The Life of Thomas More (44 page)

When Henry’s book was completed it was presented to Pope Leo X, with a solemn oration professing that there was ‘no nation which more impugns this monster, and the heresies broached by him’;
⁷
the pontiff deemed it good and rewarded Henry, ‘this great Prince’, with the title of
‘Fidei defensor’.
Martin Luther was not slow in presenting his opponent with a less welcome gift; he wrote a diatribe against Henry and, in defence of his own beliefs, did not scruple to describe the king as a pig, dolt and liar who deserved, among other things, to be covered in excrement.
⁸
Thomas More, as councillor attendant and royal servant, now entered the imbroglio. John Fisher was already composing a grand theological tract against Luther, but More was given a simpler task. He was ordered to reply on behalf of his master in the same vitriolic terms, trading text for text and insult for insult. It was a role not necessarily to his taste and he went to elaborate lengths to concoct pseudonyms for this
Responsio ad Lutherum.
He created a sub-plot in which the author of the book was a Spanish scholar, horrified by Luther’s insolence and impiety; but some months later he altered his plan and the writer of the
Responsio
was named as ‘Gvilielmvs Rosseus’ or William Ross. There were various prefatory letters to add substance and detail to this subterfuge, which seems to have been designed only to shield Thomas More. Could the celebrated exponent of the new learning admit to composing what one eighteenth-century divine called ‘the greatest heap of nasty language that perhaps was ever put together’?
⁹
Could a prominent royal servant and diplomat be revealed as ‘having the best knack of any man in Europe at calling bad names in good Latin’?
¹⁰
It was not to be thought of.

More began
Responsio ad Lutherum
in February 1523, six months after Luther’s assault upon the king had been published. He wrote a
first version quickly—perhaps within six weeks—but then revised, and added to, a final draft which was published at the end of the year. The delay in publication may have been for political as well as stylistic reasons; there was talk of Luther recanting, of Erasmus launching an attack upon him and of the emperor controlling his unruly subject. More profited from the delay by consulting with a German monk recently arrived in London, Thomas Murner, who was thoroughly acquainted with Luther’s opinions. It has even been suggested that Murner wrote some of the
Responsio
, but this is highly unlikely. That he inspired particular passages, however, is certain. More also took the opportunity of clarifying his own opinions on the nature of the Church and of the papacy, and of re-evaluating the traditions of his faith in order properly to defend them. One long addition to the first version of
Responsio
marks an advance in More’s ecclesiology that would have immense consequences for his later career. He had been discussing the matter of papal primacy with his Italian friend Antonio Bonvisi, and had at first argued that the papacy was ‘inventyd of men and for a polytical ordre, and for the more quyetnes of the ecclesiasticall bodye, than by the very ordynance of Chryste’. After some days of study and thought, however, he changed his mind. He returned to Bonvisi and admitted that he had been wrong and that the papacy was indeed of divine origin; it ‘holdyth up all’.
¹¹
This was the rock upon which More would eventually be wrecked.

So his attack upon Luther was now consistent and complete. It is in one sense a long oration in which More assumes the role of a forensic lawyer pleading his case to jurors—
‘Quaeso te lector … Ecce lector … Redeo lector … Audisti lector’.
¹²
Much of the text consists of passages from the
Assertio
of Henry and the replies of Luther, interspersed with More’s severe and caustic commentary. On the opening page, for example, he excoriates Luther’s first and perhaps gravest offence in attacking the king himself
‘nullius ordinis habita ratione’
, without any respect for rank.
¹³
Yet there are other connotations;
‘ordo’
signifies class or rank, but it can be taken to mean order, methodical arrangement, regularity and propriety. In the course of the
Responsio
, More suggests that these were also the objects of Luther’s scorn and hatred. There is a wonderful letter by Luther, in which he celebrates a sudden vision of ‘the sky and the vault of the heavens, with no pillars to
support it, and yet the sky did not fall and the vault remained fast. But there are some who want to see the pillars and would like to clasp and feel them.’
¹⁴
Thomas More was one who needed pillars and the security of an ordered world; he spoke and argued as a lawyer, but in the
Responsio
he also introduces the concept of law as the defence against disorder and chaos.
‘Vna est ecclesia Christi’
,
¹⁵
he wrote, and that one church is guided by the workings of the Holy Spirit; it is the manifest, visible and historical faith of ‘the common knowen catholic church’ whose sacraments and beliefs are derived not only from scripture but also from the unwritten traditions transmitted by generation to generation.

