The Many Lives of Thomas More

Thomas More, in critiquing the historical work of a contemporary, wrote,

"Let historians begin to show either prejudice or favoritism, and who will there be to lend any credence at all to histories?"

This admonition could apply to most words written about More himself, whose legacy has for five centuries been the source of significant debate and even conflict. For many Catholics, More is the martyred saint who had the courage to stand up to the tyrannical King Henry VIII, while the Church was being fatally divided during the Reformation. He was the man for all seasons who was executed for refusing to violate his conscience. For Protestants, and many admirers of Hilary Mantel, he is a grubby and compromising figure whose pious support for the established church enabled him to justify the killing of brave men and women who wanted the word of God to reach the masses.

Additionally, More's most famous work, Utopia, which was published in 1516, inspires equally impassioned argument. For some readers, it is interpreted as a communist text showing the benefits of a society without personal property. For other readers, this complex work represents something of a nightmare: a police state in which individual freedom is severely limited, proper religious faith is unknown, and reason is deployed to justify oppression.

Complexity is the keyword here. More is as enigmatic and contradictory as his best-known work; however, the answer is not to take one side or another or to carve him up into easily digestible morsels. It is to accept the deeply contradictory nature of a human being living in tumultuous times. Even brilliant, otherwise rational minds can be driven—primarily by fear—to positions of hatred, violence, and obstinacy. Our vantage point of the twenty-first century invites us to sort historical figures into camps of "good" or "bad," "hero" or "villain," but that is as pernicious to our perspective on the present as it is on the past, as Thomas More himself pointed out, some 500 years ago.