Amid the pious observances of American Independence Day, I found my attention unexpectedly directed to a short Substack essay over at The New Digest, entitled, “Bolt and the Bastardized Saint: In praise of Thomas More the man, in protest of his caricature.” I of all people could hardly resist giving it a read. I’d recently finished up three years working with the Center for Thomas More Studies, and I had just returned home after facilitating the Center’s week-long crash course for high school teachers, which dives directly into More’s life and writings.
The subject of this essay is the dramatic rendition to which Blessed More owes much of his contemporary fame: Robert Bolt’s stage play-turned-feature-film, A Man for All Seasons. Now this venerable work is hardly a stranger to criticism. Many observers—including those with sympathy for both saint and stage play—have already noted a kind of anachronistic individualism beneath the invocations of conscience made by Bolt’s version of Thomas More.
Yet this essay’s author, a certain Mr. Jack Kieffaber, pursues a rather unique line of attack. Mr. Kieffaber faults the Boltian character of More for failing to faithfully represent the saint of history, who made a clear-cut choice of God over king when put to the test. In contrast, Robert Bolt’s Thomas More opts for attempt after attempt at what Kieffaber calls “Processmaxxing”; that is, exploiting his expert knowledge of legal loopholes in order to escape the dilemma of divergent loyalties altogether. The protagonist of A Man for All Seasons, we are told, “seized on even the remote chance that, with the help of text and process, he could keep his morals and his manor house.” Given that Henry VIII and Cromwell ultimately do execute More in spite of his artful “Processmaxxing,” Kieffaber finds the actions of Bolt’s protagonist to be comedic, even bordering on farcical.
But that’s not all. Kieffaber strongly implies that A Man for All Seasons presents us with an unbelieving Thomas More! The Boltian More’s behavior—and that of anyone who fears suffering for God’s cause—can only be explained in one of two ways, Kieffaber tells us:
1. You don’t believe in God.
2. You’re not actually sure what God wants you to do.
“Which of these camps did Thomas More, the character, fall into?” Kieffaber asks.
Because he certainly fell into one; if he believed in a God that would redeem him for eternity and knew for a fact that opposing Henry’s new church was what God wanted him to do, he would never have even resigned his post as Chancellor — he would have stated his objection straight away and faced the consequences with a smile. But was he unsure what God wanted him to do? His final statement suggests not; few heresies are more obvious than Henry’s, and More quite clearly had his mind made up from the start.
That only leaves one option — and it’s a strange one for Bolt to attribute to a Saint.
Strange indeed. Although passages like these live up to their author’s stated desire to provoke a reaction, my own reaction remains befuddlement more than anything else.
While preparing my own thoughts, I discovered an existing response to “Bolt and the Bastardized Saint” written by Tijmen van der Maas, who points out the conspicuous absence of prudence from Kieffaber’s rather blunt account of practical reasoning. Van der Mass, however, intentionally refrains from commenting on “the historical accuracy of Bolt’s portrayal.” He therefore leaves mostly unchallenged Kieffaber’s closing assessment that the saintly More of history was cut from a wholly different cloth than Bolt’s prevaricating Processmaxxer.
That leaves the door open to the work I will attempt to do here. I want to offer a corrective to Kieffaber’s understanding of the historical Saint Thomas More’s resistance to Henry VIII, considered both in his actions and in the moral anthropology he espoused. In a curious twist, Kieffaber’s argument, particularly his contention that the Boltian More ought to have met martyrdom “with a smile,” bears an uncanny resemblance to an extended narrative persona which was developed—and refuted!—nearly five hundred years ago by More himself.
This persona, which I will discuss in detail below, can be found in the pages of The Sadness of Christ, More’s moving spiritual commentary on Christ’s suffering in Gethsemane. Indeed, when we turn to Sadness’s profound account of when and how to embrace the prospect of martyrdom, we can see that St. Thomas More strongly endorses the possibility that fear of death isn’t per se sinful and can even be meritorious—contrary to Kieffaber’s central claim that such fear betokens one’s sinful doubt in a provident God.