What is it that Luther wrote?
‘Hic sto. Hic maneo. Hic glorior. Hic triumpho.’
¹⁶
Here I stand. Here I remain. Here I glory. Here I triumph. It does not matter to me if a thousand Augustines or Cyprians stand against me. It is one of the great moments of Protestant affirmation and became a primary text for the ‘individualism’ and ‘subjectivism’ of post-Reformation culture, but to More it was
‘furor’
or simple madness. Only a lunatic, or drunkard, could express himself in such a fashion. More invoked, instead, the authority of the apostles and the church fathers, the historical identity and unity of the Catholic Church, as well as the powerful tradition of its teachings guided by the authority of Christ. Where Luther would characteristically write ‘I think thus’, or ‘I believe thus’, More would reply with ‘God has revealed thus’ or ‘The Holy Spirit has taught thus’. His was a church of order and ritual in which the precepts of historical authority were enshrined. All this Luther despised and rejected. He possessed the authentic voice of the free and separate conscience and somehow found the power to stand against the world he had inherited. He was attacking the king and the Pope, but more importantly he was dismissing the inherited customs and traditional beliefs of the Church itself, which he condemned as
‘scandala’.
¹⁷
He was assaulting the whole medieval order of which More was a part.

There is one other instructive comparison. It is often said that those whom we hate most are those whom we most resemble, and there is a sense in which Luther and More are true counterparts. In particular Luther’s early obsession with ascetic practices and his frantic reactions to the monastic life provide an exaggerated caricature of More’s own early conduct. It might even be claimed that the force of Luther’s piety
and the almost elemental power of his nature took late medieval Catholicism to its limits—and thereby destroyed the delicate balances which had sustained it. More believed that a monster had been born, slouching away from Rome, but the ‘mooncalf Luther’ was a creature of the Church’s own making.

Under the influence of Luther, More’s perspective begins to alter. The formal ironies and cultural games of his early work are abandoned and there is no more satire at the expense of foolish friars or bogus relics. There will be no more epigrams, only polemics. There will never be another
Utopia.
In fact it might be said that More forces his celebrated treatise into the real world. In
Responsio
Luther becomes a highly inflamed version of the garrulous and improbable traveller, Raphael Hythlodaeus; the German reformer is also filled with absurd fantasies, and even imagines a society of Christians who are no more than
‘Platonis ideis’.
¹⁸
But More is no longer taking part in an elaborate literary exercise; he is fighting for the life of his world, which, he believes, will otherwise be extinguished by uncertainty and doubt. The battle between the two men is like an internalised conflict between the warring selves of sixteenth-century civilisation.

And how More did rage!
Furfuris! Pestillentissimum scurram! Pediculosus fraterculus! Asinus! Potista! Simium! Improbe mendax!
Martin Luther is an ape, an arse, a drunkard, a lousy little friar, a piece of scurf, a pestilential buffoon, a dishonest liar.
‘HA. HA. he, facete, laute, lepide Luthere, nihil supra … Hui.’
¹⁹
The unmediated demotic speech here will be of interest to anyone who wishes to know how the educated inhabitants of early sixteenth-century London actually sounded when they spoke in Latin, but More’s grasp of colloquialism went much further. Someone should shit (
‘incacere’
) into Luther’s mouth, he farts anathema, it will be right to piss (
‘meiere’
) into his mouth, he is a shit-devil (
‘cacodemon’
), he is filled with shit (
‘merda’
), dung (
‘stercus’
), filth (
‘lutum’
) and excrement (
‘coenum’
); look, my own fingers are covered with shit (
‘digitos concacatos’
) when I try to clean his filthy mouth. This is not, perhaps, the normal language of a saint; but More’s scatological obsessions are shared by Luther himself. ‘I am like ripe shit,’ he once said, ‘and the world is a gigantic arse-hole. We probably will let go of each other soon.’
²⁰
‘A Christian should and could be gay,’ he said on another occasion, ‘but then the devil shits on
him.’
²¹
More suggested in the
Responsio
that Luther celebrated Mass
‘super foricam’
(‘upon the toilet’),
²²
and indeed Luther did state that he had once been visited by the Holy Spirit on the
‘CI’
²³
or cloaca.

