The Wrongs of Thomas More (Wrong 5)

A lengthy digression into the life of a saint

A cool quote from the OED

In my previous post I talked about spelunking through the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “wrong” to see how the usage of that word had developed down through the ages.

Embedded in that definition was a citation that caught my eye. But first I need to point out that “wrong” has many shades of meaning. The particular one to which the following quote applies is: “Not in consonance with facts or truth; incorrect, false, mistaken.” And one of the oldest, and certainly pithiest, examples of this usage is cited as follows:

1528 MORE Dyaloge III. Wks 210/1 Our hart euer thinketh the judgement wrong, that wringeth us to the worse.

Now, that one's a beauty because it has one foot in the more ancient meaning of the word, and one in the modern. “Wringeth us to the worse” goes to the older, bending or twisting sense of the word, and means turning or wrenching us off course into a less desirable outcome. “The judgement wrong” refers to an error, a bad call. How do we discern between a right and wrong judgment? Our heart does it (the author, writing in 1528, doesn't draw modern distinctions between the heart and the brain). Evaluating a particular judgment, our heart thinks that it's wrong if its result is that our fate is turned or wrung in a bad direction.

The author is clearly engaging in wordplay here; he knows the etymology of this word. He’s amusing himself, and perhaps his more erudite readers, with the neat turn of phrase. Thanks to the OED, we less erudite moderns can get the joke too.

I was so curious about the context of this passage that I began tracking it down in the expectation that it might make for an interesting footnote. Instead I fell into a substantial rabbit hole.

The Rabbit Hole

In the OED, citations are, of necessity, very terse. Otherwise it would be even longer than 20 volumes. So all I knew at first was that the author was someone named More—a reasonably common English name.

The OED's Bibliography listed the full citation:

A Dyaloge wherin be treatyd dyvers maters as of the veneration and worshyp of ymagys etc. ( = A dialoge concerning heresyes) 1528 Sir Thomas More

So it was none other than the original Man for All Seasons, the author of Utopia, High Steward of both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, Lord Chancellor, scourge of heretics, [much later] both a Catholic saint and a Hero of the Russian Revolution, advisor to King Henry VIII, and—in a turnaround reminiscent of the First Trump Administration—publicly beheaded on Tower Hill when he refused to go along with the King's irregular marriage to Anne Boleyn.

“A Dyaloge Wherin be Treatyd Dyvers Maters” was published in London in 1529 (not 1528 as the OED has it). This is an astonishingly obscure book. Its existence is not mentioned in either More's reasonably thorough Wikipedia entry or his even longer Encyclopedia Britannica biography. I was not able to find an electronic copy on the Internet, which is surprising given the author's prominence.

I was, however, able to purchase, for a cool $150, a physical copy. This is not a modern transcription but a facsimile of the copy in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It's printed in the blackletter typeface that was common at the time. Obviously, the spelling is half a millennium out of date. Moreover, it has a number of typographical pecularities that make it heavy sledding for the modern reader. The exact page number isn't listed in the OED—this book doesn't even have page numbers—so I had to read through most of it to find the actual quote. And having found it, I wanted to get a better understanding of the context in which More was saying it.

I expected that this would be a simple matter of translating the preceding couple of paragraphs into modern English. I was badly wrong. The context turns out to be pretty vast.

The Dyaloge

The overall conceit of Dyaloge—which is internally divided into four Books—is that More is engaging in a debate with an anonymous correspondent. Or, to be precise with a friend of the correspondent—referred to as “your friend”—who is arguing with More about (according to the title page) “the veneration and worship of images and relics, praying to saints, going on pilgrimage…With many other things touching the pestilent sect of Luther and Tyndale, by the one bygone in Saxony and by the other labored to be brought in to England.”

The book is framed as an extended point/counterpoint exchange between More and “your friend.” We never hear directly from “your friend,” but More summarizes each of the friend's points before serving up a withering counter-argument. It all seems a little like the common social media joke “asking for a friend.” More seems to be offering plausible deniability to whomever he's arguing with.

Who is “your friend?” Mention is made of a messenger who is going back and forth between wherever More is and “the university,” so we can guess that the person More is arguing with is at Oxford or Cambridge.

It's tempting to identify this group with a circle at Cambridge mentioned in the Wikipedia article about the English Reformation, from which I quote: “a group of reform-minded university students that met at the White Horse tavern from the mid-1520s, known by the moniker ‘Little Germany’.”

In this case “Germany” would be a reference to Martin Luther, he of the “pestilent sect” called out on the title page. Luther had authored his 95 Theses only about ten years earlier, in 1517, and had been excommunicated in 1521.

The Little Germany group at Cambridge included several future Protestant martyrs.