Why the Silence?
A major difficulty with Kieffaber’s account of the historical Thomas More is that it’s not exactly easy to pin down. It must, of course, differ substantially from A Man for All Seasons—the “caricature” he so greatly disdains. And yet we only get a brief summary of what Kieffaber takes to have been the actual Thomas More’s resistance to Henry VIII, a summary which barely extends to three sentences:
[More] refused the Oath of Succession outright. He was jailed for it. In prison, he waged a war of conscience in ink—likening the King to a “Turk” and a “midday devil’s minister” while eviscerating bishops who caved to royal pressure.
In addition to this summary, Kieffaber summons (but doesn’t really cite) Travis Curtright’s excellent new book The Controversial Thomas More to allegedly support his claim that the sentiments of Boltian More and historical More are miles apart. I’ll circle back in a moment to the question of whether Curtright’s work lives up to this particular billing.
My first problem with Kieffaber’s limited engagement of history is that the reputation of the actual Thomas More suffers collateral damage repeatedly, if unintentionally, from his line of attack on A Man for All Seasons. I say “unintentionally,” but I must confess a general difficulty identifying Kieffaber’s opinions at more than one point in his piece. For example, in taking a shot at Bolt’s More for resigning the Chancellorship, does he mean to criticize the historical More’s choice to do the same in 1532? After all, at that juncture, More famously did not openly confront Henry, on either the question of his divorce or the claim of Supremacy over the Church in England.
Instead of “stat[ing] his objection” to Henry “straight away,” the More of history resigned citing ill-health, as well as a desire to prepare himself for death. In 1533, More would even go so far as to seek Erasmus’s help in publishing his epitaph—a lawyerly way of setting the record straight. What exactly was More hoping to clarify? Among other things, More carves into stone the claim that he was not unceremoniously sacked by an angry king. Instead, More’s epitaph clarifies that he “resigned office…through the unparalleled graciousness of a most indulgent Sovereign (may God smile favorably upon his enterprises).”
Nor does Kieffaber’s summary do justice to More’s actions in the three-year period between his resignation and his martyrdom. Kieffaber finds it hilarious that Bolt’s More, when first offered the oath in 1534, “wants to read the damned thing first to see if the plain text lets him weasel out again” (italics original). Yet this is precisely what the actual More actually did. He even offered a compromise in which he would swear to the succession, taken apart from the rest of the oath (and its denigration of papal authority). Further, Roper’s biography tells us that More found it worth observing to his daughter, Margaret, that his imprisonment was illegal because the oath did not line up with its own statutory basis.[1]
Was all this just futile Processmaxxing? If not, Kieffaber would have done well to tell us why not. Given that he teases us with the prospect of a mythical More, boldly telling Henry VIII to take a hike, I fear he may be embarrassed by the historical More’s indirections and dodges—dodges which, you will recall, are apparently the marks of practical atheism.
A better reading of More’s motivations in the final years of his life belongs to Matthew Mehan, my friend and a fellow More scholar: to say, as Kieffaber does, that Blessed Thomas “refused [the Oath of the Act of Accession] outright” is
a misrepresentation of the long, complex process by which he held the laws, as relations with his neighbor and his king, up as a means to buy time to convince as many as possible and even his king, even if that meant persuading him with his faithful counselor's martyrdom.”[2]
Even a relatively light perusal of More’s Tower letters confirms this assessment. One comes away from these letters with the unmistakable impression that More genuinely wished Henry’s good, and that he retained no small hope that his carefully chosen mode of indirect resistance might yet bring the king and his countrymen to their senses.