This particular kind of imagery is to be found in the bawdier verses and fabliaux of the period. It is related to the interest in ‘babooneries’, too, which mark the irruption of the grotesque into the sacred. It is this tradition to which More reverts when in one passage of the
Responsio
he invokes apes, and fools, and dogs, and in another where Luther is described as an ape dressed in purple. It is the reverse world of the medieval imagination, filled with frantic symbols of fear and disorder. There are passages in More’s treatise which are close to Rabelais—another monk who, like Luther, renounced his profession for literature. When More has an image of the holy eucharist stuffed with sausage meat,
²⁴
he is close to the sensuality and spirituality of the contemporaneous French novelist who deployed the grossest types of sexual and scatological imagery.

More was a model of tact within his own family, however, and his inherent patience and forbearance became evident when his son-in-law, William Roper, began to espouse Lutheran doctrines in Bucklersbury. He allowed his daughter Margaret to marry Roper, even though the young man was at that time filled with ‘Luthers newe broached religion’. When his son-in-law went so far as to indulge in ‘open talke and companying with diuers of his owne sect’,
²⁵
he was summoned before Wolsey himself. The prelate released him with a ‘friendly warning’, no doubt because of the family connection, but Roper remained in heresy. More tried to persuade him by argument and debate, but at no point asked him to leave the household. Finally he took his daughter into the garden. ‘Megge,’ he told her, ‘I have bourne a longe time with thy husband … and still geuen to him my poure fatherly counsaile; but I perceaue none of all this able to call him home; and therefore, Megge, I will no longer argue nor dispute with him.’
²⁶
Instead he took to praying for ‘son Roper’, who, perhaps as a result, recanted his heresy and returned even more fervent to the Catholic communion.

It was in the context of his household, too, that More then composed one of his most powerful treatises. It is a meditation on the four last things—‘deth, dome, pain, and joy’,
²⁷
which can be translated as death, judgement, hell (or purgatory) and heaven—and remained unpublished
in his lifetime, simply because it was a devotional manual for the use of his family. It is emphatically a late medieval production, displaying the true sources of More’s piety in the religious practices and principles of his childhood. It is in the spirit of the skeletal effigies adorning ornate tombs, and in the manner of medieval homilies such as the
Poema Morale
and medieval sermons on death which emphasised the physical facts of human decay when a man’s ‘bake begynnythe for to croke downwarde to the erthe that he came of’.
²⁸

All of these elements are present in More’s treatise, where the reader is exhorted to ‘fantasys thyne own death … thy hed shooting, thy backe akyng, thy vaynes beating’.
²⁹
But there are also touches which are peculiar to the adult More. In this little work, addressed to those closest to him, there was no need for pseudonym or elaborate preface; he even abandoned his customary form of dialogue and spoke forth freely. When ‘the very face sheweth the mind walking a pilgrimage’, as he wrote, we ask ‘a peny for your thought’.
³⁰
More’s thoughts when his mind went on this pilgrimage to the gates of death were of the world itself as a vast prison, with ‘some bound to a poste, some wandring abrode, some in the dungeon, some in the upper ward, some bylding them bowers and making palaces in the prison, some weping, some laughing, some laboring, some playing, some singing, some chiding, some fighting’.
³¹
It is an effective passage and, written at this time when he was both courtier and diplomat, it reveals his true feelings about those like Henry and Wolsey ‘making palaces’ in this gaol of a world. There is another connotation, too, which reflects the ecclesiology of More’s reply to Luther. In the
Responsio
he celebrates the historical continuity and traditional rituals of the faith; but might that sense of an overpowering institution lead to a vision of the world itself as a prison? If you must earn merit, a proposition that Luther emphatically denied, then you must also labour. Yet, for More, this is not necessarily a dark vision. ‘If we be not in spirit mery’,
³²
we will fail in our duty to ourselves and our neighbours; and here, once again, he recommends the proper playing of a role in this ‘stage playe’ of existence. Why, for example, should we ‘envy a poore soule, for playing the lord one night in an interlude’?
³³
So a meditation on the four last things and on this fallen world leads to joyfulness rather than sorrow; it acts as a further
incentive, also, to the coherent and cheerful playing of a part on the earthly stage.