The Dyaloge creates serious challenges for anyone who is inclined to take an apologetic or sympathetic position vis-a-vis Saint Thomas More, humanist and intellectual. There's a reason it's obscure: it makes Thomas More look like a terrible human being. Anyone who wants to make More look good would want to bury this book. The best you can say about him is that he has a way with words, and he's prolific. But these dialogues most consist of him explaining, with forced patience, to an obvious straw man, that the Roman Catholic Church is infallible, that judges—civil or ecclesiastical—are wise and incorruptible, and that anyone who persistently argues to the contrary is either childish, or so deeply steeped in heresy that burning them alive in public is a perfectly reasonable corrective measure.

Mention is made (approvingly) of “the burnyng of the new testament” (presumably Tyndale's) and the forbidding of the reading of Luther's books.

“And finally touching the burning of heretics, there were some that thought the clergy therein far out of right order of charity,” More says.

He isn't being arch or funny there, he seems genuinely bemused that the college kids consider setting humans on fire to be an uncharitable way for clergymen to behave.

The dialog ranges far and wide, but in the first part of Book 3 they keep circling back to an individual, who is never named, but is referred to as “the man we now talk of,” “the person abjured,” “the man we speak of which was abjured,” and so on. He was called “a good man and very devout.” But, in some way never explained, “superstitious fear and scrupulosity...drove him to the delight of such liberty as brought him to the contempt of the good devout things used commonly in Christ's church.”

It is all maddeningly vague. Reading between the lines, we can infer that the man in question was a priest gone wrong. He both spoke and wrote certain opinions that were heretical. He belonged to “that sect,” which is never mentioned by name, but is “false.”

“For he forthwith forsook them and ever before his judges he confessed from the beginning that the matters were plain false heresies and the holders therewith hereticks, saying for himself that he never preached them.”

In other words, this man broke down under interrogation—presumably including torture—and claimed that he never actually believed in these heresies.

But according to More, this man “used among some of that sect to say, ‘let us preach and set forth our way. And if we be accused, let us say we said not so, and yet some of them shall we win away the while.’”

In other words, it was all part of the heretics' pre-arranged plan that if they got caught and interrogated by the authorities, they would claim that they had never preached any heretical doctrine. But in the meantime they might have converted a few other persons to their heretical views.

“I assure you,” More continues, “to my mind his manner in this matter before his judges was as consonant as could be to that intent and purpose.” He's talking about that pre-arranged plan of claiming innocence when caught and interrogated.

So, More is telling us that he was personally present at the man's trial; that he witnessed the man pleading innocence; but he saw through the deception.

Based on circumstantial evidence, it would seem that the man in question was one Thomas Hitton. And by “circumstantial evidence” I refer to the fact that Thomas Hitton was the only heretic burned in the year 1529. Early that year—the year that More's book was published, and the year More become Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor—Hitton had been arrested at Gravesend. Before then he had been in exile along with other English Protestants in the Low Countries. He had crossed over to England on a clandestine mission related to smuggling unauthorized translations of the New Testament. After a series of interrogations he was burned at the stake.

No other Protestant “heretic” that I can find in the historical record matches this chronology so well, and so I can only assume that More is writing this Dialog in an effort to sway the opinions of heresy-curious academics such as the White Horse Tavern “Little Germany” crowd. Or, barring that, to publicly set forth his view on why they are in the wrong.

So, let's sum up the situation as far as I can reconstruct it.

More is a devout, sincere Catholic who, earlier in his life, came this close to becoming a Carthusian monk, but instead went into the legal profession. As a matter of fact, he's so sincere that six years from now he's going to have his head chopped off because he won't support an un-Catholic royal marriage.

At the same time, he's friends with people like Erasmus, who wants to reform the Catholic Church from within. And apparently he's also in communication with the White Horse Tavern crowd at Cambridge, or people like them. He thinks they are wrong, but persuadable.

In 1528 or 9, when he's writing this Dyaloge, he's on the threshold of being Lord Chancellor. Or it may have happened already; it all depends on specific dates of when he wrote the Dyaloge. Over the course of 1529, Cardinal Wolsey, his predecessor, was getting into trouble with Henry VIII and at some point was clearly on his way out. So even if More, in the Dyaloge, isn't yet writing in his official capacity as Lord Chancellor, he's almost certainly writing as one who's in the running to get the job soon.

By his own admission in these pages, he has been present at the interrogation, by a Church court, of the heretic Thomas Hitton. This was part of a legal proceeding that led to Hitton's being burned at the stake.

