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.

 

 

John Climacus: The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Archimandrite Lazarus Moore translation. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959.

 

At Genesis 28: 10-19, we learn of Jacob’s dream at Haran, northeast of Beersheba, from which he was fleeing from his malicious brother, Esau. He sees angels ascending and descending on a ladder between Heaven and earth, and finds the LORD Himself beside him, assuring him that his people someday will prosper, throughout the world. The Christian Fathers Gregory of Nyssa and John Chrysostem interpreted this passage as a figure of the ascetic’s struggle toward God. In the seventh century, John Climacus, abbot of the Monastery at Mount Sinai, followed this line of thought, writing The Ladder of Divine Ascent (titled simply, Climax Paradisi in Latin), in response to a request from John, Abbot of Raitha. Although Jacob’s Ladder has more than seventy rungs, this version has thirty, which commentators have associated with the age of Jesus when baptized by John the Baptist.

Writing to “the servants of God,” and invoking the supreme goodness of God at the outset, Climacus immediately presents a classification of human beings in Christian terms. All angels and human beings are “rational beings created by Him and honored with the dignity of free-will.” But there the resemblances end. The angels and saints in Heaven are the “intellectual and incorporeal beings which surround God.” The “true servants of God” are “those who tirelessly and unremittingly do and have done His will.” But there are also “worthless servants” who “think of themselves as having been granted baptism but have not faithfully kept the vows they made to God.” There are those “estranged from God and alienated from Him—the unbelievers or heretics.” And there are outright “enemies of God,” who “have not only evaded and rejected the Lord’s commandment themselves, but who also wage bitter war on those who are fulfilling it.” Preeminent among them are the fallen angels, the demons. “God belongs to all free beings”; among humans, “the monk is he who within his earthly and soiled body toils towards the rank and state of incorporeal beings.” He is the true servant of God, “a mourning soul”—recall that Jesus, the Man of Sorrows, weeps but never laughs—who, “both asleep and awake is unceasingly occupied with the remembrance of death.” He has withdrawn from the world in “voluntary hatred of vaunted material things,” denying “nature for the attainment of what is above nature.” Renunciation of the world is the first step on the Ladder. Taking that step is reasonable if done “either for the sake of the future Kingdom, or because of the multitude of [one’s] sins, or for love of God”—God, Who out of respect for human free-will, “sets our contests” and “waits to see what the end of our course will be.” 

If motivated by a desire to overcome sin, the monk “should not discontinue his hot and fiery streams of tears and voiceless heartfelt groaning until he, too, sees that Jesus has come to him an rolled away the stone of hardness from his heart,” freeing “Lazarus, that is to say, our mind, from the bands of sin,” commanding the angels to free the penitent’s mind from his passion and “let[ting] him go to blessed dispassion.” Those motivated by the desire to enter the Kingdom of God, “to go out of Egypt and to fly from Pharaoh,” will need “some Moses as a mediator with God and from God,” a man standing “between action and contemplation,” praying “for us to God” to allow us to “cross the sea of sin and rout the Amalek of the passions.” This person may be what Orthodox Christians call a spiritual father. And those animated simply by the love of God will need to battle (“violence indeed and constant suffering”) “until our pleasure-loving dispositions,” our erotic longings, our natural and worldly loves, “attain the love of God and chastity” by means of “visible sorrow” in imitation of Christ. Eventually, this spiritual warfare, undertaken with “great toil” and “much unseen suffering” by means of “simplicity, deep angerlessness and diligence,” will make our mind, that “greedy kitchen dog addicted to barking,” into “a lover of chastity and watchfulness.” We can achieve this, “if only we unceasingly go right down to the depth of humility.” “He who withdraws from the world out of love for God has obtained fire at the very outset; and, like fire set to fuel, it soon kindles a larger fire.” The right foundation or first step of renunciation consists of innocence, fasting (because physical food feeds the passions), and temperance. “A firm beginning will certainly be useful for us when we later grow slack. A soul that is strong at first but then relaxes”—few indeed will not experience backsliding—is “spurred on by the memory of its former zeal,” often growing “new wings” as a result.

This first step comes with “labor and grief.” But as we progress, “we no longer feel sorrow, or we feel little sorrow,” as “our mortal mind is consumed” and we practice the Christian virtues “with all joy and eagerness, with love and with divine fire.” But what of those who cannot undertake a life in solitude, or life in a monastery, Christians who have families and are “beset with social cares”? “Do all the good you can,” Climacus replies. “Do not speak evil of anyone; do not steal from anyone; do not lie to anyone; do not be arrogant towards anyone; do not hate anyone; be sure you go to church; be compassionate to the needy; do not offend anyone; do not wreck another man’s domestic happiness; and be content with what your own wives can give you. If you behave in this way you will not be far from the Kingdom of Heaven.” (He leaves it open, as to whether you will get there.) But “those who have really [emphasis added] determined to serve Christ, with the help of spiritual fathers and their own self-knowledge will strive before all else to choose a place, and a way of life, and a habitation, and exercises suitable for them,” inasmuch as “community life is not for all, on account of greed; and not for all are places of solitude, on account of anger,” which festers when a man is alone with his bitter memories of past injuries. The “monastic state” comes in three forms: “the retirement and solitude of a spiritual athlete”; “living in silene with one or two others”; or “settling patiently in a community.” Climacus prefers the social settings for most monks, as they will have other men to lift them up if they fall into despondency, despair, lethargy or laziness. He quotes Jesus: “For where two or three are gathered in My name, there am I in the midst of them.” [Matthew 18: 20). 

