Some Conclusions
Thomas More was a scholar as well as an activist or a politician,and this is his uniqueness compared to his contemporaries(early humanists in North Europe).Peter Ackroyd,one of his biographers,says that‘he seems to have had little interest in scholarship or the pursuit of classical studies for their own sake.’In fact,what he wanted to pursue was‘the family business’.What Erasmus told us is not correct,that is,if More did not enter an inn of court,his father would disinherit him.Ackroyd also says that More‘knew that human justice was only the faintest reflection of divine law,but it became for him the principle and model of conduct upon the earth.’ According to Ackroyd,it is vogue in More's times to be a lawyer,‘since in the last decades of the fifteenth century lawyers were seen as a professional class of administrators who took up the key positions in various royal councils and offices.The sons of the landed gentry were now being directed towards the law,where there were growing rewards of prestige and wealth,rather than to the Church or trade.’[21]We may say that the uniqueness in More is seen with the combination of his dream and practices.The following are my conclusions about his religious views as well as his political thoughts.
1.The status of being a scholar as well as an activist makes More unique in his times,and helps him to play a very important role both in the changes of religious views,and in the formation of modern political thoughts of Europe.The most important contribution made by More was that he is the first or among the first group of people to discuss the problems such as the separation between state and church,church subject to state,and religious freedom etc.The following opinion is to the point that‘Thomas More advocated religious freedom in Utopia to promote civic peace in Christendom and to help unify his fractious Catholic Church.In doing so,he set forth a plan for managing church-state relations that was a precursor to liberal approaches in this area.Most scholars locate the origins of modern religious freedom in Protestant theology,and its first mature articulation in Locke's A letter on Toleration.Utopia shows that modern religious freedom has Catholic,Renaissance roots.’[22]
2.More always maintained that it was paramount to build a peaceful and good commonwealth with a wise and good monarch.As a result,everything in the world should be subject to the highest goal,and this idea has influenced many later humanists.For More,the difference between a good king and a tyrant was that‘a King who respects the law differs from cruel tyrants thus:a tyrant rules his subjects as slaves;a king thinks of his as his own children.’He also maintained that the relations between people and the kings should be that:‘a Kingdom in all its parts is like a man;it is held together by natural affection.The king is the head;the people form the other parts.Every citizen the king has he considers a part of his own body(that is why he grieves at the loss of a single one).The people risk themselves to save the king and everyone thinks of him as the head of his own body.’[23]One time while walking along the Thames,More told to his son-in-law William Roper that if the following three goals were to be achieved in his country and Europe,he would be willing to be put in a sack and to be cast into the Thames:‘The first is,that where the most part of Christian Princes be at mortal war,they were all at an universal peace;the second,that where the Church of Christ is at this present sore afflicted with many errors and heresies,it were settled in a perfect uniformity of religion;the third,that where the King s matter of his marriage is now come in question,that it were to the glory of God and quietness of all parties brought to a good conclusion.’[24]
More's ideal commonwealth has its ancient and realistic origins.According to Gerard and Sterling,he‘seems to be actively integrating Plato's ideal into the(somewhat)realistic 16th-century setting of Utopia.’[25]But Utopia was More's creation,and it is considered to be‘the foundational generic text’.Following Utopia,many famous men wrote down their beautiful tales about ideal societies,such as the chapters dealing with the Abbey of Theleme in Gargantua and Pantagruel(1534)by Rabelais,Thomas Starkey's A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset(composed between 1529 and 1533),Sir Thomas Smith's A Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England(composed in 1549),Marlowe's plays(excluding Dido and The Massacre at Paris),Shakespeare's Henry IV,part I(1598),Thomas Nashe's Lenten Stuffe(1599),and Bacon's New Atlantis(1627).[26]
3.More thought that it was necessary to make some laws by states to settle or to mitigate the conflicts caused by faiths.More held that in order to achieve the‘best state of a commonwealth’in the Christian era,the state‘must grapple with the problems posed by faith-based violence’.What he proposed was
a highly original strategy for managing the relationship between religion and government.This strategy featured a version of religious freedom that prohibited government from enforcing a complicated orthodoxy or infringing on what he considered the legitimate rights of conscience.At the same time,it allowed government to proscribe certain religious beliefs that More considered essential for virtue,and to prescribe politically dangerous religious observances.[27]
It was these proposition that contributed to the separation of state and church and the religious freedom.