More is taking time out from what is probably a busy schedule to write a lengthy and abstruse Dyaloge to a quasi-imaginary friend at Cambridge or Oxford who seems to be exhibiting sympathy for the budding English Reformation and who takes a dim view of Churchmen burning heretics.

Who is More writing this for? Definitely not a novelist 500 years in the future who is curious about the etymology of “wrong.” This is for a small and select audience, many of whom More probably knows by name. The population of England and Wales at this point is maybe three and a half million: a good-sized city in the United States today. Of those, only a small percentage can read. Those people—the literate nobles, clergy, and city dwellers—are More's only possible audience for this Dyaloge. The whole vibe of the document is precious, coy, cliquish. Clearly, everyone who reads it knows exactly who “the man we now talk of” is. It's not even necessary to mention his name; to do so would just be tacky. The person More's arguing with is addressed through multiple layers of indirection. More doesn't talk to his counterpart straight out. Instead there's an unidentified “messenger” who goes back and forth between More and his contact at “the university” where the contact has been in touch with “your friend.” Again, it all reeks of some kind of controversy within an in-group of people who all know each other but don't want to name names.

More is staking out a position here. If he's not already Lord Chancellor, he suspects he’s likely to be soon. The Protestant Reformation is creating trouble all over the place. He knows which side he's on. The King of England is a Trumpian figure. More works for him as an attack dog going after the likes of Martin Luther. He's a John Bolton type: a sincere true believer who gets recruited because he's passionate about what he believes. But, precisely because he's more sincere than his boss, it's not going to end well.

Now a priest-turned-heretic has been arrested, probably tortured—possibly while More was nearby—and convicted, leading to the first burning at the stake of an English Reformation heretic. Several more such burnings will come soon, all of them under More's jurisdiction as Lord Chancellor. More has to stake out a position, and he has to do so “publicly” where the “public” in this case is a few thousand literate Englishmen who actually care about such things.

This all gets us to the threshold of Chapter 3, which, on the surface, is mostly about judicial proceedings. A little prologue—what we would now call a TL;DR—says “The author [More] shows that men ought not to be light in mistrusting of any judgment given in the court (i.e. they should not be quick to assume that a court's judgments are false). And that much less ought any man to be bold in the reproving of a common law. And he shows also the cause why that the law admitteth more slight witness in heinous criminal causes than in slighter matters of covenants or contracts.”

The chapter has to be read on two levels. It's about judges, witnesses, evidence, the written law, and how courts and justice ought to work in general. But it's also specifically about the case of the doomed heretic I'm thinking is Thomas Hitton.

In this chapter “your friend” is expressing doubt that “the man we now talk of”—whom he apparently holds in high personal regard—was righteously convicted. “Your friend” complains that the convicted man is virtuous and decent.

More replies that even if “your friend” has a high opinion of the convicted man's virtue, that doesn't give just cause to doubt the honesty of the judge. More goes on to point out that judges are chosen for their impartiality and that they don't have a financial stake in the outcome of cases and so it's unfair to doubt their judgments unless you have “plain and sure information” that the judgment is wrong.

Which is fair enough, as far as it goes; character witnesses don't pull a lot of weight, in court, if the evidence points toward guilt.

Here’s a scan of the section in question with the relevant quote highlighted. Following that is my attempt to transliterate it into modern spelling.

“And yet is it as Aristotle saith well done indeed to make the laws so sufficient that as few things as may shall remain and be left to the discretion of the judge [illegible] that the common laws be constantly made by many more that are the particular judges and also many such as are as wise as judges. And over that the laws be to the judges a sure and substantial shield to defend and keep them from the hatred and obloquy that else would follow their sentence on the one side or the other, were their judgement never so wise. For men be so partial always to themselves that our heart ever thinketh the judgement wrong that wryngeth us to the worse. For be it never so right, all reckon we wrong whereof we feel harm. But yet of all things specially the law should best content us for that it is farthest out of all cause of such suspicion. For whereas a judge medleth with a matter present and persons who he sees and knows whereby there may perchance favor, hatred, hope or dread, pity, cruelty, mede, request, or some other affection incline him to mis-order himself in the matter, the laws always be made for the punishment of things only that are yet to come, and who shall fall in that peril the makers cannot tell: haply their foes, haply their friends, (and as men’s manners be mutable) peradventure themselves. For which cause the makers of the law made by the people in causes criminal can be but indifferent.”

