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.

Pier Paolo Vergerio: The Character and Studies Befitting a Free-Born Youth. In Craig W. Kallendorf, ed.: Humanist Educational Treatises. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Having secured their position in the remains of the Roman world, Christian thinkers needed to come to terms with substantial achievements of that world—perhaps especially its philosophy, which inclined toward skepticism concerning ‘the gods.’ Christians were of course equally skeptical, indeed scornful, of pagan deities and the religious practices and institutions supporting their worship. But they surely could not tolerate skepticism directed at the God of the Bible. What other pre-Christian philosophic motifs, and what other pre-Christian arts, including the liberal arts, could be taken up without threatening one’s salvation?

Early in the third century AD, the Carthaginian theologian Tertullian answered, ‘not much’— a least when it came to philosophy. As he put it, famously, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” A millennium later, however, Thomas Aquinas thought otherwise, deploying Aristotelian philosophy to understand much of God’s creation, the natural world, while subordinating that world, and that philosophy, to God and His revelation. His friend, Bonaventure (born Giovanni di Fidanza in the early 1220s) took at different route, in effect sacralizing all the arts, including the liberal arts, by explaining them as pathways to God. He calls this “reduction” by which he does not mean diminishment, as ‘we moderns’ tend to mean. Quite the opposite: He means tracing all the arts back to their origin in God. As translator Zachary Hayes puts it in his helpful introduction, “none of the arts, including philosophy, ought to be allowed to stand as an independent and self-sufficient discipline.”

Born in Italy and educated at the University of Paris, where he joined the faculty, “The Seraphic Doctor” eventually became General Minister of the Order of St. Francis. He was by all accounts a capable administrator as well as an accomplished theologian, so his interest in practice as well as theory, and thus in the arts, came readily to him. And both theory and practice are rightly sacralized because, as the Apostle James writes, “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the God of Lights.” Multiple gifts to mankind come from a single Source, “the fontal source of light.” 

This brings Bonaventure to the first of his many divisions of his topic. There is exterior light, “the light of mechanical art”; inferior light, “the light of sense perception”; interior light, “the light of philosophical knowledge”; and superior light, “the light of grace and of Sacred Scripture.”

Mechanical light illuminates the forms of artifacts. Following Hugh of St. Victor [1], Bonaventure considers such “servile” knowledge to include weaving, armor-making, agriculture, hunting, navigation, medicine, and drama. This may seem a decidedly heterogeneous list, but they are linked together by their purposes. “Every mechanical art is intended either for our consolation or for our comfort,” banishing “either sorrow or need,” and is accordingly “either useful or enjoyable.” The strict subordination of poēsis to philosophy, seen in Plato, remains in Bonaventure.

Sense knowledge “provides light for the apprehension of natural forms.” It takes the five forms provided by the five senses. He endorses St. Augustine’s account of the senses, which holds that sight is the purest form of inferior light. If mixed with air, this light becomes sensible to hearing; if mixed with vapor, smell; if mixed with fluid, taste; and if with “the solidity of the earth,” touch. Sense knowledge is physical, “thriv[ing] in the nerves, whose nature is to be clear and penetrable.” That is, the nerves provide accurate information and the information they provide comes from the outside, in. “Because of the well-defined nature of each sense, no apprehension would be possible without a certain similarity and correspondence between the sense-organ and the object.”

It is with the interior light of “intelligible truths” that philosophy deals. Bonaventure divides philosophic inquiry into three fields: rational, “the truth of speech”; natural, “the truth of things”; and moral, “the truth of conduct.” In terms of what we call academic ‘disciplines,’ rational philosophy “enlightens the mind,” enabling it to discern “the principles of understanding”—the discipline of logic; natural philosophy enlightens the mind to discern “the causes of being”—physics, but also mathematics and metaphysics; and moral philosophy enlightens the mind respecting the order of things, which is moral or practical philosophy. Each of these kinds of philosophy guides a certain human capacity or power. Rational or “discursive” philosophy directs the interpretive power; natural philosophy “directs itself“; and moral philosophy directs “the motive power.” Physics deals with “the generation and corruption of things; mathematics deals with “abstract forms in terms of their intelligible causes,” and metaphysics deals with “the knowledge of all beings according to their ideal causes, tracing them back to the one first Principle from which they proceeded, that is, to God, in as far as God is the Beginning, the End, and the Exemplar.” Moral philosophy concerns the lives of the individual, the family, and the political community.

Rational or discursive philosophy has three aims: “to reveal one’s thought,” in which case it pertains to grammar; “to move another to greater faith,” the act of teaching, in which it pertains to logic; or “to arouse love or hatred in another,” in which it pertains to rhetoric. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric are of course three of the liberal arts; this is why for Bonaventure philosophy ranks among the ‘arts.’ Grammar enables the reasoner to apprehend; logic enables him to judge; rhetoric, to persuade. “Reason apprehends through appropriate speech, judges through true speech, and persuades through eloquent speech.” 

The exterior, inferior/sensual, and interior/intelligible forms of knowledge are all subordinate to the “superior light,” the salvific truth of sacred Scripture as given to us by the God of light. Scripture can be understood literally and spiritually. There are three ways in which it may be understood spiritually: the allegorical way, which teaches us what to believe, and whose masters are Augustine and Anselm; the moral way, which teaches us how to live, whose masters are Gregory and Bernard; and the anagogical way, which teaches how to “cling to God,” whose masters are Pseudo-Dionysius and Richard of Chichester. “But Hugh [of St. Victor] excels all three” of these pairs. At the end of times, all the lesser forms of knowledge will be destroyed, along with the world to which they pertain, followed by the new Heaven and the new Earth prophesied in the Book of Revelation. The lesser knowledges stem from God because the heavens and the earth as we know them were created by God. “All those lights had their origin in a single light” and “all these branches of knowledge are ordered to the knowledge of sacred Scripture,” “contained in it,” “perfected by it,” and “ordered to the eternal illumination by means of it.” Of them, the anagogical way of understanding Scripture brings us closest to God. 

This means that even the lowest form of knowledge, the knowledge of those who practice the mechanical arts, bring men closer to God. “Every artisan who fashions a work does so in order to derive, praise, benefit, or delight from it,” serving a “noble, useful or agreeable good.” “It was for these three reasons that God made the soul rational, namely, that of its own accord, it might praise God, serve God, find delight in God, and be at rest; and this takes place through charity,” through agapic love. “Behold,” then, “how the illumination of the mechanical arts is a path to the illumination of sacred Scripture,” manifesting as it does “true wisdom” on its own level. Accordingly, “sacred Scripture quite rightly makes frequent use” of similitudes derived from the mechanical arts. The same is true of the higher-level light of speech, reason, and persuasion—philosophy. In terms of natural philosophy, it points to the Son of God as the “art of the Father,” as Augustine calls Him, “the union of the rational soul with the material body,” the “Word of God as begotten and incarnate.” In terms of moral philosophy, which “is concerned principally with rectitude,” the rectitude of the will, its central term, right, has “three meanings.” First, it can mean something in the center of two “extreme points.” By this, Bonaventure doesn’t refer to Aristotle’s doctrine of virtue as the ‘mean between two extremes’ of deficiency and surplus but rather to God as the Beginning and the End, the Alpha and the Omega, with Christ as the “Mediator between God and humanity,” both divine and human “so that this mediator might lead humanity back to God.” Second, the right conforms “to that by which it is ruled.” “That person…lives rightly who is guided by the regulation of the divine law,” aligning his will with God’s will, God’s commands. Finally, “something is called right when its summit is raised upward, as in the case of a human being with its upright posture.” Morally, this means the condition in which “the apex of the mind itself” is “raised aloft,” toward God. “This is what actually happens when our rational nature assents to the first truth for its own sake and above all things, when our irascible nature strives after the highest generosity, and when our concupiscible nature clings to the good.” Such a nature achieve union with God, “a union which takes place through charity.” Without charity, “all knowledge is vain because no one comes to the Son except through the Holy Spirit who teaches us all the truth, who is blessed forever.“

The Renaissance Humanists take a noticeably different approach to the liberal arts and, by implication, to the arts generally. At the same time, they are not to be confused with Machiavelli, who is sometimes lumped in with them. The Humanists do not sharply separate secular and spiritual life from one another, as Tertullian and Machiavelli both do, although for radically different purposes. Nor do they attempt to thoroughly integrate secular and spiritual life in the manner of Bonaventure. 

Professor of logic at the University of Padua, papal secretary, secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, Pier Paolo Vergerio published The Character and Studies Befitting a Free-Born Youth in 1403. The free-born youth was Ubertino du Carrara, whose family ruled Padua. Vergerio recalls that Ubertino’s grandfather, Francisco the Elder, “the wisest man of his time in general knowledge,” identified “three ways that parents could help their children”: to call them by an honorable name; to settle them in a renowned city; and to instruct them in the liberal arts. Ubertino’s father had met the first two obligations, and Vergerio would assist him in the third, deploying a wise pedagogical strategy. He brings Ubertino into the liberal arts by treating like a teacher showing him the reasons for his own education. 

Of those obligations, “instruction in the honorable arts and liberal disciplines” is the most important because it enables even children of “obscure family origins and humble homelands” to overcome those disadvantages. Conversely, “if someone,” however well-born, “is not educated from youth in the liberal arts, or if he is infected with illiberal training, there is little hope that in later years, of his own accord, he can just cast aside the latter or take up the former without difficulty”; “the foundations for living well” must be laid “in youth,” the mind “trained to virtue while it is young and impressionable,” “preserv[ing] throughout life the impressions it takes on now.” A man of “lofty rank…cannot say or do anything in secret,” and so will be exposed as dishonorable if illiberal. Echoing Aristotle’s account of the great-souled or magnanimous man, Versilio tells Ubertino, “it is only fair that those who wish all the greatest things to be due themselves, be themselves obliged to excel in the greatest things.” “There is no more firm or solid rationale for ruling than this: that those who rule be judged by all to be the worthiest to rule.” Thus, Vergerio firmly links liberal education to aristocratic honor; unlike Machiavelli, a century later, he is far from advising a prince to learn “how not to be good.” On the contrary, he would have a young man who is an aristocrat ‘by convention,’ by inheritance, to aspire to become an aristocrat in Aristotle’s sense: among the few genuinely virtuous rulers.

The allusion to Aristotle is telling. Vergerio fixes his student’s attention on the classical more than the Christian virtues. Persons are “composed of soul and body”; “strength of body and intellect are “due to nature,” to which one should be grateful, “cultivat[ing] them through the right sort of studies in the liberal arts.” We, but “especially those to whom nature has given an intellect worthy of free men,” should “turn our attention particularly to those studies for which we are naturally inclined and suited, and to devote ourselves entirely to them.” Free men “should not be allowed to languish in sloth nor be caught up in illiberal affairs.”

What, then, are “the signs of a liberal temper”? A man of liberal temperament hungers for praise, being “inflamed by love of glory”; Vergerio does not expect that the young aristocrat will be a philosopher, inflamed by love of wisdom. As Plato and Cicero teach, the love of glory is “the next best motive” after the “wondrous longing for wisdom.” The young aristocrat obeys his elders, taking “good advice” from them, understanding that the young “lack experience in life and are unable to grasp rationally the true good of virtue and the face of moral rectitude.” He “always love[s] to do what is right” and, as Socrates observes in Plato’s Republic, his “naturally well-constituted mind…does not hate or scorn anyone but puts the best construction on whatever is said or done,” even as a good bodily constitution “digests everything easily and turns it into nourishment.” Indeed, Vergerio cites Socrates, who advised young men to “look at their own image in the mirror,” not in Narcissus-like self-absorption but with a mind either to make a homely appearance “attractive through their virtues or to avoid dishonoring a good appearance with vices.” Better still, he can gaze at “a living mirror,” emulating “the behavior of someone else of high character.” For their part, “older men in general should maintain at all times a consistent pattern of gravity and discretion, but especially in the presence of their juniors.” As John Locke would tell the father of the “Young Gentleman,” two centuries later, “ill patterns are surer to be followed than good precepts.” 

Youths “who are good should be strengthened and assisted through practice and precept,” while “those who are bad and blameworthy should be corrected.” Some youths of bad character “are only following their nature,” while “others lack experience” and still others “suffer from both deficiencies.” In addressing Ubertino, Vergerio particularly remarks that the young “are especially generous and liberal by nature because they have not experienced need and have not sought wealth for themselves by their own effort; it is unusual for one who has amassed wealth by his own efforts to waste it rashly,” but you, scion of Paduan lords (he implies) have obviously not expended any such efforts. Do not, therefore, confuse liberality with lavishness. Nor should you confuse magnanimity with high-spirited arrogance, becoming “rule to others, while exalting” yourself. Such youths “are quick to reveal secrets” because “they want to be seen as in the know”—lacking the discretion they will need if they are to become prudent rulers. “And because they are inexperienced at the same time, they think they tell the truth but are deceived in many things.” For these reasons, young men “should be discouraged most of all from the vanity of lying,” attempting “to get around old men with their deceptions.” Better that they “say little and to speak seldom, unless bidden to do so.” This will save them from “speaking at the wrong time” and from exposing their ignorance. 

With their lack of experience, the young are “excessively credulous.” They change their opinions easily, “since their humors are in motion due to growth and they have in abundance the heat which is the principal cause of motion,” “follow[ing] their passions above all” because “the rational powers and prudence that could moderate their desires are weak.” Accordingly, “we must take care that our young people are kept pure for as long as possible, for premature sexual activity weakens both bodily and mental strength.” Keep them busy, physically and mentally, “for leisure makes young people inclined to lust and every intemperance”; “solitude…caresses a weak mind with constant thoughts about such things and prevents it from finding diversion elsewhere.” Keep them away from wine, as well, but “above all”—and here Vergerio at last invokes piety—it is “proper for a well-educated youth to respect and practice religion and to be steeped in religious belief” (while not being “carried away into old wives’ tales”) “from his earliest youth.” But even this has a ‘humanist’ aims: “What human thing will be worthy of respect to one who holds the divine in contempt?” Warn young men against “utter[ing] curses against holy things” or “hold[ing] up sacred names to scorn” or “swear[ing] lightly of their own accord, for those who swear rashly usually swear often.” (As, one might add, also do liars.)

Youths should learn to accept criticism and admonishment. This advances self-knowledge. And “people who won’t listen to anything they dislike are the ones most vulnerable to deception,” surely a fatal flaw, especially among rulers. “Excessive parental leniency has generally softened and enervated young people,” a phenomenon “manifest in those who have been brought up in luxury under widowed mothers.” It is better to follow “the custom among certain nations” of bringing up children “outside their city, or at any rate among relatives and friends outside the home,” since “living in someone else’s home makes them less unruly and more inclined toward the better studies that we call liberal.”

By concentrating a young aristocrat’s mind on how to educate a young aristocrat, Vergerio aims at hastening the youth’s maturation. Having thus prepared his student for a liberal education by inclining him to want one, he turns to what liberal studies are. 

“We call those studies liberal…which are worthy of a free man: they are those through which virtue and wisdom are either practiced or sought, and by which the body or mind is disposed towards all the best things.” Through liberal study, “people customarily seek honor and glory which for the wise man are the principal rewards of virtue,” even as “profit and pleasure are laid down as ends for illiberal intellects.” Vergerio thus defines the purpose of liberal studies ‘aristocratically’— presenting wisdom as the quest for honor and glory, as befits the likely inclinations of his student. (It should be noted that the Carraresi family had been a major patron of the arts generally, including the liberal arts as taught at the University of Padua.) “We will not be, I say, wise in old age unless we have first begun to be wise in youth.” As an example, Vergerio cites the exchange between an old man and a young man. The old man jibed, “one who is so wise in his youth will inevitably be senile in his old age,” to which the youth replied, “So you must have been remarkably wise in your youth.” Wisdom begins with wit. 

It won’t begin at all if suppressed “by threats and floggings.” “Excessive freedom unhinges good qualities” but “sharp unrelenting criticism saps intellectual energies and quenches the little fires that nature lights in children,” who “will dare nothing” if they “fear everything.” Special care should be taken with students inclined to melancholy; “it is a good idea to give them their head to enjoy freedom and fun.” As Aristotle and, later, Robert Burton knew “a great many clever people have this sort of complexion.”

In keeping with the aristocratic ethos, the arts “that have the greatest affinity with cultivating virtue and obtaining glory” are the liberal arts and the arts of war. Your father, he tells Umbertino, wanted him to study only the arts of war (as Machiavelli would advise). But “you have embraced both with such tenacious diligence and zeal that you have left your contemporaries far behind,” not to say your ancestors, as you attempt “to add new renown in letters to your family’s old glory in arms.” You aspire not only to patronize the liberal arts but to practice them. Here, Vergerio displays his own mastery of rhetoric, carefully separating his student from his student’s father, in effect becoming his new father. While an “old Roman emperor” called the liberal arts “a poison and a public plague,” political communities “would be far more blessed, Plato says, if philosophers ruled or if their rulers happened to be philosophers,” and while “to be sure, it is true that the disciplines of letters take away neither madness nor wickedness,” they “are a great help to those who were born for virtue and wisdom, and they often provide the means for uncovering stupidity or more destructive kinds of wrongdoing,” which Socrates’ dialectical questioning indeed did. Vergerio now begins to point his student beyond the love of honor, beyond the claim that wisdom aims at glory. Indeed, “the pursuit of knowledge gives birth to wondrous pleasures in the human mind and in due course bears the richest fruits,” including a respite from the troubles of the life of ruling. “When we are alone and free from all our other cares, what better thing can we do than resort to our books.”

“What has been entrusted to books endures forever.” Sculpture, painting, architecture—the arts Renaissance rulers prized and paid for—cannot really “describe the times,” as histories can, or “readily disclose motivation in all its variety.” But it is literature that “not only renders speech but also distinguishes styles of speaking and represents people’s thoughts.” As Socrates taught, a regime might readily be seen in a polis, but it is also present in a soul. A regime is a way of life, and “what way of life…can be more delightful, or indeed more beneficial, than to read and write all the time: for moderns to understand things ancient; for present generations to converse with their posterity; and thus to make every time our own, both past and future?” 

“What a happy family books make! Absolutely honest and well-behaved,” with no “fussing, shouting, rapacity, voracity, stubbornness in the face of authority.” Perhaps the family of books is more congenial than the Carrari?

It may be that a compromise can be worked out. The study of good books might enhance the family name. Those of “truly noble mind” and those “who are obliged to involve themselves in public affairs and human communities,” can attend primarily to history, moral philosophy, and rhetoric (“which is a distinct part of civics”). Moral philosophy can provide students with “correct views”; eloquence can enable them to win over “the minds of the masses”; history “helps us with both.” History teaches “things worth knowing from many centuries,” enabling us “to produce an example to illuminate every situation,” even as Aristotelian ethics guides us to considering right conduct in every situation. Of these arts, rhetoric is the one that “has now fallen almost totally into disuse,” not only in the law courts, where advocates now content themselves and the judges merely by citing laws against one another, but also in political communities, whether of the one or the few, in which princes and lords “want an opinion explained in few words and arguments brought nakedly into council, or in republics, where “the most brilliant speakers are thought to be those who speak artlessly and at great length.” Today, “in making speeches, nearly everyone uses those arts which may be more properly described as contrary to art.”

Beyond the public realm, many more liberal arts beckon. Poetics and music, closely related, were much esteemed by the ancient Greeks, who considered no one “liberally educated unless he knew how to sing and play the lyre.” And rightly so: “not all movements of the soul, but those which accord with reason, contribute to a harmonious life,” and “the use of musical modes is highly effective in relaxing the mind and calming the passions,” if it is used for that purpose. It can also be used for the opposite purpose, as the warlike Carrari surely know.

More comprehensive than knowledge of the human things, “knowledge about nature is especially appropriate to an in conformity with the human intellect, for through this knowledge we understand the principles and processes of natural things, along with “the causes and effects of the motions and transformations of those thing which are contained in heaven and on earth.” With arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, “we are able to explain many things that generally seem miraculous to the vulgar.” As for “the divine science,” metaphysics, Vergerio gives it rather short shrift.

Each of these studies “could absorb all a man’s efforts.” It is best “to be content with modest learning,” just as it is best to be content “with modest wealth.” A man should “embrace the study most suitable to himself,” since some souls “are abstracted from sensible and material things, and more suited to understanding immaterial substances and universals,” while others incline to “busy themselves with particulars,” being “suited to practical wisdom and natural science.” (“Aristotle, indeed, being concerned with the active, civic life, believed one should not over-indulge in the liberal arts nor linger over them in pursuit of perfection,” becoming “of little use to his city.”) “People should follow the studies appropriate to their natural bent,” while selecting only the best books within their field of study. Do not attempt to “take in everything at the same time,” rendering yourself incapable of retaining anything in particular. In this and in other matters, “the easiest person to deceive is yourself.”

Vergerio concludes with advice concerning non-liberal arts which, if properly managed, need not be illiberal but can support liberal studies, now reaffirming the authority of Umbertino’s father while effectively putting him in his place. Your father “glories most in his capacity for toil,” exhibiting praiseworthy physical courage. “One must believe he fears nothing—except, perhaps, the possibility that he might die an old man.” And indeed “we should not care overmuch for life,” “bear[ing] all things with equanimity and accept[ing] death calmly, whenever it comes, even hastening to meet it when circumstance or necessity demands.” “We ought not to fear that we have perchance lived too little, but rather that we have lived too little of the life we have lived.” Teach children “from their first years the capacity to dare great things and endure difficulties.”

As to leisure: music, yes, since singing and percussion are “quite seemly,” although “whistling is less suitable to a gentleman”; dancing exercises the body but often makes young men “lustful and vain”; chess is more consonant with manliness, offering “a semblance of fighting and hostile contest,” but dice “either fosters a greed unsuited to a free person or a softness unbefitting a man.” There will be times, however, when “one needs to do absolutely nothing and be entirely free from work, so as to meet once again the demands of work and toil.” As Charles de Gaulle asked his friend, “Malraux, do you know how to do nothing?” [2]

“I have written the foregoing for you, Ubertino, as I promised at the beginning, not to remind you that you should be doing something, but to show you to yourself.” If you “follow nature’s lead,” cultivating your “native gifts,” you will not “fail yourself” but proceed to fulfill the “brilliant promise” that I see in you. “Do not be false to those outstanding qualities you possess.”

As it happened, Ubertino had little chance. Two years after this book was written, the Carrara family was hurled from rule of Padua. His father and older brothers were killed, and it is unclear what became of Vergerio’s student. What is clear that, as Vergerio hints in his encomium to books, the Character and Studies endured far longer, enjoying many printings in the fifteenth century and after. Deprived of his professorship by the conquering Venetians, Vergerio found employment with the pope.

Notes

1. On Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon, see “Reading with Hugh of St. Victor” on this website, under the category, “Philosophers.”
2. “It isn’t easy for a man to force himself into a discipline of idleness, but it essential. Life is not work: to work without stopping sends a man mad. Remember that. And to want to do so is a bad sign: those of your colleagues who could not stop working were by no means the best.” Charles de Gaulle, quoted in André Malraux: Felled Oaks: Conversation with De Gaulle. Irene Clephane and Linda Asher translation. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, p.41.

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.

The first draft of this play was written ca. 1600. It underwent subsequent revisions by Chettle, most notably by William Shakespeare, by Thomas Dekker (himself no mean playwright), by  Thomas Heywood, and by two anonymous ‘hands.’

Sir Thomas More seems never to have been produced, and there is little wonder in that. It presents a sympathetic portrait of More, whom King Henry VIII had beheaded for refusing to sign the Oath of Succession stipulating that the king’s heir would be the children of the newly crowned queen, the Protestant Anne Boleyn. Famously or notoriously, Henry had divorced his wife of many years, Catholic Katherine of Aragon, in favor of Protestant Anne. This was part of Henry’s construction of a modern state in England along the lines commended by Machiavelli in The Prince. Such a state would break from feudalism by centralizing monarchic authority; in England, it would break with the Catholic Church, as Henry founded a ‘state church,’ the Anglican Church, which he could control—again, very much in line with Machiavelli and his philosophic follower, Francis Bacon (himself a mentor of Thomas Hobbes). To refuse to sign the Oath was an act of treason against the new regime. And it in effect denied the legitimacy of Henry’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, mother of the reigning monarch, James I.  A play that put More in a favorable light attracted the keen attention of the royal censor, Edmund Tilney, who demanded substantial alterations; the project likely never reached production.

Unlike Shakespeare’s plays, Sir Thomas More isn’t divided into ‘Acts,’ instead consisting of seventeen scenes. As Professor Jowett remarks, these might be grouped into three sections, three interlinked dramas: those depicting the London riots of “Ill May” 1517, when More intervened to calm the crowd; a visit to More’s home by his fellow Christian Humanist, Erasmus, followed by a play-within-the-play staged in the home after Erasmus’s departure; and finally, the events leading to More’s execution on July 6, 1535. 

The play opens as John Lincoln, a trader in foreign goods, the Betts brothers (one a Londoner, the other a “clown” or rustic who has moved to the city) watch an argument between a Lombard banker and moneylender, Francis de Barde, and Doll Williamson, “an honest, plain carpenter’s wife,” as she describes herself (I.4-5). De Barde has made himself unwelcome. He had lured a local goldsmith’s wife to his home, probably raping her, and then audaciously charged her husband for her room and board. He is now attempting to do that to Mrs. Williamson, who is having none of it. Her husband arrives, quarreling with another Lombard, Anthony Cavaler, about two doves the Williamson had purchased and Avaler stole, justifying this by saying that pigeon meat is too good for a “coarse carpenter” (I.25). As Doll indignantly protests, one foreigner wants to take her husband’s food, another his wife. Lincoln looks on, bitterly: “It is hard when Englishmen’s patience must be thus jetted on by strangers, and they dare not avenge their own wrongs” (I.26-29). 

They dare not, because the Lombards are under the protection of the Crown. More than two centuries earlier, King Edward I had expelled Jews from England, having already begun to use resident Lombard bankers, who had emigrated from northern Italy, for the country’s financial dealings. Jews had already been subordinated throughout Europe by the Catholic Church, as the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 had banned them, along with Muslims, from holding public office and required them to wear identifying badges. Since Roman Catholic canon law banned Christians from lending money at interest, a necessary practice that had been taken up by Jewish people—much to the benefit of England but much to the irritation of those who preferred not to pay their debts—someone had to replace them. The Lombards proved no more popular than the Jews, partly because debtors still preferred not to reimburse creditors and partly because they abused their protected status, as the outrages of de Barde and Cavaler exemplify.

George Betts dares to intervene on the Williamsons’ behalf, to the outrage of de Barde, who threatens to call no less a personage than the Lord Ambassador to see Betts punished. That’s enough for Doll, who tells de Barde, “Hands off, proud stranger, or, by Him that bought me, if men’s milky hearts dare not strike a stranger, yet women will beat them down ere they bear these abuses” (I.63-66). And the same goes for you, caviling Cavaler. “If our husbands must be bridled by law, and forced to bear your wrongs, their wives will be a little lawless, and soundly beat thee” (I.74-76). Such threats recall the depredations of the Maenads of Greek legend, who tore to pieces the Theban king, Pentheus, and the poet, Orpheus. The Maenads were followers of the god, Dionysus, no respecter of law; they lived in the woods outside cities, far from civility. Despite this show of pagan rage, Doll is also the person who cries out to Jesus and the Virgin Mary; this will prove important, later. For now, we are left to wonder if her Christian words betoken superstition, merely.

The Lombards beat their strategic retreat in search of the Lord Ambassador, while Doll laments, loudly, “I am ashamed that free-born Englishmen, having beaten strangers within their own bounds”—the Spanish, the French—should “thus be braved and abused by them at home” (I.80-83). Her husband’s friend, Mr. Sherwin, defends Englishmen’s honor, protesting that “It is not our lack of courage in the cause, but the strict obedience that we are bound to.” As the goldsmith wronged by de Barde, I too have suffered these injustices, “but how to redress yours or mine own is a matter beyond all our abilities” (I.84-88). 

“Not so, not so, my good friends,” Lincoln says (I.89). We can bypass the secular authorities because the Catholic Church has an independent voice and authority. He intends deliver “a bill of our wrongs” to the preachers who speak at the Easter Week services outside the church of St. Mary of the Hospital. Dr. Standish won’t preach on it, but his colleague Dr. Beal will, doing “as much as a priest may do” (I.112). Lincoln already has his appeal to public opinion written. It calls upon “the worshipful lords and masters of this city” to “take compassion over the poor people your neighbors”; “aliens and strangers eat the bread from the fatherless children and take the living from all the artificers, and the intercourse from all merchants,” whereby “craftsmen be brought to beggary and merchants to neediness” (I.118-129). If commoners are “knit and united to one part,” setting “their willing power for remedy, and not suffer the said aliens in their wealth,” the “natural-born men of this region” will no longer “come to confusion” (I. 130-134). The follow-on to this organizing, George Betts adds, will be to organize the allies thus won over, then to riot on May Day, the traditional day for apprentice celebrations. The Williamsons agree to join the plot. 

