Will Morrisey Reviews

Spyridon Bailey: The Shape of Fire: Orthodox Monastic Encounters. Chapters 1-3. London: FeedARead.com Publishing, 2026.

 

As a priest of the Diocese of Great Britain and Western Europe of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR), serving in England, Father Spyridon Bailey has engaged in political polemics, denouncing the movement toward world government and issuing charges of genocide against Israel. In 2007, the ROCOR itself affiliated itself with the Russian Orthodox Church and its Moscow Patriarchate, after decades of opposition to the Soviet tyranny, which had compromised the Russian church. President Vladimir Putin oversaw the affiliation. This led to some members of ROCOR to break away from the organization; Father Spyridon is not among them. He has sided with the Russians in Ukraine and against Israel in Syria, then Russia’s ally. [1]

None of this seems to affect his theological teachings, however, which are his exclusive concerns in The Shape of Fire. The fire in question is the spiritual incandescence seen in the several Orthodox monks (and a nun) whom he met during his own journey toward, and then within, Orthodoxy. Each of his interlocutors shows how, “in his love for man, God continuously offers Himself,” reaching out “to each of us through the circumstances and conditions of our lives to call us back to Himself.” The way of life of the Orthodox monasteries “offers humanity a road to purity and holiness unlike any other way of living,” an “attempt to live like the angels.” This is why Orthodox Christians who remain in the world make pilgrimages to the monasteries. The monks who distance themselves there from ‘the world’ are exemplars of the most uncompromising form of the Christian way of life, short of martyrdom.

Father Bailey has arranged these conversations in the order of the steps in his own spiritual ladder, which began as a member of a ‘charismatic’ church, a membership he severed when he became increasingly disturbed by “the bedlam that was being called worship.” At the time, “though I believed I was striving to be a Christian, I was no less a hedonist than any atheist or pagan,” animated by “the impulse to be comfortable, the desire to be satisfied, the belief that everything should somehow conform to my will, my ideas, my sense of right and wrong,” with “no true submission to God” beyond “the most basic commandments.” “I was truly a little Pope in my own personal kingdom.”

With a friend, he attended a lecture on the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” He met an Orthodox priest, asking, “Why do you repeat it so often?” Because, the priest answered, we want “to have the prayer living within us all the time,” since “the Jesus Prayer is a gift from God to help us unite ourselves to Him more deeply.” The prayer confesses the sinfulness of the one who prays; it is an act of humility before God. The mercy requested encompasses both God’s forgiveness and the hope of sharing in the blessings of Jesus’ victory on the Cross. It “isn’t just about our spiritual condition,” Father Alban explained; “it’s a matter of our whole existence,” spiritual and material. But it is primarily “a powerful weapon in the spiritual warfare” against the demons that tempt us with distractions intended to channel our way of life away from God. The prayer builds trust in God, whose “grace transforms every part of our lives,” “draw[ing] our whole life to God.” The further a Christian progresses toward God, the more the apparent sweetness of the world tastes bitter, the more the sterner Christian way tastes sweet. “The sins of the world are bitter to the soul. The bitterness is the spiritual harm they are doing to us.” The spiritual harm is the loss of contact with our “true selves, the soul,” originally breathed into the clay God fashioned into the physical shape of the first man. 

When the soul turns to serving the body, not God, it becomes ruled by feelings. “We must avoid trying to cultivate feelings,” which is what the ‘charismatic’ movement does. Such “feelings of elation” unfailingly “lead to delusion.” And they are unnecessary. “There’s no need to artificially create such reactions” because “the truth of God is reality.” “We need to prevent our reactions and feelings getting in the way, in between us and God.” The Jesus Prayer turns Christians away from such distraction. “The more we are aware of our selfishness, of our wretchedness, the more we can understand how ungrateful we are to God.” The prayer simultaneously admits that selfishness, replacing it with gratitude to Christ, to Whom we “cry out…so that we don’t fall into this abyss.” God loves us not as “a harsh judge who wants to condemn us,” but as “a loving Father Who desires for us to be saved.” It is up to us to return that love; such is “true gratitude.” Such gratitude “longs to serve, to please, to be obedient to the One to Whom we are grateful.” Although we are constantly violating that spirit of gratitude by our sins, the prayer “become[s] an opportunity for further gratitude,” in which “the work of the demons can be turned into opportunities to draw closer to God,” by the repentance it expresses. “If your desire to love [God] is true, God will see this,” and indeed the prayer itself moves Christian teachings from the head, from doctrine (however sound) to the heart. This is because prayer never really becomes habitual. “The demons work relentlessly to prevent us from praying: their goal is to separate us from God,” and prayer thus “requires a degree of struggle”; “even saints must pray as an act of will.” A very few Christians experience the prayer as having been “moved so powerfully from head to heart that it continues within them at all times,” “not as some unconscious activity,” but as “a living offering to God that comes from the soul.” This is what it means to become “spiritually aware”—a “deeper union with God than any thoughts can achieve.” For the rest of us, we must “avoid prayers without humility, without trust,” offering “our whole lives to God, our whole self,” not in the way of pagans, with their “empty incantations and mantras, but with awareness of God and ourselves.” This will “make our prayer an expression of our way of life,” tantamount to membership in God’s regime.

Without such membership, Satan “will easily fill our hearts with pride and delusion.” “You will never read of the saints going with their gut instincts or trusting their heart. These ideas are demonic deceptions.” The song “My Way” expresses the sin of Sinatra, and indeed of everyone. “The first command amongst the satanists is that they should always do as they wish, do as they will”—what Tocqueville marked as the false notion of freedom to which civil-social equality or ‘democracy’ inclines souls. “But God teaches us that this is slavery,” slavery to the passions, whereas “freedom is only known in the overcoming of temptation and the resisting of passions.” The Jesus Prayer “is the means by which we resist this path and follow Christ to Calvary,” to self-sacrifice or the crucifixion of the passions. “It is not that all feelings are bad, but that in the spiritual life we must learn to recognize them as irrelevant” because “there comes a point when we must look beyond ourselves” and our feelings are necessarily self-centered. “The true way to judge our spiritual lives is not in the feeling we experience, but in the fruit it bears in our lives,” as the Bible teaches. Ask, “Has my prayer helped me to become more obedient to God? Has God’s will been manifest in me?” Citing Saint Seraphim of Sarov, Father Alban remarked that “what distinguishes sinners from saints is determination,” the “willingness to struggle” against their sins, the refusal to give in to them. “Prayer requires attention and effort, sometimes great struggle, but it is the Holy Spirit that makes prayer real, not our feelings. “Do not judge the success or failure of your prayer by how you feel.”

“There is great evil in the world, but for most people it is laziness,” Father Bailey writes. Lack of self-discipline, intellectual superficiality, “abandonment to base impulses and desires” betoken the Hollywoodization of Western culture; “everything has become coarse and witless.” Christian sects have failed to oppose this; indeed, they have “chased after the culture,” hanging “pride flags” outside their buildings and rejecting “the need for any kind of ascetic life.” This is what Jesus means when he says that Christians risk losing their “saltiness,” the flavor of Christianity. “A Christianity that is acceptable to this world is not Christianity at all.” To get away from the ‘regime’ of the world, one must get into the regime of the Church. “The grace of God leads men to Christ even outside the Church, otherwise no one would convert, but only within the Church is the gospel truly manifested in our lives.” But even following the way of the Church, the Christian regime, we are still prey to sin, in need of repentance. “Saint Silouan said we must always have hope, but keep one foot in hell.” It is God’s grace that “permits us to see the true nature of evil, which is corruption and death” in the regime of the unheavenly city.