The indirect approach to difficult counsel—the well-known ductus obliquus of Utopia Book I—is a feature, not a bug, of More’s life and writings. His first published Latin writings speak of his admiration of the Greek poet Lucian, since “although no one pricks more deeply, nobody resents his stinging words.”[3] And in his defense of the Coronation Ode he dedicated to the young Henry VIII, More tells us that a poet worth his salt “should little by little instill proper values in men’s hearts with the sweetness of verses.”[4]
Now, a comprehensive account of how this indirection was deployed during More’s final years would take more space than I presently have. Thankfully, Travis Curtright does offer just such an account in his Controversial Thomas More, though as I hinted earlier, it does little to vindicate Kieffaber’s chosen narrative. In that work, Curtright artfully documents out how More’s multipronged and vigorous resistance to the king was, unfortunately, underemphasized by his early biographers. So yes, Kieffaber is quite correct to seek in More a staunch champion of the faith.
Yet Curtright also observes that More consistently “formulates his refusal [of the oath] in terms of loyalty and his firm reluctance to give offense” to Henry. This was in part because “the king and his councilors already knew his mind,”[5] and in part because, while More was willing to suffer the consequences of such a strategy, he wasn’t particularly interested in throwing away his life if Christian prudence left other options on the table. Indeed, More’s concern to avoid needless martyrdom flowed from a wellspring of serious moral and theological reflection—the stuff of which we’ll take a look at now.
To Fear or Not to Fear?
When St. Thomas More was imprisoned in April of 1534, he would (thank the Lord) have access to writing materials for the next thirteen or so months. During this period, in spite of painful ailments from within and intense interrogations from without, More composed no fewer than two major works—A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation and The Sadness of Christ—alongside a series of letters and a handful of beautiful prayers. Sadness, the last of these two, consists of an extended series of meditative reflections on Christ’s journey from the Last Supper into the Garden of Gethsemane. It concludes (perhaps due to the unfinished nature of the work) at the point of his seizure by the armed band sent by Jewish Temple authorities.
We have every reason to consider The Sadness of Christ as a privileged portal into the mind and heart of the real St. Thomas More. The original manuscript in More’s own hand was smuggled out of the Tower and survives today, exhibiting extensive revisions that, in conjunction with More’s use of the Latin language, suggest he had a wider European audience in mind. Moreover, the subject matter of Sadness was near and dear to More’s heart. Frequent calling to mind of the Lord’s Passion was one of his go-to spiritual practices, and one he repeatedly recommends to readers across his written works.
It is significant, then, that if you set Kieffaber’s piece side by side with Sadness, they begin to clash as early as the title page. Kieffaber claims his essay lays out a “draconian position: You should obey God without any fear of consequence.” And yet the full title of More’s work is The Sadness, the Weariness, the Fear, and the Prayer of Christ before He Was Taken Prisoner. Notice how More’s title reminds readers that Christ himself, fully God and fully man, mysteriously and marvelously chose to undergo the experience of fear.
The problem of intense fear in the face of death surfaces early in Sadness when More comments on Christ’s statement to his apostles, “My soul is sorrowful even unto death” (Matthew 26:38). It is in this particular passage that More introduces another narrative persona, an objecting voice (I’ll refer to it as the “Objector”) which potently articulates many of Kieffaber’s own concerns:
Here, perhaps, you may object, “I am no longer surprised at [Christ’s] capacity for these emotions, but I cannot help being surprised at his desire to experience them. For he taught his disciples not to be afraid of those who can kill the body only and can do nothing beyond that; and how can it be fitting that he himself should now be very much afraid of those same persons, especially since even his body could suffer nothing from them except what he himself allowed?
“Furthermore, since we know his martyrs rushed to their deaths eagerly and joyfully, triumphing over tyrants and torturers, how can it not seem inappropriate that Christ himself, the very prototype and leader of martyrs, the standard-bearer of them all, should be so terrified at the approach of pain, so shaken, so utterly downcast? Shouldn’t he rather have been especially careful to set a good example in this matter…so that others might learn from his own example to undergo death eagerly for truth’s sake, and so that those who afterwards would suffer death for the faith with fear and hesitation might not indulge their slackness by imagining that they are following Christ’s precedent?”[6]
Kieffaber’s piece—in common cause with More’s “Objector—attempts to disabuse modern Christians of their own “indulgences and concessions,” imagining that they are following Thomas More’s precedent.