After renouncing the world, the second step is full “detachment” from it, not longing for its pleasures while in a monk’s cell. “The man who really loves the Lord…will not love, care or worry about money, or possessions, or parents or worldly glory, or friends, or brothers, or anything at all on earth,” hating “even his own flesh” and “follow[ing] Christ without anxiety or hesitation, always looking heavenward and expecting help from there”—depending upon God, not man. “Water-loving plants are not such as to produce fruit in hard and arid training fields,” and “the man who has come to hate the world has escaped sorrow.” Climacus is utterly frank in describing what this entails. The “narrow way,” the regime of the Christian monk, consists of “mortification of the stomach, all-night standing, water in moderation, short rations of bread, the purifying draught of dishonor, sneers, derision, insult, the cutting out of one’s own will, patience in annoyances, unmurmuring endurance of scorn, disregard of insults, and the habit, when wronged, of bearing it sturdily; when slandered, of not being indignant,; when humiliated, not to be angry; when condemned, to be humble.” Be ready for the demons to “inflame our hearts by reminding us of our parents and brethren,” a fire that can only be fought with fire, namely “the remembrance of the eternal fire.” Your sanctuary is no invulnerable fortress; your battle continues there.

“Exile or pilgrimage” constitutes the third step. “Exile means that we leave forever everything in our own country that prevents us from reaching the goal of the religious life,” namely, the Kingdom of God, a pilgrimage “undertaken by the lovers of perfection so that they may live a life of hardship and simplicity.” It is crucial not to undertake this pilgrimage out of vainglory, succumbing to a sense of one’s own superiority to those he has left behind. The Christian regime, the Christian way of life, is indeed superior to the way of ‘the world,’ but the Christian himself remains a sinner in the hands of a vigilant if not angry God. “I do not know whether we must teach all others but teach yourselves at all costs.” Your pilgrimage is not an odyssey: “In going into exile, beware of the demon of wandering and of sensual desire, because exile gives him his opportunity,” as it did to not-so-chaste Ulysses. And you must find a new family, not return to Penelope. “Let him be your father who is able and willing to labor with you in bearing the burden of your sins; and your mother—contrition, which can cleanse you from impurity; and your brother—your comrade, who toils and fights side by side with you in your striving toward the heights.” As for a wife, let her be “separable”—the “remembrance of death,” your children “the sighs of your heart,” your body “your slave,” your friends the angels “who can help you at the hour of your death, if they become your friends.” “This is the family of those who seek the Lord,” since “love of God extinguishes our love for our parents,” bringing a spiritual sword to sever the natural ties. With regard to our home, “choose places where there are fewer opportunities for comfort and ambition, but more for humility,” lest we flee the world “in company with our passions.” All the work we do to develop “a good and firm disposition” can “be lost in an instant” if we do not take care, as “our mind, which is the organ of knowledge, is extremely imperfect and full of all kinds of ignorance,” prey to fantasy, with which we fill its void, whether awake or asleep. “The devils try to disturb us with dreams,” but “he who believes in dreams is like a person running after his own shadow and trying to catch it.” By all means, believe in some of your dreams—those “that foretell torments and judgment for you,” unless they cause despair, in which case they “are also from the devils.”

The reason we need not despair at the experience of grim dreams will be seen at the fourth step on the ladder: obedience, “blessed and ever-remembered,” a virtue that is “entirely foreign to hypocrisy and one’s own will.” Obedience aims at substituting God’s will for our own, as in the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy will be done.” This is a much more daunting command than it might seem at first. “Our treatise now appropriately touches upon prizefighters and athletes of Christ,” those who have succeeded in climbing the ladder, proving that, and how, this arduous battle against the demons can be won. We obey God by renouncing “our own life,” by mortifying “the limbs while the mind remains alive,” entombing our will and resurrecting our humility. “A corpse does not argue or reason as to what is good or what seems to be bad.” He who obeys God distrusts himself “in everything, however good it may be, right up to the end of [his] life.” Climacus has seen this way of life in monasteries, has known this among “these holy fathers,” men “gathered and united in the Lord, with a wonderful active and contemplative life, men “so occupied with divine thoughts,” so “exercised…in good deeds that there was scarcely any need of the superior to remind them of anything.” “Of their own good will they aroused one another to divine vigilance,” conversing of “death and the thought of eternal judgment.” They prayed together, each in his own mind, a practice of which “they reminded one another…by secret signs and gestures,” preempting mental wandering. Nor is this a life lived in vain; on the contrary, “it bears and shows abundant fruit,” proficiency “both in active life and spiritual insight,” both lives “in discernment and humility.” Some had attained “deepest innocence” and “wise simplicity, spontaneous and God-guided,” souls never duplicitous but all of one piece. “Among them there are none who are fatuous and foolish, like old men in the world who are commonly called ‘in their dotage.'” Gentle, kindly, radiant, sincere, “they make God Himself and their superior their very breath, and the eye of their mind keeps a bold and strict watch for demons and passions.”