Father Spyridon took the next step on the spiritual ladder, still outside the Orthodox Church, under the guidance of Nun Rachel, who explained the Orthodox understanding of icons. The Jesus Prayer is a verbal step, while icons are a visual step. Coming from an iconoclastic Protestant background, he wondered about them. She said that the Church aims “to strengthen the faithful’s awareness of the temporary nature of the world and encourage faith in the immortality of the soul.” Icons serve those purposes because “when we look at icons we see those who are live in God; these are not images of the dead” but images of men and women alive in Christ after their deaths on earth. The world God created is beautiful; secular paintings often depict that beauty. “The beauty shown in icons is something altogether different: it is holiness,” separate from the physical world. 

More than that, icons point Christian to the fact of the Incarnation, whereby “God also became part of the physical universe,” “transform[ing] the nature of the physical world,” changing “its relationship to Himself,” bringing “the whole physical creation…into the glorification of God.” Some religions (Manicheanism and Hinduism, for example) tell us to separate ourselves from the physical world. “Christians do not think this way,” as “the material world is the means through which God chose to save us” by “unit[ing] Himself to it.” As physical objects dedicated to holiness, icons exemplify that ’embodiment’ of spirituality. God rightly forbade images in His temples when Israelites were under the Law of Moses, “since God had never been seen.” Now that He has been seen in the Person of Christ, images are not only permissible but tokens of His embodiment. This is far from idolatry, as some charge. When you look through the window at the world outside, “you do not look at the glass itself.” “When we worship God or venerate the saints portrayed in an icon, it’s not the wood and paint we venerate, but the one whose image is shown there.” “When we venerate Christ in the icon, we truly venerate God Who can now be shown, it is an act of faith in the incarnation.” As for the icons of the saints, in venerating their icons “we venerate the work of the Holy Spirit in them.” As with the Jesus Prayer, “icons do not seek to evoke emotional responses, but spiritual ones.” 

Nun Rachel may have been careless when she said we “venerate Christ in the icon.” If so, she corrected herself, distinguishing between latriea, “the absolute worship which belongs to God alone,” from proskynesis, which means honoring or venerating. We can venerate not only a saint but an icon or a holy place “because through them we are able to encounter God Who alone is worshiped” (emphasis added). The icon “leads us beyond the image.”

If so, why not stick with the Word of God, alone? Because “we see the beauty, the order of creation, and for the faithful it is possible to glimpse God’s love in ways words could never express”—the difference between saying ‘I love you’ and a loving glance. The glance is more direct, aiming right to the heart without the filter of the mind. And if the love of a good person tells us what is good in us, and what isn’t, the love of God can tell us that with supreme truthfulness. “Love always involves making ourselves vulnerable, and if we are to truly love God, we must face the pain of seeing the truth of ourselves.” Every Orthodox Christian home should have a place for icons in it, a place where we can gaze at images of Christ and the saints, and where in a sense they gaze back at us. While “no man can see the face of God and live,” an icon “enables us to see something at that light, and so we do not just look through the window, but the light of God’s Kingdom passes through, to enter into our lives.” This is why the demons depicted in Orthodox iconography never look at us; we see them in profile, only. “We don’t want to make eye contact with them, because we must never converse with them.”  

Nun Rachel went on to explain some of the other practices of the Orthodox way of life. These include the Orthodox manner of making the sign of the Cross. The thumb presses against the middle and index fingers. These three fingers symbolize the Holy Trinity. The remaining fingers, pressed against the palm, “signify the two natures of Christ, that He is both fully human and divine,” God incarnate, who came “from heaven to earth”—the palm—to “be one of us. This “reminds us of Who Gd Is, and what He has done for our salvation.” In making the sign of the Cross itself, the hand goes from the head, symbolic of “knowing and believing in Him with all our mind,” then to the chest, “remind[ing] us to love Him with all our heart,” then to the right shoulder and the left, “a sign that we must serve Him with all our strength.”

By the year 1993, the future Father Spyridon had entered the Anglican Church, eventually serving as a minister. He saw that the Anglican Church was becoming increasingly heretical, however. He wanted to know “who or what was the Church, and where it was to be found.” Following advice Father Alban had given him, he read the writings of the early Church Fathers, who elaborated on the foundation of the Church by Jesus as described in the Book of Acts. He then returned to Father Alban for clarification of what he had read.

No Sola Scriptura for Father Alban. “Christ taught the Apostles much more than is contained in the Holy Scriptures.” The Scriptures are part of the tradition of the Church, which includes the Confession of faith and the Church services, indeed “the entire Orthodox spiritual life which is distinct from anything found elsewhere in the world.” To be sure, “every part of Tradition must conform” to the Scripture, but “the Holy Spirit has revealed much to the Church beyond” those writings. “Just as the Church exists in time, so its faith needed to be expressed as time progressed.” In this way, heretics blessed the Church “because they led the Church to express its faith more fully.” And it was the Church that chose the books of the New Testament that are canonical. “This means that it is the Church and its Tradition that give the Bible its authority”—that is, the Church and its Tradition guided by the Holy Spirit. Protestants have divided into so many sects because each person interprets Scripture in his own way.

But surely the Roman Catholic Church does not encourage such schism. Yet it has, Father Alban insisted. The ancient Church consisted of five patriarchates: Jerusalem, Antioch, Constantinople (which he places in the center of his list), Alexandria, and Rome, each with “its own jurisdiction and hierarchy.” One Church, one faith, with five territories and sets of rulers “in full equality to each other.” Schism arose when Rome “departed from the other four and found itself the single authority in the western world” in the center of the Roman Empire. Admittedly, saints Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome, making it “the first among equals,” the “first in honor.” But this did not translate into spiritual authority over the other patriarchates, an authority that can only exist “in the collective voice of the Church.” The Book of Acts shows the Apostles meeting in council and “resolv[ing] their differences together; Saint Peter was not granted a greater say in matters over the others,” even if the name ‘Peter’ signifies ‘rock,’ and Jesus says He founds His Church upon a rock. It must be remembered that in Matthew 16, Peter has just answered Jesus’ question to His disciples, “Who do you say I am?” with Peter replying, correctly, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus replies that Peter could only have known this because God the Father had revealed it to him. “Thou art Peter,” whose name means ‘rock,’ “and upon this rock I will build my Church.” But after Jesus foretells His torture and murder in Jerusalem, Peter denies that this could be true, whereupon Jesus rebukes him by saying, “Get behind me, Satan.” This is why all of the Apostles would meet in council; no one of them was infallible. “Christ is the head of the Church in this world and the next,” Father Alban says, not the followers of any one Apostle, “and through Him we are united to the saints.” 

