The Life of Thomas More

by Ackroyd, Peter

  Yet here also was the centre of great spiritual devotion. At eleven in the evening the monks would be woken from a short sleep and would proceed into the fathers’ choir for the recitation of Matins, Lauds and the Office of the Dead; in a darkness attenuated only by the lights they carried with them, and by the gleam of the sanctuary lamp, they sang, chanted and prayed for three hours. Their robes were of undyed wool and descended to their ankles; they wore white leathern girdles around the waist, and much of the body was covered by a great white cowl and hood. They chanted slowly, as if engaged in meditation rather than song. Guests were permitted to attend these services, watching from a gallery in the smaller brothers’ choir, and there are accounts of the ‘night-slippers’ and lights that they were given by the kitchener as they left their plain lodgings. It is a scene which Thomas More recalled in Utopia; the citizens of that insular community also wear white robes in their temple, while all is veiled in semi-darkness.6 The monks returned to their cells in the early hours of the morning and, after reciting part of Our Lady’s Office, retired to their narrow beds before being awoken again at five or six in order to attend Mass followed by prayers and spiritual meditation. Their hours between ten and two were devoted to intellectual or manual labour, in their cells, and then at a quarter to three they went back to church for Vespers; they remained at their devotions until half-past six or seven when once more they returned to their solitude in preparation for the ‘night vigil’. In solitude, too, in those hours of the day not dedicated to work or communal devotion, the monks recited the Divine Office, the Office of the Blessed Virgin, and certain prayers for the restoration of the Holy Land. It was an echo-chamber of prayer, this small London community interceding for the living and pleading for the dead. We might see Thomas More watching from the stone gallery above, as the white-robed monks continued their perpetual chant of psalms, canticles, antiphons, responsoria, prayers and hymns.

  He became thoroughly conversant, too, with a precisely regulated life of prayer and study. There was a moderate, almost paternal, discipline on such matters as the occasions for bowing in greeting or kneeling to ask pardon. Silence was generally observed, and the Carthusian diet was unique in its absolute prohibition of meat. The monks left the Charterhouse only once a week, for a Sunday afternoon walk together, known as Spatiamentum. Whether they chose to venture down the notorious Turnmill Lane towards Clerkenwell and the fields beside the village of Islington, or whether they walked down Ludgate and past the Black Friars towards the Thames, is not recorded. One or two members of the community needed to have more elaborate contact with the external world; the procurator, for example, was obliged to administer the estates owned by the Charterhouse in Bloomsbury and Edmonton, Tottenham, Kent, Hertfordshire and elsewhere. It is not difficult to imagine More, as a constant guest and friend, advising on the legal and financial matters attendant upon these worldly possessions.

  The calling of the Carthusian, according to one history of the order, ‘is far more to weep than to sing’,7 and the solitude of the monastic life did on occasions lead to emotional or even histrionic scenes. The monks were indeed particularly prone to weeping, in the exercise of what was known as ‘the gift of tears’; tears were, after all, according to St Bernard, the wine of angels. There is an extravagance and intensity within late medieval life which are revealed at sudden moments of ardour, or crisis, and which cannot be separated from the general love of spectacle and display. Of course the ardour may take strange forms, and in the records of the early sixteenth-century Charterhouse there are accounts of visitations and apparitions. The crucified figure of Jesus turned its back upon one recalcitrant monk, in sight of the community, while another was always struck with blindness on entering the church. One wastrel who declared that he would rather eat toads than fish (Erasmus noted that the meat-free Carthusians generally smelled like otters) found that his cell was instantly filled with the creatures ‘crawling and leaping after him’.8 In the uncertain period before the Reformation, the brothers saw in the air ‘a globe as of blood, of great size’,9 and in the same period swarms of flies covered the entire surface of the monastery, ‘all which things we feared were the signs and forecasts of other events’.10 There were more fortunate visitations, too, and among these reports of bloody omens are records of strange sweet scents and music infiltrating the church at times of prayer. Such accounts come from intelligent and well-educated contemporaries of More himself; his was still a world of marvels and apparitions.

  But there was another aspect of medieval piety which led him towards the gates of Charterhouse. The Carthusians were as well known for their learning as for their devotion, and one of the monks’ principal occupations lay in the copying of manuscripts; the more artistic or erudite of them were given parchment, pen and ink for the transcription of pious works. We have the names of individual monks such as William Tregoose and William Exmew who copied versions of that great mystical treatise The Cloud of Unknowing, and there are records of other texts being sent from the monastery to religious centres throughout the country. In 1500, for example, some thirty-two volumes were lent by the prior of the Charterhouse, Richard Roche, to a monastery in Coventry. At the time More himself frequented Charterhouse, a copy of The Cloud of Unknowing was being produced, but, perhaps more pertinently, in its library were to be found Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection and The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. Such was the significance of these works to More that he mentions them specifically as ones to ‘norysshe and encrease deuocyon’,11 and alludes to them throughout his own writings. The Imitation, which More believed to be composed by Jean Gerson, is perhaps the finest expression of a renovated piety, based upon austere communal living and prayer. To imitate Christ is to bear all the humiliations and the indignities of the world; there are wonderfully elaborate meditations on the passion of Christ for the world, and the necessity of discipline and suffering to be worthy of his love. Each man must find his own cross and bear it willingly into what à Kempis calls ‘the valley of my nothingness’,12 where it is necessary only to ‘write, read, chant, mourn, keep silence, pray’.13 More discovered in à Kempis an account of the worthlessness of this world and its rewards, together with the desire for solitude, prayer, and that longing for death as the gate to eternity. The simplicity and purity of these themes are taken up in More’s writings with a fervour which suggests the intensity of his own nature, and there can be no doubt that the library of the Charterhouse helped to shape his own spiritual temperament.