4.More also held that peace and stability are more important than freedom.William T.Cotton said that,‘in the phase of his career in the 1520s and early 1530s when he served as enforcer of Henrician Catholic orthodoxy,More came to regret the freedom of expression he had allowed himself in 1515-1516.In one of his chief polemical works,the Confutation of Tyndale's Answer,he declared that he would burn Erasmus's Praise of Folly or certain unspecified works of his own if they should ever be translated into English.’[28]In the second half of the 16th century the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne(1533-1592)began to cherish this idea during the French Religious Wars.For them,peace was paramount,while other matters had only a secondary meaning,because at these times,stability meant despotic rule,and instability meant no freedom at all,with even their very existence being in danger.They had to choose the relatively better option from these undesirable possibilities.
There are many other topics for us to study about Thomas More's religious views,for example,the relations between More's thoughts and Catholic traditions,New Platonism,deism etc.Hopefully I would deal with them sometime in the future.
【注释】
[1]Gerard B.Wegemer and Stephen W.Smith say that,‘A close examination of his life and work reveals many apparent paradoxes and strengthens the sense that Thomas More is not easy to understand.’For example,the same person could at the same time write‘the dark and sinister study of tyranny The History of King Richard III(1513-1518),and the playfully suggestive Utopia(1515-1516)’,and he could‘give the first philosophic and pragmatic arguments for freedom of speech and yet also defend the execution of heretics’.See Gerard B.Wegemer and Stephen W.Smith(eds.),A Thomas More Source Book(Washington,D.C.,2004),xiv-xv.
[2]Thomas More,More's Utopia,(trans.)G.C.Richards(Oxford,1923), 105.
[3]Quentin Skinner,The Foundations of Modern Political Thought,Vol.Ⅰ:The Renaissance(Cambridge,1978),233.
[4]Thomas More,More's Utopia,114.
[5]Sir.Thomas More,Utopia,(trans.)Raphe Robynson,(ed.)J.Rawson Lumby(Cambridge,1956),xiii.
[6]Quentin Skinner,The Foundations of Modern Political Thought,232-233.
[7]Quentin Skinner,The Foundations of Modern Political Thought,232.
[8]Thomas More,More's Utopia,107.
[9]Perez Zagorin,How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West(Princeton and Oxford,1993),50.
[10]Sanford Kessler,‘Religious Freedom in Thomas More's Utopia’,The Review of Politics,64(2002),228-229.
[11]Thomas More,More's Utopia,108.
[12]Thomas More,More's Utopia,107-108.
[13]Thomas More,More's Utopia,107.
[14]James Wood,Sir Thomas More:A Man for One Season(excerpt),http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/wood.htm(2019-07-27).
[15]Peter Ackroyd,The Life of Thomas More(London,1998),293-294.
[16]Gerard B.Wegemer and Stephen W.Smith(eds.),A Thomas More Source Book,xxviii.
[17]Thomas More,The Complete Works of St.Thomas More,(ed.)John M. Headley(New Haven and London,1969),Ⅴ.part 1.685.
[18]Gerard B.Wegemer and Stephen W.Smith(eds.),A Thomas More Source Book,xxix.
[19]Gerard B.Wegemer and Stephen W.Smith(eds.),A Thomas More Source Book,283.
[20]Thomas More,More's Utopia,106-107.
[21]Peter Ackroyd,The Life of Thomas More,50-51.
[22]Sanford Kessler,‘Religious Freedom in Thomas More's Utopia’,207.
[23]Gerard B.Wegemer and Stephen W.Smith(eds.),A Thomas More Source Book,235,236.
[24]William Roper＆Nicholas Harpsfield,Lives of Saint Thomas More(London,1963),91-92.
[25]W.B.Gerard＆E.Sterling,‘Sir Thomas More's Utopia and the Transformation of England from Absolute Monarchy to Egalitarian Society’,Contemporary Justice Review,8(2005),77.
[26]Georgia Brown,‘Utopia,Carnival,and Commonwealth in Renaissance England(Book Review)’,Shakespeare Studies,34(2006),201.
[27]Sanford Kessler,‘Religious Freedom in Thomas More's Utopia’,228.
[28]William T.Cotton,‘Five-fold Crisis in Utopia:A Foreshadow of Major Modern Utopian Narrative Strategies’,Utopian Studies,14(2003),62.