Imitation
and Hilton’s
Scale of Perfection
are generally also seen as part of the broad tradition of late medieval piety, with its emphasis upon Christ as both the victim and saviour of the world. The extravagances of this devotion have been well documented, with the measuring of Christ’s wounds and the counting of the drops of his blood as part of a ritualised attention to the more visible aspects of his redemptive sacrifice; the image of the dying Christ casts its shadow over a popular piety animated by the fear of wrath and the need for forgiveness, sustained by the idea of placatory prayer, and possessed by an awareness of last things. The Dance of Death painted upon the wall of St Paul’s churchyard, and the skeletons adorning the
transi
or cadaver tomb of Colet within that church, are obvious examples of a religious culture permeated by the recognition of death and decay. Yet how is this refrain upon
the uses of suffering, and this emphasis upon the hollowness of the world, consistent with the life of a young lawyer in early sixteenth-century London? Kempis’s injunction that man ‘often uses violence to himself: and labours to bring the flesh wholly into subjection to the spirit’
¹⁴
can be connected with the discipline of More’s piety and the wearing of the hair shirt. Similarly a Kempis’s image of the tortured Christ is one that can be glimpsed in More’s own preoccupation with the passion and the crucifixion. But these are external signs and tokens. If
The Imitation of Christ
was More’s golden book, as is often surmised, where was the spiritual profit to be found?

It lies at the centre of à Kempis’s teaching, when he urges the reader to ‘look on all things as passing away, and on thyself as doomed to pass away with them’.
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It is the theme taken up in many of More’s earliest epigrams and might be supposed to be his great subject; yet such a deep and permanent awareness of transience seems difficult to reconcile with More’s successful life in the world. But a recognition of the hollowness of the world no more precludes ambition than it does conviviality. It simply places it within a larger context. All becomes part of the same play which, in the words of More, you must act out to the best of your ability.
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The whole elaborate medieval edifice of spectacle and display is built upon the awareness of death. Yet within the overwhelming context of divine truth and eternity, there is also a delight to be found in the transient game and an energy to be derived from the passing spectacle. It is in this crucial area of the late medieval imagination, so open to misunderstanding and to misinterpretation, that we must place Thomas More. There is a Japanese image of the ‘floating world’, wonderfully constructed and designed in full knowledge of its eventual demise: there ceases to be any private motive in collaborating upon this infirm beautiful project, but rather an awareness of common inheritance and destiny. We may see More’s education and career as part of the same process; that is how he could combine ambition and penitence, success and spirituality, in equal measure. He could move easily through a society permeated with religious values and images; the faith of his nation was a social and political, as well as a spiritual, reality. His sense of transience, and recognition of eternity, could only be enhanced in a city which from the southern bank of the Thames looked like an island of church steeples. More kept in fine balance these complementary vistas—of
the hollowness of the world and of the delight in game. From this awareness of duality (and perhaps the duality within his own nature) springs his wit, his irony and the persistent doubleness of his vision.

That is why it is wrong to assume any struggle or crisis over the nature of his vocation; Erasmus suggests that More’s prayers and meditations in the Charterhouse were in part supposed to test his capacity for the priesthood, and that he thought seriously of ordination, but that the recognition of his sexual appetites persuaded him otherwise. Certainly his preoccupation with lechery in his later polemical works and his occasional lubricious comments suggest a man whose sexuality was easily aroused; he might have become, as he feared, an impure priest,
¹⁷
in a period when the holiness of virginity was being extolled with increasing fervour. But there was also throughout More’s life an almost overpowering sense of duty—although the citizens of Utopia revere celibacy, some believe that they ‘owe’ (
‘debere’
) both their country and nature itself the responsibility of propagating children. It may also be that his inherent sense of purposiveness and practicality guided him away from the cloister; he would have been aware of the Augustinian emphasis upon ‘service to the earthly city’
¹⁸
among those who are not yet citizens of the eternal one. There are even occasions when More attacks the lazy acceptance of the monastic ideal of silence and isolation as a way of cultivating pleasure and as a way of avoiding the tribulations of life.
¹⁹
The London humanists around him believed themselves to be living in a time of reform and renovation; it would not have been possible for him to take part in such a revival from the interior of a cell.

