The Great Dissembler

Letters

Vol. 20 No. 10 · 21 May 1998

From Andrew Gow

James Wood’s review of Peter Ackroyd’s Life of Thomas More (LRB, 16 April) is an interesting attempt to set the record straight on the Man for All Seasons. More was, no doubt, a cruel and glib lawyer whose adventitious distinction between the Church’s role in purging heresy and that of the State in purging heretics exemplifies the ethics of his black-letter, black-spirited profession. While Catholic admirers have chosen to overlook More’s apparent slide from truth-telling humanism into apologetic Papalism, Wood condemns More equally for his cruelty and for his resistance to Reformation doctrine. Wood is certain of the ‘rightness’ of the Protestant cause. To support this confessional point of view, he takes the undergraduate position c.1955-75, denouncing More as a stick-in-the-mud and arguing, once again, that traditional medieval religious practice (feast days, processions) ‘had become an almanac of rote and rite, the codification of mass ignorance’. It’s as though Christopher Haigh and countless other students of the English and Continental Reformations had not spent the last twenty years demonstrating precisely how satisfactory and satisfying the traditional round of ceremonies and practices was to their practitioners; as though great cathedral churches were not still being built right up to the Reformation, thanks to the freely-given largesse of wealthy merchants and burghers; as though the efforts of historians to de-confessionalise the study of the Reformations and to place them in their proper late-medieval and political contexts had never happened. Wood’s tendentious and traditional Protestant misunderstanding of the availability and popularity of the Bible in the later Middle Ages, his Anglican misunderstanding of justification by faith alone, and his anachronistic condemnation of More for failing to live up to the standards of free speech in a liberal democracy all betray the work of a skilled journalist, not the trained historian who might have written a more analytic review of Ackroyd’s important book.

Andrew Gow
University of Alberta

Vol. 20 No. 11 · 4 June 1998

From James Wood

Andrew Gow (Letters, 21 May) regrets that a ‘skilled journalist’ rather than a ‘trained historian’ reviewed Peter Ackroyd’s ‘important’ biography of Thomas More. I would far rather be called an unskilled secularist than a skilled journalist. (And I doubt, by the way, that a decent historian would have called Ackroyd’s book ‘important’.) Gow complains that I chastised More for failing to see the rightness of the Protestant cause, and that I rolled out the old, now discredited, Protestant case against the evil of the medieval Catholic Church. Scholars such as Eamon Duffy, Jack Scarisbrick and Christopher Haigh have certainly made a convincing case that the pre-Reformation English Church was widely revered, and many more have demonstrated the atrocious vandalism of the Protestant Dissolution. But is it possible to attack More for being ‘cruel’ and ‘glib’ (two words that Gow himself uses) and not simultaneously attack the system of thought which he represented – that of Roman Catholicism? That is why I mentioned Cardinal Newman, whose intellectual habits, three hundred years after More, are indistinguishable from More’s – the same evasion, the same devotion to institutional religious authority, the same circularity. In The Idea of a University (1852), for instance, Newman writes that the Spanish Inquisition ‘in no proper sense belonged to the Church. It was simply and entirely a state institution’ – just as More had argued that the Church had nothing to do with the burning of heretics.

Is this anti-Catholicism of mine, as Gow asserts, a Protestant argument? I hope that I made clear that the Protestant case is not powerful enough. This is partly because Protestants have been, at times, quite as cruel as Catholics (Cotton Mather et al), and partly because the danger of making More sound like someone who was just too old to catch the new modern secret of Protestantism (the ‘inevitable modern Reformation’ argument) has the effect of making him a doomed, tragic figure – and therefore something of a hero. There is a secular anti-Christian argument against More, and this is not as ‘anachronistic’ as Gow thinks. To convict More of unusual cruelty and zealousness in the burning of heretics is not to condemn him for failing to act like Robert Runcie or Tony Blair. No, one should merely note that Wolsey, in his much longer chancellorship, put no heretics to death. And one should also note that, from Epicurus to Erasmus, belief in gods or God has not automatically entailed a vicious commitment to the idea of punishable heresy. As Mill wrote in On Liberty, ‘it may be better to be a John Knox than an Alcibiades, but it is better to be a Pericles than either.’

James Wood
Washington DC