He offers three examples, each exemplifying a Christian virtue. Isidore had been a cruel and arrogant magistrate before he entered the monastery. He learned humility by being assigned to prostrate himself before everyone who went in or out of the monastery. He obeyed this harsh but loving, agapic, command for the seven years before his death. Laurence exemplified prudence—indeed, “divine prudence.” Climacus tested him, asking him “what he was thinking of when standing by the table.” Laurence told him he was thinking of “the shepherd as the image of Christ,” praying “not as before a table of men, but as before the altar of God.” This elderly monk, who had been tested many times before, advised Climacus “that if anyone surrenders himself to simplicity and voluntary innocence, then he no longer gives the devil either time or place to attack him.” And final, Abbacyrus exemplified patient, “exemplary fortitude.” For fifteen years, he had endured maltreatment by his brother monks. He told Climacus that “my fathers are testing me to see whether I am really a monk,” but “they are not doing this in real earnest.” Some of the brothers have been tested for thirty years; he was only in his fifteenth year at the monastery. “And rightly, Father John, for without trial gold is not purified.” Abbacyrus died two years later, blessing those who tempted him, then “buried with the local saints.” 

Another of “those ever-memorable fathers” advised Climacus, “Fix your mind to your soul as to the wood of the cross to be struck like an anvil with blow upon blow of the hammers, to be mocked, abused, ridiculed and wrong, without being in the least crushed or broken, but continuing to be quite calm and immovable. Shed your own will as a garment of shame, and thus stripped of it enter the practice ground.” By such determinations “will all men know, dearest father, that we are disciples of Christ, if while living together, we have love for one another,” avoiding “the devil’s disease,” which is the “will and desire in conversation…to establish his own opinion, even though what he says is true.” If we cannot achieve “such patience and obedience, then it is best for us, having at least discovered our weakness, to live far apart from the athletic lists, and bless the combatants and pray they may be granted patience.” Too many aspirants make their decision to join a holy order too easily. Climacus writes, “To admire the labors of the saints is good; to emulate them wins salvation; but to wish suddenly to imitate their life in every point is unreasonable and impossible.” 

To take the fourth step, obey your spiritual father. “Base-born children regard the absence of their teacher as a joy, but legitimate ones think it a loss.” A spiritual father will help to guide you away from the devil’s two principal snares, or sets of snares. The first set aims at reducing the monks’ zeal, “mak[ing] them hard-hearted” by “defil[ing] them with bodily pollution, or making them “sluggish in prayer, drowsy and confused by spiritual darkness,” in order to deceive them into “think[ing] they have gained nothing by their obedience.” But when Providence withdraws “our imagined goods or blessings,” God is really “lead[ing] us to the deepest humility.” The second set of snares is the opposite extreme—spiritual overconfidence or pride, “the thought that they now had the qualifications for the solitary life, and that in solitude they could attain to freedom from passion as the final prize.” Do not be deceived “by the spirit of conceit.” We will sin, even as we ascend the Ladder. Above all, do not conceal those sins or “do so as if we were confessing another’s sin,” or “lay the blame for our sin on others.” On the contrary, tell God, and tell your spiritual father, “No one is to blame for this, no man, no spirit no body, nothing but my own carelessness.” “Be like a condemned criminal in disposition and in outward appearance and thought.” Bear in mind that “everything depends on habit, and follows upon it,” as Aristotle says of the virtues, but as Christians we “have God as their great collaborator.” When “in the presence of a [spiritual] superior,” “practice extreme silence and ignorance,” “for a silent man is a son of wisdom, always acquiring much knowledge.” Pay attention to them, not your fellow novitiates. The saintly Father Acacius recalled, “I have seen innocent and most beautiful children come to school for the sake of wisdom, education, and profit, but through contact with the other pupils they learn there nothing but cunning and vice. The intelligent will understand this.” 

Novitiates choose their spiritual fathers, and must do so in self-knowledge, especially in knowledge of their own passions. Those “prone to lust” should choose “an ascetic who will hear of no consolation in food.” Prideful novitiates should choose a “stern and unyielding” spiritual father, not a “meek and kindly” one. Always assume that “that the Superior is trying you, and you will certainly never go wide of the mark.” If we anger God, the father can intercede for us in prayer, but when the father “is incensed against us, there is no one to propitiate him for us. “When the day comes when you “obtain great faith and love” for your spiritual father, “then know that the Holy Spirit has invisibly made His abode in your soul and the power of the Highest has overshadowed you.” Climacus observes that the number four is the number of the four Apostles. “Athlete, keep running fearlessly.”

The fifth step is “painstaking and true repentance.” The Apostle John exemplifies obedience, in imitation of Christ at Gethsemane. The Apostle Peter exemplifies repentance, which Christ, of course, never needed to undertake. Peter is the more ‘human’ Apostle, of the two. “Obedience precedes repentance, which is “the renewal of baptism,” a “contract with God for a second life,” a “self-condemning reflection, and carefree self-care.” It is the opposite of despair, being rather its renunciation, “the daughter of hope.” Repentance reconciles us with God and purifies our conscience. Crucially, “a penitent is the inflictor of his own punishments.” He does not wait for God or his superiors at the monastery to punish him. At an establishment set aside for penitents, called “The Prison,” “men endured hardship and bowed down to the end of their life, going about with a sad countenance all day long, the wounds in their body stinking of rottenness, and they took no notice of them, and they forgot to eat their bread, and they mingled their drink of water with seeping; they ate dust and ashes with their bread, and their bones cleaved to their flesh, and were withered like grass.” With supreme understatement, Climacus asks, “Where could you see anything like laughter, or idle talking, or irritation, or anger?” These men “were quite indistinguishable from corpses.” In seeing them, “I nearly despaired of myself, seeing my own indifference and comparing it with their suffering.” Nevertheless, “what is hard and intolerable for others becomes easy and acceptable for those who have fallen away from virtue and spiritual riches.” And “he who really keeps account of his actions considers as lost every day in which he does not mourn, whatever good he may have done on it.” Those who despair may commit suicide, but those who despair have already committed spiritual suicide, since “nothing equals or excels God’s mercies.” At the same time, do not entangle yourself in the opposite trap; do not “sicken in heart from the disease of the godless Origen,” the Neo-Platonist and pretended Christian who espoused universalism, the doctrine that all human beings will be saved, eventually. Climacus offers this prayer, in the stead of such errors: “May the holy convicts mentioned above provide you with a rule, and a pattern, and a model, and a living picture of repentance; and throughout your life you will need no book at all until Christ, the Son of God and God, enlightens you in the resurrection of true repentance.” Repentance purifies the physical senses; “by voluntarily accepting retribution and punishment, you have escaped the punishment that is everlasting.”

