Ever since his return to London in 1494, More had pursued other interests besides law, and they, too, must have vexed his practical-minded father. More had grown increasingly interested in the New Learning, which was the foundation of English humanism. He had also become a regular visitor to the London Charterhouse of Carthusian monks. He considered becoming a priest. We may imagine that the internal struggle to decide how best to live his life was a difficult one, as More was a skilled debater who could make a compelling argument for each of his options.
The attractions of the New Learning were powerful. They not only drew More to the most stimulating intellectual movement of the era, they provided new platforms for the public display of his abilities. Few scholars ever get to participate in an intellectual movement that they know is fundamentally changing the way people look at the world. Thomas More did. The New Learning promoted the study of ancient Greek and the reconsideration of the classical Latin literature of Rome. The work of the English humanists John Colet (ca. 1467-1519), William Grocyn (ca. 1449-1519), Thomas Linacre (ca.1460-1524), and William Lily (ca. 1468-1522) helped to bring this ancient literature to new audiences. New translations of ancient works were better because scholars were also becoming better linguists. They also had access to more reliable texts in Greek and Latin, thanks to the wide circulation of new editions made possible by the recent invention of the printing press. The study of Greek also supported the reexamination of the New Testament in its original language, something that had not been undertaken since Jerome translated the Bible from Greek into Vulgate Latin over a thousand years before.7 Erasmus’s translation of the New Testament into Latin in 1516 was based on Greek texts supplied to him from the Chapter Library of Saint Paul’s Cathedral by its dean, John Colet. His translation was celebrated as breakthrough scholarship all across Europe.
Over the long course of the Middle Ages, biblical study had gradually shifted from the study of biblical texts directly to the study of learned commentaries on biblical texts to the study of learned commentaries on commentaries on biblical texts. Meanings were refined to an exquisite precision, though often at a greater remove from the original source material. To the advocates of the New Learning, the works of the Scholastic philosophers often seemed self-absorbed, musty, and increasingly less applicable to the world outside the university or monastery. In Utopia, More derides that sort of Scholasticism by noting sarcastically that the Utopians, while they had independently discovered all that the ancient Greeks had known about music, arithmetic, and geometry, had fallen far behind what the Scholastic philosophers had achieved in the study of logic. The implication is that the Utopians esteemed what was important, while the Scholastics had come to care only about what was complicated.
From the Greek historians Thucydides and Herodotus, and especially from the Romans Sallust, Tacitus, and Suetonius, historians writing in the sixteenth century began to sense how they could compose more than just the event-after-event chronicles of their times. They learned that there were developmental patterns to be discerned in the study of past events, that there were discoverable causes for human action, and that figures from the past could be seen as complex human personalities. The better the history, the more it portrayed the world in which people actually lived. These lessons were not lost on More, for he would in time apply them to creating his own vivid portrait of King Richard III. E. E. Reynolds wrote that More’s History of King Richard III is “the first attempt in our language to compose a historical biography or biographical history in which personality and motive are taken into account” (Reynolds 81). As such, it is the first “modern” history to be written in England.
Along with More’s participation in the humanist revolution was his testing of himself as a candidate for a cloistered religious life. Erasmus wrote that More “applied his whole mind to the pursuit of piety, with vigils and fasts and prayer and similar exercises preparing himself for the priesthood” (Erasmus, p. 21/172-74). The monastery offered a disciplined and productive life of worship, order, prayer, obedience, and good works. Part of the day’s work for an educated monk could be taken up with study and scholarship, and it is not hard to imagine More happily giving himself wholly to the study of sacred texts. More’s esteem for the monastic ideal remained high all his life. When Margaret (Meg) Roper—William’s wife and More’s favorite child—appeared to be miraculously healed from what was almost certainly the plague, More confided to his son-in-law that, if Meg had died, “he would never have meddled with worldly matters after” (Roper 16). As a child of the Middle Ages, More had inherited an acute sense of the impermanence of material things and of the inevitable coming of “the last things.” For him, the Last Judgment would be an unbearable reckoning, if he had failed to live the pious life of which he was capable. To the end of his life, there was a religious severity to More’s character that undercut all of his worldly advancement, economic prosperity, and material comfort. No matter how imposing his chain of office, how rich his robes, how sumptuous his table, or how happy his family, next to his skin he always wore a coarse shirt made of goat’s hair. He wore the shirt to mortify his flesh and to serve as a constant, painful reminder that the world belonged to Satan and that all of its pleasures were the soul’s enemies.8
More’s interests in the New Learning and a religious life did not need to conflict with each other; Colet, Grocyn, and Linacre were all in holy orders themselves. Erasmus, too, had entered an Augustinian monastery and was ordained a priest in 1492. (He later received a papal dispensation from his vows.) To More’s father, however, classical studies and ascetic religious practice may not have seemed compatible with the day-to-day life of a lawyer. Sir John must have felt his patience sorely tested as he waited for his son to make up his brilliant, complicated mind and settle down to a proper career in law. He decided to put some parental pressure on him. Erasmus tells us that Sir John “deprived [More] of all outside help and he was treated almost as if disinherited because he was thought to be deserting his father’s profession” (Erasmus, p. 19/153-55). In the end, More chose to follow a legal career and thereby secure his family’s social position and economic well-being. Still, he must have put his scholarship and monastic practice two steps behind the law with great reluctance and regret.
World History