So why exactly does Christ undergo this kind of suffering—including fear of his impending torture and death? More’s response to the Objector is decisive. He rehearses a variety of reasons that correspond with broadly orthodox readings of the Passion narrative: such suffering reveals the truth of Christ’s two natures, providing ample ammunition against those heresies that deny his full humanity. It also builds solidarity between Christ and his followers and encourages believers to accept the variety of sufferings that come to them.
Yet More spends the lion’s share of his time elaborating a final reason for Christ’s suffering which runs through the heart of the present controversy. Its basic premise is that Christ knew future Christians would possess a diversity of temperaments and rise to differing degrees of spiritual advancement, such that a number of those who will actually face the prospect of martyrdom—More included!—will be racked with the intense experience of fear. In consideration of these fearful but faithful souls, More tells us that Christ
chose to enhearten them by the example of his own sorrow, his own sadness, his own weariness and unequalled fear, lest they should be so disheartened as they compare their own fearful state of mind with the boldness of the bravest martyrs that they would yield freely what they fear will be won from them by force. To such a person as this, Christ wanted his own deed to speak out (as it were) with his own living voice: “O faint of heart, take courage and do not despair. You are afraid, you are sad, you are stricken with weariness and dread of the torment with which you have been cruelly threatened. Trust me. I conquered the world, and yet I suffered immeasurably more from fear, I was sadder, more afflicted with weariness, more horrified at the prospect of such cruel suffering drawing eagerly nearer and nearer. Let the brave man have his high-spirited martyrs, let him rejoice in imitating a thousand of them. But you, my timorous and feeble little sheep, be content to have me alone as your shepherd, follow my leadership; if you do not trust yourself, place your trust in me.[7]
Rather than forbid his followers to ever experience fear, Christ wished them to be “brave and prudent soldiers, not senseless and foolish.” In what sense? “The brave man,” More tells us, “bears up under the blows which beset him; the senseless man simply does not feel them when they strike.” As a result,
though our Savior Christ commands us to suffer death (when it cannot be avoided) rather than fall away from him through a fear of death (and we do fall away from him when we publicly deny our faith in him), still he is so far from requiring us to do violence to our nature by not fearing death at all that he even leaves us free to flee from punishment (whenever this can be done without injury to his cause). “If you are persecuted in one city,” he says, “flee to another.”[8] This permission, this cautious advice of a prudent master, was followed by almost all the apostles and by almost all the illustrious martyrs in the many succeeding centuries: there is hardly one of them who did not use it at some time or other to save his life and extend it, with great profit to himself and others, until such a time as the hidden providence of God foresaw was more fitting.[9]
These passages are some of my favorites to use when explaining More’s remarkable moral and spiritual dynamism—that is, his deep understanding that the Christian life is a journey, and that different human beings find themselves at different points along the way. Moral dynamism is first and foremost an awareness of these variegated moral conditions. Some persons are remarkably advanced in virtue and self-knowledge; others…not so much.
It follows, then, that the good which God requires of us is itself a variegated and dynamic duty, deeply challenging in practice yet always in keeping with our frail nature. Sensible to our different strengths and weaknesses (“He remembers that we are dust”)[10], God provides the graces necessary for each person to fulfill his or her various duties in spite of life’s often surprising twists and turns.
