Book Review: Martz on More

I purchased this book used; it had previously been a community college library book and the library had rebound the paperback as a hardback, trimming the front and back covers off and affixing them to the hardback binding. I really appreciated that rebinding because the original proportions of the paperback (127 x 179 mm or 5" x 7.05") would have made it rather awkward to read--and it was still strange with long columns of type.

As YaleBooks in the UK, Europe and Overseas notes, this book was published in 1972:

Recent writings about Thomas More have questioned his integrity and motivation and have challenged the long-held view of him as a humane, wise, and heroic "man for all seasons." This new book responds to these revisionist studies by closely and persuasively analyzing More's writings as well as Holbein's portraits of More and his family.

Louis L. Martz chaired the publication of the Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More from 1963 to 1997 and was the Sterling Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University; he retired from Yale in 1984 and died in 2001.

One of the "recent writings" Martz was responding to in 1992 was Richard C. Marius' 1983 biography of Thomas More, in which he judged More according to 20th century moral standards--an historicist approach (he did the same thing with Martin Luther in 1999)--positing that 20th century moral standards are superior to 16th because we've "progressed" and therefore "improved".

Marius also co-edited three works in the Yale Edition during Martz's tenure:Volume 6, Parts I & II: A Dialogue Concerning Heresies; Volume 7: Letter to Bugenhagen, Supplication of Souls, Letter Against Frith; Volume 8, Parts I-III: The Confutation of Tyndale's Answer. So Martz was contending in print against a scholar he had hired to complete a 34-year project (and one he'd worked on past retirement from teaching). And since Marius was casting More as a violent and vituperative opponent of Tyndale and other reformers, there's the irony that Marius had edited those editions of More's controversial works against Tyndale and the other reformers under Martz's chairmanship.

Martz was also responding G.R. Elton's comments about More and the prosecution of heretics.

Chapter 1, "The Search for the Inner Man" deals with those matters pretty effectively. Martz notes that John Milton used similar rhetorical methods against his opponents and that Saint Augustine of Hippo attacked the Pelagians and the Manicheans in a similar way. Writing argumentative propaganda has its own rules and rhetorical style: "More and Milton and other devout humanists are using their command of good Latin and colloquial English as weapons against what they regard as deadly enemies of truth . . ." and they do what they must "to drive these evildoers out of the temple." (p. 21) Martz comments that it's not fair to say that Milton or St. Augustine or St. Thomas More displayed their true selves in their controversial works. And he notes from More's Apology that he was aware that sometimes he had gone too far--did Luther or Tyndale ever admit as much? (my question!)

Regarding the prosecution of heretics, Martz notes that Thomas Cromwell had heretics investigated and prosecuted too--and many more than More, comparing More's three out of six cases of religious heresy that led to burning at the stake in three years to Cromwell's 65 cases of religious treason that led to hanging, drawing, and quartering. As he concludes:

It is difficult therefore to argue that Thomas More's prosecution of those he suspected of heresy was any more severe than Thomas Cromwell's prosecution of those he suspected of treason. For both it was a grim matter of quelling what they, for different reasons, saw as sedition. Let us lay aside, then, this ancient and unfounded charge against More.

In some ways I think that Eamon Duffy--whose study of Saint John Henry Newman I so disagreed with--answers these issues better in the first part of Reformation Divided: "Thomas More and Heresy". Nonetheless, Martz presents good arguments to contradict Marius and Elton.

Inter alia, Martz offers an interpretation of the differences between the Holbein sketches and portraits of More: the official final version of the individual study and the family portrait in the sketch and in the Rowland Lockey version. In his comparison of the finished portrait in the Frick collection and the sketch featured on the the cover of the book he notes the Frick version shows control and resolution; the sketch openness and vulnerability. In the contrast between the Holbein sketch of the group portrait and the Lockey version, Martz notes the change of occasion: in Holbein's sketch the family is about to pray from the Breviary; in the Lockey version they are reading scholarly, humanist works (Seneca and Boethius).

The next three chapters, "The Order of the Heart", "The Last Letters and A Dialogue of Comfort", and "De Tristitia: Last Address to the World and to the Self" seem to search for the The Inner Man of Thomas More through his literary style and how he adapted it to the purpose of his work written either in Latin or in English. Martz identifies More's style as Augustinian, based upon the methods of Saint Augustine of Hippo, whose City of God More discoursed upon when he was 23 years old in 1501. Martz emphasizes More's use of digression, repetition, and irony; his awareness of his audience and his search for truth for both himself and the audience. Martz comments, for example, that when engaging Tyndale on the subject of the doctrine of justification by faith (alone), More interrupts Tyndale's "relentless logic" (p. 37) with "an Augustinian manner" and in "an Augustinian view of life and religion--a view that sees, not a church of "elects" who cannot fall to damnation, however they may slip, but a church of fallen people, any one of whom has yet available the hope of redemption." (p. 38). A more realistic, humane, and common sense view of Christians in this life.

That certainly reveals More as presenting a thoroughly Catholic balance of how to think about God's justice and mercy and to maintain faith in forgiveness and absolution, hope in repentance and redemption. As Martz continues in these three chapters, he demonstrates how More found that same balance in the Dialogue of Comfort, his meditations on the Passion of Christ, in The Sadness of Christ, and during his time in the Tower of London. If that conviction was in Thomas More's heart, no wonder he could be so merry on Tower Hill when mounting the scaffold.