Introducing the sixth step, the remembrance of death, Climacus distinguishes between fear of death, “a natural instinct that comes from disobedience,” the penalty human beings paid for Adam’s failure to obey God, and terror of death, which is “evidence of unrepented sin.” Christ Himself feared death, in the sense that he prayed to His Father in Gethsemane, asking if He must go to the Cross while determining to do as He was told; He did not “show terror,” having committed no sin for which He would be bound to repent. Remembrance of death is especially needed if you live in society, where the insistent frivolity of almost everyone will distress and depress you. “But amongst those who are free from noise it produces the putting aside of cares and constant prayer and guarding of the mind,” detachment from the noisemakers. Let no one imagine that renunciation of frivolity, even renunciation of one’s own will, must lead to torpor. On the contrary, “there are many activities for an active mind,” namely, “meditation on the love of God, on the remembrance of God, on the remembrance of the Kingdom, on the remembrance of the zeal of the holy martyrs, on the remembrance of God Himself present,” as well as “remembrance of the holy and spiritual powers, on remembrance of one’s departure, judgment, punishment, and sentence.” After all, “the day is not sufficient to repay in full its own debt to the Lord.” We should think and act as if this day is “the last of our whole life.” “Even the pagans have said something of the sort, since they define philosophy as meditation on death.” Those who remember death will “never sin”—well, perhaps at the same time they are remembering. 

With the remembrance of death comes the inclination to mourn, and mourning causes us to pray. Prayerful mourning is the seventh step. It is “a golden spur in which a soul which is stripped of all attachment and of all ties, fixed by holy sorrow to watch over the heart.” At this step, “temperance and silence of the lips” will be yours; “humility, thirst for dishonors, voluntary craving for involuntary afflictions, no condemnation of sinners, compassion even beyond one’s strength”—these are the fruits grasped at the sixth step. Climacus emphasizes that these are the opposite of feelings. Christian compassion is no passion. Christian tears do not betoken an outburst of emotion. “Tears without thought are proper only to an irrational nature and not to a rational one”; that is, they are less than human. Rightly, “tears are the product of thought, and the father of thought is a rational mind.” It is for this reason that “the demons fear concentration as thieves fear dogs.” “My friends,” Climacus tells his brothers in Christ, “God does not ask or desire that man should mourn from sorrow of heart, but rather that out of love for Him he should rejoice with spiritual laughter. Remove sin, and the tear of sorrow is superfluous for your eyes of sense. What is the use of a bandage when there is no wound?” Once again, virtue entails habituation. “Practice produces habit, and perseverance grows into a feeling of the heart; and what is done with an ingrained feeling of the heart is not easily eradicated.” At our judgment, God will not blame us for failing to work miracles, a power He alone can grant, or “for not having been theologians or contemplatives,” men whose gifts He grants to only a few, but “we shall certainly have to give an account to God of why we have not unceasingly mourned.”

To quench a fire completely, pour water on it gradually. “The tears of mourning will quench every flame of anger and irritability,” and it is the consequent attitude of meekness that results from the eighth step. “Anger is a reminder of hidden hatred, that is to say, remembrance of wrongs,” and it must be said that truer words have never been written. (The old joke has it, ‘He has Irish Alzheimer’s disease; he only remembers his grudges.’ But not only the Irish.) Anger is against humility. “If you want, or rather intend, to take a splinter out of another person, then do not hack at it with a stick instead of a lancet, for you will only drive it deeper.” The stick is “rude speech and rough gestures,” while the lancet in “tempered instruction and patient reprimand.” Do the latter rarely, “and not with your own hand” but by “the agency of another,” to soften the blow. For yourself and for the one you instruct or reprimand, you want to cultivate the conviction that dishonor “is praise.”

Accordingly, take the ninth step, which is to expunge “remembrance of wrongs,” which is “the consummation of anger, the keeper of sins, hatred of righteousness, ruin of virtues, poison of the soul, worm of the mind shame of prayer, stopping of supplication, estrangement of love, a nail stuck in the soul, pleasureless feeling beloved in the sweetness of bitterness, continuous sin, unsleeping transgression, hourly malice”—altogether, a “dark and hateful passion.” It can only be replaced fully by the agape, which abandons revenge. “He who nurses enmities stores up for himself endless sufferings” in this life and the next. “Let it be put to shame by the Prayer of Jesus, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” That prayer recalls our minds to remembrance of our sins against others, not their sins against us.