This is much more than a dispute over historical lineage or even doctrinal accuracy, although it is those things. “God gives the saving mysteries to the Church alone.” “Without the grace and power of God’s holy mysteries,” other groups “do not offer the fullness of faith that Christ tells us we need to be saved” because “salvation requires us to be united to God, and we can only find this by entering the full truth of Christ,” which requires the experience of taking on the regime, especially the way of life, of the Church.” A good secular regime makes a difference; it will make us “into better people” than a bad regime is likely to do. But the Christian regime, its way of life “is the path to, and of, theosis.” Then-Anglican priest Bailey asked, reasonably, “How can we know that [theosis] is happening to us?” That is, given that the aim of the Christian Church is theosis, union with God, how do I know that the Orthodox Church regime will actually get me there? 

We are not the judges of that; on the contrary, “the more sinful we consider ourselves, the more likely we are to be making progress in the spiritual life,” since “the foundation of Christian spirituality is humility” and without humility “all spiritual aspiration may become demonic” or, at best, delusional. “Salvation is not a solitary road, it is walked as part of the Church,” with other Christians, including spiritual guides, a priest. Like the Trinity, the Church, the Body of Christ, God’s ecclesia or assembly, consists of “many people, united as One Body, without losing our individuality.” The many local churches “are all equal to one another.” This resembles God Himself—not “many” but nonetheless three Persons, one God. “The Church is for all people, and the Holy Spirit unites us in our variety” as the Body of Christ.

The Orthodox understanding of the Trinity differentiates it from Roman Catholicism. This is the much-vexed “filioque” controversy. Filioque means “and from the Son,” a phrase formally added to the Nicene Creed by the Roman Catholic Church in 1014. Originally, the Creed stated that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father,” to be “adored and glorified” along with the Father and the Son. The claim that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son dates back at least six centuries before its formal adoption. Orthodox clergy rejected the addition, holding that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son. This dispute led to the Great Schism between Eastern and Western Christianity, four decades after the formal alteration of the Creed in the West. Part of the problem depends upon what the word ‘proceeds’ means; if it means both begotten or generated and ‘filtered through,’ then the verbal problem would be solved. But not the substantive problem. Father Alban states it this way: “By inserting the words ‘and the Son’ into the Creed, Rome was teaching a new and false understanding of the Holy Trinity, and this alters every aspect of our understanding of our faith.” The Father’s origin “is solely in Himself, the Son is equal and coeternal with the Father and is begotten of Him”; “He eternally has His source of being in the Father.” So does the Holy Spirit. He “proceeds from the Father, and like the Son, has His source of being eternally in the Father.” Jesus sent the Holy Spirit into the world, but sending is not begetting. This matters to the Church because the alleged “double-procession of the Holy Spirit leads to a merging of the Father and the Son, and the Holy Spirit is reduced to a mode of them, rather than a particular and equal divine Person.” By so “lower[ing] the place of the Holy Spirit,” then “the one who descended at Pentecost is not equally God as are the other two divine persons.”

“Pentecost” means ‘fiftieth,’ referring to the event that occurred fifty days after Christ rose from the dead and ascended to Heaven. The Apostles felt a rushing wind, and fiery tongues appeared over their heads, a manifestation of the Holy Spirit; the many tongues empowered the Apostles to speak many languages, and so to bring the Gospel to many peoples. This was the founding of the Church. If the Holy Spirit is a lesser being than the Father and the Son, then “the Church loses its divine life.” But “we are the temple of the Holy Spirit; this is the heart of Orthodox spirituality.” The “fire” in Father Spyridon’s book title, The Shape of Fire, refers to the fire of the Holy Spirit. Only in the Orthodox Church can the souls of Christians fully be warmed by it. “There is only one Church because there is only one God.” True, “God’s grace and life is poured out into the whole world, otherwise no one would convert,” but “this grace acts to draw people to the Body of Christ, not to set up alternative bodies.” Are then Roman Catholics and Anglicans condemned, as Muslims and Hindus are? “All who read the Holy Scriptures and pray may gain some spiritual benefit,” however misinterpreted, and so such Christians’ “existence is elevated from that of atheists and pagans.” Nevertheless, this “does not constitute membership of the Church.” Baptism and chrismation only ‘work’ if it occurs within the Church. Further, “the true depth of the holiness of the Church is something we grow to understand by living within it,” and “Orthodoxy is the living experience God gave of Himself to man.” 

Not long thereafter, Mr. Bailey met with Bishop Kallistos Ware, asking “Is it a sin for me to celebrate Holy Communion as an Anglican while knowing the truth of Orthodoxy?” Evidently so, as he and his family were “received into the Orthodox Church” eighteen months later. 

 

 

Note

1. ROCOR was founded by members of the Russian Orthodox diaspora in the early 1920s, in opposition to the militantly atheistic Communist regime. The animosity of many of its members toward Israel began in 1948, when the newly-formed Jewish state transferred ROCOR properties to the Russian Orthodox Church, probably as a quid pro quo for Soviet support for Israel. ROCOR retained control of churches in the ‘West Bank,’ then ruled by Jordan. However, in 1997, with the Jordanians having been expelled in 1967, the Palestinian Authority led by Yasser Arafat, in its turn allowed the Russian Orthodox Church to acquire those properties—Arafat having been a longtime ally of Moscow, dating back to the last decades of Soviet rule. ROCOR thus has grounds for suspicion against both Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, although with the clear ascendancy of Israel in recent years, a man like Father Spyridon is more likely to focus his criticism on Israel.

Alvaro de Silva, ed.: The Last Letters of Thomas More. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000.

Stephen Smith: The Last Riddle: Advice on Living and Dying Well from the Imprisoned Saint Thomas More. Washington, D.C.: Word on Fire Publishing, 2026.

 

“Farewell! a long farewell, to all my greatness!” (Shakespeare, Henry VIII. III.2). So exclaims the anguished Cardinal, Archbishop of York Thomas Wolsey, upon being stripped of his role as Lord Chancellor of England by Henry VIII on proof of his corruption. Repenting of worldly ambition, Wolsey learns that his successor will be the scrupulously uncorrupt Thomas More, who had enjoyed a long career as an attorney, judge, diplomat, royal secretary and member of the Privy Council. As Catholics opposed to the king’s marriage to the Protestant Anne Boleyn, both men would later be charged with treason, Wolsey dying before a trial could be held, More declared guilty and beheaded. More’s long farewell to political greatness occurred in the Tower of London, the prison for traitors, where he wrote the letters collected in these volumes. Of the two, Smith adds the most value, presenting a series of excellent commentaries on the letters and appending several prayers More also wrote during his incarceration. For his part, de Silva begins with five letters More wrote before entering the Tower, letters which provide illuminating background to the later ordeal; he also provides some fine explanatory notes. 

The first of these letters, dated February 1, 1534, addresses Thomas Cromwell, Wolsey’s friend and protégé and member of the Privy Council. As of this time, More had aroused Henry’s suspicion, having opposed the 1532 Submission to the Clergy Act, which stipulated that English clergy could “make no new laws without the king’s approval,” which Smith rightly describes as a de facto installment of Henry as head of the Church in England. More then resigned his position as Lord Chancellor. In the following year, Henry married Anne Boleyn, his marriage to Katherine annulled by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer. More “refused to attend the coronation.” 

