A GOOD LIFE

Almost effortlessly, Ackroyd manages to put in place the things upon which More’s attention fell, year by year. And somehow, along the way, he manages to put his readers in place as well. In the midst of all the lavish details of sixteenth-century daily life, our senses and our sensibilities are lifted back into a radically different time and place — until at last the biographer convinces us that we can share More’s own way of seeing his world. Ackroyd makes us smell the sewage on the roads, hear the bustle and shouts, wend our way through the street life. He forces us through the early grammar books, the prayers, the principles of rhetoric, even the sound and feel of Latin poetry.

Ackroyd also brings to life the finely wrought, tough-minded, and highly personal Catholic faith of his subject, despite the fact that (it appears) he doesn’t share that faith. At More’s christening, he makes us taste the salt, receive the cold shock of the baptismal water, start at the ritual slap.

Thomas More was born on February 7, 1478, the son of a successful London lawyer. Taken up and favored by powerful men — Archbishop Morton, and later Cardinal Wolsey — the precocious More was sent to Oxford in the autumn of 1492 at the age of fourteen. His ability to read, write, and frame an argument was already far advanced, and he was soon studying Greek as well as Latin and composing Latin poetry and dramatic passages. (It is likely that during his life More heard, spoke, read, and wrote more Latin than English, and his reputation as a Latin stylist allowed only one or two rivals in all of Europe.)

In the dangerous political world in which he lived, More quickly rose to the heights. Practicing as a lawyer in London, he attracted the attention of Henry VIII, who initially used him as a diplomat. Then — in 1529, when Cardinal Wolsey failed to secure the pope’s approval of the king’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon — Henry named More to succeed Wolsey as lord chancellor, the highest political position in the realm. But in 1532, More himself was replaced, and his fate was sealed when he refused to subscribe to the 1534 Act of Supremacy by which Henry VIII declared himself protector and supreme head of an independent, anti-papal Church of England. After months of imprisonment, More was beheaded on July 6, 1535, at age fifty-seven — declaring himself “the King’s good servant, but God’s first.”

Together with such companions as the English scholar John Colet and the Dutch priest Erasmus (who stayed with More on his visits to England), More championed a perennially new movement in the West: the renewal of Christian humanism, the call to a new beginning in a higher, fresher wave of learning. Holding that the gospels are best understood with a grasp of language, history, and a variety of methods of thought, these Christian humanists worked diligently at establishing critical texts and accurate translations. They sought a new mastery of the ancient biblical languages, and they struggled to bring back into common knowledge the commentaries and reflections of the Fathers of the Church, especially the Greeks. (This preference is a little surprising, since the Latin Fathers, with their Roman love for law and practicality and common sense, seem more “English” than the Greek Fathers, with their cosmological speculations and poetic forms. But then, More went to Oxford, and there has always been at the English universities an insistent tug toward Platonic metaphysics and mysticism.)

More has been called the greatest of all Englishmen, an amazing encomium for a papist of his time — and ours, given the antipathy to Roman Catholicism that exists even today in England. A talent for witty extemporaneous retort, a self-contained countenance, and an ability to write with an elegant brevity of language have always been prized by the English, and More is said in all these to have had no equal. And he went to his death for a quiet, understated principle, having sought by all means to spare the King the disgrace of killing him. The English also admire bravery.

Most comforting in Ackroyd’s loving Life of Thomas More is the low-key recounting of More’s faults — for since (as Leon Bloy once put it) “the only tragedy in life is not to have been a saint,” it is helpful to see that even saints are not exempt from petty human failings. More had a reputation for warmth and humor, and his daughter testified that she saw him angry only twice. But, in fact, he seems to have been often impatient, driving, severe, and a perfectionist. Against Martin Luther — the wrecker of Christian unity, disdainer of law, and unleasher of disorder (as More saw him) — More practiced a degree of vituperation unmatched until our own time, coloring his prose with every word for excrement and baboonery the rawness of sixteenth-century life could suggest.

Although shrouded in privacy, More’s attitude toward his two wives (the first died young) also seems not to have reached the ideal of marital friendship. But he did see the talent of his daughter Margaret and pushed her until she became easily the most learned woman in England (perhaps in Europe) and a public figure in her own right.

There are a few places in The Life of Thomas More where Ackroyd goes wrong. It is true that More loved order, tradition, and law, and equally true that he had an unusually strong sense of piety toward his father. But in trying to contrast the modern with the premodern (of which he makes More the exemplar), Ackroyd makes his subject seem rigid and narrow: “Thomas More,” he declares, “was one who needed pillars and the security of an ordered world.”

The fact is rather than the imagination of the Middle Ages was filled with a sense of contingency, fragility, disorder, discontinuity, and even terror. One does not have to live in modern times to feel such things. More faced the madness, bloodlust, and chaos of martyrdom with amazing equanimity. An individual Christian does not need “pillars,” if he has Christ.

It is instead — as More saw — civilization that needs pillars and order. More was acutely aware of the cauldron beneath the surfaces of things. That is why he feared the unleashing of demons taking place on all sides during the Reformation, and why he saw the need for thousands of small acts of dramatic fidelity across Europe if civilization were to advance or even survive. This is the warning More kept uttering, even in his famous 1516 political essay, Utopia. It is not the cry of a man who believes in order; it is the cry of a man impressed with the ever-present power of disorder.

Secular writers sometimes have the annoying tic of projecting upon Catholics an icy mantle of eternal verities uncomfortably at odds with their turbulent times. Such lapses are rare in The Life of Thomas More, but they do appear in one context. Every time Ackroyd discusses law — the law of reason, or of God, or of the Church — he paints a picture of narrow inflexibility. The biographer doesn’t quite understand the Catholic sense of the fleshiness of things, the incarnateness of God, the sacramentality of the singular and the particular. When Ackroyd writes of law, he seems to think of geometry. When More himself wrote of law, he thought of the wild tergiversations of English common law, rooted in unique human experiences. More’s mind hews closer than his biographer’s to the concrete texture of things.

But the reader is given more than enough information to override the biographer’s occasional lapses. The extent to which Ackroyd has dwelt with and sympathized with the living, breathing More is exhilarating. So too is the extent to which he allows us to enter an inner world like More’s and grasp its universal appeal. I would, if I could, give this book to every lawyer I know, and to every serious person who aspires to the nobility and wit of human greatness. As an antidote to our sour season, it is a perfect book.

Michael Novak holds the George Jewett chair in religion and public policy at the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent book, co-written with Jana Novak, is Tell Me Why: A Father Answers His Daughter’s Questions About God.