It is often supposed that More’s lay piety was something of an anomaly, the obsession of an aspiring and unsatisfied contemplative. But the merits and rewards of a secular vocation are described in the very books available to More in the library of the Charterhouse. The second chapter of Walter Hilton’s
Scale of Perfection
, for example, is concerned with the active Christian life in the world; it is ‘speedful that we know the gifts which are given us of God’,
²⁰
with St John as the image of the contemplative, and St Peter of the active, calling. Hilton also composed a volume entitled
The Mixed Life
in which the proper administration of the world is praised for its efficacy in supporting and assisting ‘the uncouth and uncunning’.
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The example of Christ is adduced, and a
hasty retreat into a cell or monastery is condemned. ‘Thou makest thee for to kiss his mouth by devotion and ghostly prayer’ but by failing to participate in the world ‘thou treadest upon his feet and defilest them’.
²²

It is appropriate, then, that, even while pursuing his legal training, More should lecture upon Augustine’s
City of God
in St Lawrence Jewry. In this neighbourhood church, where two of the principal attractions were the tooth and shank-bone of a supposed giant chained up for display, More addressed what is reported to have been a large congregation; no doubt his own family, living a few yards away, also attended. He was in his early twenties, but was already considered to be an able exponent of patristic texts. He had been asked to prepare the lectures by William Grocyn, the incumbent of St Lawrence Jewry, while Grocyn himself was lecturing on the pseudo-Dionysius at St Paul’s. Successive biographers of More have suggested that the congregations abandoned St Paul’s and flocked to St Lawrence, but there is no evidence for this. It is likely, however, that the audiences had a similar composition. Erasmus mentions in particular the attendance of priests and elderly men at St Lawrence Jewry, in order to emphasise that More’s learning was not some empty extravagance. In a letter written at the time More himself takes a less charitable attitude, at least towards Grocyn’s audience; he informed a friend that the size of the congregation in St Paul’s was greater than its intelligence and that it included the ignorant.
²³
Some had come to learn about new things, others out of the desire to seem intelligent, and certain people had stayed away simply because they wanted to pretend that they already knew all about the subject. Yet the very existence of these lectures, on Augustine and the pseudo-Dionysius, as well as the large numbers who apparently attended them, testify to the fact that there was a genuine curiosity about the ‘new learning’ which both More and Grocyn represented. Their knowledge of Greek (although More was still very much the pupil of Grocyn in this respect) and of patristic sources offered a new formulation or restatement of old truths.

No record of More’s lectures on
The City of God
survives, but they can be placed at the centre of his concerns during this period. He had already composed his dialogue in defence of Plato’s
Republic
, and his contemporary epigrams on the dangers of a weak or avaricious monarch provide further evidence that he was thinking as seriously about
civic as about religious issues. In his legal studies, too, he was concerned with matters of civil law and common law which had a direct relation to the good government of the ‘common welth’. More quoted from the works of Augustine all his life, and it is easy to see why he should have been drawn towards the saint even as a young man. Augustine was a rhetorician, a master of Latin prose, but he was also a revered figure of the Church who had imbibed and mastered true classical learning; his interest in Neoplatonism as implicitly heralding Christian revelation, in particular, brought him very close to More’s contemporaries. Augustine was a living authority for the time, in other words, and in expounding
The City of God
More was addressing the issues of the day.

At the centre of Augustine’s work was the question that was uniquely to concern More himself: Do we wish to live in the earthly city or in the heavenly city? It was a question posed to him at the end of his life, when he chose the latter, but in these early years it had more than private import. Was the true state a congregation of believers ruled by the intervention of grace and divine law, or was it an association of men ruled by national law and positive law? Was it essentially a
corpus mysticum
or a natural human grouping? This was the debate which More continued in his lectures at St Lawrence Jewry, but its significance is that it was precisely from these questions that
Utopia
itself would emerge. Of course we do not know what conclusions More reached in front of his learned audience, and yet certain speculations are possible.