By the time of this letter, More has been accused of having written a hostile answer to The Book of Nine Articles, a polemic published in the previous year against Pope Clement VII, who had refused Henry permission to divorce his Catholic queen, Catherine of Aragon, preliminary to his marriage to Anne. More thus stands accused of being a secret traitor to the king. On the contrary, he tells Cromwell, “I am of duty to God and the King’s Grace,” ready to “discharge my conscience” with respect to both. “I know my bounden duty, to bear more honor to my prince, and more reverence to his honorable [Privy] Council, than it could become me, for many causes, to make an answer unto such a book.” But this is not the end of the charges. A few weeks later, a bill of attainder was issued against him, accusing him of communicating with Elizabeth Barton, the “Nun of Canterbury,” who had claimed to have had divinely inspired visions compelling her to criticize Henry’s divorce and remarriage. Cromwell reports that More has been accused not only of communicating with the Nun, but of concurring with her judgment.

More admits that he knew of her and had examined a record of the words she had spoken in her trances. Father Richard Risby, the Friar’s Observant at Canterbury, had told him of the Nun’s “revelation” of “three swords,” as she had reported to Cardinal Wolsey. They were: “take none of the Pope’s right and patrimony from him”; “destroy all these new folks of opinion”—the Protestants—and “the works of their new learning”; if the king marries Anne Boleyn, God will be avenged. More explains to Cromwell that when Risby began to tell him of the Nun’s criticism of “the great matter of [Henry’s] marriage” to him, he had rejected any further discussion, replying simply that he doubted not “but the goodness of God should direct his highness with his grace and wisdom, that the thing should take such end as God should be pleased with, to the King’s honor and surety of the realm.” As for his own communication with the Nun, he had met with her later on and had asked for her prayers; he did not discuss the visions that others had attributed to her. Instead, they conferred about another woman who had claimed to receive divine revelations, which the Nun, in conference with her, condemned as “plain illusions of the devil”; this rebuke “hath wrought much meekness in her soul,” the Nun told More. The Nun further remarked, “how great need folk have, that are visited with such visions, to take heed and prove well of what spirit they come of.” She herself had been troubled by an evil spirit in the form of “a strange ugly fashioned bird,” which she had promptly thrown out the window. “We talked no word of the King’s Grace or any great personage else.” Further, More continues, the Nun eventually confessed the fraudulence of her revelation (possibly under coercion).

In sum, “I trust verily no man will, and I wot well truly no man can, any word or deed by me spoken or done, touching any breach of my loyal troth and duty toward my most redoubted sovereign and natural liege lord”—natural, in the sense that Henry is his sovereign by birth, not by conquest. For “I neither have in this matter done evil nor said evil, nor so much as any evil thought.” He vows to Cromwell, “neither good man nor bad, neither monk, friar nor nun, nor other man or woman in this world shall make me digress from my troth and faith, either toward God, or toward my natural prince, by the grace of Almighty God.” At this point, More seems confident that his loyalty to God and King Henry can be reconciled. And so he tells the king himself, in a letter dated March 5: “unto myself it is not possible any part of my said demeanor to seem evil, the very clearness of mine own conscience knoweth in all the matter of my mind and intent so good.” Citing Henry’s “high prudence,” “accustomed goodness,” and “virtuous mind,” he avers that if he should prove “a wretch of such monstruous ingratitude” as his accusers claim, “then desire I no further favor at you gracious hand, than the loss of all that every I may lose in this world, goods, lands, and liberty and finally my life withal,” in the assurance that they will meet someday “again in heaven, and there by merry with you.” Meanwhile, his slanderers, “by the peril of their own souls, do themself more hurt than me.” 

On the same day, More wrote his final letter to Cromwell, thanking him for interceding with the king on More’s behalf. The core of the controversy lies in questions surrounding Henry’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon in 1509. She had previously been married to his brother, Prince Arthur, then presumptive heir to the English throne. Arthur died a few months later. Henry and Katherine produced a daughter, Mary, but no sons, and in the next two decades Henry became increasingly displeased with the lack of a male heir. In this letter, More recalls a conversation from several years earlier in which the king had disclosed that “it was now perceived that his marriage to Katherine of Aragon was not only against the positive laws of the Church and the written law of God, but also in such wise against the law of nature, that it could in no wise by the Church be dispensable”—i.e., relaxed in this particular case, inasmuch as a pope can only do so with ecclesiastical laws. Katherine maintained that her previous marriage to Prince Arthur had never been consummated, which would have made her marriage to his brother, Henry, legitimate, but Henry suspected otherwise and eventually found English authorities who went along with his quest for a new wife.

Henry showed More the Levitical law prohibiting a man to wed the wife of his brother, on penalty of the childless deaths of both spouses. Since Henry and Katherine did have a child, this would have seemed irrelevant, no proof that Katherine’s marriage to Arthur had been consummated, but a scholar friendly to the king claimed that the correct translation was not “childless” but “without sons.” (De Silva observes that this is incorrect, that the ordinary translation is the right one.) For his part, in the presence of the king More modestly declined to interpret the passage, preferring not to pronounce the judgment of “my poor mind in so great a matter,” while holding out the possibility of considering it further. This Henry allowed, assuring him, crucially, that More was free to follow his conscience in his interpretation of the law. Since then, More assures Cromwell, he has made no such interpretation, preferring neither to “murmur” at the new marriage nor to “meddle” in it, instead joining the king’s “other faithful subjects” in “faithfully praying to God for his Grace and hers both, long to live and well and their noble issue too, in such wise as may be to the pleasure of God, honor and surety to themself, rest, peace, wealth, and profit unto this noble realm.” He does, however, regard the general councils of the Catholic Church as authoritative, since “I never could perceive but that in the declaration of the truths [the Church] is to be believed and to be standen to; the authority thereof ought to be taken for undoubtable, or else were there in nothing no certainty, but through Christendom upon every man’s affectionate reason, all things might be brought from day to day to continual ruffle and confusion,” as indeed was occurring, with the Protestant movement. He concludes with a request for another favorable intervention by Cromwell with the king, saying he cannot “find in mine heart otherwise to say than as mine own conscience giveth me, which condition hath never grown in anything that ever might touch his gracious pleasure of any obstinate mind or misaffectionate appetite, but of a timorous conscience rising haply for lack of better perceiving.” One might recall, however, the Gospel story: “The Son of Man is about to be delivered into the hands of men” (Luke 9:44).