All of which brings me to my single greatest difficulty with Kieffaber’s account of martyrdom: his lack of attention to the problem of pride. More has a number of bones to pick with the unnamed Objector he gives voice to in Sadness, yet it is a prideful deficiency in humility which proves to the greatest danger embedded in the Objector’s perspective. In addition to misunderstanding the dynamic nature of duty, the Objector’s exclusive praise of “eager” martyrs likely conceals a prideful, exaggerated assessment of one’s personal strength and sanctity:
God in his mercy does not command us to climb this steep and lofty peak of bravery, and hence it is not safe for just anyone to go rushing on heedlessly to the point where he cannot retrace his steps gradually but may be in danger of falling head over heels into the abyss if he cannot make it to the summit. As for those whom God calls to do this, let them choose their goal and pursue it successfully and they will reign in triumph. He keeps hidden the times, the moments, the causes of all things, and when the time is right he brings forth all things from the secret treasure-chest of his Wisdom, which penetrates all things irresistibly and disposes all things sweetly.[11]
Note that here, as elsewhere in Sadness, More does not dismiss the truth contained in the Objector’s praise of bravery, especially the bravery involved in freely exposing oneself to torment and death for Christ. God has indeed called some of his saints to cheerfully lay down their lives—and their sacrifice is worth celebrating! Rather than denigrating their legacy, More is taking aim at the “heedlessness” characteristic of what we might call the armchair martyr, who talks a big game without sufficient awareness of their own limitations.
More finds this heedlessness problematic in two ways. First, it resists cooperation with the times and seasons of God’s providential order, as if martyrdom was our own personal project of self-assertion. So whereas Kieffaber blithely suggests that More must have known “what God wanted him to do” in response to Henry’s “obvious” heresy, More himself repeatedly emphasizes how imperfectly we perceive our part to play within the “hidden providence of God.” This quality of hiddenness reminds Christians of God’s awe-inspiring transcendence ("My ways are not your ways”)[12], and it cuts against the temptation to seek out an obvious, cut-and-dry blueprint that will lay out, in advance, what one’s moral journey ought to look like. Discerning God’s will and freely cooperating with it is instead a dynamic and ongoing process in need of daily renewal and vigorous recommitment.
Second, heedless pride can spiritually destroy its possessor if the would-be martyr proves unable to “make it to the summit,” i.e., to persevere to the end without denying Christ—a very real risk given the extreme duress of martyrdom! This danger, I believe, weighed very heavily on the heart of Thomas More. In 1534, he confided to a fellow prisoner in the Tower that “what my own [conscience] shall be tomorrow [I] myself cannot be sure, and whether I shall have finally the grace to do according to my own conscience or not hangs in God’s goodness.”[13]
We can see this concern for inconstancy again in June of 1535, when More’s royal interrogators, echoing a bit of Kieffaber, asked why, if he was truly willing to die for what he believed in, he had spent a year without openly speaking out against the relevant laws. More’s answer reflects the dynamism we’ve seen in Sadness: “I have not been a man of such holy living, as I might be bold to offer myself to death”—in other words, no heedless rushing to the “steep and lofty peak of bravery.” And yet More will not abandon the post given to him: “Howbeit if God draw me to it himself, then trust I in his great mercy that he shall not fail to give me grace and strength.”[14]
It makes perfect sense, then, that Sadness places humility as the “starting point” for soldiers taught by “Christ the commander…since it is the foundation (as it were) of all the virtues from which one may safely mount to higher levels.”[15] As we have glimpsed in the passages above, More’s Sadness of Christ insists that such a spiritual climb is in fact possible, so long as one humbly relies on and prays for God’s gracious aid and empowerment. And so while More is deathly serious about prideful presumption within the Objector’s reasoning, the work as a whole is largely one of encouragement and exhortation, with the suffering Christ himself as the primary source of strength and consolation.