That is, the law, enforced by the monarchic regime, which already intends to break with the Catholic Church, reducing its authority in favor of a state-established church, favors the financial and commercial activities of a protected class of foreigners who serve the needs of that state. Although at least one woman would counter this with Dionysiac frenzy, the leader of the men has a plan. He will attempt to trump the law by appealing to the people through the churchmen over and beneath the statesmen. At least one of the churchmen will go along, acting on the Christian principle of compassion or charity, and perhaps because he sees Henry VIII’s intention to undermine the Catholic Church in favor of an English version of Machiavelli’s lo stato. In this, Lincoln will appeal to nationhood, Englishness, against foreign interlopers who test Englishmen’s patience by tyrannizing freeborn men and women under legal protection. This is an appeal to nature over convention, law—an appeal to the rights of natural-born English of this region against men whose ancestors arrived much more recently, men who are foreigners in the eyes of the native sons.

At the Court of Sessions, the Sheriffs’ Court held in the City Guildhall, the Lord Mayor (John Rest of the Grocers’ Company), Justice Suresby and several unnamed colleagues, and two sheriffs, one of them Thomas More, are hearing the case of Smart v. Lifter (an appropriately named habitual thief). In this time and place, the convicted cutpurse faced the death penalty, although the law classified their crimes as petty. With the permission of the Court, More interrogates Lifter privately. More wants to give some much-needed moral instruction to self-assured Justice Suresby, who has argued that Smart is even more culpable than Lifter because he had tempted him by flashing a large “sum of money” (II.56). As he puts it, intending a mot, “knaves and fools meet when purses go” (II.146). More has a prank to play on Suresby and asks Lifter (whom he has often “saved…from this place” and therefore can trust him) to help with the setup, in exchange for getting him exonerated. “As I am a Christian and a man, / I will procure thy pardon for that jest” (II.59-60). A Christian and a man: as a Christian, More will not lie to him and desires to give the judge a lesson in humility; as a man, he enjoys a good joke. While initially skeptical (“You are too deep for me to deal withal,” please to not go about “to undermine my life”), Lifter agrees, once More explains his plan (II.65-67). First, “I am a true subject to my king” (II.68)—a point of some importance, as events will unfold—and “all that I am at is a merry jest. / Perform it, Lifter, and expect my best.” (II.75-76). That is, More is a man of loyalty, wit, and wisdom—a rare combination of virtues. The plan is to get Lifter alone with Suresby, giving the skilled pickpocket an opportunity to lift his purse. No fool, Lifter sees More’s intention: “to check the folly of the Justice / For blaming others in a desperate case / Wherein himself may fall as soon as any.” (II. 92-94). The crime is serious (“desperate”), the jest is witty, but the purpose of the jest is also seriously and wisely intended as a lesson in Christian humility. More wants what is good for the soul of Suresby. 

The plot goes as planned. Unknowingly shorn of his purse, Justice Suresby re-joins his colleagues and intones a rebuke to plaintiff Smart: “Wise men look to their purses well enough” (II.147). When he discovers his own purse to be missing, More closes the trap, using Suresby’s argument about incaution against him. “Being a wise man”—that is, prudent, a man of practical wisdom—and “a magistrate,” More exclaims, as if surprised, how could you “trust your purse with such a liberal sum” of money? “‘Fore God, it is a shame / With such a sum to tempt necessity.” (II.168-171). That is, the natural virtue of prudence ought to inform Suresby’s conventional, civil role as a magistrate, wherein he must make distinctions based upon chance, choice, and necessity as they bear upon those who appear before him. Echoing Suresby’s argument against Smart, and wittily bringing a larger civil-social circumstance into consideration, More presses on: “What makes so many pilferers and felons / But these fond baits that foolish people lay / To tempt the needy, miserable wretch?” (II.175-177). Suresby gets the joke and takes the lesson. In case he doesn’t, the Lord Mayor needles him further, saying “Master Suresby, it is strange, / You being a man so settled in assurance / Will fall in that which you condemned in other” (II.191-194). More duly returns the money to the hapless judge, and the case is closed, with justice wittily tempered by mercy for all concerned, including the lead judge. With this scene, the playwrights have given us much of what we need to know about Thomas More.

Meanwhile, in the King’s Court, a cast of notables has assembled: George Talbot (Earl of Shrewsbury), a firm royalist, Henry Howard (Earl of Surrey)—the humanist poet whose sonnets are still read in English literature classes to this day, typically paired with those of his contemporary and fellow humanist, Thomas Wyatt—Sir Thomas Palmer—a soldier and friend of the king—and Sir Roger Cholmley—a member of the royal Council. [1] Concerned by the “frowning vulgar brow,” the “displeased commons of the City” and their unrest, Talbot solicits advice from Palmer and Cholmley (III.4). Surrey, for his part, deplores the “high-crested insolence” of the foreigners, who are ungrateful to the king for his permission to live and profit in London (III.12). They are tempting the native commoners to unrest; that is, this case is a larger-scale parallel to Smart v. Lifter. De Barde is suing Sherwin, demanding interest on a loan, much to Surrey’s displeasure, and all the men suspect the foreigner of sexual advances toward the wives of Englishmen. “If English blood be once up,” Surrey warns, “I fear me much,” as “some of these saucy aliens for their pride / Will pay for’t soundly, wheresoe’er it lights,” and “this tide of rage, that with the eddy strives, / I fear me much will drown too many lives.” (III.57-63). More-like, Cholmley assigns some blame to Shrewsbury and Surrey themselves. “Men of your place and greatness are to blame” because you have “not informed” His Majesty “of this base abuse” (III.65-67). If Henry knew of these “daily wrongs,” “I know his gracious wisdom / Would soon address it” (III.69-70). This links Henry to More as a man of justice, wisdom, and graciousness. It also means that the regime of the modern state that Henry is building has malfunctioned. The aristocrats should act as links between the people and the monarch. They are the ones who manage estates, governing the people. With political centralization, the upper levels of the aristocracy have a weakened connection to the provinces; it is to be noted that the lower-level aristocrat, Cholmley (a mere ‘sir,’ no ‘lord’) is the one who sees this. Additionally, with statist centralization will come urbanization; commercial London becomes an ever more important source of revenue for the Crown. But native-born Englishmen, Catholics, may not perform the crucial function of lending money at interest. To meet this problem, English monarchs have given this function to foreigners who have no ties of affection to the people, unlike the landed aristocrats. To them, the English are the foreigners—in England. They are oligarchs, out to exploit the lower orders. And they operate under royal protection, at least so long as Henry doesn’t know what they’re doing. 

A messenger arrives to report, “The City is in an uproar” (III.74). Sure enough, Dr. Beal has indeed published a “bill of wrongs,” presumably the bill that Lincoln had drawn up, with exactly the effect Lincoln had desired (III.80.). Surrey suggests that his fellow humanist, Thomas More, who is in “especial favor with the people,” might “prevail more than we can with power” (III. 87, 90). Shrewsbury concurs. That is, Surrey—a poet, a man of words—wants More to use words, calming rhetoric, to counter the incendiary words of Lincoln, mouthed by the preacher. Rightly chosen words, a rhetoric of peace, may prove more effective that “we can with power” (III.90). Lord Shrewsbury concurs, urging haste in view of the impending violence. 

His fears are justified. Lincoln, the Betts brothers, the Williamson (Doll arrayed in military attire), and Sherwin intend to lead an attack on the Dutch and French enclave, exacting rough justice on their abusers. Impassioned Clown Betts avers, “We are free-born / And do take scorn / To be used so” (IV.13-15). As before, it is Lincoln who proposes a strategy—he, too, has a sort of prudential wisdom, if of a low level, and the grievances he addresses are very real, as acknowledged by the aristocrats, as well. Since the authorities know about the uprising and the foreigners have already fled, he argues, we should burn their houses. The fires will keep the Mayor’s forces busy. Clown Betts likes this ‘middling’ way between swords and words, but Sherwin and Doll Williamson caution that Englishmen’s houses might burn, too. They are overridden by Lincoln and Betts. “If hanging come, ’tis welcome; that’s the worst,” Clown Betts avers (IV.81). He is willing to lose his property and even die for his rights as an Englishman, a willingness that foreshadows but will also contrast with the future self-sacrifice of Thomas More.

More himself, the Lord Mayor, and Sir John Munday, a London alderman injured in the riot, are now conferring [2]. The rebels have broken into Newgate prison, releasing the inmates, who include “felons and notorious murderers” (V.21). They threaten the lives and properties of the foreigners, undermining the rule of law. Shrewsbury, Surrey, Palmer, and Cholmley join them, having been dispatched by the king to deal with the rioters. However, “in God’s name,” “the King laments if one true subject bleed,” Shrewsbury tells them (V.34). More, a jurist as well as a sheriff, interjects, “My lords, I doubt not but we shall appease / With a calm breath this flux of discontent” (V.38-39). Against Lincoln and Clown Betts, then, he will oppose words to both swords and fire. “Let’s to these simple men, for many sweat / Under this act [i.e., the riot] that knows not the law’s debt / Which hangs upon their lives” (V.42-44)—a suggestion to forgive those who know not what they do. “For silly men / Plod on they know not how; like a fool’s pen”—an instrument of unwisdom—that, “ending, shows not any sentence writ / Linked but to common reason or slightest wit” (V.44-47). This likely allusion to the Lincoln/Beal document might also glance at the manuscript of the play itself, whose authors had better take care not to stir up more trouble than they intend with this treatment of supremely sensitive political and spiritual themes. Both the treatment of the rioters and the writing of the play will require wisdom and wit, consistently combined. Therefore, More continues, let us act and speak “I’God’s name on, to calm our private foes”—the rioters are private men, subjects of the King, not rulers like themselves—and do so “with breath of gravity, not dangerous blows” (V.51). That is, the King’s intention at this point comports entirely with that of Thomas More, and so does their motive, namely, Christian mercy for justly aggrieved English men and women. Shrewsbury says that “the King laments if one true subject bleed” (V.34). He and More are both true subjects, as are most of the foolish rioters, but Henry will come to doubt More’s fidelity, and therefore will make him bleed.

Scene Six, attributed to Shakespeare, begins with chief conspirator Lincoln calling for peace, so that he can be heard. He cites inflationary food prices caused by the foreigners as another of their grievances. Attempting a logical syllogism, he begins with the major premise: “Our country is a great eating country,” Lincoln rightly observes (VI.8). “Argo they [the foreigners] eat more in our country than they do in their own,” with the resulting scarcity driving up prices for us (VI.9). But this reasoning based on appetite quickly descends into a dubious set of contentions about how the foreigners have introduced root vegetables into the country (parsnips are especially to be dreaded), a supposed source of disease which in turn is somehow connected, or perhaps analogous, to the political disease afflicting London.

Lincoln’s effort to rule by rather loose reasoning does little to quiet the mob he has gathered. A messenger from King Henry then arrives, offering the King’s mercy. Interpreting this as an attempt to throw him and his followers off-balance (this, assuming that they are on balance), Lincoln replies with some insolence that they will accept it but still “show no mercy upon the strangers” (VI.26); he may be a determined Englishman, but his Christianity is in doubt. To this, the king’s man makes the mistake of calling the rebels simple, for which insult they begin to close in on him, necessitating his rescue by the Lord Mayor and his allies. Going from the messenger’s insult to flattery, addressing the seditionists as “masters,” Shrewsbury and Surrey call for order, but the citizens cannot agree on which one to hear. Now recognizing that his followers have careened out of control, Lincoln questions their “wisdom,” which Surrey then denies altogether (VI.41). More remarks, “Whiles they are over the bank of their obedience,” like a chaotic flood, “Thus will bear down all things” (VI.47-48). Their disorder threatens the state and regime. Knowing More’s credit with the many, Lincoln asks if they should let him speak, a thought heartily seconded by Doll Williamson. She is grateful to him for appointing her brother to a position of watchman for the City. The crowd agrees to hear from him.

More tells Lincoln to command the crowd to be silent, to which the ringleader protests that the Devil himself “cannot rule them” (VI.63). To that serious admission, More replies, with telling logic—better than any Lincoln has displayed—”Then what a rough and riotous charge have you / To lead those that the devil cannot rule” (VI.64-65). This is the beginning of the rule of reason in service of the rule of law. It is also the beginning of a Christian turn, as Doll Williamson swears “by th’ mass” that the “good housekeeper” More can be trusted (VI.67-68). When the citizens cry “Peace, peace!” More, echoing the Biblical rebuke of unpeaceable ones who raise that cry, rejoins, again with logic, “Look what you do offend you cry upon; / That is the peace” (VI.71-72). He sets out their self-contradiction. What is more, you violate “the peace wherein you have till now grown up,” a peace that, had it “been ta’en from you,” the resulting “bloody times / Could not have brought you to the state of men” (VI.75-77). Not only does their cry contradict their actions, but the consequences of their actions contradict their intention, which is to improve their condition. Prudently, rather than calling them simple he expresses compassion: “Alas, poor things! What is it you have got / Although we grant to get the thing you seek?” (VI.78-79). George Betts, Clown Betts’s more civilized older brother, knows the answer to that one: “Marry, the removing of the strangers” (VI.80). 

More then joins him in a public deliberation. If the foreigners are removed, their children suffering as they leave, and your “opinions” now wear the royal “ruff” of supreme authority, if “this your noise / Hath chid down all the majesty of England,” and “you sit as kings in your desires”—not in reason—with “Authority quite silenced by your brawl,” what then “have you got?” (VI.83-84, 88-90). You will have “quelled” order itself by “insolence and strong hand” because you will have set an example by which “Not one of you should live an aged man,” since “other ruffians, as their fancies wrought, / With selfsame hand, self reasons, and self right, / Would shark on you, and men, like ravenous fishes, / Would feed on one another” (VI.91-95). This is the same kind of argument he had used against too-sure Suresby. You must know yourselves before you judge others, perhaps the true meaning of “Judge not, that ye be judged.” Ordinarily, what is quelled is a riot, but these rioters are quelling injustice with injustice, and so quelling nothing, as they can see if they follow More’s reasoned speech. To her great credit, Doll Williamson does follow it: “Before God, that’s as true as the gospel.” The God who is Logos is a logical, a reasonable, God. George Betts too is persuaded (VI.99). The core group of conspirators has fractured; More has divided them and soon will conquer. 

More can now address the crowd as his “good friends” (VI.102). Friendship is friendship in reasoned word and in Logos, the supremely reasonable Word that is God. The crowd’s “innovation,” their violation of the English law, albeit in the name of natural rights, rights of native Englishmen, is “a sin / Which oft th’apostle did forewarn us of, / Urging obedience to authority”; “you were in arms ‘gainst God” (VI.105-109), against the stern admonition of the Apostle Paul (Romans 13:1-2). God has endowed the King with an office to which He has “lent” his own power to inspire fear, ensure justice by commanding and enforcing it (VI.111-112). God “hath bid him,” the King, “rule, and willed you to obey” the man to whom he has given “His own name,” that of “a god on earth” (VI.114-118). That is, More is fully aware of the Biblical command to subjects of kings to obey political authorities who do not wield the sword in vain. You who rise against the king God has installed rise against God Himself. This is not only an appeal to physical fear but to spiritual prudence: “What do you to your souls / In doing this?” (VI.120-121). Thankfully, like God, the king will meet repentance with mercy. “To kneel to be forgiven / Is safer wars than ever you can make / Whose discipline is riot”—a vivid illustration of their self-contradiction (VI.125-126). In fact, your very rebellion “cannot proceed but by obedience” to a demagogue, obviously a false freedom for professedly freedom-loving Englishmen (129). As for your “rebel captain,” Lincoln, “who will obey a traitor?”—a question Lincoln himself has already answered, against himself (VI.130, 132). You kill the foreigners and destroy and/or seize their houses, “lead[ing] the majesty of the law” on a leash and then letting the law “slip…like a hound” (VI.137). Behind the majesty of the King is the majesty of God and another majesty, the English law. You disobey the one and make a travesty of the other. 

Moreover, as punning Shakespeare might have it, if the King exiles you, given “the nature of your error,” what country would take you, other than some enemy of England, where you would now be the foreigners? (VI.142). Your “mountainous inhumanity” will cause foreign nations to treat you as inhuman, to “spurn you like dogs” (VI.VI.156, 151). “All citizens” acclaim this as true: “Let’s do as we may be done by,” first as Christians, then as human beings, and as finally as law-abiding Englishmen (VI.158). Prudently (having been brought to reasoning by More), they ask for pardon, and More assures them that “mercy will be found if you seek it”—again, as Christianity teaches (VI.164-165). Fittingly, it is Doll Williamson who congratulates him, acknowledging that he has “done more with thy good words than all they could do with their weapons” (VI.187-188). Just so. Cautiously, she adds that if he betrays them, of there are no pardons, “by the Lord, I call thee a plain cony-catcher,” a cheat. The soldier Palmer, a man of force, concurs: “You have redeemed us from much threatened blood” by using “eloquence” instead of “steel” (VI.202-203). Meanwhile, Lord Shrewsbury stipulates, “let them be sent to several prisons,” where they will be well treated (VI.168). 

Congratulated by More, who describes himself as motivated by love of country and care for the City of London, and considers himself only God’s “instrument,” the aristocrats concur with his advice that guards be placed at the London city gates as a precautionary measure (VI. 206). Shrewsbury reports the good news to Henry, then returns to announce the King’s “loving thanks” and More’s reward, a knighthood (VI.217). And better, he has been appointed to the King’s Privy Council. “Stale custom” would have him (Protestant-like?) refuse the office because of his “imperfections, in a show of excess humility”; the ancients would have credited their own virtue for such a well-deserved honor, in an exhibition of pagan pride; a Machiavellian would have attributed it to his virtù; but More shows how a Christian conceives of political authority—as service to higher authority. “My service is my king’s,” since “life or death hangs on our sovereign’s eye,” as indeed it will prove to do (VI.235-236). (As the Apostle Mark observes, “Even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”) (Mark 10:45). While on the Council, “My studious thoughts shall tend the City’s good,” although he recognizes that “New days beget new tides” and “Life whirls ’bout fate, then to a grave it slides” (VI.254-255).

At the order of the Privy Council, Lincoln is to be hanged, forthwith. On the scaffold, he repents. “I was the foremost man in this rebellion, /And I the foremost that must die for it” (VII.47-48). While “I must confess I had no ill intent /But against such as wrong us overmuch,” he now understands “that private men” should not “carve out their redress / Which way they list,” that witnesses to his punishment should learn that “obedience is the best in each degree”—that is, each person ought to obey the authorities in accordance with his civil-social status (VII.54-58). “I patiently submit me to the law” while forgiving those who caused his transgression of it; “and, as a Christian, truly from my heart, / I likewise crave they would forgive me too”(VII. 60-63). Doll Williamson delivers a short eulogy: “Say all what they can, / Thou lived’st a good fellow, and died’st an honest man” (VII.70-71).

She then learns of More’s elevation to the Privy Council. More is “honest,” like Lincoln, but also “wise” and “well-spoken”—worthy of the position (VII.101). But how honest, and how good a fellow? “I would “praise his honesty much more / If he had kept his word and saved our lives” (VII. 102-103). She readies herself for death as a Christian, knowing “I do owe God a death” (VII.112), and for her husband’s death, hoping that their two children will be adopted by “some good honest friend / To bring them up in charitable sort” (VII.116-117). And “So long as I an Englishman can see, / Nor French or Dutch shall get a kiss of me”; say “I died in scorn to be a stranger’s prey” (VII.128-129). 

But it transpires that More is indeed an honest man. The news comes: at More’s entreaty, “humbly upon his knee,” the King has pardoned everyone (VII.144). Surrey tells them that “his highness’ clemency and mercy” have saved them from “the sharp rod of justice” (VII.158, 162). In this, the King imitates God, who checks “awe-full justice” with “mercy”—both justice and mercy evidence of His, and his, majesty. God chooses kings with the intention of seeing them display Godlike virtues. Like God, the King “looketh through a veil of sufferance / Upon the frailty of the multitude,” forgiving them for “striking with the hand of public hate” and “giv[ing] you life,” in exchange for which beneficence all of you should pray for him to live long (VII.169-170, 174). And they do, shouting, “God save the King, / My good Lord Chancellor, and the Earl of Surrey!” (VI.175-176). 

These first seven scenes of the play might be thought of as an “Act” relating a single set of events in the drama, with Lincoln and his followers rising then falling, and with More rising in his public career to the height of Lord Chancellor precisely because he governed the fall of those who had assaulted the rule of king, God, and English law with prudence and charity, bringing right order back to the regime. Because justice and the law can conflict, men and women may seek redress beyond the law. But by so doing, they commit acts of injustice, becoming inhumane. Further, by violating the law they injure themselves in the long run, even if they right the immediate wrongs, because the rule of law prevents the stronger from destroying the weaker, the bigger fish from swallowing the smaller fish. The legal rights of Englishmen thus can cut both ways, for and against justice, but the rule of law is more just ‘in the long run.’ God ordains obedience to lawful authority for that reason. 

There is still another paradox, which Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights may or may not have foreseen clearly. By invoking their Englishness against their unjust tormenters’ foreignness, they invoke a sort of nationalism or patriotism that comports not so much with Catholic Christendom but with the modern state that Henry VIII intends to found. Nationalism follows statism. It is internationalism, the universality of the Catholic Church, that follows Christianity. Machiavelli was no friend of Christianity, or of the small states and feudal orders Christendom favored. Henry is consistent, as he will install himself as the head of Christianity in England, the head of the national, Anglican, Church. Thomas More is also consistent, as he will defend the authority of the Pope, head of the international, universal, Catholic Church. The people are not consistent, and do not know they are not consistent. With logic, More teaches them the reasonable way that consists with Christendom. He will now find himself fatally in conflict with a form of Protestant Christianity, one that protests not against state authority but reinforces such authority, in the name of Christianity.

Scene 8 is the first scene set in a private home, Thomas More’s home in Chelsea. The remaining scenes in the play will alternate between the private and the public. This public man has a family life, but he is now alone, a man who loves his household who is now in high public office. In his soliloquy, he recognizes that God has ordained his elevation to great authority. “That which we profanely term our fortunes”—as Machiavelli does, preparatory to tempting princes to master them— is really “the provision of the power above, / Fitted and shaped just to that strength of nature / Which we are born with” (VIII.2-5). Divine providence accounts both for events and the nature that fits us to discharge the responsibilities those events impose upon us. Providence has elevated him from “an humble bench of birth,” from nature as conceived in the people’s minds, by nativity, to the role of a lawgiver as well as one obedient to the law (VIII.6). By that nature, he owes respect to his “elder kinsmen,” and especially his father (VIII.10). Along with this humility, he reminds himself that the more honor, the higher office, wealth, and calling he may attain, “the more do thou in serpents’ natures” notice; therefore, prudently “fear their gay skins with the thought of their sharp state” (VIII.17-18) and be guided by the maxim that “to be great” is like a tightly spun thread, “great wound up, greatly undone” (VIII.19, 21). 

But for now, More will stage another piece of Christian merriment, another joke like that enjoyed at Suresby’s expense, but now with a genuinely fine man, Erasmus—a foreigner and indeed a Dutchman, like some of the unjust sharpers, but also a great humanist. Or is he? More will test him, now that Erasmus is about to be his house guest. Can Erasmus “distinguish merit and outward ceremony,” appearance from reality? With his manservant, Randall (and as he had done previously with the thief, Lifter), he devises a play within the play, a witty test now not of foolish certainty but of humanist wisdom, discernment. 

Before that, however, he acts in accordance with another reality—namely, that appearance at times betokens reality. The local sheriff enters with a ruffian named Falconer, who, like Lincoln, is accused of inciting a riot. Falconer is a scruffy fellow, long haired—this being “an odious sight” in More’s eyes (VIII.121). “Sirrah,” he tells him, “great sins are bred / In all that body where there’s a foul head” (VIII.127-128). Proper grooming betokens a certain self-care—civility, not barbarism. In this sense, appearance can be telling. With that, he sends Falconer off to his just punishment. Unlike the rioters, Falconer’s sinfulness has little or no spice of outraged decency.

Erasmus arrives, escorted by Surrey, who introduces More to him with an encomium, “He’s great in study: that’s the statist’s grace / That gains more reverence than the outward place” (VIII.136-137). The inner is what’s worthy, more than the outer. But this is not More; it is Randall, dressed as More, an inferior inner man appearing as the greatly virtuous man. Surrey remarks that the scholarly study in which More is great is the study of “the general watch of England,” guarding “the Prince’s safety and the peace / That shines upon our commonwealth” in his “loyal industry” (VIII.147-149). Erasmus admires a man whose very gatekeeper, as he has witnessed, greets visitors “in Latin good phrase,” a reflection on the master of a civil household (VIII.155). He begins to address Pseudo-More (call him ‘Less,’ perhaps?) in elegant Latin, only to be told that the master has “foresworn speaking” in Latin, the language of civility as against the ‘bar-bar’ speech of barbarians (VIII.164). Discerning Erasmus immediately questions whether this is really Thomas More. Surrey hastens to explain this away to the surprised Erasmus: “He’s ever furnished / With these conceits,” these playful inventions (VIII.170-171). Randall himself tells Erasmus that he loves a “parlous wise fellow”—wise in speech, witty—who “smells of a politician” (VIII.175). At this, the real More enters, bidding his “fool” to retire, telling his “loving, learned friends,” his fellow humanists, that the glittering appearance of “base illiterate wealth” is esteemed “whilst men of schools,” of humanist learning, “shrouded in poverty” and “counted as fools”—very much as Christians are (VIII.184-185). Scholars and Christians do not care so much for wealth, for worldly things. Erasmus delights in the joke. Melancholy is the scholar’s danger, “chok[ing] the passages / Of blood and breath” (as that magnificent eccentric, Robert Burton, would propound at witty length, in a subsequent century). [3] While “study should be the saddest”—that is, the most serious—time of life, a heightened spirit “lengthens our days with sportful exercise” such as this (VIII.194-196). More is a merry scholar, a Christian scholar confident that life in this world can look forward to life in the City of God, when life on earth is over.

Then More turns to Surrey, addressing him as “my noble poet,” and Surrey laments that “poets were ever thought unfit for state,” unlike the sportive jurist, More. Surrey’s friend adjures him not to pour such contempt on “fair poesy, ” the “sweetest heraldry of art / That sets a difference ‘tween the tough, sharp holly / And tender bay tree”—that is, between harsh statecraft and poetic harmony and grace (VIII.202-207), but Surrey continues his lament, saying that the liberal arts practiced by humanists are being eclipsed by “mechanical sciences” (VIII.208), the philosophic promoter of which will be Shakespeare’s contemporary, Francis Bacon. True enough, More replies, but “the reason / This is no age for poets” is that it has seen no heroes, no great kings—this, a measuring glance at Henry. But no matter, in the More household tonight, Surrey will be king, “master of my house” as they listen to “the Muses’ music” to “cheer our spirits” (VIII.217, 219). The food may not be sumptuous “where scholars sit,” but the courses will be seasoned with wit (VIII.220). Henry is a Machiavellian-Baconian builder of an unpoetic modern state. He replaces Roman Catholicism with a civil religion, Anglicanism, making himself the head of the new, statist church. That state will undermine the Christian family in which More takes such delight. That is, in the Christian Aristotelianism of the English old regime, the right government of the soul, seen in More, the right government of the family, seen in More’s household, and the right government of the political community (promised by More’s elevation to the position of Lord Chancellor) are being eroded by individuals like Falconer and monarchs like Henry.

Before dinner, Falconer is brought back. He’s undergone a haircut and requests a second hearing. As a result of this gentle form of beheading, I am “a new man, my lord,” he announces—cleaned up, if not baptized. That’s good enough for gracious More: “Thy head is for thy shoulders now more fit: / Thou has less hair upon it, but more wit” (VIII.247-248). As a low-life version of witty More, Falconer finds pardon in the court of the Christian humanist, who plays the role of his own future judge, Henry, but with considerably more justice, wisdom, and mercy. Falconer thus escapes the beheading More will suffer.

The ninth, central scene of the play, features another play within the play. By now, Erasmus has departed, returning to the continent. New guests are expected: the Lord Mayor (still grateful to More for his role in ending the disorders of “Ill May”) and his wife—a happy event since, as More says of himself, “More’s heart lives by good company” (IX.17). He will arrange the seating of the male guests, as “Men can best order men” (IX.32). Fortuitously, a troupe of itinerant actors arrives, offering to entertain the guests. From their repertoire, More selects a play titled The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom. “The theme is good, / And may maintain a liberal argument”: “To marry wit to wisdom asks some cunning. / Many have wit that may come short of wisdom.” (IX.65-70). The marriage of wit and wisdom is central to the central scene of the play, Sir Thomas More. Will the author of this play consummate the advertised marriage, or will he prove impotent when it comes to prudence? 

A contretemps ensues, the play delayed because the boy who will play the character, Wit, lacks part of his costume, a beard that betokens the age that may come with wisdom. More pounces, addressing the player who will portray Inclination: “Wit’s Inclination may gallop so fast that he will outstrip wisdom and fall to folly” (IX.157-158). Just so, the player admits, but in the play he will succumb to Lady Vanity, since “we have no Folly in our play” (IX.159-160). If so, More tells him, “There’s no wit in it,” as “Folly waits on wit as the shadow on the body, and where wit is ripest, there folly still is readiest” (IX.161-163). Better have a player without a beard play Wit than a Wit who is all beard and no brain—perhaps a bit like Falconer, deserving of pardon but not of admiration. And so the play begins.