Smith’s commentary begins with More’s April 1534 letter to his elder daughter, Margaret Roper. More has, he reports, “refused the oath”—that is, the Oath of Succession, required by the Act of Succession, passed earlier that year, which established children born of the Henry-Anne marriage as the rightful heirs in the stead of Mary, daughter of Henry and Katherine. In response to interrogation by the King’s Commissioners, he had said, “My purpose was not to put any fault either in the Act or any man that made it, or in the oath or any man that sware it, nor to condemn the conscience of any other man.” For himself, however, he considered that “I could not swear without the jeoparding of my soul to perpetual damnation”—damnation, because the oath implicitly denied the spiritual authority of the pope, betokening schism in the Church. Exerting what much later generations would call peer pressure, the Commissioners told him that “I was the first that ever refused it” and the king’s suspicions would intensify. But, More counter-argues, if you will not trust me in my protestations of loyalty to His Majesty, why would you suppose that you could trust me if I swore an oath? To this, the Commissioners ordered him to think things over in a garden outside; he never quite got there, preferring to stay in another room, watching the “pageant” of men in the garden who had signed the oath, who may have been placed there to pressure him further. Summoned back to the Commissioners’ meeting, he heard the Archbishop of Canterbury’s argument that, since he did not condemn those who had sworn, he must be uncertain and therefore must obey the king. More answered that “I am not…bounden to change my conscience, and confirm [i.e., conform] it to the council of one realm.” England, “against the general council of Christendom,” the Catholic Church. (This, of course, was Henry’s intention: to found an Anglican Church ruled by himself.) As for other men, he repeated that he would “leave every man to his own conscience” and hoped that “every man should leave me to mine”—an application of the Biblical injunction to judge not, that you not be judged. Da Silva intervenes with a fine note, observing that by “conscience” More most assuredly does not invoke “modern individualism or moral relativism.” Rather, More “believed that the authority of conscience [is] anchored in objective reality and in the community of faith, in what Thomas Aquinas and other medieval theologians had called veritas rerum, ‘the truth of things.'” Conscience is no mere feeling, depending rather “upon right reason and a well-disposed will,” a reason and a will formed by “the life and teachings of Christ, as transmitted by the Church.” That is, “the Christian’s inner voice is Christ himself.” And as Smith remarks, “one great goal of Thomas More’s writing, exemplified in these prison letters, may be understood as helping to foster, fashion, and forge a truly free and virtuous reader”—that is, indeed to shape that reader’s conscience as the Church intends. “The road to truth and good conscience is long and requires real diligence, patience, and humility,” very much in resistance to tyrants, for whom “there is nothing worse…than the free and strong judgment of such a virtuous reader.”

More’s second letter to Margaret is personal, not reportorial, He assures her that his body is “in good health,” his mind “in good quiet.” Ask Our Lord to “make you all merry in the hope of heaven,” trusting in the Holy Spirit and His teachings, which must substitute for the teachings that your father would otherwise be present to instill. Smith directs readers to More’s Treatise upon the Passion, where he argues that man’s “original calling” is “to be of real service to others through a life of diligent labor and care, all be performed with good hope and active love,” a love corrupted by the disobedience of Adam and Eve. “In More’s thinking, human redemption involves the vital recovery of our original vocation.” Even while imprisoned, More intends to continue his service to family and friends. The latter included John Fisher, the bishop of Rochester and confessor to Queen Katherine, whom da Silva describes as “the only member of the English hierarchy who remained faithful to the Roman Pontiff.” He too would be rewarded with a beheading. The two men exchanged letters and gifts; in one letter, Fisher wittily suggested that More defend himself by observing that the statute establishing Henry as the supreme head of the English church used “the word ‘maliciously'” to describe refusal; “therefore a man who spoke nothing of malice did not offend the statute.” With equal good humor, More wrote back, concurring but “fear[ing] that [the statute} would not be so interpreted” by his judges.

Margaret next sent a letter imploring her father to take the oath, for the sake of his family and friends. Following the suggestion of the first editor of More’s letters, which were published in 1557, Smith suspects that this was actually a ploy to get Cromwell to allow her to visit him in the Tower. Be that as it may, More replies that while danger to those he loves is “a deadly grief to me,” worse than any death sentence that may be handed down by his captors, “I can no further but commit all unto God.” It is the fear of God’s displeasure, not the fear of men’s displeasure, that has “stirred my own conscience,” in reverent imitation of Christ’s passion on the Cross. “And thus my dear daughter, the blessed spirit of Christ for his tender mercy govern and guide you all, to his pleasure and your weal and comfort both body and soul.” This effectually reminds his daughter that Christ rules, in finality, what secular rulers rule temporarily; while we may hope for the best on earth, and More does so hope for their sake, we may need to bear a cross of our own. To this, Margaret replied, picking up on her father’s mention of comfort, that his family’s comfort in this ordeal has been “the experience we have had of your life past and godly conversation, and wholesome counsel, and virtuous example.” This being so, we may hope to “meet with you, mine own dear father, in the bliss of heaven to which our most merciful Lord has bought us with his precious blood.” After another visit from Margaret, More wrote a letter to “all his friends,” requesting that any request she makes of them be considered as if it had come from himself. If a friend is ‘another self,’ then Margaret may have been not only his daughter but the closest of his friends.

There follow two of the most important letters in the collection, from August 1834, usually referred to as the “Dialogue of Conscience.” The first is a letter from More’s stepdaughter, Alice Alington, to Margaret, the second ostensibly Margaret’s reply to Alice, but likely written by More himself. Alice reports a conversation she had with Lord Chancellor Audley, in which he told her two of Aesop’s fables. In the first, there is a country in which a few were wise, many fools—not an unheard-of circumstance. The wise, whose superior wisdom consists of a combination of natural and divine science, learned that a cursed rain was about to fall, one that would make everyone in the country a fool—making the wise fools, too, and the existing fools (presumably) even more foolish. With apparent wisdom, they dug caves in which to hide from the rain. Upon emerging from the caves after the rain, expecting to rule the many with ease, they were shocked to find that the many fools simply ganged up on them, making their wisdom useless. They might as well have allowed themselves to be rained on; at least then they would have shared rule with their fellow fools. Audley implies that More and his friends are the wise minority, but not so wise practically, in failing to follow the majority who have sworn fealty to England’s new, statist and tyrannical, regime. Smith observes that for Audley, “the desire of the wise and the foolish proves the same”; it is libido dominandi. The will to power of the ‘theoretically’ wise fails because they are not practically wise; their scientific knowledge does them no good because they don’t understand the ‘power politics’ they attempt to play. More is not only no wiser, practically, than the foolish majority, he is also no better, spiritually or morally, as he (Audley suspects) is motivated by the same tyrannical passion as everyone else.

The second fable consists of the confessions of a lion, an ass, and a wolf. The lion confesses that he has devoured all beasts that he comes upon. The priest forgives him because the lion is a king, an official who ought to make himself feared, and it is “also his nature” to devour. The ass ate a straw in his master’s shoe, and even that small subtraction made his poor master cold. The priest sends him to the bishop. The wolf, a carnivore like the lion, was put on a strict diet by the priest, but became so hungry that he ate not only a whole cow but her calf, too. His conscience judges him blameless, since a cow and a calf are worth nearly nothing—to the conscience of a wolf. So much for the priest-imposed diet. Here, the king is of course Henry, the pardoned heavy eater. The ass, as Smith interprets the passage, is Thomas More, who orients himself by the teachings of the Bishop of Rome. The wolf is the one Thomas More should be, if he were to follow Audley’s counsel. Alternatively, it might be the real More whom the wolf represents, an animal that makes too much of his conscience, which only ‘justifies’ his own predatory nature. In that reading, the ass might represent those who have taken the oath, similar in their nature to the fool-majority in the first fable, their punishment (if they eventually receive one) deferred to the judgment of a higher authority, a bishop who happens now to be under the control of the lion-king.

