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Scott, Jonathan
2004.
Commonwealth Principles.
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Thomas More: on the Margins of Modernity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 January 2017
Extract
Once upon a time men who read and wrote about Sir Thomas More, the author of Utopia and Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor, were convinced that he was a modern man, by which in some measure they seem to have meant their kind of man. This conviction became fully standardized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Those, however, who saw him as a modern man — Lord Acton, Bishop Creighton, Principal Lindsay, Sir Sidney Lee — could not help but view More with impatience. For in their eyes he reneged on his modernity. He did not in the end stand firm for free thought, or for toleration, or for emancipation from the bondage of medieval bigotry and superstition. And although Karl Kautsky was sure that at the horizon Sir Thomas had seen the red light of the Marxist dawn, More did not even throw himself into the struggle for socialism. Instead he approved of the execution of men who were burnt at the stake because they rejected the spiritual control of the medieval church; and in the end he died a martyr for the unity which through the centuries that orthodox and persecuting Church had imposed on Europe.
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References
1. Chambers, R. W., Thomas More (London, 1949), pp. 16, 353–5Google Scholar.
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13. Chambers, pp. 226-7.
14. Ibid., pp. 9, 131-44, 384-7. On the contrast between More's medieval Catholic collectivism versus Bacon's modern, Protestant, scientific individualism, p. 263.
15. Some of the deviations resulted from the partial incompatibility of the ethics of a warrior aristocracy with the Christian ethic, but that was already a very old story by 1515.
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28. Quoted in Carlyle, I, 138, n. 2.
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30. Utopia, pp. 106-8.
31. Ibid., pp. 108-9.
32. Ibid., p. 113.
33. Ibid., p. 118.
34. Ibid., p. 132.
35. Ibid., p. 118.
36. Ibid., pp. 150-1 (dress), 161-6 (meals), 159-61 (the ailing), 141-3 (education, work, and hours of labor), 143-5 (leisure).
37. Ibid., p. 299.
38. See the very shrewd remarks on this point in Mason, H. A., Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period (London, 1959), p. 111 Google Scholar.
39. Utopia, p. 157.
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