Such resentment pushes us to slander, a sin “born of hatred and malice.” If someone disparages his neighbor, ask him to stop, since “I fall into graver sins every day, so how can I criticize him?” How can I join you in your condemnation of him? With this reply, “you will heal yourself and your neighbor with one plaster,” following Christ’s injunction to avoid “judgment,” lest I be judged. This is the tenth step. Avoiding judgment of others does not mean to overlook their sins. Rather, “hasty and severe judges of the sins of their neighbor” have “not yet attained to a thorough and constant remembrance and concern for their own sins.” They leave no sufficient time to mourn for themselves.

The eleventh step is in one sense not a step ‘up’ but a step ‘down.’ Do not mount “the throne of vainglory” by becoming talkative. It is “the friend of silence” who “draws near to God, and by secretly conversing with Him is enlightened by God.” But “garrulity comes especially from vainglory.” People who love to talk too-highly esteem their own opinions and brains.

Lying is an especially pernicious sort of talk, “the offspring of chatter and joking” and “the destruction of love” because it ruins trust. Worse still, joking “destroy[s] in their hearers the habit of mourning,” which isn’t easy to develop or to recover, once lost. In describing this twelfth step, Climacus shows that he has understood the teaching of Plato’s Socrates, however: “When we are completely cleansed of lying, then we can resort to it, but only with fear and as occasion demands.” Socrates’ example is lying to someone who wants to know where a weapon is, so he can kill an enemy. Climacus gives no example, perhaps because he regards the teaching as true but dangerous, particularly in light of the commandment against it. Retreating to safer ground, he observes that “he who has become merry with wine involuntarily speaks the truth on all subjects, and he who is drunk with compunction cannot lie.”

Warring against the sin of acedia or despondency, spiritual sloth, is the thirteenth step. This sin leads to slackness—the “neglect of asceticism, hatred of the vow made,” a “blessing of worldlings” but a curse for Christians, since it amounts to an implied accusation that God is “merciless and without love for men” by thinking, in effect, ‘What’s the use?’ “Community life oppose[s] despondency,” being more the “constant companion of the hermit.” Climacus calls it the “gravest” of the “capital vices,” which may be why he lists it under the number 13, symbol of atheism. For the Christian sliding into it, the antidotes are to remember his sins and to perform manual labor. Both community life and manual labor take the mind off itself, while remembering one’s sins directs the Christian mind toward the soul-labor of repentance, away from listlessness.

The fourteenth step aims at crushing that “clamorous yet wicked master, the stomach.” If wonder is the first step toward philosophy, here Climacus takes it: “I wonder if anyone has got free of this master before settling in the grave.” In addition to being a vice in itself, gluttony is “the father of fornication,” an illicit attempt to work off all those extra calories without going to the trouble of more rigorous exercise. (If Adam “had not been overcome by his stomach he would not have known what a wife is.”) A disciple of the dubious Origen, Evagrius, “afflicted by an evil spirit,” supposing himself “to be the wisest of the wise,” told his readers to combat gluttony by consuming only bread and water. “This is like saying to a child: ‘Go up the whole ladder in one stride.'” Be more “cunning” than that, first “only deny[ing] ourselves fattening foods, then heating foods, and only then what makes our food pleasant. Just “give your stomach satisfying and digestible food, so as to satisfy its insatiable hunger by sufficiency.” While despondency is the gravest of sins, the stomach is “the prince of the passions.” It “alone…is the cause of all human shipwreck,” he avers, with some exaggeration. Fasting, on the other hand, “is the coercion of nature and the cutting out of everything that delights the palate, the prevention of lust, the uprooting of bad thoughts, deliverance from dreams, purity of prayer, the light of the soul, the guarding of the mind, deliverance from blindness, the door of compunction, humble sighing, glad contrition, a lull in chatter, a means to silence, a guard of obedience, lightening of sleep, health of body, agent of dispassion, remission of sins, the gate of Paradise and its delight.”

If gluttony encourages fornication, that makes purity, successful resistance to lust, the logical fifteenth step. “Purity means that we put on the angelic nature”—a very big step, indeed. It is “the supernatural denial of nature,” which is why Climacus warns his readers not to “expect to confute the demon of fornication by arguing with him; for with nature on his side, he has the best of the argument.” The way to proceed is to expel erotic love with agapic love, “extinguish[ing] the material fire by the immaterial fire.” Chastity is “common to all the virtues” because it means that you have achieved “perfect insensibility to difference in bodies,” i.e., the sexual difference between them, but more: “the rule and limit of absolute and perfect purity is to be equally disposed towards animate and inanimate bodies, rational and irrational.” Obviously, this achievement is humanly impossible, due rather “to the presence of Him who is above nature,” stronger than nature. “He is great who remains free from passion when touched. But greater is he who remains unwounded by sight, and who has conquered the fire caused by the beauties of earth by meditation on the beauties of heaven.” By contrast, the sensual person loves bodies so much that “a kind of shameless and inhuman spirit openly asserts itself in the very feeling of the heart,” producing “a feeling of physical pain in the heart, fierce as from a blazing stove,” abandoning the fear of God and thereby the beginning of wisdom, “disdain[ing] prayer” and being “perpetually drunk with desire for creatures, rational and irrational.” In warring against ascetics, especially, those who, with God’s grace, have conquered their nature, the devil sets them to desiring “what is unnatural.” While ascetics are no longer tempted by women, they do not know, “poor things, that where a worse downfall has been prepared for them, there was no need for the lesser one.” He does not specify what the worse downfall is, and the story about St. Anthony, who lamented of a young monk that he had sinned after helping some elderly monks by miraculously bringing wild asses for them to ride, isn’t explicit, either, although Climacus hints first at bestiality, then at masturbation (“bodily intercourse is possible without intercourse with another body”). And finally, there is the sin that consists of “a flick of the mind”—a “simple remembrance with which the soul has no time to dally, since it is independent of time, unconnected with any image, impervious to analysis, and in some cases even unknown to the person himself”—the effect of “a mere glance, or touch of the hand, or hearing of a song, without any notion or thought.” In this circumstance, physical “violence in bodily prayer”—that is, “stretching out the hands, beating the breast, sincere raising of the eyes to heaven, deep sighing, frequent prostration”—will help you if you are alone. If you are with others, and such gestures are out of place, silently pray the Jesus Prayer, and “with invisible help you will invisibly drive away the invisible ones,” the demons who have taken aim at you.