  The Imitation and Hilton’s Scale of Perfection are generally also seen as part of the broad tradition of late medieval piety, with its emphasis upon Christ as both the victim and saviour of the world. The extravagances of this devotion have been well documented, with the measuring of Christ’s wounds and the counting of the drops of his blood as part of a ritualised attention to the more visible aspects of his redemptive sacrifice; the image of the dying Christ casts its shadow over a popular piety animated by the fear of wrath and the need for forgiveness, sustained by the idea of placatory prayer, and possessed by an awareness of last things. The Dance of Death painted upon the wall of St Paul’s churchyard, and the skeletons adorning the transi or cadaver tomb of Colet within that church, are obvious examples of a religious culture permeated by the recognition of death and decay. Yet how is this refrain upon the uses of suffering, and this emphasis upon the hollowness of the world, consistent with the life of a young lawyer in early sixteenth-century London? Kempis’s injunction that man ‘often uses violence to himself: and labours to bring the flesh wholly into subjection to the spirit’14 can be connected with the discipline of More’s piety and the wearing of the hair shirt. Similarly a Kempis’s image of the tortured Christ is one that can be glimpsed in More’s own preoccupation with the passion and the crucifixion. But these are external signs and tokens. If The Imitation of Christ was More’s golden book, as is often surmised, where was the spiritual profit to be found?

  It lies at the centre
of à Kempis’s teaching, when he urges the reader to ‘look on all things as passing away, and on thyself as doomed to pass away with them’.15 It is the theme taken up in many of More’s earliest epigrams and might be supposed to be his great subject; yet such a deep and permanent awareness of transience seems difficult to reconcile with More’s successful life in the world. But a recognition of the hollowness of the world no more precludes ambition than it does conviviality. It simply places it within a larger context. All becomes part of the same play which, in the words of More, you must act out to the best of your ability.16 The whole elaborate medieval edifice of spectacle and display is built upon the awareness of death. Yet within the overwhelming context of divine truth and eternity, there is also a delight to be found in the transient game and an energy to be derived from the passing spectacle. It is in this crucial area of the late medieval imagination, so open to misunderstanding and to misinterpretation, that we must place Thomas More. There is a Japanese image of the ‘floating world’, wonderfully constructed and designed in full knowledge of its eventual demise: there ceases to be any private motive in collaborating upon this infirm beautiful project, but rather an awareness of common inheritance and destiny. We may see More’s education and career as part of the same process; that is how he could combine ambition and penitence, success and spirituality, in equal measure. He could move easily through a society permeated with religious values and images; the faith of his nation was a social and political, as well as a spiritual, reality. His sense of transience, and recognition of eternity, could only be enhanced in a city which from the southern bank of the Thames looked like an island of church steeples. More kept in fine balance these complementary vistas—of the hollowness of the world and of the delight in game. From this awareness of duality (and perhaps the duality within his own nature) springs his wit, his irony and the persistent doubleness of his vision.

  That is why it is wrong to assume any struggle or crisis over the nature of his vocation; Erasmus suggests that More’s prayers and meditations in the Charterhouse were in part supposed to test his capacity for the priesthood, and that he thought seriously of ordination, but that the recognition of his sexual appetites persuaded him otherwise. Certainly his preoccupation with lechery in his later polemical works and his occasional lubricious comments suggest a man whose sexuality was easily aroused; he might have become, as he feared, an impure priest,17 in a period when the holiness of virginity was being extolled with increasing fervour. But there was also throughout More’s life an almost overpowering sense of duty—although the citizens of Utopia revere celibacy, some believe that they ‘owe’ (‘debere’) both their country and nature itself the responsibility of propagating children. It may also be that his inherent sense of purposiveness and practicality guided him away from the cloister; he would have been aware of the Augustinian emphasis upon ‘service to the earthly city’18 among those who are not yet citizens of the eternal one. There are even occasions when More attacks the lazy acceptance of the monastic ideal of silence and isolation as a way of cultivating pleasure and as a way of avoiding the tribulations of life.19 The London humanists around him believed themselves to be living in a time of reform and renovation; it would not have been possible for him to take part in such a revival from the interior of a cell.