The player taking the role of Prologue deplores the fact that today, “throughout the whole world in every land,” not only England, “Vice doth increase and virtue decays” (IX.173-174). How has this happened? Because, as Wit recalls, I have “dreamed fast of mirth and play,” since “In youth is pleasure, in youth is pleasure” (IX.186-187). More whispers to the Lord Mayor, “What will [Wit] be by that time he / comes to the commodity of a beard?” (IX.197-198). Before that can happen, Inclination passes off Lady Vanity as Wisdom, gulling young Wit. Since the player who was sent to retrieve the missing beard has yet to arrive, and he was the one slotted to play Good Counsel, More takes that part. He exposes Lady Vanity as an impostor Wisdom—as so much that passes for wisdom is—and tells foolish young Wit, “Be ruled by me” (IX.270). He invokes the distinction between appearance and reality. “Wit, judge not things by the outward show. / The eye oft mistakes, right well you do know,” well, now that you have been goodly counseled (IX.279-280). At this point, the player, Luggins, arrives belatedly, lugging the beard that was to have betokened Good Counsel. Since More had already played Good Counsel, neither the boy-player nor the prop-beard are needed. Having taught the lesson of the play, More calls his guests to the banquet, which will begin after the player who played Wit alerts him to fact that they have not received full payment. That is, Wit counsels More well, appealing to his sense of justice. More praises him for that, then sets things right by adding to the payment and punishing the unjust servant: a just conclusion to this morality play that the host has cut short. The marriage of wit and wisdom has occurred, in the soul of Thomas More and in his household for the edification for the assembled public men. If the family is the microcosm of the political community, More shows that he can make a sound Lord Chancellor, replacing the corrupt Lord Wolsey. The advent of the modern state has brought the increase of vice and the decay of virtue; More might have remedied that, in England.

The morality play embedded in the center of a ‘modern’ play embodies the soul of More, a man seemingly of a season whose time has come and is now going. The morality play was the dramatic genre invented by Christians. They are now challenged by Machiavellian statists who would turn their religion into an instrument of statecraft. Can a Christian humanist survive in modernity? If so, on what terms? Can he become, somehow, a man for all seasons?

The next scene of Sir Thomas More shows how this might become so, and how it does not. The Privy Council has convened, with More arriving a bit late, ready with a complimentary speech intended to relieve the awkwardness but also to frame the purpose of the Council as it moves forward with its deliberations: “Upon this little board is daily scanned / The health and preservation of the land, / We the physicians that effect this good, / Now by choice diet, anon by letting blood”—by political economy or by war (X.14-17). It is “our toil and careful watching” that enables the King to sleep peacefully, when he sleeps (X.18). Here, in public life, wit is, or should be, subordinated to wisdom. The councilors take up the question of what to do about France, which has attacked northern Italy, perhaps intending to move against the Pope in the south. To oppose the French effectively, an ally on the continent would be very helpful. Surrey recommends against allying with the Holy Roman Emperor, as that would make the Empire too strong on the continent, but Shrewsbury argues that “The Emperor is a man of royal faith” who loves the English king (X.42). He “will not soil / His honor with the theft of English spoil” (X.55-56). More concurs, and the policy is set. The Christian humanist sides with the statesman who has based his argument on his assessment of the character of him who rules the allied regime, against the humanist poet who has made a ‘geopolitical’ argument, a surprisingly impersonal assessment for a man like Surrey. (Is he merely overcompensating for his ‘poetic’ side, or has the lack of heroic kings in modern Europe, perhaps the result of a creeping Machiavellianism, inclined him to discount persons?) More and Shrewsbury look at the regime, embodied by a Christian prince, not (or not so much) at the balance of power, as a Machiavellian would do.

The English king has state-building, Machiavellian, plans, and these interrupt the deliberations of the Council. Good soldier Palmer arrives with “articles” from Henry, the Oath of Succession which commits those who take it to his plan to make the children of Protestant Queen Anne Boleyn the heirs to the English throne. More calls for delay, time to deliberate. For his part, the Bishop of Rochester, a faithful Catholic, refuses the oath outright. Palmer sharply retorts that the Bishop must now report to the King for “this capital contempt” (X.82). At this, More resigns from the Council. Seeming-prudent Shrewsbury predicts that both Rochester and More will change their minds. Surrey justifies his decision to sign the king’s order in Christian terms, as did More. While More called for consultation with conscience and the laws of England, Surrey thinks of the Pauline injunction to obey rulers because God has ordained them as such. The question, then, is whether obedience to monarchs has no limits, whether monarchy is by divine right absolute.

At More’s home, Lady More recounts “the strangest dream / That e’er my sleep was troubled with” to her two daughters and her son-in-law (XI.8-9). Images of severance from “the golden fleet” of King Henry’s barges, of the Tower where traitors are imprisoned, and of death for her husband and herself: she will not be far wrong; elder daughter Margaret and her husband, William Roper, share her forebodings, even as he asks her to pay “no respect” to “fond dreams” (XI.19, 27). But More enters “merrily” with the news that he has been stripped of his titles. “Weep not at my fall” but “here joy like to private friends,” since public “triumph” and “public scorn” balance one another, with “days of pleasure” having “repentant ends” (XI.84-86). Good cheer in the face of worldly failure marries wit and wisdom. To his wife’s terror, he replies, “breed not female children in your eyes” (XI.75); that is, against Machiavelli’s suggestions that Christians are ‘effeminate,’ More suggests that manliness and Christianity go together.

At the same time, the Bishop of Rochester, already imprisoned in the Tower, explains the benefit of his ruin to his friends Surrey and Shrewsbury: “In my restraint / From worldly causes I shall better see / Into myself than at proud liberty” (XII.13-15). His imprisonment will give him time for introspection, for self-knowledge. “The Tower and I will privately confer / Of things wherein at freedom I may err” (XII.16-17). In the privacy of his home, with his family, More looks to good cheer in good company, with sober repentance in the background. In the privacy of the Tower, Bishop Rochester, who has no family to consider, no family to encourage, to teach by his example, will exhibit no merriment, put repentance in the foreground of his soul. He assures his friends of his continued love for the King, and they in turn promise to work for his release. The Catholic priest thus foreshadows More’s conduct, when the Catholic layman will be imprisoned.

Back at Chelsea, More reminds his family that virtue is what truly “breeds gentry,” not bloodlines (XIII.9), that “great men” must be “musicians” who “learn low strain after the notes that rise,” (XIII.39-40). Eschewing his merriment, bidding “farewell of mirth’s hurtless laws,” he soberly remarks that both Court and King, his judges, are mortal, that God may “pardon me in my saddest hour,” and therefore they have no reason to lament “my exile from the Court” or even his bodily torture, “wer’t imposed” (XIII.56,69-73). God’s Court is the site of true judgment. And “Perchance the King, / Seeing the Court is full of vanity”—the vanity that he had exposed as false wisdom not long before this—exhibits “pity lest our souls should be misled, / And sends us to a life contemplative,” away from the strife of political action (XIII.78-81). “O, happy banishment from worldly pride / When souls by private life are sanctified!” (82-83). And if, as his wife now fears, he will be wrested from private life and executed, in that case the King only “intends to send me” to a greater King, “the King of Heaven” for a richer present than any Henry can bestow. “The worst chance is death, / And that brings endless joy for fickle breath” (XIII.90-91). But what of the children, Lady More asks. If stripped of their inheritance, her husband replies, “they have minds instructed how to gather more,” as “there’s no man that’s ingenious can be poor” (XIII.95-96). Natural ingenuity in gathering more is practical wisdom, and if Thomas More is practically wise, then the children More has taught will continue to gather more. “And therefore do not weep, my little ones. / Though you lose all the earth, keep your souls even, / And you shall find inheritance in heaven.” (XIII.97-99). He is more concerned with his household servants, whom he has not educated but to whom he proceeds to offer a lesson. Releasing them from service, he tells them to “Think, when an oak falls, underwood shrinks down / And yet may live, though bruised. I pray ye strive / To shun my ruin; for the axe is set / Even at my root, to fell me to the ground.” (XIII.116-119). In view of his prudentially envisioned liberation from the world, he liberates his servants, “for heaven can tell / That More loves all his followers more than well” (XIII.121-122). In a few minutes’ time, More has told of his love of family, of king, of servants, and, animating all those loves, his love of God.

The love of king will not be reciprocated. Shrewsbury and Surrey return from their mission of entreaty to inform him that if he continues to refuse to subscribe to the Oath of Succession, he will be removed from house arrest and sent to the Tower on the charge of high treason. This is too much for his wife and daughters, who cry out to God in their sorrow. Unperturbed, More looks at the sergeant-at-arms who accompanies his friends, recalling that he was the man he’d saved from “cruel riotous assault” during Ill May (XIII.158). Far from condemning him for ingratitude, More savors the real import of the coincidence: “Thou art reserved / To be my summoner to yond spiritual court” (XIII.159-160). Against his wife’s entreaties, he will go to the Tower “with all submissive willingness, and thereto add / My bones to strengthen the foundation / Of Julius Caesar’s palace” (XIII.176-178). English tradition taught that Julius Caesar had built the Tower of London, a place to enforce the Roman law he brought to English barbarians. Now, Henry is Caesar, a modern state builder, and Thomas More will render him his due. “Friend,” as he calls the sergeant-at-arms, “do thine office,” the office that enforces the new law of the new Rome, as More himself had done so recently (XIII.180). “To a great prison, to discharge the strife / Commenc’d ‘twixt conscience and my frailer life, / More now must march” (XIII.184-186); he had already “discharged” the strife of Ill May, which now can be seen as a prefiguration of this. Conscience bids him both to remain faithful to Rome, not to Henry’s calculated severance of his state and regime from it, while at the same time remaining faithful to the King, God’s appointed ruler of England. His life will be the price of these duties, which conflict only in appearance, not in the reality he has consistently preferred to appearance. If, in another play, Cardinal Wolsey bids farewell to all his greatness, here More bids farewell to Chelsea (“I shall ne’er see thee more”) and to his family—family being the bond that Christ splices asunder with His Word-sword. He reserves a taste of punning wit for his departing word to them: “Grave More thus lightly walks to a quick grave” (XIII.194).

Outside the Tower, a crowd has assembled, blocking the bridge. The people remain steadfastly with More, as they would do decades later, Jowett recalls, when Sir Walter Raleigh was conveyed to the prison in July 1603. Even the warders agree: “A wiser or more virtuous gentleman / Was never bred in England,” says one, his partner adding, “I think the poor will bury him in tears”—testimony to his care for the poor in purse and in spirit (XIV.10-12). As Shrewsbury, Surrey, bring More past them, delivering him to the Lieutenant of the Tower, a woman cries out, “Ah, gentle heart, my soul for thee is said. / Farewell, the best friend the poor e’er had.” (XIV.43-44). After he and his friends bid him farewell, More welcomes the Tower itself, where “many a guilty soul, and many an innocent, / Have breathed their farewell to thy hollow rooms” (XIV.60-61). He enters with clear conscience, “my comfort,” since “God is as strong here as he is abroad” (XIV.70). No respecter of persons, of rank, God is equally no respecter of places; He rules them all. 

At More’s house, his servants have lingered. More is at trial, not yet convicted. If, as one says, there is neither a wiser, a merrier, or a more honest man in “the universal world” that God rules, it may be that, being “too good a lord for us,” as another remarks, “God himself will take him” (XV.14, 20-21). They agree that their master has been a just ruler of the household—the household, the building block of political life. When word arrives of their master’s conviction, they show themselves true servants of him. Like the crowds during Ill May, they are now “masterless,” but unlike them they defer to the authority of the king and the law, even as king and law intend to make him “a dead man to the world,” “his sweet soul to live among the saints” (XV.37, 39-40). They learn that in addition to their liberty, he has granted each of them a substantial payment, “a kind remembrance / Of a far kinder lord,” in an act of providence for the innocent victims of his conscientious choice, imitatio Christi (XV.53-54). 

More converses with the Lieutenant of the Tower, whose experience of his prisoner has convinced him of his wisdom, patience, “constancy of mind” and “Christian resolution in all troubles”—all signs that he is “not unprepared” for death, thanks to his “peace of conscience” (XVI.7-10,12). With “peace of conscience, ” “I have not lived so ill I fear to die,” More rejoins, and although afflicted with severe pain during “a sore fit of the stone” that night, this only induces him to thank King Henry for choosing to end his suffering anon (XVI.13, 17, 19). “In life and death, still merry Sir Thomas More,” the Lieutenant exclaims; wisdom has not eclipsed wit. Rightly so, in Christian terms. Christianity leaves room for wit and wisdom, permitting their marriage, because in it ‘comedy’ overcomes ‘tragedy,’ Resurrection overcomes Crucifixion. God guarantees the comic or happy ending, even while not excusing His followers from the tragic ending of physical pain from disease and strife, emotional pain from farewells to families and friends, and death. If Christ weeps several times in this world, but never laughs, He provides for human beings the chance neither to weep nor to laugh, when they come into His presence in the Kingdom of God. More often laughs and smiles but never weeps. As it happens, that will not make him an anti-Christ.

Hearing that Bishop Rochester has died at the executioner’s hand, More calls him “a rich man, believe me,” one now resident in the City of God (XVI.36). As for himself, he is likely “the poorest chancellor / That ever was in England,” a testament to his honesty in office (XVI.46-47). He has spent much of his money on charitable gifts to “halting soldiers and poor needy scholars,” while the remainder of his estate will revert to the Crown (XVI.55-56). Surrey was not entirely mistaken in saying that poets are poor, always out of pocket. More explains that he has had a poetic side, playing the role of a poet in the sense that “poets were never thrifty,” and “never shall” be (XVI.65). 

Enter his wife, daughters, and son-in-law, weeping. But More tells them that he is better-off now, since “when I was Chancellor” I had no peace from business; “here there’s none of this” (XVI.70, 73). His impending death only means that “tomorrow I shall be at liberty” not only from political business but from all the world (XVI.81). Reminded by his wife that his “poor wife and children” still need care, he leaves them to the protection of God, who “hath the power to keep / You safer than I can” (XVI.87-88). “Live all, and love together, and thereby / You give your father a rich obsequy” (XVI.122-123). “God send us all his everlasting light” (XVI.128). In this stern farewell, More exemplifies Christian love, which is never sentimental, never ‘compassionate’ in the modern, Rousseauian sense. He wants his family to imitate him, even as he imitates Christ, sternly directed to the Cross by His Father. “God bless you” (XVI.125).

Allusions to his Christlikeness abound when he arrives at the scaffold for his beheading, the following morning. “I am come about a headless errand, / For which I have not much to say, now I am here,” the end of witty speech being, in his case, wise silence (XVII.51-52). He says nothing that would inflame the passions of his friends, the many who are poor, against the regime of the one. He calls the executioner his “honest friend,” remarking that his ‘dropping’ will result in his ascending “i’God’s name” (XVII.53). It is the hangman, not the former lawyer, former sheriff, former Lord Chancellor Thomas More who now has the law in his hands, and More obeys the law as Paul the Apostle commands Christians to do.

Shrewsbury and Surrey are the witnesses, and he rallies them a bit: “Ye see, though it pleaseth / the King to raise me thus high, yet I am not proud; / for the higher I mount the better I can see my friends / about me,” although “I perceive by / your looks you like my bargain so ill that there’s not/ one of ye all dare venture with me” (XVII.59-65). Shrewsbury wants him to confess to committing “great offense unto his majesty,” and More obliges in his own way: “I confess his /majesty hath been ever good to me, and my offense / to his highness makes me, of a state pleader, a stage player” in what he ironically calls “this last scene of my tragedy” (XVI.73-78). He will send His Majesty his bald head—hatless, since “it is not / requisite any head should stand covered” to a king (XVII.78-80). His beheading is “good for / the headache” (XVII.87-88). That is, dying is as medicinal for the Christian More as it was for the philosopher, Socrates. When the executioner begs his forgiveness for what he is about to do, he wittily wishes that were in the executioner’s power to forgive him, to exonerate him from legal judgment, but “the law, my honest friend, lies in thy hands now” (XVII.94). And he gives the man his purse as “thy fee,” as if the executioner were his attorney before the law, a cock to Asclepias being an unnecessary sacrifice for a Christian to make, the supreme sacrifice having already been made for him. He remarks that he shaved off his beard last night, perhaps in honor of the example of his forerunner, Falconer, whom he had pardoned in what turned out to be a very un-Henrylike act.

Before heading to the block, he “forsakes all mirth,” but also all tears, since “The fool of flesh must, with her frail life, die.” Morus means ‘fool’ in Latin, and Christians are fools in the world’s eyes, as his friend, Erasmus teaches in a witty book, In Praise of Folly). “Our birth to heaven should be thus: void of fear” (XVII.121-124). If Nietzsche intended to go beyond good and evil, the Christian More finally intends to go beyond laughter and tears, beyond comedy and tragedy.

The final words of a play of this time were typically spoken by the survivor of the highest rank. Would that not be Shrewsbury? Not here. Here they are spoken by the humanist poet, who speaks of “a very learned worthy gentleman” who “seals error with his blood” (XVII.125-126)—evidently More, at least in appearance, but possibly King Henry? Professor Jowett notes the ambiguity, which at very least ‘saves’ the play from the royal censors. And it is true that More saved the king’s rule, threatened by rebels, by appealing to Christian principles, as Henry himself has conspicuously failed to obey, thereby undermining his own legitimacy. Whatever Surrey may mean, More knows they must now act instead of speaking: “Come, we’ll to Court / Let’s sadly hence to perfect unknown fates, / Whilst he tends progress to the state of states” (XVII.126-127). Does he thereby save Henry’s rule a second time? In this world, Christians go towards fates that are perfectly unknown with the intention of perfecting them insofar as they are able. After death, they undertake the truly royal progress to the Kingdom of God, where they will receive their crowns, honors greater even than a chancellorship.

Notes

1. For the purposes of the play, the authors have conflated the poet with his father, who was the one who was active at this time. The senior Howard supported the advancement of More to the position of Royal Chancellor and was later beheaded at the command of Henry VIII.
2. The editor remarks that this Munday is unrelated to Anthony Munday, the playwright.
3. See Robert Burton: The Anatomy of Melancholy. Six volumes. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blaoir, eds. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1989). The great Oxford don combatted melancholy with the ‘physic’ of wit and merriment, More-like.

Defeated by scheming Wolsey, her soul having grown “sad with troubles,” Queen Katherine has retreated to her rooms, where she has one of her ladies in waiting sing her a song to comfort her (III.i.1). Music, even secular music, need not beckon to pleasure; it can offer comfort, if not by invoking God then by invoking nature, which the mythical Orpheus renewed with his song, his music making “a lasting spring” (III.i.8). By hearing the Orphic music, not by seeing, one finds not so much truth as solace: “In sweet music is such art, / Killing care and grief of heart / Fall asleep or, hearing, die” (III.i.12-14). 

Her comfort, if she found it, ends with the arrival of the cardinals Wolsey and Campeius. “All hoods do not make monks,” she tells her ladies, and these two are false, indeed (III.i.23). Wolsey asks for a private conference, which she declines because her conscience is clear. “I know my life so even”—that is, true in both senses, honest and faithful (III.i.37). And “Truth loves open dealing” (III.i.39). When Wolsey begins to speak to her in Church Latin, so that her ladies won’t understand the conversation, she tells him to speak in English; if bad Catholic Churchmen intend to deceive the people, an honest Catholic layperson will insist on witnesses who hear what they say—foreshadowing the translation of the Bible into English by Protestant Anglicans. The men are here to hear, that is, to sound her out and, as usual, to ply her with their “counsel” (III.i.67). How do you “stand minded in the weighty difference / Between the King and you”? (II.ii.58-59). That is the sort of knowledge Wolsey always seeks, knowledge useful for manipulation.

Katherine knows that they intend to betray her. To Wolsey’s claim that she enjoys the King’s love and that in England her “hopes and friends are infinite,” she replies that no Englishman will “dare give me counsel,” fearing to be known as a friend to one who is “‘gainst his highness’ pleasure”: an excellent description of the dilemma subjects of tyrants always face (III.i.84-85). She tells them that the only persons she can trust live in her native country, Spain, perhaps hoping that Wolsey will do what he has done to many others—separate her from the king by sending her away—rather than what he has done to a few—separate her from the king by having her killed. They attempt to persuade her to stay under the king’s protection; in Campeius’s words, “‘Twill be much / Both for your honor better and your cause, / For if the trial of the law o’ertake ye, / You’ll part away disgraced” (III.i.94-98). Speaking frankly as always, Katherine ripostes, “Ye tell me what ye wish for both—my ruin. / Is this your Christian counsel? Out upon ye!” (III.i.98-99). God is above kings, and He will judge. “Ye have angels’ faces, but heaven knows your hearts” (III.i.145). You cardinals embody not the cardinal virtues but the cardinal sins. “Say I warned ye,” since “the burden of my sorrows” may yet “fall on thee” (III.i.109-110). She has been true to her husband, but “virtue finds no friends” (III.i.126). She has failed to produce an heir to the throne, and that, she suspects, is why he wants a young wife. The cardinals’ unpleasant, punning references to “service” ll.52, 67) reinforce this. Like the care and grief of heart Orpheus’ music kills, and like “the lily / That once was mistress of the field and flourished / I’ll hang my head and perish” (III.151-153). If Orphic music brings life and harmony, their words bring death and discord, as seen when the cardinals persist in their sham (“our ends are honest,” Wolsey protests) (III.i.154), and she, a woman without allies at her wit’s end, finally consents to hear their counsels, since the king “has my heart yet, and shall have my prayers / While I shall have my life” (III.i.180-181). As a Christian, her heart remains true, even if her mind can think of nothing more to say. Like true-hearted, Christian Buckingham, she will die, rumored to have been poisoned by an agent of the king himself. [1]

Dukes Norfolk and Surrey, along with Lord Surrey and the Lord Chamberlain, confer with one another at the royal palace. Their restiveness under King-Cardinal Wolsey has intensified. Surrey, especially, wants revenge for the execution of his father-in-law, Lord Buckingham. While the Lord Chamberlain worries that while we all know what Wolsey deserves, what can we realistically do? Wolsey “hath a witchcraft / Over the King in’s tongue” (III.ii.18-19). Norfolk immediately denies it: “O, fear him not: / His spell in that is out” (III.ii.19-20). He has been exposed, Suffolk explains, because his letters to the pope were intercepted and read to the king, who learned that it was Wolsey he urged the pope to delay ruling on the divorce because Henry was “tangled in affection” with Protestant Anne Bullen, which annoying fact has made it at least temporarily impossible for the Cardinal to arrange the king’s marriage to the French king’s sister, in the latest of Wolsey’s ever-shifting alliances. Now the king sees, knows the truth: that his trusted prelate “hedges his own way,” not the way of the king (III.ii.39). Further, Henry has already married Anne—who, Suffolk predicts will produce “some blessing to this land,” the child the audiences know to be Elizabeth I. The aristocrats are delighted with that marriage, as it ruins the Wolsey plot, inducing Cardinal Campeius to leave for Rome. As for Katherine, she hence forth will no longer be called ‘Queen’ but ‘Princess Dowager’ and ‘widow to Prince Arthur’; that is, the terms of Cranmer’s argument have been accepted by the Church and by Parliament, as well.  

At this, Wolsey and his ally, the attorney and Member of Parliament Thomas Cromwell, arrive, glumly. Wolsey knows that his letter has been intercepted but still imagines that he can somehow arrange the French marriage. “Anne Bullen? No, I’ll no Anne Bullens, for him.” (III.ii.87-88). She is nothing but “a spleeny Lutheran”—Luther himself, if not Anne, having been justly known for his high temper (III.ii.99). She does not serve his cause, and, sharing his bed, may well undermine the institutions of Catholicism, and therefore himself, in England. Meanwhile, Cranmer, that arch-heretic, reputedly sympathetic to Protestantism, has “crawled into the favor of the King”—an act of usurpation that Wolsey has always considered grounds for exile (III.ii.103). 

Enter the king, at a distance, reading evidence of Wolsey’s corruption. “What piles of wealth hath he accumulated / To his own portion!” (III.ii.107-108). Still worse, there may be “mutiny in’s mind” (III.ii.120). He had not earlier been able to see into a soul, and consequently stayed on the surface of things, of bodies. He now knows that the Cardinal’s thoughts are scarcely “fixed on spiritual objects,” but rather on matters sublunary (III.ii.132). Taking his seat on the throne, he has his Constable of the Tower, Thomas Lovell, call Wolsey over. To the Cardinal’s pious salutation, Henry gives an ironic reply: “You are full of heavenly stuff, and bear the inventory / Of your best graces in your mind, the which / You were now running o’er” (III.ii.137-139). But he drops his verbal masquer’s mask soon enough, coolly observing that he had reduced his own holdings “to bestow / My bounties upon you” (III.ii.159-160). Wolsey protests his loyalty (“for your highness’ good I ever labored / More than mine own that am, have and will be”), before the king hands him the evidence against him, walking out (III.ii.191-192). “This paper has undone me,” the Cardinal gasps, attributing the brutal turn of fortune to some “cross devil” (III.ii.210, 214). He now reveals, for the first time, what had been his supreme goal: “to gain the popedom” (III.ii.212). When Norfolk, Suffolk, Surrey and the Lord Chamberlain arrive to strip him of the royal seal that entitles him to authenticate documents issued in the king’s name (and thereby to feign the king’s commands), and to retire to house arrest, Wolsey fulminates his denials. And the nobles have no written commission from the king; their mere “words cannot carry / Authority so weighty” says the man of words, of rhetoric, if not noticeably of the Word. The king will know “my truth,” he threatens, again demonstrating the ambiguity of the play’s subtitle, All Is True. The comprehensive charge against him, Norfolk tells him, is writing to Rome and to foreign princes, ego et rex meus, I and my king, a treasonous assertion of equality with the sovereign, one which he further parlayed in making the king “your servant” (III.ii.316). And they have also discovered his ambition to become pope by his customary method, bribery—presumably, bribes paid to the cardinals who would elect him. The king now commands the surrender of all his property and puts him “out of the king’s protection” (III.ii.344). 

The older English regime consisted of a monarch sometimes supported, sometimes not supported, by the aristocrats. Wolsey has attempted to replace the aristocrats with himself and the international aristocracy of the Church. The nobles have shown him that he has failed, and with this, they leave him alone. After Norfolk, Suffolk, and Surrey read out the inventory of charges against him, Chamberlain intervenes, advising them to “Press not a falling man too far”; it is “virtue” to relent, and “His faults lie open to the laws: let them, not you, correct him” (III.ii.33-35). Suffolk, to whom Wolsey has done the most injury, forgives him. This is a telling glimpse into the ethos of the English regime and an answer to Machiavelli. If the Common Law of England can provide the criteria for judging, provide a human equivalent to the God who reserves final judgment for himself, then Englishmen can forgive, can follow the Gospel command, without ruining themselves or their country. Continental Europe had no equivalent to the English Common Law, no institutional protection against Machiavellianism, in or out of the Church.

Machiavelli’s prince is a man alone, but supposedly so to his own advantage, the better to keep his own counsel and plot the ruin or the subordination of others. Wolsey’s practice of Machiavellianism has left him literally alone, however—isolated from all those he had ruined or subordinated. “A long farewell to all my greatness” (III.351). He understands this not only as his own condition but as “the state of man,” who hopes, wins honors, then “falls, as I do” (III.ii.352, 358). Crucially, “I find my heart new opened” (III.ii.366). An open heart can admit God. He compares his fall to that of Lucifer. When his secretary, Cromwell arrives and pronounces himself speechless at the Cardinal’s ruin, Wolsey pronounces himself “truly happy” for the first time because “I know myself now, and I feel within me / A peace above all earthly dignities / A still and quiet conscience” (III.ii.378-380). While recognizing that his pride has led to all this—too much honor is too heavy a burden “for a man that hopes for heaven”—he hasn’t quite been cured of it, claiming “a fortitude of soul” that enables him “to endure more miseries and greater far / Than my weak-hearted enemies dare offer” (III.ii.389-390). And he is far from having lost his care for ‘this world,’ asking for news of it. Cromwell gives it to him in three blows in ascending order of humiliation. The king has replaced you with Sir Thomas More as Lord Chancellor, More being a member of the Carthusian order Wolsey had despised; Thomas Cranmer, his rival, has been named Archbishop of Canterbury; Lady Anne has finally been “viewed in open as [Henry’s] Queen” (III.ii.404). This last blow is the worst: “All my glories / In that one woman I have lost for ever” (III.ii.408-409). To Cromwell, who promises to pray for him, Wolsey holds himself out as an instructive example of how not to live. “Fling away ambition. / By that sin fell the angels…. Love thyself last; cherish those hearts that hate thee. / Corruption wins not more than honesty”—as anti-Machiavellian a teaching as there may be (III.ii.440-444). “Let all the ends thou aimest at be thy country’s / Thy God’s, and truth’s”—the theme of the play. Then, if you do fall, you will fall a martyr. “Had I but served my God with half the zeal / I served my king, he would not in mine age / Have left me naked to mine enemies” (III.455-457). To this he might have added, ‘and with a quarter of the zeal I served myself.’ Considering these last words in this play, one may conclude that Wolsey’s repentance is a work in progress. But isn’t everyone’s? In the meantime, he has achieved the Socratic philosopher’s aim, self-knowledge, with the Christian insight of being “a poor, fallen man” (III.ii.413). What is truth? said jesting Pilate. If the truth stood before him, embodied, then truth is both what is and Who is at once, and truth means not only understanding but fidelity to God and to the nature of the creature God made by breathing into some clay He fashioned, along with the fidelity to the regime that shields that faith from Machiavellianism.