In Augustine’s work the history of the world is conceived in terms of these two cities, the city of the world and the city of God, distinct but not entirely separate, together experiencing ‘the vicissitudes of time’.
²⁴
The heavenly city exists within the earthly city, in separate individuals or in communities of believers, so that it is possible to see within the fallen city—let us say, London—‘an image of the Heavenly City’.
²⁵
The physical presence of the churches themselves in the City, some of them of ancient date, was a token of sacred history within the walls. The city of the world could aspire, at least, to the condition of the city of God; there was a strong tradition in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries which affirmed that human community, with the possibilities for instruction and joint worship, was the most appropriate place for the pursuit of the divine. That was partly More’s experience of the Charterhouse, but as he lectured in the church by the Guildhall he may
have possessed a wider vision. Could he be at the same time a citizen of London and a citizen of the heavenly city? Was it possible to live in the city of God while remaining in the city of men? It seems possible that this indeed became the lifelong project of Thomas More. He knew that London was no abiding city, and it is clear from the actions of his subsequent career that he believed himself to be part of a larger spiritual community (the living and the dead together); at this time in his life, with that combination of intelligence and piety unique to him, it might have seemed that they could be reconciled.

There is further evidence of his spiritual devotion in a short treatise which he translated from the Latin in this period. It is a biography of Pico della Mirandola, the young Italian scholar and philosopher who died of a fever in Florence, in 1494, after seeking the truths of the universe. It is likely that More was introduced to his work by John Colet; Colet had already annotated Pico’s commentary upon Genesis, and he was in any case immensely attracted to the mixture of cabbalism, Neoplatonism and deep spirituality that the Italian exemplified. The formal context for More’s translation was that of a traditional new year’s gift; he presented what was essentially a devotional work to a friend, Joyeuce Leigh, who had been admitted to the order of the Poor Clares or Minoresses—a house of nuns situated outside the city walls, just beyond Aldgate. It is likely that she came from a wealthy London family well known to the Mores and had made the orthodox journey into relatively comfortable seclusion. More’s translation was part of a hagiographical tradition, but it was not merely an exercise for a specific occasion. It is clear that he was powerfully affected by his subject; there were similarities between the two young men which could not fail to have impressed themselves upon More. Pico possessed ‘an incredible wit’ and ‘a marvelous fast memory’ but his ‘besy & infatigable study’ was tempered by the fact that ‘He was of chere alwaye mery & of so beninge nature he was never troubled with Angre’ and always evinced ‘a plesaunt and a mery cotenaunce’.
²⁶
He derived ‘great substance’ from reading Greek and Latin authors, but gained no profit from academic learning which ‘leyned to no thing but only mere traditions & ordinaunces’. Precisely the same qualities and opinions were shared by More, and it seems likely that Cresacre More was right to believe that his great-grandfather saw in Pico a very pattern of action and belief.
²⁷
There was much emphasis in this period on the virtues of ‘imitation’—
Imitatio Christi
being the single most important example—which is the more pious aspect of that conception of the world as a stage in which each must play a part.

If we can take the
Life
of Pico as in certain respects an act of self-definition, then, More’s excisions from, and alterations of, the original (written by Pico’s nephew) take on a biographical relevance. More is particularly interested in explaining how Pico had for a time followed ‘the croked & ragged path of voluptuouse lyving’
²⁸
but had chastened the appetites of the flesh with prayers and self-flagellation. A later printing of the little book has on its title-page an image of the crucified Christ, along with the assorted scourges and whips of his Passion. It is clear that the need to tame the possibilities of ‘delirious pleasure’
²⁹
was one of More’s early and principal concerns. The omissions within his translation are also significant, since he touches only lightly upon the more quixotic or occult reaches of Pico’s knowledge in order to emphasise his devotional orthodoxy. Walter Pater in his
Studies in the History of the Renaissance
turned Pico della Mirandola into a fabulous youth whose mission was to reconcile pagan and Christian learning; certainly his interest in esoteric knowledge, and his almost Paracelsian belief in the image of the divine man within every human being, suggest his true affinities. But the young More had no interest in such matters and instead celebrates his subject’s following of God, Church and ‘ye faith of Chryst’.
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