Roper / Brémond The Life of Sir Thomas More

Including Personal Correspondence
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-80-273-0370-0
Verlag: e-artnow
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 205 Seiten

Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), venerated in the Catholic Church as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman, and noted Renaissance humanist. He was also a councilor to Henry VIII, and Lord High Chancellor of England from October 1529 to 16 May 1532. He wrote Utopia, published in 1516, about the political system of an imaginary, ideal island nation. Content: 'Sir Thomas More' by Henri Brémond 'The Life of Thomas More' by William Roper Collected Letters of Thomas More

Autoren/Hrsg.

Roper, William

Brémond, Henri

Leseproben

Chapter II
Erasmus and Thomas More
Table of Contents I HAVE already mentioned that the contemporaries of Thomas More's youth liked to associate his name with that of Erasmus. At this distance of time such a conjunction is a constant surprise and source of anxiety. If there had been nothing between these two humanists but a close bond of friendship, Greek, strictly speaking, might explain everything. But that loophole is closed to us. On both sides the sympathy was full and entire. No amount of searching will reveal one single line of More that could be construed as containing the slightest disavowal of the work and thought of Erasmus. On the contrary, there are many passages, and those decisive, in which the future martyr adopts all his friend's thoughts and defends them out and out. What course are we to take? Must we surrender the author of The Praise of Folly to the Protestants or the Freethinkers, and with him thirty years and more of the intellectual life of Thomas More? If the facts demand it, we will make the sacrifice, however heavy. Or, on the other hand, are we to join the early biographers of More in an attempt to establish a quarrel between the two friends on the earliest possible opportunity, and conjure up at all costs some means of separating them? We are prepared to do that too, on the understanding that justice and truth allow it. But in any case we must give them a hearing before we judge them. They have both taken us into their confidence, and if one of them seems a little too elusive, the other, and the only one to interest us directly in this chapter, offers a transparent sincerity. I am aware, too, that an unauthoritative biographer would be ill-advised to attempt to conduct so delicate an interrogatory on his own account, and mean to confine myself to following step by step the proceedings of two masters whose knowledge and orthodoxy are unquestioned, Dom Gasquet, the Primate of the English Benedictines, and Father Bridgett, the official biographer of Blessed Thomas More. II Erasmus, as every one knows, spent several fairly long periods in England. His first visit took place in 1497, when More was beginning his second year of the law. Erasmus was some ten years older than the young student. They met probably at the house of William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, who had been a pupil of the already famous humanist's in Paris. Erasmus soon left London for Oxford, but from the tone of the letters he wrote at that time to More, it is clear that a firm and affectionate friendship was beginning between them. They could meet, too, from time to time. One day when Erasmus was resting at Lord Mountjoy's country house, More came to see him and proposed to take him to the next village. There they found the whole of Henry VII.'s family with the exception of prince Arthur. The king's children gave them audience in great state, Henry, aged nine, but already possessed with a sense of his own importance, two little princesses, and a child in the nurse's arms. "More," writes Erasmus, "... after saluting prince Henry, presented him with I know not what writing. As I was entirely taken by surprise I had nothing to offer, and I was obliged to make a promise that I would write something to show my respect. I was somewhat vexed with More for not warning me, and especially so since the prince while we were dining sent me a note asking some fruit of my pen. I went home and in spite of the Muses, from whom I had long been separated, I finished my poem within three days." Prince Henry we shall meet again. Meanwhile Erasmus, on his return to the Continent, praised his English friends to the skies: the kindness of Prior Charnock, his Oxford host, the learning of Colet, and the "suavity" of More. Towards the end of 1505 he crossed the Channel again. This time he went straight to More's. More had been married for some months, and his house was assiduously frequented by an academy of Hellenists—Colet, Grocyn, Linacre, and Lilly. The delight of the band of scholars may easily be imagined. In their ardour for work, and with a view to tempering their "humour" anew at a good spring, the two friends made use of the interval to turn several dialogues of Lucian into Latin. More chose the most caustic, and, not to neglect his profession of barrister too completely, occupied himself in writing a declamation on tyrannicide in imitation of the same author. He wished Erasmus to follow his example. "If he bade me to dance on