The fourth Act begins with the two gentlemen who had witnessed Buckingham on the way to his execution, waiting for Lady Anne to pass by, after her coronation—one losing his head to the axe, the other having a crown placed upon hers. Regime change, or at least regime reform, has begun. They do not fear it. “The citizens, / I am sure, have shown at full their royal minds— / As, let ’em have their rights, they are ever forward— / In celebration of this day with shows, / Pageants, and sights of honor” (IV.i.7-10). That is, the English commoners are faithful, true citizens in a monarchic regime, a constitutional monarchy in which they have legal rights and are protected, whatever unjust machinations may go on at court.

One of the gentlemen has a list of those now elevated to higher office, including the Duke of Suffolk as High Steward, the Duke of Norfolk as Earl Marshal; the anti-Wolsey aristocrats have been rewarded. Princess Dowager Katherine, he further reports, has been formally divorced, with the assent of Archbishop Cranmer, and has taken ill. The royal procession passes, with satisfying pageantry. The second gentleman exclaims, rather as Henry had done, that Anne has “the sweetest face I ever looked on”; as for the king, “I cannot blame his conscience” (IV.i.43, 47). A third gentleman concurs, pronouncing her “the goodliest woman / That ever lay by man,” adding that “Such joy / I never saw before” in the people (IV.i.69-70, 75-76). At the coronation ceremony, she “came to the altar, where she kneeled and, saint-like, / Cast her fair eyes to heaven and prayed devoutly,” then bowed humbly to the people; “she had all the royal makings of a queen,” acknowledging both the authority of God, the Highest, and the support of the ‘low,’ the commoners (IV.i.83-87). He also remarks that although Cranmer’s enemy, Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, has become the king’s secretary, Cranmer will enjoy the support of Cromwell. Religious factions within the king’s court remain, but they seem more manageable, now that Wolsey has been removed.

Describing herself as mortally ill, Katherine hears her gentleman usher, Griffith, report the death of Wolsey, who died “full of repentance, / Continual meditations, tears and sorrows,” having given “his honors to the world again, / His blessed part to heaven” before dying “in peace” (IV.ii.27-30). Recalling Wolsey’s pride, ambition, corruption, arbitrary unlawfulness, and empty promises, Katherine observes that his final illness mirrored the illness of the example he left for the clergy. Griffith recalls her to charity, citing Wolsey’s rise “from an humble stock,” his scholarship, his powers of persuasion (IV.ii.49). Admittedly, he was insatiable in his desire to acquire (in this, a Machiavel), but “his overthrow heaped happiness upon him,” finding “the blessedness in being little”; “he died fearing God” (IV.ii.64, 68). With this, Katherine relents: peace be with him. These two speeches form a double funeral oration for the duplicitous man who finally repented. As she had done before, she calls for comforting music. This time, there are no scheming clergymen to interrupt; she dreams of a sort of heavenly masque, very much in contrast with the one Henry had participated in, at Wolsey’s dinner party. The Orphic music she heard first heralded life on earth, natural life, springtime; the solemn music she hears now heralds supernatural life after death, prefiguring Heaven, to which she holds up her hands in rejoicing. When she awakens, she tells Griffith not of an earthly crown offered her by the white-robed figures in her dream but of garlands and promises of “eternal happiness” (IV.ii.90).

She receives one last visitor. Lord Caputius, an ambassador in England from the Holy Roman Emperor, comes at the request of King Henry, to tender her former husband’s “princely commendations” and hope for her “good comfort” (IV.ii.119), to which she replies that “I am past all comforts here but prayers”(IV.ii.123). She gives him a letter she had written to the king, asking for his protection of their daughter, Mary, and for his pity on her loyal ladies in waiting, who “so long / Have followed both my fortunes faithfully”—both her reign as queen and her exile from the royal court (IV.ii.140-141). They deserve good husbands, aristocrats. As for the men in her employ, let them be paid wages due and “something over to remember me by” (IV.ii.151). Finally, tell the king, “in all humility,” that “in death I blessed him” and let “all the world” know the truth, that “I was a chaste wife to my grave” (IV.ii.161-163, 170). Inter me “yet like / A queen and daughter to a king” (IV.ii.171-172). Katherine’s testament expresses not only Christian charity but also Christian deference to ruling authority, as had Buckingham. Henry is marrying a Protestant, yet as a faithful Roman Catholic she makes no protest. It is true that she does not bless Anne, but neither does she curse her. She bears Lutheran Anne’s rise with silent patience. In this, she graciously acquiesces to the regime reform Act Four portrays. No Catholic-Protestant discord will result from her last words. This political settlement follows from her spiritual settlement; both her enemy, Wolsey, and Katherine have been blessed with the Christian liberation; the truth has set them free. In this sense, “all is true.”

Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, rigorous Catholic and former ally of Wolsey, sees Sir Thomas Lovell walking after midnight. “Affairs that walk, / As they say spirits do, at midnight have / In them a wilder nature than the business / That seeks dispatch by day,” he observes, justifying his curiosity about what Sir Thomas is about, a curiosity legitimated by his religious authority (V.i.13-16). Lovell knows about a wilder nature still, reporting that Queen Anne is in labor, and that it is feared she will die. No friend of Protestants, and indeed no friend of Gospel charity, the Bishop hopes that the child will survive and that the mother will not. This is too much for Lovell, who admits having entertained that tempting thought, “yet my conscience says / She’s a good creature and a sweet lady, [who] does / Deserve our better wishes” (V.i.24-26). She gets none from Gardiner, who replies that “it will ne’er be well” until both Anne and Archbishop Cranmer, a Protestant sympathizer, “sleep in their graves” (V.i.29, 32). Cranmer is “a most arch heretic, a pestilence / That does infect the land,” a rank weed, Sir Thomas, / And we must root him out” (V.i.45, 52-53). He has said as much to the Privy Council.

After the would-be persecutor departs, the king, who has been playing cards with Suffolk, arrives and asks Lovell “what is the news” of Anne’s labor. Lovell says he is praying for her in her suffering, upon which Henry dismisses Suffolk and calls for Cranmer to be brought to him. The king confides the news of complaints against the Archbishop at the last Council meeting, telling him he must retire to the Tower of London pending trial and bear this with patience. It is likely that Anthony Denny, a Protestant Privy Council member who had accompanied the king on this walk, informed him of Gardiner’s agitation. Cranmer “humbly thanks [his] highness,” for “I know / There’s none stands under more calumnious tongues / Than I myself, poor man” (V.i.108, 111-113). Upon closer questioning, Cranmer avers that “the good I stand on is my truth and honesty,” and “I fear nothing / What can be said against me” (V.i.122, 125-126). Having seen from his experience with the late Cardinal Wolsey with “what ease / Might corrupt minds procure knaves as corrupt / To swear against you,” and recalling how Jesus Himself was accused by false witnesses, the king recommends caution while assuring his friend that “they shall no more prevail than we give way to” (V.i.131-134, 143). To ensure that the enemies cannot punish him without such royal intervention, Henry gives him a ring to exhibit as proof of the king’s intention to be the final judge in the matter. After Cranmer leaves, weeping in gratitude, Henry tells the assembled aristocrats that the man “has strangled his language in tears”—more reliable guides to the truth of a soul than words, which are easier to use for deception—in a man, if not necessarily in a woman (V.i.157). As the supreme judge in the English regime, Henry has already examined the accused and found him humble, true or faithful, and honest. Having learned in Wolsey’s hard school of deception, he has become a prudent judge. 

Anne’s elderly duenna now arrives to announce that the queen has given birth. Tell me it’s a boy, a rightful heir to the throne, the king demands, at which point the old lady artfully obeys the command while leading him to the truth: it’s a “lovely boy,” in fact a girl who can give birth to boys, someday (V.i.164). She leaves, complaining that the money he paid her for her errand was insufficient; “I will have more or scold it out of him” (V.i.173). We will never know if she tries, as the play moves to more considerable controversies.

The Privy Council calls Archbishop Cranmer to its chambers, only to show its contempt by leaving him outside, cooling his heels with the “boys, grooms, and lackeys” (V.ii.17). When the king’s physician happens by, assuring Cranmer that he’ll report back to the king, who comes and views the scene from a window, indignantly. (His Highness is still enough of a Catholic to swear by the Virgin Mary at the sight.) Sir Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor and an ardent Catholic, presides at the trial. Citing the frailty of human nature, More accuses Cranmer of having “misdemeaned” himself, “and not a little” by spreading the heresies of Protestantism through “the whole realm” (V.ii.48, 50). Gardiner remarks the political issues of “reformation”: “Commotions, uproars, with a general taint / Of the whole state,” as recently seen in the peasant revolts in two German states and the Anabaptist Rising in Münster. Cranmer defends himself by saying that no man living “more detests, more stirs against, / Both in his private conscience and his place, / Defacers of a public peace than I do” (V.ii.73-75). This Pauline response evidently does not answer the charge of heresy, since a Protestant would say the same as a Catholic on this point. When Gardiner pretends to speak for the king and remands him to the Tower (“where, being but a private man again, / You shall know many dare accuse you boldly— / More, I fear, are provided for”), Cranmer, who has promised himself to practice the virtue of patience, contents himself with irony: “Ah, my good lord of Winchester, I thank you: / You are always my good friend” (V.ii.89-93). In contrast with Wolsey and his former ally, Gardiner, Cranmer remains humble, since although he observes that Gardiner seeks his ruin, “Love and meekness, lord, / Become a churchman better than ambition” (V.ii.96-97). When the recording secretary, Thomas Cromwell, mildly criticizes Gardiner for being “too sharp” with “a falling man,” Gardiner accuses him of being “a favorer / Of this new sect” (V.ii.113-114). More quiets them and orders Cranmer to the Tower.

At this, Cranmer produces the king’s ring, guaranteeing an immediate appeal of the sentence. “Ye blew the fire that burns ye,” Cranmer tells his dismayed accusers, just before Henry strides in, frowning. Wolsey-like, Gardiner fills the air with obsequious phrases invoking Henry’s honorable duty to defend the Church, to place “his royal self in judgment” between that Church and “this great offender” (V.ii.154-155). “I come not to hear such flattery now,” the king rejoins; “you play the spaniel / And think with wagging of your tongue to win me,” but he knows “thou has a cruel nature and a bloody” (V.ii.160-163). “I thought I had had men of some understanding / And wisdom of my Council, but I find none” (V.ii.169-170). The accusers are now the accused. Turning to Cranmer, he calls upon him to baptize his newborn daughter and to serve as her godfather. He commands Gardiner to embrace and love the Archbishop, which the rogue is not slow to do. Upon hearing Cranmer’s gracious and forgiving response, the king pronounces himself satisfied with this newfound union, which strengthens him and brings honor to them, he proclaims. In Cranmer particularly, he finds a “true heart” (V.ii.208)—the heart being the center of the soul as conceived in Christianity, truth being the theme of the play. He also knows that the commoners see this, regarding Cranmer as a faithful friend to those who are friends to him. 

From the few to the many: from time to time, throughout Henry VIII, the people enter the political stage—once in justifiable rebellion against heavy taxation, again in peaceful enjoyment of the coronation pageantry, now in a celebratory riot after the christening of the infant Elizabeth. They have breached the walls of the royal court, and the undermanned staff can scarcely control them. But they quickly come to order when a procession of notables approaches, with Garter, the King-of-Arms, shouting at them to make way for “the high and mighty Princess of England, Elizabeth” (V.iv.2-3). Archbishop Cranmer delivers an oration before the king, prophesying that she will become like the Queen of Sheba in her desire for “wisdom and fair virtue,” of “pure virtue,” nursed by truth. “All is true”: the future queen herself will be true to England, bringing to “this land a thousand thousand blessings,” as truly prophesied by a true Christian (V.iv.19). Better than Machiavellian but also not the powerless sort of Christian woman—no Katherine—”She shall be loved and feared” (V.iv.30, emphasis added). As in Micah’s prophecy of an earthly paradise, under her rule “every man shall eat in safety / Under his own vine that he plants” (V.iv.33-34). Crucially, “God shall be truly known” (V.iv.36).

Under Elizabeth’s rule, music will consist of “merry songs of peace,” as men love their neighbors and God, who “shall be truly known” by a people freed from the conventional hierarchies of blood and governed instead by men who walk “the perfect ways of honor” and rest their claims to rule on that way of life, a new regime (V.iv.37). When she dies, a virgin, the ashes of this “maiden phoenix” will “create another heir / As great in admiration as herself” (V.iv.41-43)—England’s reigning king, James I, sponsor of the greatest English translation of the Bible. This man will “make new nations”—the American colonies—and “he shall flourish,” like “a mountain cedar, reach[ing] his branches / To all the plains about him” (V.iv.51-53). “O lord Archbishop,” Henry replies, “thou hast made me now a man” (V.iv.63). That is, although his wife had produced a daughter, Mary, her legitimacy was in question not because there was any doubt concerning his paternity—Katherine’s virtue was never in doubt—but because the grounds for his divorce from her, the claim that their marriage violated canon law and was therefore no marriage, had tormented him. The king declares a holiday in the literal sense: a holy day, a sabbath in which no man shall work. He is now the political equivalent of the Christian new man.

Epilogue is the play’s last character, complementing Prologue, completing this new kind of morality play. Epilogue is humble but of good cheer, remarking that the play will “never please / All that are here,” inasmuch as some will sleep through “an act or two,” awakened only by the trumpet blasts that sound periodically, heralding the arrival of the royal personage, while others will delight only in its satirical jabs at Londoners (V.iv.1-3). At least the play will be said to have exhibited “the merciful construction of good women, / For such a one we showed ’em”—Katherine, possibly Anne, possibly the faultless, prophesied Queen Elizabeth. That is a good enough result, since “all the best men are ours” when their ladies tell them to applaud (V.iv.13-14). 

James I is the great Protestant king. His mother, Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, Protestant Elizabeth’s half-sister (James’s godmother) gives him a link to the old, Roman Catholic England even as he embodies the new England of his father’s Anglican Church, which the new Archbishop of Canterbury, his father’s new Christian friend, presages. James kept England out of the Thirty Years’ War, the brutal religious war on continental Europe. He was compounded of both parties’ spiritual stock. 

Note

1. Shakespeare would not have known what modern research has confirmed: Katherine, blocked from visits to or from her daughter, Mary, died of natural causes, possibly cancer, but not before forgiving her former husband.

“Prologue” speaks at the beginning of the play; he is a character, similar to “Chorus” in Henry V, the only other ‘history play’ that has a prologue. “Chorus” lauds the magnitude, indeed the grandeur of King Harry’s warring, but “Prologue” strikes a different key when introducing the rule of Henry VIII. A choric character or set of characters narrates with praise or blame. “Prologue” as a character personifies an abstraction, not unlike the characters in the medieval ‘morality plays,’ in which ‘Virtue’ and ‘Vice’ come before us. But Prologue himself embodies no moral standard, although he does provide one. The audience, perhaps a touch rowdy before the show begins, may expect a “merry, bawdy play” (Prologue.14), something along the lines of When You See Me, which the editor describes as “a comic history of Henry VIII’s reign” first staged in 1605 and revived the same year this play was first performed. Prologue wants no confusion of genres: “I come no more to make you laugh; things now / That bear a weighty and a serious brow, / Said, high and working, full of state and woe, / Such noble scenes as draw the eye to flow, / We now present.” (Prologue.1-5). The subject of this play deserves weeping and pity, not laughter. In terms of theater, this will be a tragic history; in terms of religion, one of the play’s central themes, one recalls Shakespeare’s contemporary, Thomas More, who noticed that Jesus as remembered in the Gospels wept “twice or thrice,” but never laughed.

Not only tears and pity but truth is at stake when considering the much-controverted rule of Henry VIII. “Such as give / Their money out of hope they may believe / May here find truth, too.” (Prologue.7-9). Sophist-influenced Pontius Pilate jestingly asked Jesus, “What is truth?”—not waiting for an answer from Him, the embodiment of truth, who stood before him. Those who come to see a show, to be entertained, “may pass,” inasmuch as they are the well-to-do, front-row-seat denizens who can afford to pay a shilling to watch, up close (Prologue.11). But those who come to hear a comedy “will be deceived” (Prologue.17). Seeing at its best is philosophy, at its lowest a taste for divertissement. Hearing at its best hearkens to religion, the spoken Word of God, the truth Jesus not only embodied but enunciated. At its lowest, well, “gentle hearers, know / To rank our chosen truth with such a show / As fool and fight is, besides forfeiting / Our own brains and the opinion that we bring / To make that only true we now intend / Will leave us never an understanding friend.” (Prologue. 17-22). Therefore —in philosophic logic and Christian Logos —”for goodness’ sake…be sad, as we would make ye” (Prologue.23-25). Suspend your disbelief, as religion urges, and think of these actors on stage as if those they portray are still living. “Think you see them great” and then “see / How soon this mightiness meets misery” (Prologue.29-30). That is, correct your thinking, your sight, your insight. If, having seen tragedy, “you can be merry then, I’ll say / A man may weep upon his wedding day” (Prologue.31-32). Shakespeare’s comedies end in marriage, in joy not weeping. To weep at the end of a comedy would be as jarring as to laugh at a fall from greatness.

The sobered audience first sees and hears three English aristocrats: the Duke of Buckingham, the Duke of Norfolk, and Lord Abergavenny, Buckingham’s son-in-law. Norfolk has just returned from a showy meeting in France between King Henry and François I, a spectacle for the eye he describes in equally glowing words to Buckingham, who had remained in England with “an untimely ague” (I.1.4). These two kings, Norfolk exclaims, were worth any four others as “In their embracement they grew together” (I.i.10) in “earthly glory” (I.i.14). This was a marriage of “pomp” (I.i.15), with the French as golden as “heathen gods,” shining on the English and thereby making “Britain India”—India, land of rubies, where Elizabeth I, Henry’s future heir to the throne and contemporary King James I’s godmother, had authorized the British East India Company’s commercial ventures in 1600. Every night, the procession of ladies proved a “masque” that “was cried incomparable,” only to be made “a fool and a beggar” the next night by an even more superb show (I.i.26-28). The kings, “equal in lustre,” suns shining over all, would call the “noble spirits,” the aristocrats, to ceremonial combat, and these men “did perform / Beyond thought’s compass,” making the legendary story of the warrior Bevis of Hampton believable (I.i.35-36). For his part, Buckingham cannot bring himself to believe this (“O, you go far”), but Norfolk insists, “As I belong to worship and affect / In honour honesty…All was royal,” well-ordered, well-ruled, with each office performing “distinctly his full function” (I.i.38-44). The courtly show imitated the rightly ordered kingdom lauded by the political writers of Christendom, itself an imitation of God’s rightly ordered cosmos, where everything has a rightful place.

Buckingham remains skeptical, however. Behind all this fine display, “who did guide…this great sport together”? (I.45, 47). He doubts that the apparent rulers really ruled, ruled in truth. Norfolk knows: “All this was ordered by the good discretion / Of the right reverend Cardinal of York,” Thomas Wolsey (I.i.50-51). The incense-wafting Cardinal incenses Buckingham. “The devil speed him! No man’s pie is freed / From his ambitious finger.” (I.i.52-53). Such a keech, such a lump of congealed fat, could block the sun—whether the light of the sun-kings or that of the Son, King of kings. Norfolk attempts to explain if not to justify Wolsey. He is no aristocrat, “not propped by ancestry, whose grace / Chalks successors their way” (I.i.59-60). Aristocrats stay within legitimate bounds, bred and educated and habituated to their right place in the political regime. Wolsey is a Renaissance ‘new man,’ although evidently not the New Man of the Gospels. Nor did he rise to authority in Henry’s court by “high feats done to th’ crown” as, for example, a warrior or a navigator (I.i.61). Rather, “spider-like, / Out of his self-drawing web…The force of his own merit makes his way / A gift that heaven gives for him” (I.i.62-65). He is a man of Machiavellian virtù, a self-made man who relies on the gifts God gave him at birth. Young Abergavenny will have none of that, affirming the judgment of his father-in-law. “I cannot tell / What heaven hath given him…but I can see his pride / Peep through each part of him” (I.i.66-69). His gifts, if that is what they are, were hell-given, not heaven-sent, or else Wolsey “begins / A new hell in himself,” a blotch on the English political order and God’s (I.i.68-72). 

Buckingham presents the evidence of Wolsey’s scheming. In planning the conference in France, the Cardinal arrogated the task to himself, pushing aside the aristocrats and clerics on the king’s Privy Council. At the same time, Abergavenny adds, he imposed the costs of the expensive display upon the aristocrats, “so sicken[ing] their estates that never / They shall abound as formerly” (I.i.83-84). Wolsey follows Machiavelli’s prescription for building the modern, centralized state by ruining the aristocrats who stand between the regime of that state—here as elsewhere in Europe, the monarch, but in England a monarch beguiled by a man grown so fat on money that he blocks the sun-king from his subjects’ view and the view of subjects from the king. Buckingham asks, rhetorically, what the result of this ruinous and vain diplomatic display was, and Norfolk admits, “The peace between the French and us not values / The cost that did conclude it” (I.i.87-88). Exactly so, my lord: a “hideous storm” followed the ceremonies, presaging France’s violation of the treaty when English merchants’ goods were seized at Bordeaux. God and nature protested.

Norfolk worries for his friends’ safety. “The state takes notice of the private difference / Betwixt you and the Cardinal.” (I.i.101-102). Your enemy is not only powerful; his “nature” is “revengeful” and “his sword / Hath a sharp edge” (I.i.108-110). Don’t talk so much. Starting now, since here he comes, “that rock / That I advise your shunning” (I.i.113-114). In the Bible, the solid rock is Jesus, offering refuge in the storm; this rock of the Church offers shipwreck. Upon seeing Buckingham, Wolsey “fixeth his eye” upon him, “full of disdain”; Buckingham returns the stare (I.i., stage direction). This is no Christlike man of charity and forgiveness. Wolsey comes with guards and secretaries carrying papers, which he indicates are records of testimony from Buckingham’s surveyor, the man who establishes the crucial boundaries between one aristocrat’s property and another’s, demarcating the proper places of things. Buckingham is under investigation. After he passes by, Buckingham, who suspects that the Cardinal is taking whatever prejudicial evidence he has to the king, wants to “follow and out-stare him” at court (I.i.129). Norfolk tries to talk him out of it with Senecan advice: “let your reason with your choler question / What ’tis you go about”; “be to yourself / As you would to your friend”—applying the Golden Rule to yourself (I.i. 130-131, 135-136). Buckingham resists, citing the difference between an aristocrat and a commoner from provincial Ipswich: “From a mouth of honour” the aristocrat intends to “quite cry down” Wolsey’s “insolence,” which implies “There’s no difference in persons” (I.i.137-139). Knowingly or not, he resists the policy of modern statesmen, recommended by Machiavelli, to centralize political authority by degrading the authority of the aristocracy that stands in the way of the monarch and the people. Buckingham wants his case to be adjudicated on the basis of who and what he is, as distinguished from who and what Wolsey is—aristocrat versus commoner, “this top-proud fellow” (I.i.151). (Fellow being a term of denigration in the mouth of an aristocrat.) Norfolk persists in his Senecanism. “Be advised: / Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot / That it do singe yourself” and “There is no English soul / More stronger to direct you than yourself, / If with the sap of reason you would quench / Or but allay the fire of passion.” (I.i.140-141, 146-149). The moral stance fortified by the philosopher of pagan antiquity, which defends the soul with the rule of reason over the passions, has formed part of the aristocrats’ education. Can it defeat the ‘modern’?

Buckingham relents, but only temporarily. Seeing corruption and treason in the person of the Cardinal (“Say not ‘treasonous,'” worried Norfolk gasps), Buckingham calls him a “holy fox, / Or wolf, or both” (I.i.158-159). Machiavelli tells his prince to be lion and fox, both; Professor McMullen cites Matthew 7.15, where Jesus warns against false prophets, ravening wolves in sheep’s clothing. Wolsey is indeed a Machiavellian fox, but he has nothing of the lion’s awe-inspiring fearsomeness; he is a canny devourer, only. Here in England, he counseled the king to undertake “this last costly treaty” (I.i.165). But when approached abroad by the Holy Roman Emperor, his fellow Roman Catholic, who feared the alliance of England and France, Wolsey accepted a bribe to persuade the king to break the peace treaty. That is why the French seized British goods at Bordeaux; they retaliated against a treaty breach. “Thus the Cardinal / Does buy and sell his honour as he pleases / And for his own advantage.” (I.i.191-193). 

While the aristocratic gentlemen talk, the Machiavellian Cardinal acts, having induced Henry to have Buckingham and Abergavenny arrested for “high treason” (I.i.201). Buckingham submits to his arrest with Pauline Christian grace: “The will of heaven / Be done in this and all things: I obey.” (I.i.209-210). The king has ordered him to be imprisoned in the Tower of London, along with his son-in-law, who also submits. And others of Buckingham’s circle have warrants against them, including a Carthusian monk, whose “austere, contemplative order” (note to l.221) doubtless offends fat, ravening Wolsey. That is, the real power in England’s modernizing state has moved to eliminate his rivals in both the secular and the clerical aristocracies. Buckingham sees that his surveyor has been bought off with gold, the corrupt Cardinal having corrupted another man to betray his rightful lord. “My life is spanned already,” Buckingham also sees (I.i.223). 

This first scene of Henry VIII recalls the political condition brought on by the state-building Tudors, who replaced the Plantagenets (and understandably so, given the cataclysmic tyranny of Richard III, killed on the battlefield of civil war by the future Henry VII). In the feudal state that had prevailed for centuries, the two aristocracies, the landed, warlike aristocrats and propertyless, spiritual-warrior clerics, had balanced one another. This balance supported but also limited the power of monarchs, as they limited one another. This was a system of ‘checks and balances’ embedded in civil society. Machiavelli’s modern state destroys that balance. Because it does, a priest who whispers policy to a king can effectively tyrannize the country while laying up his treasure not in Heaven but on earth. If the mighty leviathan, the modern state, is to be balanced, not tyrannical, it must follow Locke into a social contract and Montesquieu into statist institutions of balanced powers. England won’t have such institutions for many decades.

The second scene of Act I begins with a symbolic first entrance of King Henry, who leans his own bulk on the bulky Cardinal’s shoulder as he seats himself on the throne. They are accompanied by Thomas Lovell, constable of the Tower. Henry fulsomely states his gratitude to the Cardinal. “My life itself, and the best heart of it”—heart being the core of a human being, according to the Bible—”Thanks you for this great care” (I.ii.1-2). You have “choked” a “full-charged confederacy” against me. He will now hear the testimony of Buckingham’s surveyor (I.ii.3-4). Queen Katherine then arrives, along with Norfolk and the Duke of Suffolk, an aristocrat in the old feudal and chivalric manner. After Henry assures her that she wields “half our power” (I.i.11), Katherine petitions Henry regarding a “great grievance” in his loyal subjects, who are at the point of rebellion (I.ii.20). “Not almost,” Norfolk immediately adds; many of the people are “all in uproar / And danger serves among them” (I.i. 29-30, 36-37). And with just cause: the clothiers have been taxed heavily, upon the “pretense” of paying for “your wars in France,” which we have already learned that Wolsey had precipitated (I.ii.59-60), forcing them to lay off many of those who work for them. “Their curses now / Live where their prayers did” (I.ii.63-64). Henry knows nothing about it, and when he asks Wolsey, the Cardinal admits that he has had a part in it, but only one part, the Privy Council having concurred. But in fact, as Katherine immediately replies, Wolsey had usurped the authority of the Council in imposing the tax and is now trying to deflect the blame. Both Wolsey and Katherine serve as intermediaries. Wolsey stands between the king and his Privy Council, blocking him from knowing the truth. Katherine and Norfolk stand between the king and the people, reporting truthfully on their condition. Both Wolsey and Katherine are Catholics in name, only Katherine is Catholic in spirit.

When Henry expresses his disapproval of the tax (it is “against my pleasure,” the inveterate pleasure-lover intones), Wolsey goes a bit further, saying that the thing would never have “passed me but / By learned approbation of the judges” on the Council (I.ii.68-71). He even draws a moral lesson from the affair, lamenting that “‘Tis but the fate of place and the rough brake / That virtue must go through” (I.ii.75-76), proving that, like Norfolk, he can invoke Christian Stoicism. But only when it might serve to strengthen his bond with the king, namely, the weighty burden they share as public servants. We must soldier on, he continues, since if “we shall stand still / In fear our motion will be mocked or carped at, / We should take root here where we sit, / Or sit state-statues only.” (I.ii.85-88). 

Henry is no Machiavellian, however. He does not rise to the Cardinal’s bait, this time. He doubts that there is any legal precedent for this tax. “We must not rend our subjects from our laws / And stick them in our will” (I.ii.93-95). That is, the rule of English common law, not tyrannical rule, shall prevail. He orders that the tax be rescinded and those who have refused to pay it be pardoned. Adroit Wolsey whispers to his secretary that the written declaration should be supplemented with the rumor that he had interceded with the king to arrange this.