  It is often supposed that More’s lay piety was something of an anomaly, the obsession of an aspiring and unsatisfied contemplative. But the merits and rewards of a secular vocation are described in the very books available to More in the library of the Charterhouse. The second chapter of Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, for example, is concerned with the active Christian life in the world; it is ‘speedful that we know the gifts which are given us of God’,20 with St John as the image of the contemplative, and St Peter of the active, calling. Hilton also composed a volume entitled The Mixed Life in which the proper administration of the world is praised for its efficacy in supporting and assisting ‘the uncouth and uncunning’.21 The example of Christ is adduced, and a hasty retreat into a cell or monastery is condemned. ‘Thou makest thee for to kiss his mouth by devotion and ghostly prayer’ but by failing to participate in the world ‘thou treadest upon his feet and defilest them’.22

  It is appropriate, then, that, even while pursuing his legal training, More should lecture upon Augustine’s City of God in St Lawrence Jewry. In this neighbourhood church, where two of the principal attractions were the tooth and shank-bone of a supposed giant chained up for display, More addressed what is reported to have been a large congregation; no doubt his own family, living a few yards away, also attended. He was in his early twenties, but was already considered to be an able exponent of patristic texts. He had been asked to prepare the lectures by William Grocyn, the incumbent of St Lawrence Jewry, while Grocyn himself was lecturing on the pseudo-Dionysius at St Paul’s. Successive biographers of More have suggested that the congregations abandoned St Paul’s and flocked to St Lawrence, but there is no evidence for this. It is likely, however, that the audiences had a similar composition. Erasmus mentions in particular the attendance of priests and elderly men at St Lawrence Jewry, in order to emphasise that More’s learning was not some empty extravagance. In a letter written at the time More himself takes a less charitable attitude, at least towards Grocyn’s audience; he informed a friend that the size of the congregation in St Paul’s was greater than its intelligence and that it included the ignorant.23 Some had come to learn about new things, others out of the desire to seem intelligent, and certain people had stayed away simply because they wanted to pretend that they already knew all about the subject. Yet the very existence of these lectures, on Augustine and the pseudo-Dionysius, as well as the large numbers who apparently attended them, testify to the fact that there was a genuine curiosity about the ‘new learning’ which both More and Grocyn represented. Their knowledge of Greek (although More was still very much the pupil of Grocyn in this respect) and of patristic sources offered a new formulation or restatement of old truths.

  No record of More’s lectures on The City of God survives, but they can be placed at the centre of his concerns during this period. He had already composed his dialogue in defence of Plato’s Republic, and his contemporary epigrams on the dangers of a weak or avaricious monarch provide further evidence that he was thinking as seriously about civic as about religious issues. In his legal studies, too, he was concerned with matters of civil law and common law which had a direct relation to the good government of the ‘common welth’. More quoted from the works of Augustine all his life, and it is easy to see why he should have been drawn towards the saint even as a young man. Augustine was a rhetorician, a master of Latin prose, but he was also a revered figure of the Church who had imbibed and mastered true classical learning; his interest in Neoplatonism as implicitly heralding Christian revelation, in particular, brought him very close to More’s contemporaries. Augustine was a living authority for the time, in other words, and in expounding The City of God More was addressing the issues of the day.

  At the centre of Augustine’s work was the question that was uniquely to concern More himself: Do we wish to live in the earthly city or in the heavenly city? It was a question posed to him at the end of his life, when he chose the latter, but in these early years it had more than private import. Was the true state a congregation of believers ruled by the intervention of grace and divine law, or was it an association of men ruled by national law and positive law? Was it essentially a corpus mysticum or a natural human grouping? This was the debate which More continued in his lectures at St Lawrence Jewry, but its significance is that it was precisely from these questions that Utopia itself would emerge. Of course we do not know what conclusions More reached in front of his learned audience, and yet certain speculations are possible.

  In Augustine’s work the history of the world is conceived in terms of these two cities, the city of the world and the city of God, distinct but not entirely separate, together experiencing ‘the vicissitudes o
f time’.24 The heavenly city exists within the earthly city, in separate individuals or in communities of believers, so that it is possible to see within the fallen city—let us say, London—‘an image of the Heavenly City’.25 The physical presence of the churches themselves in the City, some of them of ancient date, was a token of sacred history within the walls. The city of the world could aspire, at least, to the condition of the city of God; there was a strong tradition in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries which affirmed that human community, with the possibilities for instruction and joint worship, was the most appropriate place for the pursuit of the divine. That was partly More’s experience of the Charterhouse, but as he lectured in the church by the Guildhall he may have possessed a wider vision. Could he be at the same time a citizen of London and a citizen of the heavenly city? Was it possible to live in the city of God while remaining in the city of men? It seems possible that this indeed became the lifelong project of Thomas More. He knew that London was no abiding city, and it is clear from the actions of his subsequent career that he believed himself to be part of a larger spiritual community (the living and the dead together); at this time in his life, with that combination of intelligence and piety unique to him, it might have seemed that they could be reconciled.