Love of bodies is one kind of materialism, love of money another, amounting to an instance of the more general love of external things, which we may ‘idolize.’ “The worship of idols, a daughter of unbelief, an excuse for infirmities, a foreboder of old age, a harbinger of drought, a herald of hunger,” must be resisted as the sixteenth step. Money is indeed the proverbial root of all evils inasmuch as it “produces hatred, thefts, envy, separations, enmities, storms, remembrance of wrong, hard-heartedness, murders.” Following it, the seventeenth step is poverty, which minimizes the number of material things to which we have become attached. To become impoverished is to resign one’s cares, one’s anxieties, becoming “an unencumbered traveler” alienated from sorrow and faithful to God’s commandments. Truly, “a poor monk is lord of the world,” having “entrusted his cares to God and by faith…[having] obtained all men as his slaves” as “a son of detachment,” “pilgrims for the Lord.” The only danger in poverty comes to the one who “impoverishes himself for no reason,” unintentionally. Such a person merely “abstains from present goods and is deprived of future ones.” This is the poverty ‘moderns’ lament, as they declare ‘war on poverty.’ 

Love of money can bring “insensibility,” the “deadening of the soul and the death of the mind before the death of the body.” Such a man “is a brainless philosopher, a self-condemned commentator, a self-contradictory windbag, a blind man who teaches others to see,” a hypocrite whose “mouth prays against his passion, and his body struggles for it,” “philosophiz[ing] about death” wile “behav[ing] as if he were immortal,” “prais[ing] prayer, but run[ng] away from it as from the plague.” Climacus admits “my own powerlessness, since I am sorely afflicted with this sickness,” fighting with “with the scourge of the feat of the Lord and with unceasing prayer.” It is a “tyrant” who tells him, to “be constant in vigil, meditating on the eternal judgment; then perhaps I shall to some extent relax my hold on you.” If so, he will have taken the eighteenth step.

The prayer of “the really obedient man, his nineteenth step, can make him become “suddenly radiant and exultant,” having been “prepared and fired beforehand by his sincere service” to God and neighbor. Prayer and singing psalms in chapel is best for most, “solitary prayer [being] for the very few.” The closely related twentieth step, which encompasses first bodily and then spiritual vigil, begins with literal standing at prayer “during day and night.” We also stand while singing songs and while reading Scripture. Such pious sleeplessness in the all-night vigil can be mitigated by working with one’s hands or thinking of death, but “God accepts and values the offerings of each according to their intention and power.” And once sleep comes, “the soul which has spent all day unceasingly engaged with the word of the Lord will love to be occupied with it in sleep, too.” 

Solitaries are especially vulnerable to “unmanly and puerile cowardice,” strength being found in numbers. “Cowardice is a falling away from faith that comes from expecting the unexpected,” a “loss of conviction.” It readily comes to the man who is alone, who leaves himself open to groundless imaginings. To counter it, “do not hesitate to go late at night to those places where you usually feel afraid,” rather as someone who has a natural fear of the dark can overcome it by long walks at night. “Arm yourself with prayer,” since “it is not darkness and loneliness of place that gives the demons power against us, but barrenness of soul.” Take this twenty-first step, for the very good reason that “he who has conquered cowardice has clearly dedicated his life and soul to God.”

Traditionally, pride takes pride, if that is the right word, in being the worst of sins. Vainglory is the beginning of pride, “unholy self-esteem” a “perversion of character” that squanders the virtues won in previous struggles. It delights “at the sight of increasing virtue,” but just as “the sun shines on all alike,” so does “vainglory beam on all activities,” making them evaporate. Vainglory is idolatry aimed not outward at visible objects but at other men. “A vainglorious person is a believing idolator; he apparently honors God, but he wants to please not God but men.” His asceticism “exhausts his body” without earning him any reward from God—cheating the ascetic twice. He mouths self-depreciation, but so what? It is “he who maintains the same love for the very man who reproaches him” who exhibits genuine humility. A vainglorious man may live with the monks, “but in mind and thought he is in the world.” As his vainglory increases, “it gives birth to pride.” Stopping vainglory before it reaches that culmination is the twenty-second step.

A treatment of “mad pride” and its worst consequence, “unclean blasphemous thoughts,” accordingly follows. Pride and blasphemy are related because “pride is denial of God” and “flight from divine assistance.” To understand that one needs divine assistance requires humility. Pride affords “a foothold for satanic possession,” which is madness, the sure way to Hell. Climacus finds the beginning of mad pride in false gratitude. “I have seen people who thank God with their mouth but mentally magnify themselves.” But it is “utter madness to fancy one deserves God’s gifts.” We monks should rather “constantly be examining and comparing ourselves with the holy Fathers and the lights who lived before us,” finding “that we have not yet entered upon the path of the ascetic life, and have not kept our vow in holy fashion, and in disposition are still living in the world.” A true monk “experiences rapture of mind and sorrow of life.” He has taken the twenty-third step of overcoming pride. Blasphemous thoughts, “born from foul pride,” can be remedied by prayer. There will be times, nonetheless, when demons will push blasphemous thoughts into our minds; God forgives us for those.