This business properly disposed, with both Henry’s justice and Wolsey’s injustice duly confirmed, the main purpose of the king’s court now proceeds with the entrance of Buckingham’s corrupted surveyor. Katherine expresses her regret that the Duke “is run to your displeasure” (I.ii.110). Henry too regrets it. Buckingham is a learned man, a fine speaker, his “nature” and his “training” both so fine “that he may furnish and instruct great teachers / And never seek for aid out of himself.” (I.ii.111-114). And yet it is just such a nature, “once corrupt,” that will “turn to vicious forms, ten times more ugly / Than ever they were fair” (I.ii. 116-118). The king’s mind, prepared by Wolsey, already judges the surveyor’s coming testimony against Buckingham to be true. The surveyor falsely reports that Buckingham has spoken of murdering Henry and revenging himself upon Wolsey, basing his ambition on the false prophecy of that Carthusian monk, the Duke’s confessor, “who fed him every minute / With words of sovereignty” (I.ii.149-150). This, the surveyor heard from his lord’s own mouth. 

Katherine intervenes, remarking that the surveyor had been fired by Buckingham, “on the complaint o’ th’ tenants,” who had complained of the man’s corruption (I.i.173). She warns him not to let his anger against his former employer ruin his soul, inasmuch as bearing false witness is a sin not only against man but against God. The audience now sees that the surveyor corrupted by the Cardinal already had acted corruptly in the course of his duties, well before Wolsey plied him. He is a little Wolsey. Henry, however, wants the testimony to continue, despite this new evidence. The surveyor, ignoring the queen’s pious warning, swears that “On my soul, I’ll speak but truth” (I.i.177). According to him, the truth is that he had warned his lord that the monk might be deceived “by th’ devil’s illusions,” but that Buckingham persisted in his murderous intentions (I.ii.179-180). The king is convinced by this testimony, calling Buckingham “a giant traitor” (I.ii.199). Ever alert to a chance to put a rival down, Wolsey asks the queen if she now believes that Henry can “live in freedom” if Buckingham is freed from the Tower, to which Katherine can only answer, “God mend all,” prudently evading the question (I.ii.200-201). A cardinal of the Church might be expected to concur, but Wolsey remains silent and the king judges Buckingham a “traitor to th’ height!” (I.ii.214). The commoner-cardinal has suborned the commoner-surveyor to ruin an aristocrat, furthering both centralizing statism and the tyrannical regime of the commoner-cardinal. For his part, Henry, a one-man supreme court, has prejudged a case in the Cardinal’s favor, brushing aside the evidence against the false witness his wife, whom he said shared power with him, had so clearly presented.

The trial scene, in which Katherine in effect acts as Buckingham’s necessarily helpless attorney, thus turns on the stated theme of the play: truth. A monarchic regime in a modern state wields immense power: legislative (as seen in Wolsey’s tax, vetoed by the king), judicial (they testify before Henry in the king’s court), and executive (quite literally to the point of a power to ‘execute,’ to capitally punish, accused traitors). In that state and regime, the political and religious authorities have become fused, even as the kings of England and France had seemed one person during their moment of amity. The same prelate who arranged the peace and inspired the war that followed in order further to enrich himself has nearly divorced the king from the commoners and has succeeded in divorcing him from important aristocrats, landed and clerical. Henry is not himself a tyrant, a tyrant by nature, but he acts tyrannically because he has ‘married’ himself to churchman of genuinely tyrannical nature; politically, he is more ‘married’ to the Cardinal than he is to his virtuous wife. All is true, with respect to the play itself, which testifies that all is not true in religio-political relations, that it is exceedingly difficult to find the truth, whether in framing laws or in judging cases under the laws.

The play now shifts to a conversation between the Lord Chamberlain, a member of the king’s household who oversees his household finances and schedule, and Lord Sandys, who are soon joined by Sir Thomas Lovell. The Lord Chamberlain and Sandys complain of the young who have succumbed to “the spells of France,” the “new customs,” quite “unmanly,” that they have brought back from their time at the French court (I.iii.1-4). If Wolsey is one of the ‘new men,’ the commoners who have risen to positions of authority either by displays of virtue or by deceptive virtù, the scions of the old aristocracy have become new, unmanly men, weakening their own authority. The Lord Chamberlain gruffly laments, “As far as I can see, all the good our English / Have got by the late voyage [to France] is but merely / A fit or two o’th’ face”—some pretentious facial expressions aping those of the self-conceited French courtiers. McMullen cites a passage from the contemporary writer, Thomas Dekker, who made an important connection: “Deceipt,” he observed, “studies Machiavell, and hath a French face” (note to I.iii.7). And further, “their clothes are after such a pagan cut to’it, / That sure they’ve worn out Christendom” (I.iii.13-14). 

Lovell arrives, announcing another novelty, a “new proclamation / That’s clapped upon the Court Gate”—rather as Luther had clapped his 96 Theses on the church door. Sure enough, Christianity having been “worn out,” the proclamation aims at reformation, in this case “the reformation of our travelled gallants / That fill the court with quarrels, talk, and tailors” (I.iii.19-20). The Lord Chamberlain responds with rightful piety: “Now I pray our monsieurs / To think an English courtier may be wise / And never see the Louvre.” (I.iii.21-23). English wisdom is prudential, common-sense wisdom, needing no refinements, no “foreign wisdom” learned in France, as Lovell says; perhaps now they will “understand again like honest men” (I.iii.29, 32). French moeurs foster “lewdness,” giving young English aristocrats new ways to “lay down ladies” (I.iii.35, 40)—a telling criticism, given what we will soon see of King Henry’s proclivities, and indeed of the proclivities of the older aristocrats themselves. 

Because we immediately learn that these mature aristocrats have been corrupted, too. Their complaints against the younger aristocrats are hypocritical. They are off to a dinner sponsored by none other than Cardinal Wolsey, whose “bounteous mind,” as Lovell calls it, guides “a hand as fruitful as the land that feeds us” (I.iii.55-56). He is truly “noble,” the Lord Chamberlain says (I.iii.57). Sandys can only agree, adding that “In him,” a Churchman, “sparing would show a worse sin than ill doctrine” since men of his way should be most liberal,” have been “set here for examples” (I.iii.59-62). With this confusion of aristocratic nobility and Christian charity with generously offered corruption, they hasten off to the dinner, where, to the tune of secular music, the master of ceremonies announces the rather Epicurean moral principle of the evening: “Good company, good wine, good welcome / Can make good people” (I.iv.6-7). No good reformation, and no Protestant Reformation, this. Among the “sweet society of fair ones,” as Sandys exclaims, is one Anne Bullen, a Protestant beauty and attendant to the queen. Sandys engages in some flirtatious courtly banter with her—evidently, he needs no sojourn to France so to do—and Wolsey arrives, greeting his company by saying that any “noble lady / Or gentleman that is not freely merry / Is not my friend” (I.iv.35-37). Then, a party of masquers arrives, pretending to be Frenchmen who cannot speak English and dressed as shepherds; they include the king. They will prove good shepherds—by Wolseyan standards. The king chooses Anne as his dancing partner, self-seduced: “O Beauty, / Till now I never knew thee” (I.iv.75-76). Wolsey quickly recognizes the king beneath the disguise, and Henry cheerfully unmasks, not only literally but then morally, asking the Lord Chamberlain who that “fair lady” is, with whom he danced (I.iv.91). She is the daughter of the Viscount Rochford, “one of her highness’ women” (I.iv.93). “Sweet partner,” he tells her, “I must not forsake you,” as indeed he will not (I.iv.103-104). 

The king has the virtue of justice. When he is acting as king, he intends to act fairly and, in the case of the unjust taxation, succeeds in doing so. His tragic flaw is in the way he hears and sees: hearing false testimony and soft music, but above all seeing outward beauty and allowing it to turn him away from a marriage to a virtuous woman. The highest-ranking clergyman, the highest-ranking political man, the aristocracy that should be guided by Christian principles and animated as well by classical virtues have all become Machiavellians aiming at political domination and physical pleasure or Epicureans vulnerable to Machiavellian manipulation. This may be the moral and political product of the decades of civil war that culminated in Richard III’s vile tyranny.

The first Act of Henry VIII reveals the character of the king, his virtuous Catholic queen, his pretended-religious corrupt chief counsellor, and the English aristocrats, old and young. All except falsely accused, genuinely noble Buckingham and the still nearly unknown Anne Bullen are at the height of their authority, although the fall of the silly young aristocrats is evidently in the works. King Henry has the virtue of justice, handicapped in its exercise by the difficulty of ascertaining truth in a royal court corrupted by the deceiving, Machiavellian Cardinal. What he can see clearly is beauty in the person of a woman who is not his wife. He seems ready to ‘convert’ from Catholic Katherine to Protestant Anne, with momentous consequences for his regime. Is Miss Bullen a woman of virtue? And is Protestantism a better form of Christianity?

Act II begins with a conversation between two gentlemen, who discuss the guilty verdict handed down in the case of Lord Buckingham. The first gentleman, who attended the trial, presided over by Lord Norfolk, recounts that Buckingham “spoke, and learnedly, for life, but all / Was either pitied in him or forgotten” by the jury of aristocrats, his peers (II.i.28-29). Throughout, Buckingham exhibited “a most noble patience” (quite in contrast to Wolsey’s sham nobility, on display at the dinner), being “never so womanish” as to fear death (II.i.36, 37). The gentlemen agree that this is all the Cardinal’s doing, forming part of a systematic strategy of exiling or killing anyone whom “the King favors” (II.i.47). Unlike the king, the people understand the Cardinal’s intention: “All the commons / Hate him perniciously and, o’my conscience, / Wish him ten fathoms deep” (II.i.49-51).

This might easily lead to rebellion, as the unjust tax had done, but Buckingham himself now appears and addresses them. He thanks them for their pity, yet asks them to listen to what he has to say and then to return to their homes and forget him. “The law I bear no malice for my death— / ‘T has done upon the premises but justice— / But those that sought it I could wish more Christians. / Be what they will, I heartily forgive ’em.” (II. 62-65). That is, he takes care not to impugn English common law or the proceedings of the court (it was indeed “a noble one”), while Christianly forgiving the jury and apparently his accusers (II.i.119). He calls upon the accusers or the jury to “glory not in mischief,” however, “for then my guiltless blood must cry against ’em” (II.i.66-68). The man whose anger had seemed unquenchable has quenched it, Christianly. “As the long divorce of steel falls on me” (foreshadowing the momentous marital divorce that looms), “make of your prayers one sweet sacrifice, / And lift my soul to heaven” (II.i. 76-78). There is not a hint of treason from the man falsely accused of treason. “I forgive all” and, as for the king, I “shall cry for blessings upon him” (II.i.83, 91). He can say this out of Christian charity but also from an understanding of justice: “I am richer than my base accusers, / That never knew what truth meant” (II.i.104-105). Providence stands: “Heaven has an end in all” (II.i.124). He asks God to forgive him for whatever sins he may committed. 

The speech shakes the gentlemen. What if Buckingham really is innocent? Will not the people revenge him by attacking his accusers, despite his adjuration? Further, there is a new rumor, the “buzzing of a separation / Between the King and Katherine” (II.i.146-147). They suspect that Wolsey may have whispered accusations against her, as would be consistent with his policy of isolating the head of state from anyone who might oppose Henry’s chief (ir)religious counselor. Although Wolsey had accepted the Holy Roman Emperor’s gold in exchange for persuading the king to break the treaty with France, he now, one gentleman suggests, intends to take revenge upon the Emperor, who is also the king of Spain, the archbishopric of Toledo; as McMullen explains, the Emperor is Katherine’s nephew, so to strike at her is to strike at him (footnote, line 161). The other gentleman protests, “But is’t not cruel / That she should feel the smart of this? / The Cardinal / Will have his will, and she must fall.” (II.i.165-166). Indeed it is cruel, but we are in too public a place to continue the conversation, his friend observes. “Let’s think in private more” (II.i.168).

And to confirm their suspicions independently, the Lord Chamberlain reads a letter to himself from a person who had charge of some fine horses the Chamberlain had purchased, reporting that the Cardinal had confiscated them on the grounds that a master shall be served before a subject. He is joined by Suffolk and Norfolk, who report the king’s worries over his planned divorce, abetted by the man Norfolk now calls “The King Cardinal.” Until Henry knows that man for what he is, Suffolk adds, “he’ll never know himself” (II.ii.21). This is because Wolsey, as Norfolk sees, “dives into the King’s soul and there scatters / Dangers, doubts, wringing of the conscience, / Fears and despairs,” counseling a divorce that would cause “the loss of her / That like a jewel has hung twenty ears / About his neck” without ever “los[ing] her luster” but indeed “lov[ing] him with that excellence / That Angels love good men with,” whatever the strokes of Fortune (II.ii.30-33). What Wolsey intends is not a royal marriage with the Protestant Anne but with the Duchess of Alanson, the French king’s sister. That is, having missed his chance for advancement from the Holy Roman Emperor/King of Spain, Wolsey has shifted his hoped-for alliance to France, the country he persuaded Henry to ‘divorce’ England from. The Cardinal “turns what he list”; “all men’s honors / Lie like one lump before him, to be fashioned / Into what pitch he please,” acting as if he were God forming Man out of clay (II.ii.20). Suffolk can only pray, pray that God will “free us from his slavery” (II.ii.42). All this notwithstanding, Suffolk avows that “I love him not nor fear him” (denying the Machiavellian formula): “there’s my creed” ((II.ii.48-49). He hints at Protestant leanings, charging that the one “who made him proud” was the Pope (II.ii.54). And Wolsey will indeed laud Rome as “the nurse of judgment” (II.ii.92).

Norfolk and Suffolk enter the king’s chamber, much to His Highness’s displeasure: “How dare you thrust yourselves / Into my private meditations? / Who am I?” (II.ii.63-65). He means, ‘Do you not know that I am your sovereign, not to be approached unbidden?’ but of course the king’s real dilemma is that he does not know the truth about the Cardinal and therefore about himself. “Who am I?” indeed. He orders them to leave, but before they can go, Wolsey and a papal Legate, Campeius, who has come to preside over the divorce proceeding, enter the chamber. Deluded Henry calls the Cardinal “the quiet of my wounded conscience,” a “cure fit for a king” (II.ii.73-74). The aristocrats leave, Suffolk whispering to Norfolk, “this cannot continue” (II.ii.82). 

The prelates have sent messages to Rome and to clerics throughout Europe, soliciting their assurances that the king’s marriage to Katherine was actually against the will of God—this, to pressure her brother, the Spanish king to forego any objection. The king’s secretary arrives—Stephen Gardiner, elevated to that position by Wolsey, to whom he vows loyalty, not to Henry. Wolsey had moved his predecessor out of the palace, fearing his genuine virtue, which might have caused him to rise in the estimation of the king. “He was a fool,” Wolsey explains to Campeius, “for he would needs be virtuous” (II.ii.130-131). Henry would be virtuous, too, but he does not know himself, does not recognize that his pangs of conscience about having contracted a wrong marriage are in large measure pangs of eros regarding Anne Bullen. With the Cardinal’s help, he has persuaded himself otherwise. He is Wolsey’s fool, not a fool for Christ.

How has Anne responded to the king’s attentions? The queen’s lady in waiting talks things over with an “Old Lady,” a duenna-like character reminiscent of Juliet’s Nurse. She does have a conscience, worrying that Katherine is undeserving of the king’s disfavor, “so good a lady that no tongue could ever / Pronounce dishonor of her” (II.iii.3-4). Since it is “better to be lowly born” than to be raised up and then thrown down, “by my troth and maidenhead / I would not be a queen” (II.iii.22). The Old Lady is having none of that: “I would / And venture maidenhead for’t; and so would you, / For all this spice of your hypocrisy” (II.iii.24-26). A “woman’s heart” always yearns for “eminence, wealth, sovereignty,” and such prizes have bent your flexible “conscience” (II.iii.29, 32). “You would not be a queen,” she puns, ‘queen’ meaning whore, as well. When Anne denies any such ambition, the Old Lady sniffs, “Then you are weakly made” (II.iii.40).

The ubiquitous Lord Chamberlain enters with the news that the king intends to make Anne the Marchioness of Pembroke, along with a substantial income—this, presumably, to set her up either as his mistress or to elevate her aristocratic status, clearing the path to make her his queen, in one or both senses. The Chamberlain confides to the audience that, having “perused her well,” he understands how her well-mingled “beauty and honor” have captivated Henry. After he departs, the Old Lady exults (after all, she will accompany Anne to her new estate), while rather sharply remarking that these new honors will have kingly strings attached. One does not receive a thousand pounds a year in exchange for “no other obligation” than “pure respect” (II.iii.95-96). Anne is discomfited by this rough humor, asking only that her attendant say nothing about this to Queen Katherine. “What do you think me?” the Old Lady exclaims, her version of English good sense having been questioned (II.iii.108). In the morality plays, the Vetus homo, the Old Man, recalls Old Adam, the originator of original sin. The Old Lady is his womanly counterpart, serving as a touchstone for the New Lady, Christian and Protestant, testing her to find the truth of her. True or hypocritical? True or self-deluded, regarding her real motives? 

Back at court, the Archbishop of Canterbury, several bishops, the two Cardinals, and King Henry and Queen Katherine gather to hear the judgment of Rome on Katherine. She pleads her case, asking for right, justice, and pity, having always “been to you a true and humble wife” and the mother of his children (II.iv.21). Twenty years earlier, Henry’s father and her father had “gathered a wise council to them / Of every realm…who deemed our marriage lawful” (II.iv.49, 51). Turning to Wolsey, who counsels patience, she assures him that she will be—”when you are humble”! (II.iv.72). “You are mine enemy, and make my challenge / You shall not be my judge” (II.iv.75-76). O, but Madam, he smoothly replies, “You speak not like yourself”; “you do me wrong” (II.iv.83, 86), failing to display your usual gentle and wise disposition. Knowing that he “tender[s] more your person’s honor” than his “high profession spiritual,” knowing further that his heart—again, the center of the soul—is “crammed with arrogancy, spleen and pride,” she continues to refuse the Cardinal as her judge and appeals to the Pope, demanding “to bring my whole cause ‘fore his Holiness, / And to be judged by him” (II.iv. 108, 114-115, 118-119). She walks out. 

Henry admits that Katherine is “the queen of earthly queens,” a woman of “sweet gentleness,” saintly meekness, “wife-like government,” and unquestioned piety; “noble-born, /And like her true nobility she has /Carried herself toward me” (II.iv. 134-139). Worried, the Cardinal quickly requests that the king declare publicly that he had nothing whatever to do with arranging these proceedings. The king so absolves him—whether naively, self-deludingly, or hypocritically, one can only guess. He further excuses the queen’s outburst by saying she must have been lied to by Wolsey’s enemies, who are wont to bark “like to village curs” (II.iv.156). It was rather the Bishop of Bayonne, a French ambassador, who raised doubts about the legitimacy of his marriage to Katherine, in light of a proposed marriage between his daughter Mary and the Duke of Orléans. He then worried that his lack of a male heir was a divine judgment on himself. Weighing “the danger which my realms stood in / By this my issue’s fail,” “hulling in /The wild sea of my conscience, I did steer / Toward this remedy whereupon we are / Now present here together,” intending therewith to “rectify my conscience” (II.iv. 194-200). He challenges the Bishop of Lincoln to prove his marriage lawful, in which case he will remain married to Katherine. At that, Campeius asks for an adjournment of the proceeding, given the queen’s absence, at which point Henry suspects the “dilatory sloth and tricks of Rome” (II.iv.234). To evade them, he decides to call upon “my learned and well-beloved servant,” Thomas Cranmer, who had written the document sent to Rome and the clerics of Europe, justifying the divorce on the grounds that Katherine had been married before she married the king. With his approach, “I know / My comfort comes along” (II.iv.236-237). He dismisses the court, which has not comforted the royal Epicurean. [1]

King Henry Eighth and Cardinal Wolsey share a decidedly unspiritual bond: the love of pleasure. Both have fattened in self-indulgence. They differ, in that the king means well, wants to do justice, is troubled when he fails, whereas Wolsey is a Machiavellian; he loves ruling even more than pleasure. As of the midpoint in the play, he has out-schemed the king.

Note

1. While the play does not explain the argument in favor of what it calls the divorce (actually an annulment), it would have been familiar to the audience. Katherine of Aragon had first married Henry’s elder brother, Arthur, then Prince of Wales, heir to the throne occupied by Henry VII. Arthur died, and under canon law a man is not allowed to marry his brother’s widow. The pope granted Henry of York dispensation to do so. Cranmer’s argument for annulling the marriage thus rested upon canon law, not the dispensation; the reason for appealing to clerics throughout Europe, not only the pope, might be a suspicion that the pope might not overrule the dispensation. This would explain both Katherine’s appeal to papal authority and Henry’s impatience with papal “sloth and tricks.”

John of Salisbury’s life spanned most of the twelfth century, and he knew many of the luminaries of that time. Thomas Beckett was a friend and eventual companion in exile. He studied under Peter Abelard in Paris. He is said to have been introduced to Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, by Bernard of Clairvaux. He served as Theobald’s secretary and then under Thomas Beckett. King Henry II exiled him to France, possibly thanks to his association with Beckett. Well respected there, he was eventually appointed to the Episcopate of Chartres by Louis VII, in which office he spent the final four years of his life.

Written during his time at Canterbury in the 1150s, the Metalogicon defends the Trivium against attacks by the “Cornificians.” Cornificius is a name John gives to the leader of this group; his identity no one has figured out. John approves neither of their critique nor of their character, they being among those “who would rather criticize the works of others than look after, order, and reform their own lives.” Proto-Machiavellians, the Cornificians brand “the habit of obedience” as “a stigma of servility,” and “the absence of guilt” as “an admission of impotence.” It might be, then, that they were partisans of the English king against the Catholic clergy, attempting to undermine the moral and intellectual authority of those loyal to the Papacy. John emphasized the connection between the liberal arts and morality, “since I am convinced that all things read or written are useless except so far as they have a good influence on one’s manner of life.” The defense of the liberal arts is in turn a defense of philosophy, which again he carefully associates with morality: “Any pretext of philosophy that does not bear fruit in the cultivation of virtue and the guidance of one’s conduct is futile and false.” Intellectual rectitude is a form of moral rectitude, as there are “three things that cause me to fear”: “ignorance of the truth, misled or wanton statement of falsehood, and the haughty assertion of fact.” Since “humility is guarded when we listen, while pride often insinuates itself when we speak,” he readily confesses himself to be guilty “in all three respects,” asking his readers to pray for him.

He does not ask his readers to pray for “the malicious wrangler,” Cornificius, a man of “inflated arrogance” who, “barring no means in his effort to console himself for his own want of knowledge…has contrived to improve his own reputation by making many others ignoramuses like himself.” Cornificius and his followers are contra natura. Nature has endowed man with reason and speech, while divine grace “fructifies nature.” Love of the good aims at beatitude, perfect happiness, and the Holy Trinity “has so arranged the parts of the universe that each requires the help of the others, and they mutually compensate for their respect deficiencies.” Virtue, strength of character, helps man to acquire beatitude. It is therefore “beyond me” to understand “what is the real aim of one who denies that eloquence should be studied; who asserts that it comes as a natural gift to one who is not mute, just as sight does to one who is not blind, and hearing to one who is not deaf; and who further maintains that although nature’s gift is strengthened by exercise, nothing is to be gained by learning the art [of eloquence], or at least that the benefit accruing is not worth the effort that must be expended.” In this, the Cornificians are decidedly not proto-Machiavellians; Machiavelli did at least demand effort from his followers, if not the kind of effort John of Salisbury has in mind.

How then does eloquence aid philosophy? The love of wisdom that animates philosophy proceeds by reasoning. “Reason would remain utterly barren, or at least would fail to yield a plenteous harvest, if the faculty of speech did not bring to light its feeble conceptions, and communicate the perceptions of the prudent exercise of the human mind.” That is, the effort expended in articulating thoughts, often in argumentation, strengthens thought, clarifies it. Further, thought is not only theoretical but prudential, and prudence is a cardinal moral and political virtue. “It is this delightful and fruitful copulation of reason and speech which has given birth to so many outstanding cities, and has made friends and allies of so many kingdoms, and has unified and knit together in bonds of love so many peoples.” For John, this means preeminently the relations between England and France, unified (if by now somewhat shakily) by the Roman Catholic Church. The traditional Church education in the liberal arts, beginning with the Trivium, must therefore be defended. “One who would eliminate the teaching of eloquence from philosophical studies, begrudges Mercury”—the messenger-god, the god of eloquence—his “possession of Philology”—for John, another word for philosophy—and “wrests from Philology’s arms her beloved Mercury.” Such a man “may seem to attack eloquence alone,” but in fact “he undermines and uproots all liberal studies, assails the whole structure of philosophy, tears to shreds humanity’s social contract, and destroys the means of brotherly charity and reciprocal interchange of services.” Carried much further, this would dehumanize men, who “would degenerate to the condition of brute animals,” their cities seeming “like corrals for livestock rather than communities composed of human beings united by a common bond for the purpose of living in society, serving one another, and cooperating as friends.” By eliminating or severely limiting communication by words, “what instruction could be given in faith and morals, and what agreement and mutual understanding could subsist among men?”

Cornificius himself exhibits what human beings would become, were they to acquiesce his criticisms of rhetoric, a topic to which no less a philosopher than The Philosopher, Aristotle, devoted a substantial book. Cornificius is a man of “bloated gluttony, puffed-up pride, obscene mouth, rapacious greed, irresponsible conduct, loathsome habits (which nauseate all about him), foul lust, dissipated appearance, evil life, and ill repute.” I, John, would reveal his identity, “were it not that I am restrained by reverence for his Christian name,” and so “have thought it better to be lenient with the person, without ceding any quarter to his error.” And while “nothing is more despicable than to attack the character of the proponent of a doctrine simply because his views are not to our liking,” Cornificius evidently gives ample cause to condemn his character quite apart from his views. And those views, it would seem have had a malign effect on this character, if it is not his malign character that has given rise to his views. Ever a man of Aristotelian moderation and Christian charity, John allows that “as far as a Christian may licitly do so, I would despise both the person and his opinion” (emphasis added).

“But let him snore away till midday, become drunk in his daily carousals, and squander his time by wallowing in carnal excesses which would shame even an Epicurean pig, a much as his heart desire.” Taking the higher ground, “I will confine myself to attacking his opinion, which has ruined many, as not a few believe what he says,” namely, the “host of fools” who “follow him,” that “motley crowd, made up mostly of the lazy and dull, who are trying to seem, rather than to become wise.” Before doing so, however, one must note that “verbose, rather than eloquent,” Cornificius “is continually tossing to the winds verbal leaves that lack the fruit of meaning,” a “hodgepodge of verbiage,” boasting “that he has a shortcut whereby he will make his disciples eloquent without the benefit of any art, and philosophers without the need of any work.” For the eros of philosophy and the Holy Spirit, he would substitute “a spirit of intoxication…under the guise of philosophy.” This, John adds, “is a common and well-known fact in all the monastic orders.” Some disciples of Cornificius go on to become “the same sort of physicians that they had previously been philosophers”—sophists of the body rather than the mind, demanding payment for their services and thus refusing to care for the poor while extracting money from patients desperate with pain. Still others engage in “the trifling concerns of court”—again, for the money. “They deem nothing sordid and inane, save the straits of poverty. Wisdom’s only fruit, for them, is wealth.” Since “the secret and hidden resources of nature” cannot “be charted by one who is utterly ignorant of all philosophy,” such men are rightly disqualified from philosophy, medicine, and politics alike. Or, at least, they should be. Regrettably, like Cornus, the crow, Cornificius “set himself to carping on what he despaired of learning.”

“But enough of this.” “Disregarding the personal faults of Cornificius” (relevant though they are, given the link between learning and virtue), “let us refute his erroneous doctrine.” That doctrine consists of two main points: “there is no point in studying the rules of eloquence,” he argues, “which is a gift which is either conceded or denied to each individual by nature”; “the rules of eloquence confer neither wisdom nor love of wisdom” because “philosophy (or wisdom, its object) is concerned not with words, but with facts.” 

It is true, John concedes, that eloquence as often described does not amount to philosophizing. “A man who is a liar in word and spirit will come to believe the falsehood he peddles.” But that is false eloquence. “He alone is eloquent who fittingly and efficaciously expresses himself as he intends”—he “who can with facility and adequacy verbally express his mental perceptions.” That being so, “I am at a loss to see how anything could be more generally useful,” not only useful for those who philosophize but “more helpful in acquiring wealth, more reliable for winning favor, more suited for gaining fame.” In order of moral rank, virtue and wisdom, which “differ in name rather than in substance,” come first, eloquence second, followed by health, “the good will of one’s associates and an abundance of goods,” acquired not only to satisfy physical desires but “to provide the material instruments of action.” Since “one’s fellows…possess the same human nature,” nothing can be “more universally efficacious and more likely to win distinction” than excellence in exhibiting the distinctively human characteristic: logos—reason and speech. 

The natural gifts we receive at birth can be “canceled or hindered by defects” or “restored or helped by aids.” Prudent care of those gifts “assists nature.” Socrates’ eros, initially directed at the bodies of women, “was subdued and controlled,” channeled into an erotic longing for wisdom. In souls whose nature is “propitious,” industrious cultivation will allow “its fruits [to] be readily harvested”; “if nature is unbenign it should be nursed even more carefully, so that, with the aid of virtue, it may more happily and gloriously grow strong.” But the Cornificians would “do away with logic,” the core of genuine eloquence.