the tightrope," said Erasmus, "I should obey without a murmur." And he published his declamation with a preface in which More is not forgotten. "Unless my ardent love blinds me, nature never made any one so ready of wit, so keen-sighted, so shrewd. His intellect is equalled by his power of speech; and his suavity is so great, his humour so keen yet so innocuous, that he has every quality of a perfect advocate." Coming down to detail, he adds the following lines, which we feel to be very just: "The style of his oratory approaches more the structure and dialectic subtlety of Isocrates than the limpid stream of Cicero, although in urbanity he is in no way inferior to Tully. He paid so much attention in his youth to writing poetry, that you may now discern the poet in his prose compositions." We have now reached the critical moment, the year 1508, in which Erasmus returned once more to England, and again came to stay with Thomas More. Some weeks later, while he was riding in difficult country at the mercy of his mule, he was seized with an idea which struck him as a splendid find. He communicated it to his host. More was not the man to throw cold water on any project of the kind; he encouraged Erasmus, egged him on, prompted him with a few jests of his own, until at length, by the end of a few weeks, The Praise of Folly was finished. The very title of the famous little book, the Encomium Moriae, set a seal, so to speak, on the literary brotherhood of the two friends, and stood for a pleasant reminder that the work had been written under Thomas More's roof and in collaboration, of a kind, with the future author of Utopia. Collaboration, we say; but More was not content with encouraging Erasmus and defending him. In the campaign of which The Praise of Folly is the most famous episode, he stood shoulder to shoulder with his friend and fired a shot himself. The pamphlet he composed has all the biting wit and the dashing attack of the Moria itself. In 1516, before the outburst of Luther, he still declared that for his own part he could not have wished the suppression of a single line of Erasmus's epigrams against the monks, and about the same time he himself was indulging in a few piquant anecdotes on the same theme. Devout as he was and singularly attached to the Blessed Virgin, he was merciless in ridiculing certain devotions which he judged superstitious, though it may be noted that in all these matters his touch is more delicate and lighter than that of Erasmus. Their friendship continued without a cloud. In 1517 More was languishing, a reluctant ambassador, at Calais. Erasmus and Peter Giles sent him their portraits, just finished by Quentin Matsys, from Antwerp. "Peter," wrote Erasmus, "pays one-half of the cost, and I the other. Either of us would gladly have paid the whole, but we wished the gift to be from both." More was delighted, and replied with an outburst of affection. "You cannot believe, my Erasmus, my darling Erasmus (the erasmiotatos is untranslatable), how this eagerness of yours to bind me still more closely to you, has heightened my love for you. . . . You know me so well that I need not labour to prove to you that, with all my faults, I am no great boaster. Yet, to tell the truth, there is one craving for glory I cannot shake off, and it is wonderful how sweetly I am elated when the thought occurs to me that I shall be commended to the most distant ages by the friendship, the letters, the books, the pictures of Erasmus." The year before. More had written his famous letter to Dorpius in defence of The Praise of Folly, In 1520 appeared his letter to a monk who had sent him certain vile slanders against Erasmus. But he was already absorbed by affairs of State, and soon afterwards by the struggle against Protestantism. The two friends, however, did not lose sight of each other; they continued to correspond, and always in the same tone, and we shall see before long how, even in his struggle with the Lutherans, More remained sensitive to every attack on Erasmus's orthodoxy, and claimed that quality stoutly for his "dear darling." III In its main lines, the history of this famous friendship is known. It is both sad and amusing to see how usually serious and sincere biographers have fallen victims to the temptation to attenuate or amplify the facts, so as to fit them to their wishes. So legends are born. Stapleton, who was a staunch Catholic controversialist in the campaign against Protestantism, is unable to stomach the idea that More can have remained a friend of Erasmus. To him, as to nearly all his contemporaries, Erasmus is nothing but a forerunner of Luther, and therefore, by one of those unconscious sophisms of which we are all capable, he will have it that, sooner or later, his hero must have arrived at the same conclusion. "Their common devotion to letters," he writes, "was the cause of More's having a greater affection for Erasmus than for any one; and Erasmus justly returned it to the full. The friendship, however, was rather honourable to Erasmus than beneficial to More, and in proportion as the heresy hatched from the terrible egg laid by Erasmus grew bigger, More's affection diminished little by little and continued to cool." Every word of that is clearly cut to pattern—the pattern of legend....