The countermeasure to pride is humility, whose “precursor” is “weakness,” that is, a circumstance irremediable by the exercise of our own powers. Meekness, simplicity, and guilelessness” constitute the twenty-fourth step. They originate not in nature but from habit—for example, “praying calmly and sincerely for a troublesome neighbor.” The soul “finds rest” in a meek heart, while “a turbulent soul is a seat of the devil.” Meedness may be gained only to be lost, however. “I have seen honest sous who learnt to be evil from evil people.” Another snare is knowledge, which “puffs up many people,” although ignorance can be another: “There are here and there people who pride themselves on their ignorance.” Climacus offers a paradoxical but telling definition of “a simple-hearted monk”: he “is like a rational dumb animal, who lays his burden on his director.” “Dumb animal” in the original sense of not talking, or at least not much. “Rational” in that he understands that his director, his spiritual father, knows better than he. As for those knowledge-clever men, “a fall has often corrected” them, “giving them salvation and innocence in spite of themselves.” With divine intervention, a Saul can become a Paul.

There is humility, and then there is “sublime” or “holy” humility, “rooted in spiritual feeling.” This is the twenty-fifth step. Climacus does not attempt to describe the experience of it, which attempt would be “like a man who by words and comparisons wants to give an idea of the sweetness of honey to people who have never tasted it.” The monk who has taken this step accepts indignity “with the greatest pleasure” because it “relieves and cauterizes diseases of the soul and great sins” Such a man has jettisoned “all bad temper” and lives in “true distrust of [his] own qualities and [in] a constant desire to learn.” That is, he does not resemble a philosopher in one way—he does not rely on the unassisted power of human reason—while very much resembling a philosopher in his eros for wisdom. He desires wisdom but seeks it from God and from Godly men. Such men are now immune to “the poison of hypocrisy,” having no reason to attempt to conceal their faults. “Having in mind Christ’s passion, [they] regard themselves always as debtors.” Whatever intellectual or other natural powers they possess, they understand as “gifts of God,” and “so live as to account themselves unworthy of such wealth and each day add it to their debt.” The Socratic philosopher seeks self-knowledge; the man of holy humility understands it as “a true ideal of one’s spiritual growth and an unbroken remembrance of one’s slightest sins,” knowing that “it is better to offend men than God.” At the same time, they do not seek contention with others: “Birds fear the sight of a hawk, and those who practice humility fear the sound of argument,” which betokens prideful striving to assert the superiority of one’s own convictions over those of others.

Rationality grows beyond the step of obeying one’s spiritual father—an elder who one day will pass on—when one achieves “discernment of thoughts, passions, and virtues,” the twenty-sixth step. Discernment begins with self-knowledge, moves to “a spiritual sense that faultlessly distinguishes what is truly good from what is of nature and opposed to,” then becomes perfect in knowledge from “divine illumination,” which “can enlighten with its lamp what is dark in others.” With this step, the passions of gluttony, cupidity, and vainglory, along with those of lust, anger, despair, despondency, and pride have been “piously destroyed,” although Climacus cautions that “he who has been negligent” about the first three “will not conquer even one passion.” You can’t jump over any step on the Ladder. Conflicts with Satan come from “three generic causes”: negligence, which is “pitiable”; pride, which is “disastrous”; or “the envy of demons,” which is actually “blessed.” He explains the last, surprising, claim by first identifying the “three pits” that the demons dig for us. They try “to prevent any good at all from being done,” to frustrate us; monks should counter this “by zeal and fear of death.” They try to ensure good results will “not be done according to the will of God” but by means unacceptable to Him; monks should counter this by “obedience and humiliation.” Finally, “when these rogues fail in this too, they stand “quietly before our soul,” praising us “for living a thoroughly godly life”; counter this appeal to vanity with “unceasing self-condemnation.” (A holy man might respond to a person who praises his virtues by saying, ‘No, I am the greatest of sinners.’) “Perilous, truly perilous is the sea that we humble monks are crossing.” Our very efforts provoke the demons to redouble their efforts to ruin us. Therefore, “let us try to learn divine truth more by toil and sweat than by mere word, for at the time of our departure it is not words but deeds that will have to be shown.” Although the later Protestants will accuse such Christians as Climacus as trying to earn their way to salvation by works, not by faith, what he means is works animated by faith, and by the Word if not by words. He regards learning as a matter of such doing, not only as an act of reading or of listening. He retains profound esteem for reading and listening to the Gospel. The main virtues of which “the active life” of a Christian consists are fasting and obedience; “the first destroys sensuality, and the other reinforces this destruction with humility.” 