Logic, “the science of verbal expression and reasoning,” being able to say what you mean, and meaning something that is rationally sound, in its broader meaning “includes all instruction relative to words.” Like any art, it “is a system that reason has devised in order to expedite…our ability to do things within our natural capabilities,” “an efficient plan, which avoids nature’s wastefulness and straightens our circuitous wanderings.” While “nature is the mother of all the arts,” “she has given reason as their nurse for their improvement and perfection.” It makes natural ability effective. Reason improves all the arts, including itself; logic is the art whereby the capacity for reason improves itself. Bernard of Chartres, the teacher of one of John’s teachers in Paris, identified three natural intellectual capacities: the ability to flit about, “easily learning but just as quickly forgetting”; the ability to creep along, “mired down to earth,” never progressing; and the ability to walk, the mean between these extremes, the ‘Peripatetic’ way of Aristotle, which “has its feet on the ground so it can firmly stand, and because it can climb, provides prospect of progress, and is admirably suited for philosophizing.” This is “a basis for the arts,” enabling the mind to exercise reason, which “examines and investigates things that make an impression on the senses or intellect.”

Eloquence and dialectical reasoning join with grammar in the Trivium. A complete liberal-arts education adds the Quadrivium, which consists of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. The liberal arts are “the first to proffer their services to the natural abilities of those who philosophize.” “Our ancestors…studied them diligently,” learning “to comprehend everything they read,” elevating “their understanding of all things,” not only of books, having been “empowered” to “cut through the knots of all problems possible of solution.” The Trivium teaches “the significance of all words,” while the Quadrivium “unveil[s] the secrets of all nature.” The liberally educated person has achieved self-sufficiency. He does “not need the help of a teacher in order to understand the meaning of books and to find the solutions of questions.” The liberal arts are liberal because they liberate human souls from undue dependency upon the opinions of others. 

The first art of the Trivium is grammar. Like all arts, “grammar imitates nature.” And so, for example, a noun (a person, place, or thing) “does not admit of degrees of comparison”; a dog is a dog, not a different sort of cat. There can be different species of dogs and cats, but each species, each subspecies, is what it is. Nouns follow nature, that way. They help us to ‘grasp’ the natural thing they denote.

Further, “since our intellect is, as it were, the soul’s ear, as well as its hand, it derives absolutely no conception from words whose absurdity precludes understanding.” It means nothing to say, “a categorical horse.” But since “not everything false is absurd”—if I tell you I own a square circle, you cannot know what I mean—but if I say that circles are squares, I am either mistaken or lying—we need logic to separate true from false statements. The kind of logic the Trivium features is dialectical logic. Dialectic does not have the rigor of demonstrative (or apodictic) logic, most often seen in mathematics. Demonstrative logic proceeds from incontrovertible premises, self-evident definitions. Dialectic proceeds from probabilities. it does not estimate “utility or goodness,” either; that is the task of political science, which “treats of degrees of justice, utility, and goodness.” Grammar is more modest than logic, since the sentence “Man is rational” is no less grammatical than “Man does not exist.” The logician, whose is out to “determine truth and falsity,” begins with grammar, is limited by grammar, but goes beyond grammar, because as a logician he checks the premises of his argument against what is. If the premise of my argument is, ‘all humans are white,’ and you can produce a non-white human, my argument collapses. If the premise of my argument is, ‘all humans are categorical,’ the grammarian “jumps up to condemn this as absurd,” telling the philosopher that he is positing an unmeaning claim. Poets, too, “must never forsake the footsteps of nature.” It, too, “belongs to grammar, which is its mother and the nurse of its study.” Admittedly, neither poetry nor grammar is entirely natural, and each owes most of its content to man, its author and inventor,” but “nevertheless nature successfully asserts some authority in both.” A poetry that drifts away from grammar “will be dropped from the roll of liberal studies.”

“Nature is rich and bountiful, and liberally provides human indigence with her untold wealth, with the result that the properties of things overflow into words as our reason endeavors to make words cognate to things discussed.” Here is where the conventional, the customary element of language comes in. Custom is “the supreme arbiter of speech” in the sense that when we see a cat we may convey what we see to others and indeed to ourselves by the word ‘cat,’ but not if we are French; then we will say or think ‘chat.‘ Yet custom too needs not to contradict nature. If it does, it cannot endure and, while it endures, it will do human beings no good.

Why? Because in terms of the relation of custom to words, proper “speaking is the articulate and literate verbal expression of our thoughts”; it “shuns the pitfalls of solecisms and barbarisms.” To do so, the student needs to learn the art of grammar, learn to detect grammatical errors, and understand figures of speech. This matters because “the art [of grammar] is, as it were, a public highway, on which all have the right to journey, walk, and act, immune from criticism or molestation. To use faulty grammar always means that one is forsaking the proper thoroughfare.”

The art of grammar and the detection of grammatical errors are fairly straightforward. Figures of speech (“metaphors, metonymy, synecdoche, and the like”) can easily confuse the hearer and are “the exclusive privilege of the very learned.” One must always “take care to avoid crude figures that are hard to interpret” because “what is primarily desirable in language is lucid clarity and easy comprehensibility.” Otherwise, sophistry will likely ensue, “envelop[ing] the mind in a fog of fallacies.” Almost always, a speaker should “make straight the way for understanding.” 

“Grammar prepares the mind to understand everything that can be taught in words,” as such great men as Cicero, Quintilian, Caesar, and Martianus affirm. With characteristic sophistry, Cornificius “invokes the authority of Seneca to defend his erroneous contentions.” Seneca teaches, rightly, that “liberal studies do not make a person good.” John remarks “that the same holds true of other studies”; alluding to 1 Corinthians, he writes that “knowledge puffeth up” and that “it is charity alone that makes one good.” Nonetheless, will not alone sufficient to form good character, grammar “contributes” to such formation. Without it, you could not read Homer, and poetry is the cradle of philosophy. “The chief aids to philosophical inquiry and the practice of virtue are reading, learning”—by which he means grasping the doctrinal content of what you read—followed by “meditation and assiduous application,” that is, practicing what good principles have been set forth in the book. Meditation is necessary because it “reaches out farther to what is unknown,” what isn’t in the book, to “the hidden recesses of questions.” With the knowledge gained by reading, learning, and meditation, you can find the right goals of action. “It is accordingly evident that grammar, which is the basis and root of scientific knowledge, implants, as it were, the seed [of virtue] until it becomes solid virtue, and it grows in manifold respects until it fructifies in good works, wherefore men are called and actually are ‘good.'” John hastens to say that grace is still needed to impart “the faculty of writing and speaking correctly to those to whom it is given.” As to the books best read, “of all branches of learning, that which confers the greatest beauty is Ethics, the most excellent part of philosophy, without which the latter would not even deserve its name.”

“Subject both to nature and the will of man,” grammar provides the gateway to both philosophy, especially dialectical logic, and the formation of civil laws, which themselves “derive their force from human constitution while what is deemed expedient for the common welfare is considered equivalent to natural justice.” Yet Cornificius, “beating against a solid wall like a blind man, rashly brings to trial, and still more brazenly accuses logic.” The purpose of logic is “to ascertain the truth,” and in civil life it is indispensable to bringing the mind to prudence, the capacity for practical reasoning. Prudence is the first of the four cardinal classical virtues; while it “consists entirely in insight into the truth, together with a certain skill investigating the latter,” justice “embraces the truth” thus discovered, fortitude “defends it,” and temperance or moderation makes sure that none of these virtues ventures into foolish actions. “Thus it is indubitable that prudence is the root of all the virtues,” and “he who dreams of teaching philosophy without logic, is, in effect, presuming to eliminate the reasons of things from the quest for wisdom, inasmuch as logic presides over these reasons.” 

While Plato founded logic (he puts the first statement of the principle of non-contradiction into the mouth of Socrates in the Republic), Aristotle elaborated its corollary rules. There are several kinds of logic. Demonstrative or apodictic logic deduces conclusions from the fundamental principles of the sciences; “it rejoices in necessity.” Probable logic founds its deductions on opinion, preferably the opinions of the wise. Dialectic and rhetoric are subdivisions of probable logic, and both offer deductions that are likely, not necessarily so. Sophistry, however, “merely wears the disguise of probability or necessity,” having “no care at all for facts” and aiming only at “los[ing] its adversary in a fog of delusions.”

Dialectic being the kind of logic studied as part of the Trivium, John focuses his defense of logic on it. While grammar concerns the right way of saying things, dialectic concerns the substance of what is said. “A word’s force consists in its meaning,” animating the word “as the soul animates the body.” Like all kinds of logic, dialectic issues in judgment—in this case, judgment founded on probable truth. Christianity is right to teach that “the only sure road to truth is humility,” and dialectical logic teaches humility about the truths it discovers, as its practitioner must admit that he has arrived at truths that remain uncertain. Having so arrived, he will not engage in immoderate disputation, oversubtlety, or loquacity. Real eloquence derives from this practical wisdom. “In the hand of a pigmy or dwarf, the sword of Hercules is worthless.” To avoid this, not only must one not be an intellectual pigmy or a moral dwarf, making dialectic an end in itself, “walking ’round about and surveying itself, ransacking its own depths and secrets, limiting itself to things that are of no use whatsoever in a domestic or military, commercial or religion, civil or ecclesiastical way, and that are appropriate only in school.” Glancing again at the Cornificians, he asks (rhetorically) “What moral philosopher does not fairly bubble over with laws of ethics, so long as these remain merely verbal? But it is a far different matter to exemplify these things in his own life.” Without “the other disciplines,” you “cannot possess the riches that are promised and provided by dialectic.” Dialectic originates “as a consequence of other studies,” which “it subsequently organizes and vivifies” if it is not “deterred by the noxious impediments of inertia and ignorance.” It is prior to those studies (e.g., the Quadrivium) in the sense that, having originated in the need those studies have of it, it now must precede them in the course of study itself. It is “the common servant” of all other philosophic studies, whether natural or moral.

Dialectic proceeds by syllogism, aiming at convincing an opponent. The wider the knowledge of probabilities the dialectician possesses, the more convincing his arguments are likely to be. It proceeds to inquire into (for example) “whether one of two contradictory propositions must always be true.” However, one must not trivialize the Trivium: “Those who dispute with each other about whether or not goats have wool are not really discussing dialectal problems.” And avoid the opposite extreme, the tendency to invest very small things with remarkable significance, to “have the impression that every letter of the alphabet is pregnant with the secrets of Minerva.” Many supposed dialecticians “seem to be wrangling over words,” merely. The thesis of a genuinely dialectical argument is “an opinion of some learned authority,” especially if that opinion “is not commonly accepted.” The serious use of dialectical reasoning may be seen in Aristotle, especially in his discussion of genera and species—that is, of classifications requiring the mind to distinguish between what is and what is not a particular kind of thing, the exercise of the principle of non-contradiction regarding things.

Aristotle cautions his readers that “genera and species do not exist, but are only understood.” By this, he means they are abstracted from “particular things”; the particulars actually exist but the genera and species exist as commonalities among the particulars. The “abstracting intellect…simply contemplates the form, without considering the matter, even though in fact the former cannot exist apart from the matter.” The intellect “comes into sharper relief in proportion as it considers simpler things in themselves, namely, apart from composition with other things.” Reason discerns genera and species, “mental representations of actual, natural things, intellectual images of the mutual likenesses of real things.” John is no neo-Platonist. He does not claim that there are ‘ideas’ detached from individual things. Form always exists “through the matter, while conversely the matter is determined,” given shape, “by the form.” He concurs with Aristotle, who argues that “universals are only understood, and there is no actual thing that is universal.” On the other hand, “those who declare that genera and species are merely sounds or word concepts” have “strayed far afield from Aristotle’s teaching.” 

The study of Aristotelian logic predominated in John’s own intellectual formation, and he devotes most of the final two sections of his book to summary of and commentary on Aristotle’s treatises on the various aspects of logic: the Categories, Of Interpretation, the Topics, the Posterior Analytics, and Sophistical Refutations. In so doing, he aims at presenting each treatise “in such a way as to make the comprehension of its contents as easy as possible.” Definitions of “pertinent” terms and “the differences between words, as they occur,” are critical to such presentation. Just as important is the ‘attitude’ of the interpreter to the work he interprets. “That which is written should be studied with sympathetic mildness, and not tortured on the rack, like a helpless prisoner, until it renders what it never received.” Begin with “the evident literal meaning of what is written, until he obtains a fuller and surer grasp of the truth by further reading or by divine revelation.” And if he finds a passage impossible to understand, “let him not be therewith deterred” but instead continue to other books and even other writers, “as authors mutually explain one another, and all things help in turn to explain other things.” “There is little or nothing that lies concealed from one who is well read.”

The Categories teaches elementary logic, focusing on the meaning of words. Aristotle shows how a word can have multiple meanings and so require scrutiny with respect to what a given speaker or writer means by it. This “certainly both helps us to avoid being misled by fallacious reasoning and empowers us to deceive others by the same.” Definitions of words must fit the nature of the things denoted by them, showing “what things are universal and what ones singular, what ones substances and what ones accidents.” To know the truth about any thing, we first need to know if it actually exists, and then know what it is, what kind of thing it is, its size, “its relation to other things, where and when it exists, what it does, and what it undergoes.” And finally, we need to know why it is the way it is, although this knowledge belongs fully only to God. “The great efficacy of the categories with regard to the works of nature melts away when confronted with the divine essence,” since the works of nature are limited and God is not. Still, knowledge of the categories “is very useful,” inasmuch as human beings live among natural objects, and these are knowable. For its part, Of Interpretation investigates how to determine whether a statement is true or false. While the Categories deals with the elements of sentences, whereas Of Interpretation deals with the sentences themselves. 

While those two books introduce logic, the Topics, along with the Posterior Analytics and the Sophistical Refutations, give “the body of the art.” Of these, the Topics is the most important, “especially for those whose aim is probability,” the dialecticians. “The Topics is the first book which explains reasons,” teaching “argumentation from commonplaces,” which is what “topics” are. Clear definitions of words and accurate interpretations of sentences underlie any rational discourse whatsoever, and the Topics “lucidly teaches the art of defining,” which requires no equivocation and no indefiniteness, as “it is an absolute impossibility for anything to exist without its own specific differentiation”—that is, the characteristic or constellation of characteristics that distinguish it from other things. It is true, of course, that “what is substantial is frequently uncertain,” and therefore cannot be defined as precisely as we would like, at least for now. There was a time when “men thought that it was impossible to cut diamonds,” but since the discovery of an effective technique of doing so, we now know it’s easy. Also, individual things cannot so much be defined as described, since each is unique. John concedes that “it is easier to do something than to do it well; and virtue always involves difficulty.” 

The matter of definable genera and species on one side, describable but not definable individuals on the other side, leads to the problem of “identity and diversity,” definitions referring to the first, diversity to the second. “Things are said to be ‘different’ and ‘the same’ in several different senses.” This animal is not only a cat, it is also Felix, an observation involving no logical contradiction. “A knowledge of genus, property, and accident, as well as of definitions, is necessary for both proof and refutation in questions of identity and diversity.” “The determination as to what is necessary and what probable lies concealed in nature’s bosom, and nature alone knows her own forces.” Nature must then be “carefully observed” and “thoroughly examined.” Nothing “helps more to provide a knowledge of topics, to beget fuller understanding of the truth, to teach and to persuade, and to develop a happy faculty of dealing with every kind of subject” than the investigation of nature. In logic as in all areas of knowledge, Aristotle directs his readers to nature. 

To undertake this investigation rationally, one must understand reasoning. “All experts make ready their instruments before they attempt to accomplish anything by means of their art, lest their particular competence by nullified by the lack of suitable implementation.” This is what the several books on logic do. And since “showing off one’s art always invites suspicion,” it is better to discuss controverted topics with “an unassuming manner.” Pace Cornificius, but “excessive verbosity is the greatest wastrel of all,” exceeding even yourself in its profligacy. Here again, prudence should govern, as “we should deal with a learned man in one way, but with an illiterate person in another.” Syllogisms make sense to a learned man, but others need the more down-to-earth argumentation by induction. And waste no time arguing about the inarguable “Many subjects do not admit of disputation,” such as those that “transcend human reasoning, and are consecrated entirely to faith,” as well as those that “appear unworthy of the attention of the questioner and answerer, and serve only to demonstrate that those disputing about them have either lost their minds, or never did have any sense.” Rather, “to grasp the truth as it actually is, belongs to divine and angelic perfection, to which one approaches more closely in proportion as he more earnestly seeks, ardently loves, accurately investigates, and happily contemplates reality.”

His friend Thomas Beckett has “requested” that John next turn to the Posterior Analytics, which “examines reasoning” itself. While it is true that “the principles of all branches of learning are interwoven, and each requires the aid of the others in order to achieve its own perfection,” analysis breaks down topics into components that simplify the task of understanding them. John warns that the Analytics itself, however, is a difficult book to interpret, a “confusing” book, in part “because of its intricately involved examples,” its “meticulous exactness and brevity”—all features bespeaking Aristotle’s intention “to prevent its examples being anywhere subjected to refutation.” Do not read this book too closely, as its “subtle intricacies” will bog you down. 

The Analytics contains discussions of both inductive and deductive reasoning, leading again to a consideration of nature, although John pointedly remarks that “I have never known anyone who became a master at recognizing natures as a consequence of this chapter.” Overall, the book emphasizes demonstrative rather than probabilistic proofs. By John’s time, demonstrative proof, “the most demanding of all forms of reasoning,” has “practically fallen into disuse,” except among mathematicians and, among them, the geometers. It was his excellence in presenting the science of demonstrative proof that Aristotle won the title of “The Philosopher.” He had “forg[ed] a crucible for analysis” that earned him his advancement to “the authoritative position of teacher.” 

“But who is equal to this discipline?” Perhaps the great polymath, Aristotle, but since a demonstrative proof requires unassailable first principles as its premises, and since few men master more than one field in which they know enough “to infer conclusions based on the necessity of incontrovertible truths,” the comprehensive use of demonstration is exceedingly rare, less and less possible as each field of knowledge advances. Still, “it is the inherent nature of science to strive for demonstration,” so the attempt must be made, increasingly within each field and not overall. The promising fact is that there are certain “universal concepts of the mind, and then things that are known per se,” which form the basis for demonstrative logic; every human being at least potentially can comprehend such proofs. “What is more immediate to sense experience is better known to us, whereas what is more remote from it, as with the universal, is better known in itself and of its [own] nature.” That is, since “universal concepts derive their credibility from the fact that they are inductively inferred from particular things,” we “come to know abstractions by induction.” As Aristotle writes, “unless we have sense experience, we cannot make inductions.” It is “bodily sensation,” the “primary power or initial operation of our conscious soul,” that “constitutes the basis for all the arts, and forms the initial knowledge which both clears and makes ready the way for first principles.” Sense experience is an innate power of the soul that perceives things and discriminates among them. “No or very little knowledge can exist independently of it,” memory is a “treasury” of sensations. Sense experience is extrinsic to the mind, which analyzes that experience.

Imagination is “the offspring of sensation…nourished and fostered by memory” and capable of visualizing the future. It is not necessarily a reliable guide to the future, however, or to conduct in the present. “Numbered among imagination’s offspring is carnal lust, a poisonous pest, extremely opposed to the project of philosophizing.” Imagination does not obey the principle of non-contradiction, since our pleasurable expectations run into disappointing realities. The result is Goethe’s Werther, who Aristotle anticipates two millennia in advance: “If the sadness and sorrow grow so violent that they disorder and upset the soul, anger flares from the friction.” Imagination therefore needs to “develop caution, whereby it comes to shun whatever is noxious, such as images that encourage melancholy, anger, and lust, or their daughters, envy, hate, calumny, carnal wantonness, and vanity”—in a word, Cornificianism. But then again, “if our imagination becomes overly cautious, it risks becoming timid, whereas if it grows too incautious, it is in peril of becoming foolhardy.”

Sensation and imagination make “judgments”—e.g., warm/cold, black/white. These opinions may or may not be accurate, reliable, since “often as senses are duped,” as when we see a stick in the water, whose parts seem disconnected. “Sensation deceives the untutored.” The cure for such deception is the experience that leads to prudence, which aims at “the investigation, perception, and skillful utilization of truth,” looking to the future in a rational, not merely imagined way, thereby “form[ing] providence.” Prudence recalls past events, appraises what is present, begetting discernment by “tak[ng] full cognizance of everything” to the degree possible. That is, sensation and imagination yield opinion, which is subject to prudential reasoning that can then lead to scientific knowledge. Extract the stick from the water to see its real shape. Ergo, “sensation is the progenitor of science,” the origin of human knowledge. Notice that Aristotle, with John following, comes close to the modern scientific method. Prudence brings experience, preserved by memory; the word ‘experiment’ means a kind of experience. In modern science, the ‘memories’ are the results of previous experiments/experiences. Memories, John writes, result in “an experimental proof.” 

For a Christian, faith complicates the picture. Aristotle, John reports, defines faith as “exceedingly strong opinion.” It is “most necessary in human affairs, as well as in religion” because “without faith, no contracts could be concluded, nor could any business be transacted.” And, of course, “without faith, where would be the basis of the divine reward of human merit?” Lying “between opinion and science, faith “strongly affirms the certainty of something” without having “arrived at this certainty by science.” If true, religious faith leads to sophia, wisdom in the highest sense originating from a spiritual source, not a temporal-sensible source. The ancients, living before the Christian revelation, “conceived of Prudence and Truth as sisters.” Since prudence born of sense experience alone is fallible, it seeks the “sure and reliable” estimate of reason; “prudence therefore begets Philology” or philosophy. However, “it is easier to love reason than to possess it,” which “is the lot of the few.” Only with “intensified effort” can the soul see “with greater clarity,” hold its opinion “with greater security,” and judge “with greater accuracy.” What is more, “the very things concerning which reason alone judges, and whose essence is distinct from the nature of sensible and individual things, are likewise called ‘reasons.'” Some reasons achieve certainty only through the supreme Logos. “That God is God, that the Father has a Son, and that the Holy Sirit has the same substance as both [Father and Son], are not merely statements” but eternal truths “firmly founded in the divine judgment,” not in the judgment of every human being. There are also humanly accessible “everlasting” if not eternal truths, such as mathematical ratios (the word itself meaning reasons), inhering in the nature of created things and therefore infinite in their perpetuity if not eternal as the God who ordained created things. 

Human beings, alone among created things, partake of some portion of the Logos. They are capable of reason, which is both a power and an activity of that power. “God, breathing life into man, willed that he partake of the divine reason”; only man “contemplates divine truths.” Accordingly, reason “transcends all sense perception, and judges concerning spiritual as well as material realities,” “ris[ing] to the contemplation of heavenly things.” In this, the ‘ancient,’ Seneca concurs with the Hebrew Bible, “although his opinion was not really exactly the same,” since his conception of the “Divine Spirit” was actually naturalistic. This being so, it is nevertheless true that in both the ‘ancient’ and the Hebrew senses, “our reason is ennobled by its divine origin, and powerful with a divine activity.” This is why “philosophy agrees that the cultivation of reason should be our primary concern,” as “reason curbs unruly impulses and brings everything into conformity with the norms of goodness.” Obeying the divine mind, “one will move through his allotted span of life making happy progress,” with reason “watch[ing] out for both our body and soul,” serving “as a moderator to bring them into cooperation” in accordance with their natures. “Reason, although divine, is, as it were, set into motion by the winnowing fan of sensory perceptions and acts of the imagination,” begetting prudence, begetting philosophy.

There is still another feature of the human mind that is indispensable to wisdom. The “intuitive understanding,” for which the Greek word is nous, “actually understands what reason investigates.” Reason, proceeding from the principle of non-contradiction, discards falsehoods, serving as a higher-level winnowing fan, separating not false sensations from true but false thoughts from true. Nous “treasures up the preparatory gains of reason into wisdom.” It is, then, the higher-level equivalent of memory, the treasury of experience. “Besides comprehending what is human,” intuitive understanding “also contemplates the divine causes behind all reasons within the natural powers of its perception,” although there remain divine truths “more or less fully known to us” only “according to the decree of divine dispensation,” divine revelation. Such understanding, “according to Plato, ‘is possessed only by God and a few select individuals,” the philosophers. Wisdom proceeds from intuitive understanding. “I believe that wisdom,” sophia, “derives its name from the fact that good men have a discerning taste for the things of God,” as seen in the writings of the Early Church Fathers, who “associated knowledge with action and wisdom with contemplation.” The Biblical prophets themselves “testify that even fear, which is ‘the beginning of wisdom,’ is a result of the sensory experience or mental image of pain.” Fear of actual or future divine punishment brings human beings to refrain from offending God and to practice piety and to exercise obedience to His commands. Thus, “one acquires knowledge, which relates to action,” and repeated actions bring not fear but courage in ‘this life’ among the things on earth. Such is “rational submission,” in contrast to submission to the passions and to the passionate, the tyrannical. Intuitive understanding “concerns itself with divine truths, and the relish, love and observance of the latter constitutes true wisdom. 

While “certain lesser philosophers,” who reason “from the fact that from sense perceptions our mind proceeds to scientific knowledge, argue that we can have knowledge only of those things that are perceived by our senses,” this claim would be “lethal” to philosophy. The thinking soul is invisible and indivisible, therefore “imperishable.” One should always think and act as an imperishable being, not as one who will evanesce without personal consequence.

From Aristotelian logic, John now turns to Aristotle’s account of the appearance of logic in Sophistical Refutations. “I would be reluctant to say that any other study could be more beneficial to the young,” who are in urgent need of identifying sophistry under its many masks. Further, “if one lacks [a knowledge of] sophistical logic, in vain does he claim to be a philosopher.” Careful study can make sophistry “serve as the handmaid of truth and wisdom”; “otherwise, it will “play the adulteress, who betrays her blinded lovers by exposing them to errors and leading them to the precipice.” He does not mean an intellectual precipice, only. “An erroneous life is more pernicious than faulty speech.” Sad to say, “there is hardly anyone, who, in his actual way of living, does not take after the sophists,” making a show of being better he is. Concealing one’s defects from others “is to become a sophist in one’s way of life.” It is to be a Cornificius.

Predictably, Cornificius disparages Aristotle’s books on logic. John continues to disparage Cornificius, turn, a man “even more contemptible than Bromius, the buffoon of the gods.” Bromius is one of the names of Dionysus, god of wine and madness, the dying-and-rising god who mimics Christ, amounting to an Anti-Christ. “Since logic has such tremendous power, anyone who charges that it is foolish to study this [art] thereby shows himself to be a fool of fools.” Just as Bromius is the buffoon of the gods, Cornificius is “the clown of philosophers”; “he yaps at what he cannot attain.” 

What should a rational person do, when pestered by such a man? If his argument amounts to mere quibbling over words, “refuse to argue any further with him” and tell him he is wasting his time. More impressively, however, sophists will attempt to trap their prey into a self-refutation, a fallacy, a paradox, a solecism, or confusion exhibited verbally by babbling. They often accomplish these things by inducing you to admit a false premise; if so, “bring the discussion back to a reexamination of what was previously conceded.” If you see that the conclusion reached is a mixture of truth and falsehood, then “accept what is intelligible, but reject what cannot be explained.” And “finally, if the mode in given instances utterly defies human comprehension, we should not worry about seeking scientific knowledge of it.” Even sound logic, “by itself,” is “practically useless,” as the modern scientists would remark, centuries later. The young, especially, incline toward “the impudence of sophistry.” “The temerity of adolescence should be restrained,” and it is “the duty of those who have the title and function of teachers to see to this.” “Facetious folly, noisy [volubility], empty loquacity, and puerile silliness, should all be set aside, as soon as the first soft beard begins to appear on one’s face.” Mercury, the god of eloquence, must wed Philology in order for the young man’s soul to attain “three things most desirable”: genuine goodness, unadulterated truth, and sound, trustworthy reasoning. John cautions that human nature at its core wants these things, but cannot acquire them unaided. We need divine grace. Prudence “elicits this affection” for divine things, fear of God being the beginning of wisdom; love of God in turn leads to Wisdom, Sophia, resulting from the contemplation of divine things. 

Previously, John had identified philology with philosophy. He now refines his definition. Philology—literally, love of logos—precedes “its two sisters, philosophy and philocaly, which is love of beauty. “Philology comes first, inasmuch as it discloses the nature, power, and counsels of each of the others,” laboring “to attain certitude” and thus “exercis[ing] great caution to avoid error.” Philosophy and philocaly go beyond this winnowing function by conferring actual virtues on a human soul. That is, by the exercise of logic, of reason, we achieve knowledge that “can be called ratum, established. Ratio yields ratum. It is true that only God possesses “true reason,” but human beings can make progress by considering what a thing is, how it differs from, or is similar to other things, and “whether it has, or can have contraries.” God possesses “original reason,” which “embraces the nature, development, and ultimate end of all things,” but his human creatures partake of this “spiritual force that examines the natures of things and acquires a knowledge, not only of material entities, but also of concepts perceptible by the intellect alone.”

