In his 1557 edition of More’s English Works, William Rastell’s title page for The Last Things tells us that More wrote this treatise “about the year of our Lord 1522.”18 He did not finish it. The title page also declares that in 1522 More was a knight, a member of King Henry Vlll’s Privy Council, and undertreasurer of England. In 1522 More’s star was shining brightly and still in its ascendancy. At that moment, though, when it seemed that his family, intellectual, creative, and professional lives were all at their greatest strength, More chose to turn his vision inward and to remind himself to be unassuming about his successes. The wheel of fortune, he may have thought, continues to turn, and each triumph in the world is but a moment’s reprieve from the inevitability of the coming of the four last things: death, judgment, pain (hell), and joy (heaven). The theme of The Last Things is this verse from scripture, “Remember the last things, and you shall never sin” (Last Things 127; see Ecclesiasti-cus 7:40). More had intended to write meditations on all four last things, but he only worked on his treatment of death, which he nearly completed.
The “Remembrance of Death” is in two sections. The first section is a meditation on the pain and horror of dying. It is an attention-grabbing way to begin a treatise. More begins by asking his readers to recall the “Dance of Death” images in Saint Paul’s Cathedral, whose depictions of flesh torn from bones, heads in charnel houses, and ghostly apparitions are gruesome. They are there, he says, to cause us to imagine our own deaths, lying in bed, our heads throbbing, backs aching, veins beating, hearts racing, throats rattling, flesh trembling, mouths gaping, noses sharpening, legs coiling, fingers fumbling, breath shortening, strength failing, life vanishing, and death drawing on (Last Things 139-40). This is a very medieval exercise of the penitential imagination. It is a reminder of the frailty of life and the need to put spiritual things first and to leave the devil, the world, and the flesh behind. Whether we live many years or few, in the grand scheme of things our lives are short. No one knows when death will come, but come it will. It is always better to anticipate death than to be caught unawares and unprepared.
The second section of the Remembrance of Death is a survey of the Seven Deadly Sins, with suggestions about how the contemplation of death will help to combat them. Traditionally pride was the chief sin and the wellspring of all the others: envy, wrath, covetousness, gluttony, sloth, and lechery (lust). The contemplation of death for prideful sinners, More says, can be “a right effectual ointment. . . to wear away the web that covers the eyes of their souls” (Last Things 155, with my modernized spellings). More explains this through a stage analogy:
If you should perceive that one were earnestly proud of the wearing of a gay golden gown, while the rogue plays a lord in a stage play, would you not laugh at his folly, considering that you are very sure, that when the play is done, he shall go walk a knave in his old coat? Now you think yourself wise enough while you are proud in your player’s garment, and forget that when your play is done, you shall go forth as poor as he. Nor do you remember that your pageant may happen to be done as soon as his. (Last Things 156, with my modernized spellings)
The idea is that while we may ridicule a poor actor who fools himself into “earnestly” believing that he is a king when he is not, we can easily forget that while we are on Earth we, too, are poor actors in a kind of stage play. Both the rich man and the rogue wear the same corruptible “gown” of flesh. If we fool ourselves into believing the pretense that our wealth, social status, and professional accomplishments are real, then we will not be prepared to face the true reality of God’s judgment after death. More concludes his meditation on pride with another analogy, one more serious than that of a stage play. He compares our lives on Earth to the plight of condemned prisoners in a jail. We may have different estimates of our status, wealth, or personal security among our fellow prisoners, but so long as we believe in those things, we are living in an illusion. We are all condemned to death, and if we would do ourselves or anybody else any good we must first realize this truth about our own existence.19
In The Last Things More is no longer writing as a self-assured humanist. By 1522, times had begun to change for the worse. The intellectual and political moods in England and on the Continent were turning less hospitable to speculative thought and witty flights of fancy. The Reformation was putting a strain on relations between church and state everywhere. On the Continent, Catholics were burning the books of Protestant heretics. In England, Catholics would soon be burning books, too, including copies of Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament. Henry VIII was growing restive and more willful. Charges of treason and public executions were on the rise. As the times began to grow uncertain and as passions rose, More began to draw back to those things that were most deeply set into his psyche, about which he felt in the marrow of his bones to be most sure. He was born into the Catholic Middle Ages, and to the Catholic Middle Ages he began gradually to withdraw.
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