475 years ago today (well, actually, July 6, but today is his feast day), Henry VIII had his close friend and advisor, Thomas More executed. It was a tragic and telling moment, a moment glorious and horrific at once. It was a day that should--if we are alive to the complexities of this world and the majesty of the next--cause us to pause, consider, meditate, rethink, and re-imagine our position and relations in and to the world. In so many ways--from his treatment of his family, to his relationship to the crown and government, to his profound Christian humanism--More reflects the light of the One for whom he died.
Has there been a stronger and more imaginative scholar of More in this generation than Stephen Smith at Hillsdale College or Gerry Wegemer at the University of Dallas? Though I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting Wegemer, I know Steve well.
As he has reminded me many times, the period prior to More and Henry's falling out could be considered a Catholic golden age. Indeed, what better conjunction of events and movements could we imagine in the world: an educated and Thomistic (seemingly) king; an English Common Law tradition; and an Anglo-Roman Catholic humanism led by scholars such as More, Fisher, and Erasmus (Dutch, but often in England)?
But, so much of this ideal shifted and grew corrupt when William Tyndale published his Obedience of a Christian Man in the late 1520s. In the book, Tyndale reintroduced into the Occident the Oriental and ancient notion of the “Divine Right of Kings”; that a king had a duty to reform and control the Church. This is, of course, proved a complete reversal of the medieval notion of kingship with the most dire of consequences.
"In 1528 Anne Boleyn exacerbated Henry's lust for imperial power by giving him a book that justified everything he would ever want to do. That book was William Tyndale's The Obedience of a Christian Man. More called this book "a book of disobedience" and diplomatically cautioned Henry about its content. Henry was already highly cautious about the author; he had, in fact, banned Tyndale from England . . . . Nonetheless, he was soon seduced by the claims of Tyndale's book. This book is famous in the history of political thought because it gives the first jurisdiction in the English language for the divine right of kings." (Gerard Wegemer, Thomas More: Portrait of Courage (Scepter, 1998), 131.)
Or, as J.J. Scarisbrick has written: "We know also of another person who particularly influenced Henry--William Tyndale. The latter's Obedience of the Christian Man, the first thorough-going apologia of Caesaropapism, argued on the evidence of the Old Testament and early Christian history--and brought to him by Anne Boleyn--made a mark. 'This is book for me and for all kings to read,' he said when he had finished it. Tyndale's sweeping assertion of the rights and duties of princes and their claim to the undivided allegiance, body and soul, of their subjects, may well have opened up a new world for Henry even if he did not yet intend to realize the new order of kingship in England." (J.J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 247).
What better proof of the power of ideas than the ideas presented to Henry by Tyndale, no matter how indirectly? Temptation begets power, and power begets temptation. Even the best among us, of course, can resist such things for only so long.
And, yet, out of this tragedy, we see the glory of Truth, in the person of Thomas More, standing before his people, his king, and his Church, proclaiming all that matters . . . . to the point of death. . .
. . . and, more importantly, to eternal life.
Further reading:
Anything Stephen W. Smith has written or edited, but especially:
And, thanks to Carl Olson at Ignatius for reprinting Chesterton's essay on More:
Thomas More was "the wisest and best man in England."
--Russell Kirk, 1974
0 comments:
Post a Comment