III.Why did More Justify the Suppression of Hereti...
Though More supported freedom of faith,he had,as Lord Chancellor,imprisoned and interrogated Lutherans,and also sent six reformers to be burned at the stake.[14]We may say More spared no effort to suppress heretics,and he‘as a layman defending the Church was unique’.With the spread of reformers’ideas,More was becoming‘harsher and stricter’.When a number of people were arrested for owing banned books,‘More interrogated them in Star Chamber and then consigned them to the Tower,the Fleet or the Counter.The condemned heretics were forced to ride facing the horses’tails,with various of their texts pinned to their clothing’.In fact,they became‘living books of heresy’.When a prisoner's servant who wanted to give his employers some help drew up a petition to the parliament,More summoned the servant and consigned him to the Fleet prison.In order to search the banned books,More‘launched a sudden raid upon the house of John Petyt’.Petyt was a wealthy merchant who was suspected of financing Tyndale.Petyt was imprisoned in the Tower and died there.[15]
Generally speaking,in suppressing the heretics,More showed some barbarity.In fact,it is difficult for us to associate these deeds with his humanist ideas.Why did More exhibit such ruthlessness towards heretics?Gerard B.Wegemer and Stephen W.Smith tell us that,‘in order to understand the historical situation of the time better,one should note that heresy in More's day was not simply what we today understand as heresy.When More defended the use of legitimate force against heretics,he pointed out that he had a civic duty to do so because the actions of heretics were“seditious”in the eyes of the law.’[16]We could therefore say that for More the suppression of heretics was simply out of the needs to defend the country's peace.
The degree of More's hatred for Martin Luther and his disciples is incredible.When talking about Martin Luther,it seems that sometimes More was not criticizing,but simply blaspheming him.We will all be alarmed by his vulgar and scornful words or phrases when More declared that‘the most absurd race of heretics,the dregs of impiety,of crimes,and filth,should be called Lutherans.’He also condemned Luther,claiming that‘who,when he had got the better of cacodaemons in impiety,in order to adorn his sect with fitting emblems,surpassed magpies in chatter,pimps in wickedness,prostitutes in obscenity,all buffoons in buffoonery.’[17]Rarely a humanist should speak like a shrew.According to the analysis by Gerard B.Wegemer and Stephen W.Smith,Martin Luther had posed three threats to the world that Thomas More couldn’t tolerate:
First,Luther's early claim that the spiritual elect had independence from all governors and from all laws except those of the Gospel was seen by More as a sure path to war.Second,More foresaw the disastrous effects from Luther's denial of free will:To teach people that they were not responsible for their actions and that their actions did not affect the state of their soul or the justice of their lives—these doctrines,in More's view,could not lead to civil behavior or a peaceful state.Third,More strongly opposed Luther's inflammatory language which dehumanized‘papists’and stirred thousands to angry violence against those‘dregs of the earth’.[18]
Of course,in dealing with the heretics of his ages,Thomas More used his own principles.In A Dialogue Concerning Heresies(1529),he wrote that‘if they(heretics)had left violence alone,good Christian people would perhaps still to this day have used less violence toward them than they do now.’He restated that,‘heresy well deserves to be punished as severely as any other sin,since there is no sin that more offends God’,but he still maintained that,‘as long as they refrained from violence,there was little violence done to them’.[19]In fact,the idea had formed in More's mind before Martin Luther posted his‘95 theses’on a church door in Wittenberg in 1517.In Utopia(written in 1516)we can see that any violence used in missionary work,even to‘speak publicly of Christ's religion with more zeal than discretion’,needed to be punished too.[20]To More,the main principle was that any violence disturbing social peace has to be ruthlessly suppressed,no matter where the violence came from.