The clear superiority of divine or original reason to human reason raises the question of providence and free will. Aristotle has no place for divine providence, but he does consider the relation of necessity to choice, “maintain[ing] that, although things are, on the one hand, partly necessary, they are also, on the other hand, partly subject to natural changes and to free will.” He does not venture to “presume to state definitely what is true in each and every case, however, and his followers continue to dispute the matter. This is an example of man’s rational imperfection. “Slipping about in a mire of incertitude, man apprehends as much as he can.” For human beings, humility is a virtue, since we have so much to be humble about. The Latin word for truth, verum, derives from the Greek heron, meaning secure, stable, certain, clear. A ‘hero’ should be true, although unfortunately, since wily Odysseus, “the name denotes perfidy.” Rather, we Christians “refer to the transfer of the elect from this world’s inconstancy and emptiness to the glory and security by a catholic word, and call them ‘saints,’ owing to the confirmation they have attained.” To sanction means to confirm, to ‘ratify,’ leading us back to ratum.

The contrary of the security, the stability of truth is emptiness. “What is false is absolutely nothing”; “this both the ancient philosophers and the catholic Fathers have declared.” All is vanity, says the Book of Ecclesiastes, because what is temporal, temporary, is fundamentally empty. Such things “vanish like smoke.” Unlike God, matter, and ideas, although God is eternal, whereas matter and ideas, created things, are only perpetual. As to the speaker of falsehood, the anti-Christ or opposite of God, “something that is false is so called from the fact that only a mind that was empty and void would conceive of such a thing.” “The truth of anything is directly dependent on the degree in which it faithfully reflects the likeness of God.” “In God…reason and truth are one”: “I am the truth.” God’s reason “illuminates itself, and His truth contemplates itself.” But in creation, “truth is one thing, reason another,” since in creation “truth is an image of the divinity, which is sought and found by reason in created things,” aby “a virtue or activity of the mind, whose object is to discern truth.”

Aristotelians intend to “reject all empty illusions, determine objective reality, and seek after, venerate, and live according to the truth of God in every respect.” In so far as they actually do so, “they do not labor in vain.” But they cannot do so, comprehensively. “The many impediments to understanding include invincible ignorance of such things as the mysteries of the Holy Trinity, which reason cannot explain; the frailty of man’s condition; the brevity of human life, the neglect of what is useful and concern with what is unprofitable; the conflict of probable opinions; sin which makes one unworthy of seeing the light; and finally the great multitude and vast expanse of subjects to be investigated.” The “pagan philosophers…suppressed the truth of God by falsehood and became vain in their thoughts through their own fault.” In this, they failed to comply with the command of their own Delphic oracle, who commanded, ‘Know thyself.’ A person who knows himself exhibits not pride but humility. “He is not thrusting himself precipitously and rashly into questions that exceed his comprehension” and takes care to love God and love his neighbors as he loves himself. He who “imagines that he can find God by processes of investigation and argumentative reasoning conducted by the faculties of his own mind…is doubtless making the greatest possible of all mistakes.” If you really know yourself, you will know that “it is absolutely impossible to know what He is.” “Since not only man’s senses, but even his reason frequently err, the law of God has made faith the primary and fundamental prerequisite for understanding of the truth.”

John concludes his book by citing both a secular-political and an ecclesiastical-political illustration of human error. “The present day is more suited to weeping than to writing,” as “what I see about me convinces me that the world is subject to vanity.” Our hopes for peace were ruined in southern France, thanks to a conflict between the French king, Louis VII, and the English king, Henry II. Several years earlier, Louis had annulled his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine on the grounds that she had produced no male heir. She lost no time marrying Henry, then Duke of Normandy, who, upon assuming the English throne, formed the Angevin Empire, with territories on both sides of the Channel. Louis took strong exception to that and war had ensued. “Kings whom we had seen the best of friends have become each other’s implacable enemies.” Now, too, the Catholic Church has lost “our Sovereign Pontiff,” Adrian, whose death “has saddened most our own England, his native country,” and none more than John himself, his close friend. “Even after he became Roman Pontiff, it was his delight to have me eat with him at his very own table.” John had successfully petitioned Adrian to grant Ireland to Henry, arguing that the Donation of Constantine gave authority over all islands to the Church. [1] Quite apart from the sorrow of this loss has been its schismatic consequences, “the worst catastrophe.” The German Emperor Frederick I set up an anti-pope called ‘Victor IV,’ in opposition to the new pope, Alexander III. “Wars have broken out that are worse than civil, for they are sacerdotal and fraternal.” And finally, in these times of misery, John has been appointed to administer the office of Theobold, the venerable Archbishop of Canterbury, who is now “gravely ill.” I cannot, he writes, “adequately describe the torments of my crucifixion,” and can only pray to God that He will, in His mercy, deliver Theobold “from all mental and physical infirmity, so far as He foresees this to be expedient for Himself and for us.” He asks his readers to pray for him. “Let them pray that, dispelling the darkness of ignorance, and uprooting love of empty vanity, He may enlighten me with His knowledge, and make me a zealous investigator, lover, and observer of the truth.”

Note

1. The editor hastens to note that there is no such grant of authority in the Donation of Constantine, although Pope Urban II had asserted such a right in 1091.

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.

Born about four years after Rome fell to the Ostrogoths in 476 AD, Anicius Manlius Seveninus Boethius wrote the Consolation while awaiting execution on the order of Theodoric, the Ostrogoth king who ruled most of what had been the Western Roman Empire. They had been close allies for the previous two decades. An Arian, Ostrogoth tolerated Roman Catholic worship, watching contentedly as Boethius, raised in an aristocratic Catholic home, entered the Roman Senate at age 25 and became a Consul at age 33. Theodoric finally appointing him as magister officiorum in 522, having named his friend’s two sons as consuls. But Boethius had made powerful enemies both in the Senate and at court by investigating the corruption that pervaded both institutions. At the same time, tensions between Rome and Constantinople were rising, with Theodoric becoming increasingly suspicious of possible traitors in his entourage. When correspondence between Boethius and the Eastern emperor, Justin I, was adduced as evidence of a conspiracy to overthrow Theodoric, Boethius was ruined—within a year of having reached his political zenith.

His book begins, understandably, with an elegiac poem. Fortune having “changed her cheating faith,” Boethius had sought consolation from poetry “in old age’s gloom.” As he wrote this “tearful complaint,” however, “it seemed to me that a woman appeared, standing over my head,” gazing at him with “a holy look,” with books in her right hand, a scepter in her left. The hem of her dress has the letter pi sewn on it, at the base of a latter of ascent to a theta. Pi symbolizes practical wisdom, prudence; theta symbolizes sophia, theoretical wisdom, the topics of the scholarly Quadrivium, on which Boethius had written extensively. Boethius is a man of theoria who had seemed to have mastered practice as well—a philosopher-near-king. His sudden fall might suggest a failure of practical wisdom.

The lady sees the Muses of Poetry “standing by my bed” and is not amused. “Who let these whorish stage girls come to see a sick man,” to proffer their “sweet-tasting poison”? “These are the kind of women that choke off a mind’s rich fruit, wrapping it up in sterile thorns of passion”—in this case, melancholy. They are “Sirens, sweet until you bring destruction,” habituating the mind to disease “instead of setting it free from pain.” My Muses will take over from here. The scene recapitulates the expulsion of the poets from Socrates’ City in Speech, along with the philosopher’s suggestion that he might permit them to return, if poetry can be reformed, conforming to political philosophy. Beginning immediately, every section in each of the five books, excepting the final section, will have a short poem summarizing the lesson of that section. The poem or metrum following I.i. alludes to Boethius’s work on mathematics and music, fruits of sophia. He had “pried into hidden nature’s secrets,” rather in the fashion of the pre-Socratic natural philosophers. This again suggests a neglect of prudential wisdom.

“Now is the time for remedies, not for tears,” astringent lady tells him. “Are you the one who was nursed on my milk and ate at my table until you gained manly strength of mind. Did I not give you all the weapons you needed, ones that would have kept your mind safe from harm?” You are confused. You have forgotten who you are, forgotten your knowledge of yourself—the themes of Plato’s Meno. [1] His re-minding begins, as seen in the metrum: “The sun now launched, / shines with sudden light, and / strikes wondering eyes with its rays.” Wonder, not fear, is the beginning of philosophic wisdom, and Boethius must begin again. He recognizes his visitor as Lady Philosophy, whom he addresses as if she were the Madonna, calling her “lady of all virtues.” Alluding to Socrates, Lady Philosophy assures that “it would not be right for Philosophy to let an innocent man walk his path alone”; she is not “afraid to face an accusation or tremble in fear—as if such charges were new to me!… Did I not stand beside [Plato’s] Socrates as he won victory by death, a death he did not deserve?” And she has seen how “the Epicurean and Stoic herds and all the rest tried to snatch [Plato’s] legacy” and me as well, ripping her garment and going off “with some little shreds torn from it.” As the metrum has it, “The virtuous man, / calm in his orderly life, / stares Fortune in the face / and drives proud Fate beneath his feet.” Such a man will “Fear not, hope not,” disarming the “impotent wrath” of “raging tyrants” who have “not true strength.”

He understands all of that ‘theoretically,’ but he has not lived by it. And so, Lady Philosophy demands that he show her his “wound,” so that she can cure him. He recalls that she had “hallowed the words of Plato when he claimed that the Republic would be blessed if lovers of wisdom ruled it or if its rulers happened to love wisdom,” so that the polis will not “fall to wicked and criminal men.” That is what I did, taking part “in public life for the sake of benefiting all good men” and “endur[ing] grim and irreconcilable quarrels from the wicked,” “preserv[ing] the law” while never fearing “to offend the powerful.” “How often I risked myself by using my authority” as a senator, a consul, and as magister officiorum from “countless attacks from the unchecked greed of the barbarians,” the Ostrogoths. “I never strayed by choosing right over wrong.” And as for the backstabbing Roman senators, he exposed corruption amongst them, and “prevent[ed] an informer from introducing documents accusing the Senate of treason” against Theodoric, precisely in order “to preserve the Senate,” not to ruin it. Even though the Senate passed decrees against Boethius, such “foolish self-deception never changes the true worth of anything”; the Senate is worth preserving, even if the majority of senators have deluded themselves. As for the letters he supposedly sent to Justin I, they are forgeries. No, what has plunged Boethius into melancholy is that God has not intervened on his behalf. “I suppose it is a common fault to lean towards evil, but it is almost monstrous that every wicked man accomplishes his plots against the innocent, while God looks on.” He quotes an unnamed philosopher who asked “If God exists, what is the source of evil? And what is the source of good if He does not?” Having been sentenced to death in absentia, without a fair trial, “instead of receiving the rewards of true virtue I suffer the penalty of a crime I didn’t commit.” Moreover, like Socrates, he stands accused of sacrilege, even as you, Lady Philosophy, “endowed me with virtue in order to make me become like God,” rather as theosis in accordance with God’s grace makes Christians gods. [2] This is finally an assault on you. “These wicked men will gain credence for their charge because of my closeness to you”; “you too have to be ripped apart because I am assaulted.” How, he asks in the metrum, could the “Builder of the starry universe,” could permit “twisting Fortune [to] bring ruin” to “the innocent”? He implores the cosmic Ruler to “stead the earth, surround it /with Your law which rules the vast sky” but evidently not men on earth. 

Lady Philosophy refutes this account of ‘the problem of evil.’ On the contrary, “to be led by [God’s] reins and yield to his justice is perfect liberty.” You have not truly suffered exile; you are self-banished. I will prove that this is so, but gently, since your wound “has hardened and grown scarred by the constant pricks of your anxieties.” After all, “God gives the times their tasks,” and this is not yet the time for “stronger remedies.” And so, she begins by questioning him, Socrates-like. Is the world ruled by chance or by reason? Reason, he replies, since that alone can account for its orderliness. In that case, what “rudders” does God use to steer the world’s course? He doesn’t understand the question, so she tries again: What is nature’s telos? He admits that “sorrow has dulled” his memory, as if he has regressed to the condition of unphilosophic young Meno. Well, then, if you don’t recall nature’s telos, what is its origin? God, of course. What is man? “A rational and mortal creature.” Very well then, “Now I know…the greatest cause of your disease: you no longer know what you are.” “Overwhelmed by forgetfulness of your nature, you grieve at being in exile and deprived of your goods,” no longer “aware of the telos of all things” and thus supposing “that base and wicked men are powerful and happy,” having “forgotten with what rudders the world is steered.” Yet there is a possible cure because, as his answers indicate, “your true nature has not totally abandoned you,” since you retain “a true opinion concerning the governance of the universe, a governance you believe to be dependent on divine reason rather than the whims of chance.” That is, it may be that his theoretical inquiries have imbued him not with philosophic knowledge of nature and its “Builder” but at least with a partially right opinion of them, and that right opinion indicates a potential for the correction of his misunderstanding of divine providence. Meanwhile, as the metrum has it, “banish joy, / banish hope, / banish fear. / Put them to flight! / The mind is shackled— / when these rule.” His passions must subside, if reason can be made to rule his soul.

Your error, Lady Philosophy explains, is clear: “You suppose it’s the changes of Fortune that have overthrown your soul.” But consider your soul’s “nature, her ways, and her worth.” If you do, “you would realize that she is not responsible for anything of beauty that you have ever had or lost.” Instead, “You believe that Fortune has changed towards you.” Not at all. She is by nature and by her ways fickle, a “blind spirit.” That being so, if her ways of the moment please you, “make use of them and don’t complain”; if she betrays you, then “reject her and cast her off.” “No one could ever count on her to be loyal, and now she has left you, too”—unlike me, Lady Philosophy kindly refrains from adding. Why do you esteem “a happiness that will pass away”? “Wisdom takes thought for how things will turn out in the end.” Once you have accepted her gifts, you must “endure without complaint whatever happens under her terms,” just as a sailor who follows the winds, neglecting to take the helm and steer the ship by shifting its sails, will never get to where he “choose[s] to go.” You have foolishly expected Fortune to be reliable, but “if Fortune began to be permanent, she would cease to be Fortune.” She amuses herself by “proving her power,” as the philosophically corrected poetry of the metrum intones.

Lady Philosophy now has Fortune speak. She tells Boethius that her gifts are not really his. “When Nature brought you forth from your mother’s womb, when you were without resource or possessions of any kind,” an orphan, “I took you up,” bringing you wealth, authority, the favor of the king. “Now it pleases me to pull back my hand.” What is your complaint? I do not give, I lend. You lived for decades on borrowed gifts. “Wealth, honors, and other things of that sort are mine by right; they are slaves that belong to me and come along with me, and so they depart with me.” Get it straight, man: “if the things you mourning over had been yours in first place, you would never have lost them.” Even nature changes—from day to night, from spring to summer, summer to fall, fall to winter. Neither it nor I am bound by “the insatiable desire of men.” And so, “Rise up, if you wish, but on this condition: don’t consider yourself injured when you descend, as the rules of my game demand.” And as for God, the metrum adds, even if he “answered prayers with gold, / heaped honors on those asking, / still this gain would seem nothing” to men whose “greed only opens new mouths.” 

As for your mouth, Lady Philosophy now observes, “if Fortune were speaking these words to you in her own defense, you would be utterly unable to open [it] in reply.” Would you? The arguments “sound good,” he admits (“smeared as they are with the honey of sweet speech and poetry”) but rhetorical and poetic music, and even plausible reasoning, do not reach “the pain of sorrow” which “lies too deep when someone is miserable.” Very well, but I have not yet attempted a cure, she replies; I have only applied “a sort of poultice for a pain that stubbornly resists a cure.” Having released him from the clutches of the conventional Muses, he can now be reminded of “how many and how great are the sources of your happiness,” the many favors Fortuna did lavish upon him. As for the misfortunes, “it is fixed by eternal law— / nothing created remains.” Among created things, change is the only constant, both Fortuna and nature obeying the dictates of the eternal law. Yes, but: “for all the adversities of Fortune the saddest is this: to have once been happy.”

Sad it may seem, but you forget that even Fortune has not taken everything from you. Your father-in-law, who adopted you when you were orphaned, still lives, as does your wife, his daughter, “modest in her chastity and sense of honor, a daughter worthy of her father. Your sons remain consuls; “even in their youth [they] show evidence of the nature of their father and grandfather.” Admittedly, “staying alive is a natural concern to man,” and your chances of survival are poor, but “even now you have those things that no one can deny are dearer than life.” “Fortune hasn’t brought down her hatred upon everyone you love.”

My life is one thing, my glory another, he protests. I have lost so much of it. True enough, Lady Philosophy replies, but “no one is easily satisfied with the state of his fortune.” “Man’s condition produces anxiety,” since even at its most favorable “it never lasts forever.” Conversely, “every condition is blessed when a man endures it with an untroubled spirit.” Why then do men “seek outside yourselves for the happiness that has been placed within you?” Rule yourself rightly and “you will possess what you would never wish to lose and what Fortune can’t take away from you.” And that being so, how can “present happiness make men blessed, when it doesn’t make them miserable if they lose it?” As the metrum has it, “If it’s permanence you wish— / avoid the quicksand.” 

Lady Philosophy now applies “some cures that are a little stronger.” These descend from generalities to particulars, just as prudential reasoning does. You may suppose that you own your riches, your property, but consider that “avarice makes men hated” while good repute comes when you give your things away. Too often, riches come from “making others poor.” As for physical beauty, seen in jewels, in the fields and the seas, what is it compared to the “true beauty” of human reason and soul? Neither Fortune nor nature allow you to keep such “external goods.” Of course, you need some such things, those that “satisfy your needs, which is all that Nature requires.” Beyond that, what do you need for happiness? “In reality, men who possess very many things need very many things”—guards, servants, high walls, for example—while “men who measure their abundance by the necessities of Nature and not be the excesses of desire need very little.” And you surely are not “so impoverished that you have no innate good that belongs to you.” “You are an animal made godlike by your reason,” so why do you want glory gained “only through the possession of lifeless objects?” They are inferior to you, and in chasing after them you do injury to “your Creator,” who has already endowed you with far more valuable gifts. “If you judge the vilest of things as your goods, you place yourself beneath those very things by your own judgment—and a fair judgment it would be,” because “human nature is such that a man surpasses other things only when he is aware that he does so,” only when he knows himself as human. “That same human nature is reduced to being lower than the beasts if it ceases to know itself.” 

So much for what we now call ‘economics,’ the acquisition of external physical things. But Boethius has never been so much homo economicus as homo politicus. He has lost his “offices and might.” That is the source of the honor he has lost. Lady Philosophy remarks that the honor political men receive does not attach principally to the offices they hold but to the “just use” they make of the power they wield. If evil men can hold office—Boethius knows they can, and do—officeholding itself cannot be intrinsically good. “It isn’t the office that brings honor to virtue, but virtue that brings honor to the office.” And in any event, power itself is quite limited: “Can you command someone whose soul is free?” And consider that the tortures inflicted by tyrants can be inflicted on them. In an inverse statement of the Golden Rule, Lady Philosophy asks, “Would you suppose that a man has any power, when he can’t keep someone from doing to him what he can do to others?” What the possession of power really does is to show the man, giving no honor to evil men but “highlight[ing] their lack of honor.” Power “couldn’t transform / twisted Nero,” the metrum says; it only revealed him for what he was.

But high office has not shown me to be an evil man, Boethius objects. On the contrary, “ambition for earthly things hasn’t held any power over me, but I’ve looked for the opportunity to do the things that would keep my virtue from growing old and stale.” I have taken high office to exercise my virtue, to retain the strength of my character. Yes, but as you have already admitted, you regret the loss of your glory. “Minds that are excellent in their nature but haven’t yet reached the perfection of their virtue can still be enticed by this one thing: the love of glory and the fame of great services done for the state.” Consider, then, the limits of such glory. The earth is tiny compared to the cosmos; land is a small portion of the earth; much land is uninhabitable; languages limit the spread of fame to one’s own people. What, then, is the real scope of fame? Time also limits it, as famous men of one era are often forgotten in a few decades. What counts is eternity. Yet, “leaving aside the superiority of your conscience and virtue, you demand rewards in the words of other men.” But “when death releases the soul from the body, what good does fame do these distinguished men who seek glory from virtue?” And if the soul is not eternal, “there is no glory left, since the one to whom the glory was attributed no longer exists.” Fame dies soon after they do, a “second death.”

These things being so, Fortune’s most valuable service occurs when she turns against you—”when she shows herself, uncovering her ways.” That is when “she instructs” honestly, by “show[ing] herself fickle and unstable.” She “uses her allurements to draw men astray from the true Good,” while using “her claw to drag men back to the things that are good.” So, for example, now that you have lost your wealth, “you have discovered your friends,” those who have remained loyal. They are “the most precious form of riches,” among the external riches. Love, friendship, “weaves people” together, “knotting with sacred law.” It constitutes the best politics because it “dictates justice” when “that Love which rules the heavens” also “rule[s] your hearts.” 

With this, Boethius pronounces himself now “equal to the blows of Fortune.” He has fortified himself with Lady Philosophy’s wisdom, but solid defenses are less than what he might achieve. Lady Philosophy now promises to lead him to “true happiness,” “the happiness your soul dreams of, but which it can’t now see, since you are occupied with the mere shadow of things,” like the inmates in Socrates’ cave. She distinguishes between two kinds of happiness: felicitas, the kind “that is more familiar to you,” and beatitudo, “true blessedness.” The true telos of every human being is beatitudo. Once a soul has achieved that, “a state made perfect by the coming together of all good things,” it desires nothing more. Typically, men mistake this “true Good” for riches, honor, power, or pleasure. They “seek the highest Good, but seek it as if they were drunk and didn’t know the path that led to their home.” This notwithstanding, men’s very errors show “how great is the power of nature, since men agree in choosing the end of the Good, though they differ in their various opinions about how to achieve it,” “dream[ing] of your origin, although only in faint images.” Against Fortuna’s wheel Lady Philosophy sets Nature’s circle—the soul’s desire to return to “the source” of genuine happiness, a return that “mak[es] the circle eternal.” 

Boethius confesses that he was “distressed” by one thing after another, even when he enjoyed wealth and honor. He was not self-sufficient. He readily agrees with Lady Philosophy that “money possesses nothing by its own nature which prevents it from taken against the will of those who possess it,” while human nature “is satisfied with very little, while nothing is enough for avarice.” Money is a base distraction, as “men seek what is buried in the earth and ignore what soars the starry pole.” And, in the central chapter of the Consolation, he goes on to acknowledge that the high public offices that bring honor do not “implant virtue” in one’s mind or remove vices from it; on the contrary, they “tend to bring wickedness to the surface rather than remove it.” It is wisdom that is worthy of respect, whether or not the wise man holds office. What is more, “honor vanishes immediately when it appears before men who don’t consider it honor,” as when a man honored in Rome travels to a foreign country, or when an office once considered honorable loses its good reputation—as has happened to the Roman senate, many of whose members have been exposed as corrupt. Even and perhaps especially the highest offices leave officeholders vulnerable; kingship is like sitting under the sword of Damocles, as the happiness of kings can end in “calamity”; kings live in fear. They, too, depend upon outsiders, their guards to preserve them; their office can ruin friendship (“the most sacred good, since it results from virtue, not chance”) since political friends attach themselves on account of your good fortune, not in virtue. “Even though far away Indian land / shakes beneath your law / and remote Thule serves you, / still you cannot dispel dark worry / nor banish wretched complaint— / this isn’t power!”

Often “stolen” “through the shameful opinion of the crowd,” he who considers glory might well wonder, ‘If you are so high, why do you care about the opinions of the low?’ “Men who are extolled without reason should blush at hearing themselves praised,” and even if you deserve the praise, does glory add to your self-knowledge? That is unlikely, since your glorifiers are often ignoramuses. If the source of your glory is a noble birth, you have borrowed that glory from your ancestors, who at best may be said to oblige you to “live up to [their] virtue.” In reality, all men come from the same truly glorious “Source,” their true Father, “A Father” who has “limited [their] souls with bodies” and thus limited their glory. And speaking of bodies and the bodily pleasures many confuse with happiness, they too are limited, limited by diseases and pain, altogether among “the vilest and most fragile of things.” To seek pleasure is to put yourself on the level of animals. People take you to be handsome? Fools: they can’t see your ugly internal organs, handicapped as they are by their own organs, their eyes. So deceived, some of them may be attracted, but the most intense bodily pleasure, sexual pleasure, produces children, who can be “tormentors.” Or it may be that “some tormentor invented” them.

What, then is true happiness, beatitudo? Lady Philosophy observes that by nature, all things are “simple and indivisible” if left to themselves. The problem is that they can be “broken apart by human error and transferred from the true and perfect to the false and imperfect.” A human being who remained true to his nature would enjoy self-sufficiency and power, deserve reverence and honor, and be “full of joy, too.” Indeed, self-sufficiency, power, reverence, honor, and joy are really “one and the same”—human nature as “the Father of all things” created it. In treating these five attributes as if they were not a unity, by pursuing one or another of them, we act against our own nature. That is why “we should call upon the Father of all things” for guidance. At the physical center of the Consolatio, Boethius has placed that prayer, in which Lady Philosopher sings to the “Governor of the universe, / Ruler with perpetual reason,” the unmoved mover and “highest Good innate” which joins all things together in an emanation of that Good, including human nature, in which Mind, “Soul,” and matter are coordinated in natural union, in harmony with the cosmos itself, wherein the World Soul “moves all things” in accordance with the eternal law. “Permit my spirit to rise— / and grant light to my mind / that I might fix clear sight on You,” a being of “quiet calm,” unmoved while moving all else, ultimately, towards you, as “You are the Leader and the Way— / The First and the Last.”

This movement is the exact opposite of that seen in ancient atomism, in advance of modern evolutionism, which posits a world in which the simplest things are the lowest, which then proceed to greater complexity, to ‘higher’ life-forms. Lady Philosophy replies, “when the perfection has been removed, one can’t imagine what is the source for the thing that is called imperfect. For the world of objects has not taken her origin from lesser, incomplete things but proceeds from the whole and complete objects and slips down into these weak and lowly ones.” As for God, the ultimate source of all, “nothing greater than God is able to be imagined,” so “who can doubt that the thing that is surpassed by nothing is good?” Thus “reason shows that the Good is God.” And since “we have concluded that the perfect Good is true blessedness,” we cannot evade the further conclusion that “true blessedness must reside in the most high God,” the Good. “God is blessedness itself,” the highest unity, inasmuch as the existence of two or more gods would mean that none were perfect, none would “possess the other.” In a naturalist-philosophic parallel to the Biblical teaching on theosis, the final divinization of men by means of human obedience to God’s law indispensably assisted by God’s grace, Lady Philosophy teaches that “men become blessed through the acquisition of divinity” and thereby “become gods” by “participation” in the Good. Self-sufficiency, power, reverence, honor, and joy are the “limbs” of blessedness, “bound to the Good as if it were the ‘head.'” It is not finally these limbs that we desire but “the Good itself.” Because most of us lack self-knowledge, we fail to see that, but “Whoever sees this Light, / will say that even the sun— / is not bright.”

Very well, then, what is the Good? All things perish when they lose their unity. In plants and animals, only “when body and spirit come together” do we call them living things; death is their separation, the dissolution of the unity. “Everything continues while it is one, but perishes when it ceases to be one.” Nothing in nature “wishes” its own destruction; this is one of “the laws of nature,” itself ordained by “Providence.” Oneness is good; “everything seeks the good.” The “very cornerstone of truth”—the natural equivalent of Jesus?—is that “either all things are bound up with no oneness and, being deprived of oneness, they flow without a guide, or if there is anything to which all things universally hurry, it will be the highest of all goods,” the end, the telos, “of all things.” To stay on this journey, or to return to it after having strayed from the right way, to “track the truth, / and resist false paths, / [one] must turn back [to] the light of innermost sight,” reasoning the way back to “the treasury within,” genuine human nature. “For not all mind’s light is captured / by man’s matter and mass. / Inside clings truth’s seed, submerged in the soul.” This is what Plato’s Socrates means by “memory,” in the Meno. The poetic Muses are many; Lady Philosophy, the true Muse, is one. The law of nature is the law of love, easily channeled wrongly, but aiming at the Good, making the cosmos cohere. [3]

Boethius indeed says that he is now “remembering” what he said earlier that he did not know. “The world would not have come together from so many diverse, contrary parts, unless there were one who had joined together such diverse things,” “without someone to hold together what he had joined.” Someone or some ‘one’? “Whatever this thing is through which created things exist and are set in motion, I will call by a name that all men use, God.” Lady Philosophy adds, reinforcing her teaching, “God has been shown to be the Good itself,” and then begins to refer to the Good as a Person: “He orders all things in accordance with the Good, if, in fact, He rules everything through Himself, whom we have concluded to be Good,” as “a kind of helm and rudder with which the mechanism of the universe is preserved stable and incorrupt”—the rudder of the subordinate rudders, the “rudders of goodness,” which Boethius had not known, initially. In terms of morality, “things possessing a will freely direct themselves towards the will of the one ordering them, as if they were agreeable and accommodating to their ruler?” This accords with the teaching of the Book of Wisdom, which tells us that “Wisdom reaches boldly from end to end, an arranges all things pleasantly” (Wisdom 8:1, cited by the editors). God is all-powerful; being good, indeed the Good, God cannot do evil: ergo, “evil is nothing, since the one who can do everything is unable to do it.” And so, Lady Philosophy turns to the problem of evil, which has vexed Boethius. 