It's easy to read these words as the abstract, philosophical musings of a bien-pensant humanist—the proto-Communist author of Utopia who later became a Catholic saint. But in the same year that the above words were printed, their author become Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor—the highest judicial post in England and Wales. During Thomas More’s chancellorship, six Protestants were burned at the stake for the crime of heresy. And this is not just coincidental. More by this point was an inveterate heretic-fighter who had personally assisted Henry VIII in writing a polemic aimed at Martin Luther. Luther’s response had then triggered what we would now call a flame war, with More writing amazingly scatological, abusive and threatening attacks on Luther under an assumed name, just like a modern-day Redditor. Earlier in “A Dyaloge,” More talks at length about his Protestant-fighting efforts. So, his words in the above passage have to be read both as a general, abstract statement about the importance of a clear and specific legal code to the maintenance of a fair and trusted judiciary, and a way of preparing himself to hear the screams of heretics dying at the stake as punishment for their thought crimes. More believes in absolute right and wrong strongly enough to see people burned alive for it. But being who he is, he needs a theory of right and wrong that’s robust enough to back that up.

To reference a common Internet meme: that escalated quickly. All I wanted was to track down a particularly delicious play on “wrong” and “wring” cited in the OED, and in no time I found myself embroiled in a minor detective story that completely destroyed any illusions I might ever have entertained about the character of Thomas More. He was a monster. To be clear, I am not one of those who likes to hold historical persons to modern standards. But by his own admission in Dyaloge, More was in communication with peers at Oxford or Cambridge who were expressing (to put it mildly) reservations about the practice of burning thought criminals alive, and questioning whether the Church was infallible. He could have simply agreed with them. Instead he hardened his heart and made a career of setting people on fire.

More's authoritarian surrender

Thomas More was as intellectually gifted as anyone who ever lived. It's not like he was worried that the conversation was getting over his head. There was no argument he wasn't smart enough to follow, no debater who could outscore him on points. But in 1529 he's been shouldering serious real-world responsibilities for a while, and he's getting ready to become the chief of the British judiciary. I think he has made an internal decision: these religious debates are fine for academics, but I've got a job to do, decisions to make, actions to take, and so it all has to be reduced to simple terms that we must all abide by.

Why does he make the decision that he does, though? The picture that comes through clearly in Dyaloge is of a brilliant and capable man who has made a choice to debase himself at the altar of the Roman Catholic Church. We know that he was in the habit of wearing a hair shirt. This is a term that nowadays is only used in a metaphorical sense. Thomas More was doing it for real. He could afford comfortable clothes made of good fabric. But underneath those, against his skin, he chose to wear rough, itchy fabric as a form of self-punishment and penitence.

I'll leave the armchair psychoanalysis as an exercise for the reader. Some caution is warranted. But clearly it was important for Thomas More to subordinate himself totally to his religious beliefs. The brain that was capable of learning so many things and dealing with so many ideas had to be bridled, humbled, and harnessed to an overwhelmingly powerful institution with a clear and strong hierarchy that led ultimately to the Pope and thence to God. This is precisely the argument that More is making in the pages of the Dyaloge. His opponent, “your friend,” is trying to make the argument that scripture alone is enough to lead us to salvation. More counters that both scripture and the Church—the one Church—are necessary. He hates the idea that random individuals can read scripture—translated by the likes of Luther and Tyndale into their own languages—and find true religion. It looks like anarchy to him. Submission to authority must be part of the picture. Any intelligent person will counter “what if the authority is wrong?” and so More is forced to support the position that the Church can't be wrong.

No reasonable human, then or now, believes that there's any institution, made up of fallible humans, that's never wrong. When More comes out in support of that position, he's putting on an intellectual hair shirt. That's his act of self-degradation. All of his learning and brilliance are being publicly humiliated and subordinated to an authority. It's the very publicness of that subordination, the blatantness of it, that is at the basis of authoritarianism, then and now. When otherwise well-informed and intelligent persons come out in favor of a Hitler, a Mussolini, a Trump, or any other authoritarian figure, they're not really claiming that they believe everything the boss says. No one could believe that. They're making a public gesture of submissiveness. And the more outrageous the leader's lies, the greater the humiliation, the more profound the submission. If you are psychologically predisposed to be submissive, then there is pleasure in the submitting; and once it's done, it gives you license to burn your enemies with a clear conscience.

Four centuries after his death, within a span of 27 years, More was made a Roman Catholic saint and a Hero of the Russian Revolution. In 1918, in the Soviet Union, his name was carved on a monument along with those of other founders of the Communist movement. Catholic sainthood came in 1935. In most ways the Soviet Union and the Roman Catholic church could hardly be more different. They were, of course, blood enemies. But both are among the most centralized, top-heavy, and authoritarian institutions that humans have ever created.

This series of posts is about being wrong—about taking the wrong turn at some point or other, leading to wrong conclusions and wrong actions. It's about errors in thinking. But the whole point of becoming an authoritarian is that you are releasing yourself from the obligation to think—from the stress of it, the work, the fear that you might be wrong.