However Audley intended this Aesopian wisdom to be understood, he is tempting More through the medium of his stepdaughter, who pronounces herself displeased by them but at a loss for an answer. The letter signed by Margaret provides her with a very fine one. She (or more probably More himself, writing in her name) reports that she has warned her father that if he doesn’t change is mind he is “likely to lose all those friends that are likely to do you any good.” More rejected this suggestion as serpentine. De Silva quotes Augustine on the point, that Adam ate the fruit not out of concupiscence but out of “attachment and affection [to Eve], by which it often happens that we offend God while we try to keep the friendship of men.” More told her, “If it were possible for me to do the thing that might content the King’s Grace, and God therewith not offended, there hath no man taken this oath already more gladly than I would do,” in gratitude to the king’s many favors. But my conscience will not let me do it, “and “for the instruction of my conscience in the matter, I have not slightly looked, but by many years studied and advisedly considered.” Conscience requires instruction and thought, and it tells him “that either I must deadly displease” God, “or abide any worldly harm that he shall for mine other sins, under name of this thing, suffer to fall upon me.” This is an important teaching for Alice and Margaret to receive. They, and others, might suppose that More will suffer punishment because his refusal to take the oath is sinful, a violation of Romans 13. On the contrary, his refusal is the right action to take, and God allows him to be punished only apparently for it, but really for previous sinful acts which he, along with his daughters and the rest of us, do commit. He trusts that God “should give me strength rather to endure all things, than offend him by swearing ungodly against mine own conscience”; “I look in this matter but only unto God,” even “though men call it as it pleaseth them and say it is no conscience but a foolish scruple.” If wisdom is what enables human beings to distinguish between appearance and reality, More thus imparts some of his wisdom to the women.

More then turned to a refutation of Chancellor Audley’s use of the two fables from Aesop. Recalling that Thomas Wolsey, when he was Lord Chancellor, used the first fable to great effect in persuading Henry to intervene on the continent against the French king—comparing those advisers who counseled against intervention to the seeming-wise men who tried to escape calamity by hiding in caves—More interprets the fable to mean that the self-supposed wise men were “stark fools before the rain came.” What is more, according to the Gospel, the ‘fools’ who trust in God are fools only in appearance, only in the eyes of the world. “I trust my Lord reckoneth me among the fools, and so reckon I myself, as my name is in Greek”—as more indeed is. Those who charge that he is animated by libido dominandi, rather than Christian conscience, are simply mistaken. “I was one of the greatest rulers in this noble realm,” but he gave up his high office at his conscience’s command. He cites Boethius’ simile in The Consolation of Philosophy, where his esteemed predecessor in martyrdom wrote that a man who takes pride in ruling other men “is much like as one mouse would be proud to bear a rule over other mice in a barn.” [1] Rather than that, “God, I say, gave us the grace so wisely to rule ourself here” by remaining awake to His promises. I shall never “pin my soul at another man’s back, not even the best man that I know this day living”—perhaps Lord Rochester, perhaps Erasmus.” Yes, those who want me to take the oath and save my life may mean well, but they would “carry my soul a wrong way.” Some even ‘wisely’ say one thing, take the oath, while thinking the contrary—in anticipation of the recommendations of some Jesuits in the next century, the ones Pascal condemned—but More will have none of that. 

Calling her now “Marget” (the French word for apple, as Smith notes with amusement, in view of her “serpentine” temptation), More tells her his own fable, which is no fable at all but as instructive as one. A man named “Company” held out on a corrupted jury, refusing to be companionable with men in order to avoid companionship’ with lost souls in Hell—a wise choice, indeed. “I pray thee now, good Marget, tell me this, Wouldst you wish thy poor father being at the leastwide somewhat learned, less to regard the peril of his soul than did there the honest unlearned man?” He wittily lodges an imaginary plea to those respected men who want him to go along to get along with them. You want me to swear to the oath as you have done, to “sware because you sware,” to go along because you went along. Very well, then, “let me not go alone” in following my conscience; “if there be any good fellowship with you, some of you come with me.” Fellowship should work both ways, should it not? Conscience is a form of company. With More, it keeps him in good company with God, the Church, and with himself. His soul is rightly ordered.

As for the law, attorney More observes that “every man being born and inhabiting” England, where the common law rules, “is bounden to the keeping in every case upon some temporal pain, and in many cases upon pain of God’s displeasure too, yet is there no man bounden to swear that every law is well made, nor bounden upon the pain of God’s displeasure, to perform any such point of the law, as were indeed unlawful.” And even the oath, which requires Englishmen to follow Henry in his break with the Catholic Church, ignores the laws established not by one segment of the Church but by the whole Church in its general councils. No Christian need follow a law laid down in contradiction to the Canon Law as determined by those councils, unless under the command of “special revelation and express commandment of God.” Thus “I can see none that lawfully may command and compel any man to change his own opinion, and to translate his own conscience from the one side to the other.” What is more, some of More’s critics have themselves changed their opinion on this matter, whereas More has stood fast. They are in the majority, you say? Not really, if you count, as you should, those in Christendom as a whole, “well learned men and virtuous that are yet alive.” Then add the saints who are long dead. If I follow God, trusting that He will keep me in His grace, “no man shall do me hurt but if he do me wrong.” And if they do me wrong, I reply with a riddle of my own: “A man may leese his head and have no harm.” He has built a “castle for the safeguard of mine own soul.” 

Margaret made one last attempt. What if you are executed, but you would have changed your mind, had you lived longer? No, he replies: the only motive he could have for changing his mind would be fear of bodily torture and death, which count for little against spiritual and eternal torture and death. “I know myself.” I might succumb to fear, but God’s grace “hath strengthened me hitherto, and make me content in my heart, to lose goods, land and life too, rather than to swear against my conscience.” (At the same time, as Smith observes, he will not judge those who have sworn the oath as fearful, although he evidently suspects that they are.) The king “hath taken from me nothing but my liberty,” for which loss he has been more than compensated by “the spiritual profit that I trust I take thereby.” I am no better than the Apostle Peter, whom he, like all Catholics, regards as the one designated by Jesus as the first pope; he and the other apostles feared for their lives in the boat on the Sea of Galilee, only to be rebuked by Jesus as men of little faith. “I trust that [God’s] goodness will cast upon me his tender piteous eye, as he did upon Saint Peter and make me stand up again and confess the truth of my conscience afresh, and abide the shame and the harm here of mine own fault.”

Here, Smith makes an especially fine observation: In refusing to eat the “apple” that is Alice’s letter, with its deceptive, serpentine interpretations of Aesop’s fables, an apple proffered by Margaret whom he initially, playfully-seriously calls “Eve,” then “Marget” or apple, More would turn her into the “Daughter Margaret,” as he calls her at the end of the letter. In this, he shows himself “ready for the experience of this great testing point of his mind, soul, body, and character.” And he also shows Margaret “how he has retained his peace and gladness of soul, even under such trial.” If he can do so, cannot she? Not by herself, but guided by her father and relying on strength of soul fortified or even provided altogether by God’s strength. Smith quotes the Apostle Paul, quoted by More “several times in the Tower”: “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” “Serve God, be merry, and rejoice—here are the three parting counsels from More to his daughter, likely coauthor [of this letter], and friend.” He may not be able to convince the others of his conscientious insights, but her, yes.

