Thomas More: Why Patron of Statesmen? ed. by Travis Curtwright (review)

In 2000 Pope John Paul II proclaimed St. Thomas More to be the patron of statesmen and people in public life. And yet scholarly investigations of More’s principles of statesmanship are still relatively few. In commissioning and editing this often stimulating collection of essays, Travis Curtwright seeks to fill the gap. He and his fellow contributors, several connected to the Center for Thomas More Studies at the University of Dallas, aim to revive interest in More by distilling from his writings and life experiences the very essence of this subtle, steely individual who began as a commercial lawyer and moral philosopher and ended up as Henry VIII’s only honest councillor. It is an approach that in the wrong hands could become clumsily instrumentalist and teleological. Fortunately, these contributors know the pitfalls and largely avoid them.

Of the ten essays, the most suggestive are those dealing with More’s most famous book, Utopia (Louvain, 1516), with his declamation in response to Lucian’s The Tyrannicide, with his wider understanding of the values of law, liberty, duty, and justice (drawing not least on his relatively neglected Latin poems), and with his continuing commitment to political leadership, meaning his opposition to Henry VIII’s first divorce and break with Rome after resigning as lord chancellor. For Carson Holloway, analyzing the response to Lucian, More’s point was that a politician needs an accurate diagnosis of the true roots of political disease before he can begin to cure it. The argument here is nicely shaded. For Gerard Wegemer writing on liberty and justice, however, it is starker. More, he believes, was a fully-fledged Ciceronian and so determined to bring philosophic insight to bear in public life within the limits of the practical—this even though James R. Stoner, writing on images of the statesman in Utopia, explains that Ciceronian statesmanship can never be the last word, given the prominence in book II of Utopia of Hythloday’s descriptions of the Utopians. Wegemer succumbs to a temptation to link More the author to an understanding of the choices of his political career that may be flawed. According to Wegemer, More did for Tudor England what Cicero did for the Romans. A reading first proposed by one of More’s earliest biographers, Nicholas Harpsfield, this interpretation was massively reinforced in the twentieth century by the dazzling scholarship on Utopia of Quentin Skinner. And yet it was said of More that he could always see both sides of the question. Some superlative recent journal articles, notably by Eric Nelson and John Michael Parrish, suggest that Utopia is more likely to represent, at the very least, the conflicting sides of More’s divided consciousness. No one today, except perhaps the novelist Hilary Mantel, whose bestselling Wolf Hall (London, 2009) is considered along with Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons (London, 1954) in an essay by Louis Karlin, would agree with Sir Geoffrey Elton that More was driven into a political career chiefly by ambition, and that he lied about it to Erasmus. Elton, on that occasion, got his facts awry. Where Stoner hits the nail on the head is in characterizing More as a literary statesman as much as a practical politician. As a real-life politician, More got his head chopped off, as Hythloday (and Machiavelli) had already predicted would happen to scrupulous idealists serving a king rather (just perhaps) than a well-founded republic. By writing Utopia, More created an entirely new literary genre, one that has continued to rekindle the perennially central issues of social and political thinking ever since. And for that, his statesmanship should be honored.