How is this possible, given human sin? Human beings still ‘stand a chance’ because “vice or passion is not originally planted in nature, for God is not the Creator of passions.” What is more, “there are in us many natural virtues from Him, among which are certainly the following: mercy, for even the pagans are compassionate; love, for even dumb animals often weep at the loss of one another; faith, for we all give birth to it of ourselves; hope, for we lend, and sail, and sow, hoping for the best.” And “love is a natural virtue in us,” as “the bond and fulfillment of the law,” as seen in Romans 13:10: “Love worketh not ill to his neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.” In all things, “ask yourself: Am I really doing this in accordance with God’s will?” To learn what God’s will is, first mortify your own, pray, and ask advice from the fathers “or even the brothers with humility of heart and no thought of doubt”; “God is not unjust, and will not la astray souls who with faith and innocence humbly submit to the advice and judgment of their neighbor.” As to consulting the Bible, at least “at the beginning of the monastic life some of the unclean demons instruct us in the interpretation of the Divine Scriptures,” which the Devil himself has been known to quote. “Vainglorious people and…those who have been educated in secular studies” are particularly vulnerable to their scheme of gradual deception, “lead[ing] them into heresy and blasphemy,” perhaps because vainglorious souls will find what they want to find and former secularists will likely bring un-Christian philosophic notions to their study of the Bible. “We can recognize this diabolic divinity, or rather, devilry, by the disturbances and the confused and unholy joy which are felt in the soul during the instruction.” And while it is true that “an energetic soul rouses the demons against itself,” as our “conflicts increase, so do our crowns.

Writing about the twenty-seventh step us risky. It is “the holy solitude of body and soul.” “We, who are weak and infirm, hesitate to philosophize in our discourse about the haven of solitude,” for the demons lurk around “the table of good brotherhood,” waiting to snatch a soul, “run[ning] off with it in its mouth and devour[ing] it on the quiet.” He therefore refuses to talk about peace of soul to those who have yet to attain it. He is willing, however, to “speak briefly about solitude, if only to explain what it is.” Disengagement from all worldly affairs and “earnest prayer” are the first actions to take, followed by a deliberate attempt to concentrate mind and heart on God, channeling them away from considerations of the lower things. This is difficult. “Those who are thoroughly versed in secular philosophy are indeed rare; but I affirm that those who have a divine knowledge of the philosophy of true solitude are still more rare.” Read, but “let what you read lead you to action,” for as a Christian “you are a doer,” and putting the right words “into practice makes further reading superfluous.” “Seek to be enlightened by the words of health through your labors, and not merely from books,” especially allegorical books, “because they are dark words, and they darken the weak.”

At this point on the Ladder, “holy and blessed prayer” becomes even more important as the twenty-eighth step. Prayer, “the converse and union of man with God,” which “upholds the world and brings about reconciliation with God,” yields “invisible progress” towards Him. “For him who truly prays, prayer is the court, the judgment hall and the tribunal of the Lord before the judgment to come.” Prayer should be “completely simple.” The publican and the prodigal son “were reconciled to God by a single phrase.” God knows, and so needs no elaboration. The right order of prayer is thanksgiving followed by confession, “heartfelt contrition of soul,” and then only then petition. Because “instability is natural to the mind,” you should “shut off your thought within the words of your prayer.” When distracted, return. Always remember, faithfully, that “Spirit cannot be bound, but where the Creator of the spirit is, everything obeys.”

The penultimate, twenty-ninth step is “heaven on earth,” by which Climacus means “godlike dispassion and perfection.” This is “the resurrection of the soul before the general Resurrection.” That “soul has dispassion who is immersed in the virtues as the passionate are in pleasures.” Dispassion means “to hold all persons in the same regard as inanimate things” in the sense that God is no respecter of ‘persons,’ those of high earthly rank and reputation. The humble man knows that all men are created equal, and at this step you will “have humble thoughts” even “in the midst of high undertakings and achievements.” To unite with God means disuniting with men insofar as men concern themselves with less-than-godly things, animated by less-than-godly passions.

The thirtieth and final step brings together faith, hope, and agapic love, “the supreme trinity among the virtues.” Like the Holy Trinity, these three are three-in-one, the first a ray, the second a light, the third a circle, but “in all, one radiance and one splendor.” “The first can make and create all things; the divine merc surrounds the second and makes it immune to disappointment; the third does not fall, does not stop in its course and allows no respite to him who is wounded by its blessed rapture.” Of these three, love is the greatest because it is “the progress of eternity,” ruling “over all.” 

Praying to Love, he receives an answer: “Unless you renounce your gross flesh, you cannot know my beauty May this ladder teach you the spiritual combination of the virtues.” And so Climacus calls his brothers to the ascent.

The spiritual, spirit-centered, body-sacrificing ascent John Climacus describes and defends has a ‘worldly’ or ‘secular’ dimension. It concerns the question of aristocracy. The aristocrats of antiquity and the later aristocrats of the Middle Ages were warriors. They too sacrificed their bodies—in their case, for the sake of their families, political regimes, countries, and for the sake of honor, even glory. These were men of thumos, of spiritedness, as distinguished from spirituality, holiness. Their thumos caused them to despise the dishonorable, merely mortal body. Classical philosophers attempted to steer such aspiring Homeric heroes into willing rule by philosophers, by reason (Plato, albeit with irony) or to a life of virtue (Aristotle, who understood the aristocratic regime of genuine virtue to be the rarest of all regimes). Such modern philosophers as Locke and Montesquieu attempted to steer the Christian aristocrats away from chivalric conflicts and towards the peaceful competition of commerce and industry. The strict ascetic hierarchy of the monastery that Climacus is still another attempt to re-channel honor-loving aristocrats, here a spiritual aristocracy. Tocqueville’s claim, that Christian began the long-term trend toward ‘democracy,’ i.e. social equality, became true, but not without this profoundly undemocratic claim, which goes so far as to suggest not only that many are called but few are chosen by God, but that God chooses very few, indeed, and only those who undertake a way of life that amounts to a new kind of heroism, a heroism of the spirit.