One such consolation is that fear, along with all obstacles in the spiritual life, is actually an occasion for real growth in holiness and virtue. In Sadness, the central danger with fear involves yielding to it and giving up the fight—“a capital crime according to the military code,” as More reminds his reader.[16] His frequent martial metaphors are fitting because the dynamic journey back to God is a constant struggle, such that the successful Christian soldier is indeed the one who perseveres to the end. But within the journey itself, More insists that the “struggle against fear… is not criminal or sinful but rather an immense opportunity for merit.”[17] And as indicated above, he believed that many of the Church’s “illustrious martyrs,” including More’s much-loved Apostle Paul, availed themselves of this opportunity to merit greater favor in the eyes of God and men by adding fear to their list of defeated enemies. And so More concludes:
The fear of death and torments carries no stigma of guilt but rather is an affliction of the sort Christ came to suffer, not to escape. We should not immediately consider it cowardice for someone to feel fear and horror at the thought of torments, not even if he prudently avoids dangers (provided he does not compromise himself )….No matter how much the heart of the soldier is agitated and stricken by fear, if he still comes forward at the command of the general, goes on, fights, and defeats the enemy, he has no reason to fear that his former fear might lessen his reward in any way. As a matter of fact, he ought to receive even more praise because of it, since he had to overcome not only the enemy but also his own fear, which is often harder to conquer than the enemy himself.[18]
…
To recap the argument to this point, Kieffaber’s attack on A Man for All Seasons doesn’t do justice to the play because it doesn’t do justice to the historical Thomas More, both in his actions and his writings. Indirection in speech and recourse to legal procedure were powerful weapons in More’s arsenal, weapons that he deployed as a brave but prudent soldier in the wider battle for the soul of England. And in the thick of this battle, he was painfully aware of his own fear and frailty. Yet More understood that such fear was not a sinful doubt to be abhorred, but another field to be won.
I hope I’ve made clear that More’s martyrdom was no simple affair, and that when it comes to his resistance to Henry VIII, a real understanding of what he did and why requires much more than a paragraph or two. In this respect, A Man for All Seasons constitutes a flawed but solid dramatic introduction to the final act of More’s life. I particularly appreciate how it portrays More’s integrity and deep sense of duty, as well as the lack of understanding his resistance received from those he loved the most. Yet I confess I felt compelled to pen this response, less because A Man for All Seasons is in serious danger of getting knocked down a peg in the court of popular opinion (Wolf Hall is the greater danger on that front), and more because any opportunity to break open Sadness of Christ and share it with a new audience is an opportunity worth taking.
In 1929, G. K. Chesterton famously opined that St. Thomas More would be more important in a hundred years’ time than ever before. My sense is that this prophecy will be vindicated in our time, partly because there remains much work to do when it comes to fresh readings of More’s approach to law and governance—an approach which can amply enrich our contemporary discussions of the same. In this respect, I am not unsympathetic to efforts like Kieffaber’s that would wrestle his image from the pantheon of modernity’s veneration.[19] But to avoid creating caricatures after our own liking, we would all do well to imitate Travis Curtright in returning to the sources—More’s own writings—with the same care and attentiveness that this titan of statesmanship displayed throughout his remarkable and dynamic life.
Notes
Gerard B. Wegemer and Stephen W. Smith, eds., The Essential Works of Thomas More [hereafter EW], (Yale University Press, 2020), 1410.
https://x.com/MTMehan/status/1941523260320969030.
Letter 5, to Thomas Ruthall; EW 20.
Letter 86, to Germanus Brixius; EW 468.
The Controversial Thomas More, 110.
EW 1264. Now More didn’t invent this Objector ex nihilo. Curtright, drawing of the work of the late Clarence Miller, points out that More is re-entering a debate on the same subject (Christ’s fear), held some 35 years earlier between two of his friends and fellow humanists, Erasmus and John Colet; see the discussion in The Controversial Thomas More, 117-124.
EW 1257.
Matthew 10:23
EW 1254.
Psalm 103:14
EW 1254-55.
To paraphrase Isaiah 55:8.
Letter 207, to Fr. Nicholas Wilson; slightly modernized.
Letter 216, EW 1333.
EW 1258.
EW 1256.
EW 1255.
EW 1256.
https://iusetiustitium.com/st-thomas-more-and-the-summons-ex-officio/