The following two letters went to Dr. Nicholas Wilson, chaplain and confessor to Henry VIII. More recalls Wilson’s extensive research on the question of marriage and divorce, particularly the relevant question at hand, namely, whether it is licit to marry one’s brother’s wife. By now, Wilson had been imprisoned in the Tower (he would be released three years later, after surrendering and signing the oath). More cites many Church Fathers on the subject, and they agreed on their interpretations of these authorities. Yet More still refuses to admit his reasons for signing the oath, “for they be secret to mine own conscience.” I shall “make answer to God, and shall leave every other man to his own” conscience. “I put my trust in God and in the merits of his bitter passion, and I beseech him to give me and keep me the mind to long to be out of this world and to be with him.” Smith remarks More’s refusal to become “a partisan over the oath.” He has eschewed factitious statements and acts “in an already fraught political situation in his country.” That is, at exactly a moment when More seems least ‘political,’ he exercises sober political judgment. As for Wilson, he was wavering, perhaps hoping (in Smith’s words) “to escape the drama of his own conscience, the burden of thinking, deliberating, and freely choosing and acting for himself,” hoping that More could decide the matter for him with an airtight argument against the oath. If so, More’s insistence on “meddl[ing] with no man but of myself, nor of no man’s conscience…but of mine own” must have frustrated him. More prefers to offer him the comfort of prayer. Just as Henry had told More to look first to God, only then to his English king, so More now tells Wilson to look first to God in prayer, only then to More. The difference is that More will not go back on his advice. Smith emphasizes how these letters from More to his “fellow prisoner, professional colleague, and friend,” concluding with the sentence, “in God is all,” illustrates “the spirit of friendship” as it should be among Christians. Shortly before his execution, More would write a letter to another friend, the Italian merchant and friend of the humanists, Antonio Bonvisi, who had been sending supplies to him in the Tower. Calling him “of all friends most friendliest,” More thanked him for his kindness. “This faithful prosperity of this amity and friendship of yours towards me (I wot not how) seemeth in a manner to counterpoise this unfortunate shipwreck of mine.” Calling their friendship a gift from God, even greater than Bonvisi’s gifts to him, he bade him farewell. In Smith’s words, “This priceless letter communicates as clearly as anything More ever wrote his character and vision as an author and a man,” a man grateful that Bonvisi has remained his friend despite More’s inability to do anything for him. “The worst of times for Thomas More was the best of times for their friendship. It is also to be noted that More was actually capable of doing something for Bonvisi.” In praying to God that they both “hold cheap all the riches of this world all the glory of the whole universe, and even the sweetness of life itself, for the ardent desire of that joy” that will come to those who spend eternity in His company, he provides a gentle reminder to a man of great worldly wealth.

In response to a grateful letter from Margaret, thanking him for his latest “most godly and loving letter,” which gave her heart “inestimable comfort,” More repeats that “to the world, wrong may seem right sometimes by false conjecturing” (More has studied philosophy), “sometimes by false witnesses” (as the practiced lawyer has seen in the many trials). The world calls his refusal of the oath “an heinous offense” and “my religious fear toward God” an instance of “obstinacy toward my Prince.” If women are more ‘social’ than men, more inclined to look for peace with their neighbors, it may be that More wants to shore up his daughter’s conscience on that side. His refusal to divulge his reasons for declining the oath might exasperate “my most dreadful Sovereign Lord and Prince” even more than his supposed obstinacy. If the king relents, he will declare his reasons. Meanwhile, he will continue to live in gratitude to God has granted him the strength to resist his fear of pain and death, enabling him to govern himself by “reason with help of faith,” which solves the “riddle” of how “a man may lose his head and yet have none harm, but instead of harm inestimable good at the hand of God.” 

“I thank our Lord in this quiet and comfort is mine heart at this day, and I trust in God’s goodness so shall have grace to continue, yet (as I said before) I verily trust that God shall so inspire and govern the King’s heart that he shall not suffer his noble heart and courage to requite my true faithful heart and service with such extreme unlawful and uncharitable dealing only for the displeasure that I cannot think so as other do. But his true subject will I live and die, and truly pray for him will I, both here and in the other world, too.”

More’s wife, Lady Alice More, has not been passive in this ordeal. Around Christmas of 1534, she wrote to Henry, asking him to have compassion for her husband’s physical condition (he suffered from several painful afflictions while imprisoned, including kidney stones) and the family’s impending financial ruin. By this time, Parliament had passed the Act of Supremacy, making the king the Supreme Head of the Church of England, a formal break with the Catholic Church. A few months later, Parliament, again at the king’s behest, passed the Act of Treason which made speaking maliciously against the king’s new title an act of treason punishable by disembowelment. Under these circumstances, Mrs. More’s hope for an exhibition of “tender pity and compassion upon” her husband’s “long distress and great heaviness,” and her plea for allowing him “to live the remnant of his life with your poor said beadswoman his wife and other of your poor suppliants his children,” was unlikely to induce His Majesty to unbend, and he did not. Just before More’s execution, she would write a similar letter to Privy Council member Thomas Cromwell, who would himself be executed by the king, a few years later. This letter had no better effect than the other.

Early in 1535, More wrote to Stephen Leder, the Vicar of Ware, who had told him of rumors that More had capitulated and signed the oath. Not so, and “I trust in the great goodness of God, that he shall never suffer it to be true.” On the contrary, I shall continue to refuse, “not for obstinacy but for the salvation of my soul, because I cannot induce mine own mind otherwise to think than I do concerning the oath.” Nor has he, or will he, write to the king to beg for mercy—again, not out of obstinacy “but rather of a lowly mind and a reverent,” preferring not to further irritate Henry, who gives every evidence of being convinced that More is a man of ill intent. He quotes Proverbs 21:1: God is the one “in whose hand the hearts of Kings are,” and he “commit[s] the whole matter” to Him.

In his final letters to Margaret, he reports on his last appearances before his judges, the four undoubting Thomases: Cromwell, Audley, Cranmer, and Howard. Cromwell showed him the text of the Act of Supremacy. More contented himself with saying that he remained “the King’s true faithful subject,” one who continued to pray for him. He professed no intention to “meddle in the world again”; “my whole study should be upon the passion of Christ and mine own passage out of this world.” Upon being handed a copy of the Treasons Act he repeated what he had said before. “And if this be not enough to keep a man alive in good faith I long not to live”; “therefore my poor body is at the King’s pleasure, would God my death might do him good.” 

In still another hearing, in which he was informed that Henry was “nothing content nor satisfied with mine answer” because his “obstinate mind and an evil toward” Henry, expressed by his “demeanor” had “been occasion of much grudge and harm in the realm,” he “answered that I had no malignity and therefore I could none utter,” “very heavy” though he was “that the King’s Highness should have any such opinion of me.” He now said what he had previously told Margaret, and Margaret only, that “a man may in such case lose his head and have no harm.” He politely declined to incriminate himself by stating his objections to the statute. At this point, Cromwell recalled that, as Lord Chancellor, More had himself exacted confessions from accused men. To this, More pointed to “a difference between those two cases”: “at that time, as well here as elsewhere through the corps of Christendom, the Pope’s power was recognized for an undoubted thing which seemeth not like a thing agreed in this realm and the contrary taken for truth in other realms.” To Cromwell’s threat of death, More considered “the difference in charge of conscience” as “the difference [that] standeth between [be]heading and hell.” 

“Much was then answered unto this by Master Secretary [Cromwell] and my Lord Chancellor [Audley],” which answers would be “over long to rehearse,” as they doubtless were. For a final time, they demanded that he sign the oath. At his refusal, “Master Secretary said that he liked me this day much worse than he did the last time, for then he said he pitied me much and now he thought that I meant not well.” To this, More tells his daughter, “God and I know both that I mean well and so I pray God do by me.”

The day before his death on July 6, 1535, More wrote to her, recalling the martyred Thomas Beckett and telling her, “tomorrow long I go to God,” as it is the saint’s feast day “Fare well my dear child and pray for me, and I shall for you and all your friends that we may merrily meet in heaven.”

_________

One of Smith’s finest choices as editor of these letters has been to append four of Smith’s short Tower writings and some illuminating quotations from his last interview with the king’s inquisitors. In these, More does not address his daughter, in which correspondence he lovingly navigates the Biblical injunction to subordinate one’s love of family, love of one’s own, to the love of God with a father’s love for his loving child. He rather addresses, first, all Christians and indeed all human beings, and finally his persecutors, giving them the confession they had long sought while making it clear that they are the ones who should be confessing.

In “A Godly Instruction,” More advances the reasoned justification for the Biblical command to love enemies. “Bear no malice nor evil will to no man living.” Why not? The man whom I hate is either good or bad. If I hate a good man, I am evil. If I hate a bad man, two things might happen: he might “amend and die good and go to God”; he might not amend, die evil, “and go to the devil.” If he and I are both saved, we will find ourselves together in loving harmony in the Kingdom of God. Why, then, should I be the “enemy to him with whom I shall in time coming be coupled in eternal friendship?” If, however, he continues in the way of evil and “be damned, then is there so outrageous eternal sorrow towards him that I may well think myself a deadly cruel wretch if I would not now rather pity his pain than malign his person.” Better to “pray for such merciful amendment in other folk as our own conscience showeth us that we have need in ourselves.” This last adjuration illuminates More’s reflections on conscience in the Letters. There, he understandably concentrates his attention on the accusations against himself, justifying his conduct in his own eyes and in the eyes of those who are willing to see. He remarks his own sinfulness but emphasizes his conscientious sinlessness with respect to the charges. Here, he turns his examination of conscience inward, upon himself, upon More as sinner leaving no possible misperception of him as self-righteous.

In a second “Godly Instruction,” More turns to reasoning on the threat of death, paraphrasing Scripture: “Whosoever so saveth his life that he displeaseth God thereby shall soon after, to his no little grief, full sore mislike the same.” Every man must die; that you know. What you don’t know is “how, or how soon.” If you attempt to delay your death, you risk bringing down “the everlasting torments in hell,” given your human, all-too-human propensity to succumb to sin. By escaping death in this world, you merely delay the inevitable “for a while.” Further, suffering here provides you with an opportunity to “wholly commit” your soul “into the hands of God,” your “trusty and faithful Creator.” You will imitate Christ in His willingness to suffer—far more intensely than you ever will—while trusting in His Father, in the promise of Resurrection. “Inasmuch as ye be partakers of Christ’s pains and Passion, full heartily rejoice, that thou mayest likewise rejoice at the revelation of his glory.” And “what a shame were it for a Christian man to be content rather to lose the life and bliss everlasting than suffer a short death somewhat before his time.” As for himself, it is “my firm hope” that “he which so dearly bought me will not, without my own damnable fault, lose me to his most malicious enemy.” 

“A Godly Meditation” is a poem addressed not directly to men but to God, for the benefit of men. In it, he asks for God’s grace to enable him “to set the world at naught.” He would put his mind on God, not on “the blast of men’s mouths.” He would find contentment in solitude, “rid[ding] my mind of all worldly business” in order “to lean upon the comfort of God.” Repenting of his sins, accepting his suffering as punishment for them, he wishes “gladly to bear my purgatory here.” (More fully accepts the Church’s teaching on Purgatory, but may suffering on earth reduce one’s time in it?) He would “foresee and consider the everlasting fire of hell,” grateful therefore to Christ in His supreme suffering. Mindful of his own inclination to playfulness and witty speech, he determines “to eschew light foolish mirth and gladness,” the temptation to take his merriment too far. Finally, he would “think my most enemies my best friends,” in view of the fact that Joseph’s brothers “could neve have done him so much good with their love and favor as they did him with their malice and hatred.” To put oneself in the mind of More’s unworldly ambitions is “more to be desired of every man”—not only in More, in the Tower, faced with his accusers—than “all the treasure of all the princes and kings, Christian and heathen, were it gathered and laid together all upon one heap.”

“A Devout Prayer,” written a few days before his execution in July 1535, consists of an eloquent elaboration of the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Imploring God to “take from me…this lukewarm fashion, or rather key-cold manner of meditation, and this dullness in praying unto thee,” he asks instead for “warmth, delight, and quickness in thinking upon thee.” He alludes to Revelation 3:15-16, where Jesus warns the Church of Laodicea, “Because thou art lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” Christ’s Passion should not be met with men’s indifference. He asks for mercy not only for himself but for “all that bear me evil will, and would me harm,” whom he hopes to see in Heaven. As Smith well observes, “More longs for all his actions to savor of the Holy Spirit.” 

In the end, More told his inquisitors exactly what he thought of the Oath of Succession, the Act of Succession upon which it was based, and the other legal innovations establishing Henry as the head of a centralized, Machiavellian, modern state. “This indictment is grounded upon an act of Parliament directly repugnant to the Lawson God and his holy Church, the supreme government of which or of any part whereof, may no temporal prince presume by any law to take upon him, as rightfully belonging to the See of Rome.” As “but one member and small part of the Church,” England “may not make a particular law disagreeable with the general law of Christ’s universal Catholic Church.” Further, England’s Magna Carta stipulates that the English Church shall be “free and have all of its rights whole and its liberties uninjured,” rights now violated by Parliament and king. In addition, Henry took an oath of obedience to the See of Rome upon his coronation. The “pestiferous law” appointing Henry as “Head of the Church of England” contradicts “all human and divine laws.” More charges that “the one single cause” of his persecution unto death has been his unwillingness “to consent to the second marriage of the King.” He hopes for clemency not from the king but from God, and he hopes for God’s clemency for his enemies. “We read that Saint Paul persecuted Blessed Stephen, but they are now together in heaven,” and “so all of us, though we disagree in this life, will nevertheless agree in another life with perfect charity.”

 

Notes

1. Smith suggests, plausibly, that the Consolation served as “a great inspiration for More’s own Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation,” the “masterpiece” among the writings he composed in the Tower.