Book IV has seven chapters, symbolic of Creation. Is God’s Creation flawed? What is evil, and why doesn’t God put a stop to it? Boethius confesses that it was the pain of his “mistreatment” that “made me forget” the arguments Lady Philosophy has made, and not so much the mistreatment itself but the question, “If the ruler of the universe is in fact good, how can evil exist or go unpunished?” Meanwhile, “virtue lacks reward and is even overthrown and trampled underfoot by wicked men”; “virtue, not vice, is punished.” On the contrary, Lady Philosophy replies: despite appearances, “the good are always powerful and the wicked always abject and helpless,” “never without punishment or virtues without reward.” As in Plato’s Phaedrus, “I’ll give you wings that will lift you upon on high, so your fear can be cast aside, and you can return unhurt to your homeland,” the Good. You will end your Phaedrian journey saying, “I remember! This is my home my source, my end.” 

She argues as follows: if someone has achieved the object of his desire, he must have had the power to do so; insofar as you have an ability, you are strong, and if not, you are weak; “all men desire the Good when they seek blessedness”; “some men become good by attaining the Good,” that is, the acquire what they see; evil men seek the Good but remain evil; ergo, good men are powerful, evil men weak. The good man is like one who walks on his legs, the evil man like one who walks on his hands. That is, the good man proceeds according to nature. The “changeable desires are not natural”; as Socrates puts it in the Republic, the desires are foolish and inconsistent counselors. Evil men are weak because “they can’t even reach the goal to which their natural inclination leads.” By contrast, the good man, the one who “reached the goal of things worthy to seek,” having “nothing else he could strive for,” surely must be judged the more powerful. “What’s weaker than the blindness of ignorance” in an evil man, or his lack of self-rule and of the moderation self-rule enables, or worse still, the perverse will of the one who “knowingly and willingly desert the Good to turn to vice?” To abandon “the common goal of all things” means that he “ceases to exist” as a real human being. He has become almost literally a ‘nihilist.’ Such a man ceases to “exist in a real and essential way,” failing preserve his nature. Their power is in this sense only a seeming, “for if evil is nothing…it is certain that the wicked can do nothing, since evil is all they can do.” And “the ability to do evil is not power,” as Plato’s Socrates argues in the Gorgias. They will never arrive at beatitudo, blessedness. Worst of all, the tyrant is “strangled with inner chains”: libido (desire, but especially greed), ira (anger), maeror (sorrow), and spes (fleeting hope). “Pressured by these malcontent / [he] does not do what he himself wishes.”

This means that “goodness always produces rewards and that wickedness always brings its own punishment.” “However much the tyrant may rage, the wise man will not lose his crown, nor will it wither away.” For the wise man isn’t crowned with laurel by someone else; his crown is within his soul. His reward, blessedness, is “the greatest and most beautiful thing of all,” as he is “blessed through the very fact of [his] goodness” and rightly called a god, the highest honor of all. This is the meaning of the old saying, ‘virtue is its own reward,’ which should be supplemented with the saying, ‘wickedness is its own punishment.’ A woman who had endured a bad marriage once told me, “People like that live in their own Hell on earth.” As Lady Philosophy puts it, they have “lost their human nature,” even if they have retained the physical shape of a human. Echoing Aristotle, she adds, “a man who abandons virtue, since he can’t become godlike, turns into a beast,” even as the sailors with Ulysses were turned into swine when the followed the song of the Sirens and drank the potion of Circe. It is Mercury, the messenger of the gods, who saves Ulysses, who then finds his way home.

To Lady Philosophy’s assurance that evil men who satisfy their desires are even less fortunate than those who fail, not-quite-convinced Boethius replies, “But how I wish they would quickly lose their misfortune and lose the ability to commit their crimes.” But no, in that case they are only prolonging their wicked condition and, therefore, their misery. They would be better off dying young, their desires unfulfilled. A just punishment might correct them; pain would be good for them. “Should we imitate these men, then, when they seem to be like beasts?” Those who suffer the injuries they inflict are unfortunate, but they are even more unfortunate. The one who commits an injury is more pitiable than he who suffers it.” We pity those with bodily illnesses; should we not pity those with mind illnesses, soul illnesses, even more? “Cherish the good; pity the evil.” 

Yes, Boethius concedes, but why do evil men “snatch the rewards of virtue” even as “the punishments due to the wicked are inflicted on the good.” What is the reason “for such unfairness and disorder?” If the universe were governed by “random chance,” this would be explicable, but “the belief that God governs everything increases my amazement.” 

To answer this, Lady Philosophy must turn to a lesson in metaphysics. Accordingly, she announces “a new beginning” of the dialogue. “Here we deal with the simplicity of Providence, with Fate’s course of events, with unexpected occurrences, with divine thought and foreknowledge, and with the freedom of the will.” By simplicitas, she means that God, the source of Providence, is pure being, not a compound. The origin, growth, and form of all things come from, are provided by, “the stability of the Divine Mind.” Providence “is the divine power of Reason itself. What “has been called Fate in the past” is Providence as it works on the motion and arrangement of things; “it allows Providence to connect everything with its proper order.” That is, “Providence encompasses all things equally, not matter how different they are,” whereas “Fate sets in motion individual objects that are distributed according to space, form, and time” (emphases added). “This unfolding of the temporal order, which is unified through the foresight of the Divine Mind, is Providence, but the same union, arranged and set in order in time, is called Fate,” its order “proceed[ing] out of the simplicity of Providence.” By Providence, God “permanently and at one time disposes the things to be done,” sets the overall plan. By Fate, God “tends to those very same things individually throughout time.” Fate may be “carried out” by “divine spirits,” or “the World’s Soul” (a concept borrowed from neo-Platonism), or nature, or by “the heavenly movement of the stars,” or by “the power of angels,” or by “the various skills of spirits”—one notices that nature and the stars constitute the central pair. Providence “is the immovable and simple plan for divine things, and Fate is the movable interlacing and temporal outline for those things that divine simplicity has determined are to be done.” All fated things are “also subject to Providence,” but “some things that are placed under Providence lie above the course of Fate.” This is why those who center their souls on God free themselves from Fate. They have gone ‘above’ it, closer to the central, simple Supreme Mind. Although prone to linger under Fate, human beings, having been infused with the spirit of divinity at their creation, retain the capacity to attend to their true nature and become the ‘gods’ they are said to be capable of becoming by the Bible and by some of the classical philosophers. 

What has this metaphysical framework to do with the problem of evil? Everything: “it happens that the limits imposed on each thing dispose and direct it towards the Good, although to you humans who aren’t able to understand this order everything seems confused and disturbed.” God’s Providence does no evil; evil is not its telos. By their “wicked error” men “stray as they seek the Good.” Providence, including Fate, doesn’t make them do it. God “looks out from the lofty watchtower of His Providence and sees what is best for all and works out what He knows is suitable for them”; “a knowing God works out the things that the ignorant wonder at.” The “lofty watchtower” imagery, which the editors trace to the Aeneid and to Plato’s Timaeus and Statesman, is a classical motif, even as the ‘personalizing’ of God (“He knows”) invokes the Bible. When bad things—immediately bad things, such as those suffered by Boethius—happen to good men, it may tp prevent them from being “spoiled by a long period of happiness,” or because “they can strengthen the virtues of their souls by the use and practice of patience”: strength rejoices in the challenge. Still others live in fear of things they actually can endure, others blithely ignore threats they cannot endure. In these cases, “Providence uses sorrows to teach these men to understand themselves.” Even death itself can purchase “honor in this world” to “some men”; Boethius himself will exemplify that. “Only divine power, to which bad things too are good, can use these bad things and bring about some good effect.” More immediately, as Lady Philosophy has already explained, “the joys of evil men…provide a good example to virtuous men of how they should judge the kind of happiness they often see falling to the wicked.” While bad things inflicted on good men are blessings in disguise, good things bestowed upon evil men are curses in disguise. Meanwhile, “it isn’t right for a mortal to try to understand in his mind or express with his words all the tools of divine workmanship.” The metrum at the end of Book IV, chapter vi cites as an example of “God’s law” the way in which, “in a just treaty with the universe / the stars keep their ancient peace,” and “the sun ignited in red flames / impedes not the moon’s cold rotation.” It is divine Love that “renews the eternal course” of the heavenly objects, a love that causes all things to “seek to hold their end, the Good.” [4]

In the seventh chapter of Book IV, Lady Philosophy ‘rests’ in the conclusion that “every kind of fortune is completely good,” rewarding of testing the good and punishing or correcting the evil. (Hence the Christian prayer, ‘Glory to God in all things.’) A fortune that tests or corrects is useful, and “whatever is useful [is] good.” A courageous man should not complain when “the cry of war breaks out,” since this will be “the means of increasing his glory.” A wise man “shouldn’t be upset when he has to battle with fortune,” since this will be “the means of shaping his wisdom.” That is why “we call it virtue,” which means strength. No one “progress[es] in virtue” by “wallow[ing] in pleasure.” If Agamemnon, Ulysses, and Hercules had not labored and sacrificed, we would not consider them heroes. She advances a bit of Aristotelian advice: “With unyielding strength take the middle road.” 

But given the superintendence of Providence, how can men be said to have free will, to be praised as heroic, damned as vicious? Are the moderation of good men and the immoderation of evil men a mere effect of Fate? Lady Philosophy addresses these questions in Book V.

She begins with a consideration of “chance.” Does it really exist, given the reality of Providence? Strictly speaking, it does not because nothing can come from nothing; everything has a cause. But one can still speak meaningfully about it. In the Physics, Aristotle defined chance or fortune as a circumstance in which something “done for a specific purpose” turns out differently, for better or for worse. We call “chance” a result that occurs when “causes come together unexpectedly and without being hoped for, and so they seem to have produced an accident.” The story of the farmer who discovers gold hidden in his field by a man who hid it there is a good example: two unrelated events occurring because two different men acted for different purposes resulted in an outcome unanticipated by either one. However, the ultimate cause of this sequence of events was providential. The metrum teaches that “even chance wears a bridle, heeds the law,” which was provided, as Lady Providence has explained, by the Supreme Mind. 

Where does this leave free will? “Rational creatures could not exist if there were no freedom of the will” because “anything that by its nature uses reason also possesses judgment, which allows it to make decisions about things.” Reason enables those endowed with it “to want something or not to want it, although I don’t think this freedom is equal in all beings,” as divine beings without bodies to interfere with their reasoning “have within them the power to achieve what they want,” while human beings, “more free when they continue to contemplate the Divine Mind,” are “less free when they fall down to human bodies,” “assenting and yielding” to bodily passions. They can choose, even if “that gaze of Providence, looking forth from eternity, sees all things and, in accordance with men’s merits, arranges everything as it has been predetermined ahead of time.” 

Boethius sees “an even greater difficulty,” however. God knows beforehand “every deed and wish.” This being so, “the outcome of things foreseen is necessary.” True, foreseeing them doesn’t make them happen, but anything foreseen must happen as foreseen, if God is doing the foreseeing; “if we know something will happen, it must happen,” and God’s knowledge is perfect. Unlike us, he has no false beliefs; he does not engage in ‘wishful thinking’ or in fearful thinking. “This alone is enough to do away with freedom of the will.” “The Divine Mind that sees all without error binds and constrains them to one outcome.” This means, among other things, that the ‘justice system’ of rewards and punishments for good and evil men, respectively, makes no sense. Indeed, there can be “neither vices nor virtues.” Prayer, too, is pointless.

Lady Philosophy begins her reply by agreeing that knowledge of an event that will happen does not cause it to happen. But consider a chariot race. As an American sharpie once remarked, the battle may not go to the strong, nor the race to the swift, but that’s the way to bet. If this were not so, Boethius concedes, “then the use of skill would be in vain, if everything were moved by compulsion.” But, Lady Philosophy then argues, “you believe that to think things are different from the way they are is opposed to the integrity of knowledge.” Not so. What is known “is known not according to its ability to be known but rather according to the ability of the knower.” The same person will know the roundness of a ball quite differently if he examines it by sight or by touch. And this is not only true of the physical senses. The senses, imagination, reason, and intelligence (nous) each perceive in its own way, in each human being. [5] Thus, “in understanding, everything uses its own ability rather than the ability of the things to be known”; therefore, “every judgment is the act of someone judging,” judging without the assistant from any “power outside him but through his own power.” Understanding comprehends the other ways of knowing, without erasing them.

This forms the basis of free will. Unlike Locke, for example, Lady Philosophy does not take the human mind to be a passive tabula rasa, collecting the ‘sense impressions’ Locke calls the ‘simple ideas,’ a power limited to putting these together into ‘complex ideas.’ Simplicitas comes not from ‘below,’ from the senses, but from ‘above,’ from God, the ultimate example of simplicitas. “The mind within the body is not engraved upon by the object perceived through sense, but by its own strength makes judgment about the effect occurring to the body. “Human beings can raise their minds to the level of reason.” Only the divine exercises intelligence, “knowing not only its own sphere but what pertains to others,” while “surpass[ing] those others.” The effect of this is that human beings tend to think of divine knowledge as if it were the product of reasoning, analogous to human reasoning. We suppose that divine intelligence sees the future the way we do, as part of a sequence of events. We will either deny that God can know the future, or we will claim that he has foreknowledge because he has already determined what the future will be. 

But “what sort of knowledge” does the Divine Mind possess? Humans live within time, within the course of events, going forward from past events to the present to future events. Our minds do not “grasp tomorrow,” and they have “already lost yesterday.” If our souls are immortal, extending into infinity, they nonetheless are not “eternal” because the human mind “doesn’t comprehend and embrace the entire space of the time it lives,” not yet possessing the future and no longer having a past. The Divine Mind is fundamentally different. “Whatever comprehends and possesses all at once the complete fullness of unlimited time and also possesses all of the future and has lost none of the past…is rightly claimed to be eternal,” “embrac[ing] all at once the complete presence of unlimited life.” As the Timaeus indicates, “God is eternal, but the world is only perpetual.” God’s knowledge “surpasses all movement of time and remains in the simplicitas of its presence,” “understand[ing] all things simply and consider[ing] them as if they were being done now.” God’s so-called foreknowledge is really “never-failing knowledge of the present moment.” “Just as you men see something in this temporary present of yours, so He discerns all things in His eternal present.” If so, then God’s seeing no more makes things happen than our seeing makes things happen; foreknowledge it does not change “the nature or integrity of things.” The Divine Mind readily distinguishes “both the things that will necessarily come about”—e.g., the sunrise—from “those that will come about without necessity”—e.g., a man walking. “It knows what will happen, although it knows that the things themselves lack all necessity of happening.” There are “two necessities”: “simple” necessity (the sun rising, all men are mortal) and “conditional” necessity (“If you know someone is walking, it is necessary that he is walking”). No necessity causes the man who is going forward voluntarily to walk, but if he is walking, he is necessarily going forward (or backward.) “God sees as present those future things that occur through the freedom of the will”; “all things that God foreknows will happen will come about, but some of them proceed from freedom of the will.” Some things that God knows “happen through the necessity of things, while others occur through the power of the things that do them.” Our future actions do not cause God’s knowledge of them. God’s simplicitas causes his knowledge of them. 

Thus “freedom of the will remains unviolated by mortals,” the justice system makes sense, and God’s justice system, ruled by himself, the all-seeing “watchman on high,” makes perfect sense. “So, let us shun vices and cultivate virtues, lifting our minds to proper hopes, and offering humble prayers on high. For, if you wish to speak the truth, a great necessity has been placed upon you men to do good, since you live in front of a judge who sees all things.”

Notes

1. On the Meno, see “Teaching Virtue?” on this website under the category “Philosophers.”
2. See “Theosis,” on this website under the category “Bible Notes.”
3. The metrum concluding this chapter invokes the story of Orpheus, beloved by the poetic Muses, the being “whose songs subdued all” but who could not subdue his passion for his wife, Eurydice, and earthly being. Orpheus disobeyed “the merciful arbiter of the shades” in Tartarus—i.e., Tartarus himself, whose underworld has been named for its ruler—who decreed that he might reunite with her so long as he did not look back at her as he left “Tartarus’ darkness.” He did so, anyway, and Erydice was killed. “Whoever, having been weakened, / turns back a gaze to Tartarus’ chasm— / whatever excellence he has gained, / looking back, he loses.” This last point evidently contains a warning to Boethius, preoccupied as he was with the honor and fame attendant to his years in high public office.
4. The editors remark that this poem “is in the same meter and discusses the same them as 1 metrum 5, in which a sorrowing Boethius asks the God who governs the physical universe to show equal concern for man. Here Lady Philosophy is singing and argues that God does indeed do this and that the order in the physical universe mirrors the order in God’s interactions with man.” 
5. Nous, according to Aquinas, following the classics, “perceives the truth without actively working to figure things out, which is the task of reason,” as the editors explain (p.161 n.35). As Lady Philosophy puts it, intelligence “understands the reason’s view of the whole, and the imagination’s view of the figure, and also the matter that is perceived by senses, but not by using reason, imagination, or the senses, but by one stroke of the mind, looking forth at all things according to form, so to speak.”

Born in Dacia around 360 AD, not long before its conquest by the Huns, John Cassian traveled widely—to Bethlehem, Alexandria, Constantinople (where the Patriarch, John Chrysostom, made him a deacon of the Church), Rome (where he was ordained to the priesthood by Pope Innocent I), and eventually to Marseille, where he founded two monasteries, writing the Institutes as a guide for the monks, recalling the practices he had seen in the monasteries of Palestine, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. “Institutes” are the principles that guide the practices.

In his preface, he thanks the local bishop, Castor, for summoning him, a foreigner, to “collaborate in your great work”: building a “true and spiritual temple for God,” a “community of holy men” in whose souls dwells “Christ the king.” “You are concerned that the simple life of holy men be explained in simple language to the brothers in your new monastery.” To this task, Cassian brings “experience and practice alone,” since “such things could never be handed on or understood or conjured up by men of leisurely meditation or verbal teaching”—the stuff of philosophizing—but by a person “who has striven to learn” the “reasoning of what was done” in the monasteries with the same “zeal and effort” as displayed in those Christian temples. Saints Basil and Jerome reported on these practices but did not experience them; in all humility, I have.

The book moves from the “outward appearance” of the monks, their garb, to their “inner worship,” including their spiritual warfare against sin and the demons who tempt them to sin. With respect to clothing, “it is proper for a monk always to dress like a soldier of Christ, ever ready for battle, his loins girded.” The Old Testament prophets Elijah and Elisha “were responsible for the beginnings of this profession.” Elijah wore a leather belt, “a kind of trademark of his”—girt loins indicating his chastity—and only sufficient clothing as to serve as a covering for “the shame of nakedness” and for protection from the cold, “not such as nurtures seeds of vanity or pride.” On the contrary, a monk’s clothing “should be grimy with filth accumulated by neglect,” and nothing should differentiate him from the other monks while everything should differentiate him from the world. The small hoods they wear remind them “to hold constantly to the innocence and simplicity of small children,” very much in contrast with the laurels sported by imperial dignitaries. The cords that extend from the neck to the armpits free their arms and hands for work, as he who does not wish to work shall not eat. For the rest of the body, the monk dresses in goatskin, which “signifies that, once all the turbulence of their carnal passions has been put to death”—the goat being the traditional symbol of lust. In all, he “must abide in the most elevated virtue,” with none of “the willfulness or wantonness” of youth. His belt, made with “dead skin,” indicates Elijah-like chastity. He carries a staff, as did Elisha—another outward sign of spiritual warfare, warning him that he “must never go out unarmed in the midst of the numerous barking dogs of the vices and the invisible beasts of the evil spirits.” Whereas the monks of southern regions he had observed wore only sandals, “we ourselves,” here in the north, should adapt our footwear and other clothing to the climate, so long as we dress “in keeping with the humility of our profession” as well as “the character of the climate.” 

In this appropriate clothing, monks have prepared themselves for their most spiritually important activities: praying and singing, both night and day. These practices must be ruled aright. “Many persons in different places—following their own ideas and possessing, as Aristotle says, ‘a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge’—have stablished different models and rules for themselves in this matter.” But the Egyptian monastics adhere to traditions upheld by “a succession of elders.” For example, “no one is allowed to rule over a community of brothers, or even over himself, unless he not only gets rid of all his possessions but also recognizes that he is in fact not his own master and has no power over himself,” ready to obey as a child would do, “because he is beginning afresh.” As for his superiors, “no one is chosen to rule over a community of brothers unless, before he himself exercises authority, he has learned by obedience how he should command those who will be subject to him and has understood from the institutes of the elders what he should pass on to the young.” The person willing to undergo the strictest of obedient discipline possesses “a most lofty gift and a grace of the Holy Spirit.” 

Night prayers and psalms follow a regular order: twelve psalms followed by two readings, one from the Old and the other from the New Testament. “This number, which was set in the distant past and which is inviolate in the monasteries of those regions even until now, has been kept for so many centuries because the elders declare that it was not established by human whim but was given to the fathers from heaven by the teaching of an angel.” Nor should this surprise anyone today, in the fourth century, as it was the Apostle Mark himself who first ruled as Alexandria’s bishop over a “multitude of believers.” The Apostle “had one heart and one soul” in pursuing not only the way of prayer but the way of “rigorous abstinence,” worshipping with “such fervor that the very appetite and memory of food only disturbed them every second or third day.” The monks amounted to a spiritual aristocracy, mirroring the civil-social aristocracy that characterized the ancient world around them. “When the faith of the few had not yet been spread among the multitude and grown lukewarm, the venerable fathers, reflecting with unceasing concern on those who would follow them, came together to discuss what form daily worship would take throughout the whole body of the brotherhood,” establishing the practices that prevail to this day. In their prudence, they limited the number of psalms so as not to cause the monks to become distracted by bodily discomfort; “it is not a multitude of verses but rather the understanding of the mind that pleases them.” As to the prayers, they were kept brief but frequent, again to avoid distraction—a “pointed brevity” enabling the monks “to be able to dodge the lurking devil’s darts.”  

When they are not praying and singing, the monks work with their hands throughout their waking hours at night, “offering a sacrifice to God” in so doing. This also ensures “that the hateful enemy, jealous of our purity and always lying in wait for it and continually attacking it, might not by some phantasm of sleep sully the cleanness that we have acquired by nightly psalms and prayers.” And even when no such assault occurs, sleep induces grogginess upon awakening, often “produc[ing] heaviness and torpor in the mind for the whole day, dulling its vigor and clouding that clarity of intellect and impoverishing that richness of heart which would make it possible for us to remain wary and strong throughout the day in the face of all the enemy’s snares.” In all, the monks “practice equally the virtues of body and soul, balancing the profit of the outer man with the gain of the inner.” This is what has preserved the monastic regime in its unity for so long, with none of the schisms that distraction from God’s teachings and traditions might flourish in a condition of idleness. Even while working with his hands on whatever task he has been assigned, the monk will review a psalm or scriptural text in his mind, “giv[ing] none of his talents or his time to harmful schemes or to wicked plots, nor even to idle gossip, since both his mouth and his heart are constantly busied with spiritual meditation.” If a lapse does occur, the monk suffers internal exile, with no one permitted to “pray with him until he has done penance on the ground and his reconciliation and pardon for the thing committed have been granted publicly by the abba, in the presence of all the brothers.” He must be humbled, lest by “a destructive consolation he hardens his heart more and more.”

The daytime hours go similarly—prayer, psalms, work. The pacing of these activities differs, however, with prayers and psalms at the third, sixth, and ninth hours of the day, three psalms each time. Each hour commemorates an event seen in the Gospel: The Holy Spirit first visited the apostles in the third hour of the day; Jesus mounted the cross at the sixth hour, and Peter received his commission to preach to the Gentiles at that hour, too; at the ninth hour, Jesus harrowed Hell, Cornelius the centurion “learned from an angel who spoke to him that the offering of his prayers and alms had been received by the Lord, and Peter received “the sacraments of the call of the Gentiles” that had been revealed to him at the sixth hour. That is, the timing of daytime prayer and song reminds the monks of their calling, of Christian sacrifice, of the guarantees God makes to the faithful, and of their obligation to preach the Gospel. As with the brevity of nighttime prayer, the division of these periods of devotion allows for “the body’s frailty” and the mind’s need for refreshment.

Cassian describes the conditions of admission to communities formed according to such a strict regime, along with the training undergone once the renunciates are admitted. The seeker must lie outside the monastery for at least ten days, giving “an indication of his perseverance and desire, as well as of his humility and patience” by embracing the knees of each brother who goes by, enduring their rebukes and insults, bearing inspection for any money that may be secreted on their person. The monastery accepts no money from him, lest “he might be puffed up with self-confidence from having mad this offering,” holding himself above “his poor brothers.” Not only would such a person “never stoop to the lowliness of Christ,” but if he could not endure the regime he might demand his money back. 

Once admitted, each renunciate is assigned a supervisor, a spiritual father. The renunciate must never “hide any of the wanton thoughts in their hearts but to reveal them to their elder as soon as they surface,” accepting his judgment of them without question, so that “it never happens that the clever foe is able to get the better of a young man as if he were inexperienced and ignorant, or to deceive him by some trick.” All of their actions, including “attend[ing] to their common and natural necessities” and “leav[ing] their cells” for any reason, must be done only with “the knowledge and permission of their superior.” He shall obey the superior’s orders without question, whether or not the task assigned is physically possible; he must still attempt it and accept failure. If “he prefers reading to obedience” he must repent publicly. At meals, he must remain silent, with his hood “drawn lower than [his] eyebrows,” preventing a “free view” that might “facilitate a roving curiosity.” Cassian tells the story of one renunciate who was commanded to roll a huge rock over to his superior. “He little weighed the impossibility of the command or of the deed in his reverence for the old man and in his sincere and simple dutifulness, which led him to believe with absolute confidence that the old man could give no order that was purposeless and unreasonable.” Nor was it, having been issued to test his obedience. A much more extreme and unsettling case was that of the renunciate who was admitted along with his eight-year-old son. They were separated, perhaps in accord with Jesus’ prediction that obedience to Him would sunder families. But worse, the child was “purposely neglected, clothed in rags rather than garments, and so covered over and marred with filth as to shock rather than delight his father whenever he could see him.” The boy was also subjected “to the blows and slaps of different persons.” Cassian invites us to admire the father’s heart, “unmoved out of love of Christ and the virtue of obedience.” Finally, in imitation of God’s command to Abraham for the sacrifice of his son, the father was told to throw his son into the river. While the monks rescued the child from the water and “the man’s faith and devotion were so acceptable to God that they were immediately confirmed by divine testimony,” one does wonder what effect all of this had on the boy. As a reward, the abba of the monastery designated the man as his successor. We hear nothing more of the son.

Cassian ends his account of the monastic practices with an exhortation delivered from one monk to another. “Renunciation is nothing else than a manifestation of the cross and of a dying” to the world; “he lives in you who was crucified for you,” and you crucify yourself out of the fear of the Lord that is the beginning of wisdom, of that discernment that recognizes the traps set for you by Satan. You thus “prepare your soul not for peace or security or pleasure” but to experience the “trials and difficulties” you will encounter on your way to the highest regime, the Kingdom of God. Scripture teaches that “the gate is narrow and the path is strait which leads to life, and few there are who find it,” but you are “one of the chosen few”; “do not grow cold through the example and the lukewarmness of the multitude, but live as do the few, so that with the few may deserve to be found in the kingdom.” This path of humility and obedience, walked steadily and long, will bring the humility and obedience of action into your soul, ingrain it there, so that “the things that you used to do out of a certain dread of punishment you will begin to do without any difficulty, as it were naturally, and no longer with a view of punishment or fear of any kind, but out of love for the good itself and out of pleasure in virtue.” Foolish in the eyes of the world, you will attain “purity of heart”; “with purity of heart the perfection of apostolic love is possessed.” 

Let the spiritual warfare begin, then. Cassian turns to the eight sins that must be overcome, listing them in the order of difficulty in combating them. They are: gluttony, fornication, avarice, anger, sadness, acedia, vainglory, and pride. Sins are “harmful passions” that “claim dominion for themselves,” exercising “a most cruel tyranny over our mortal body.” It is God’s Word that can, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, break “the iron bolts of the vices that shut us out from true knowledge” and “lead us to our concealed secrets”—concealed from others and very often from ourselves. “Thus, penetrating the dark shadows of our vices with the most pure eyes of our soul, we shall be able to expose them and bring them to light,” discern their “causes and natures,” and “bedewed with spiritual remedies,” be “led to a place of refreshment and perfection.” Even then, no one monk will have all the virtues; Christ is present “when all are assembled.” That is the spiritual advantage of the regime of the holy community.

Gluttony, “the desire to gourmandize,” must be counteracted by fasting. No “uniform rule concerning the manner of fasting” can “easily be kept because not all bodies have the same strength.” But while metabolisms vary, there is nonetheless “one rule of discipline for everyone with regard to an abstinent and virtuous mind.” Do not eat until sated, either with respect to the quantity or the quality of your food. “The mind that is suffocated and weighed down by food cannot be guided by the governance of discretion,” the rule of reason both natural and spiritual. “Too much food of any kind makes it stagger and sway and robs it of every possibility of integrity and purity.” Gluttony wasn’t Sodom’s only sin, but it was its first. “The surfeit of bread…set ablaze” the Sodomites’ lust. Therefore, “eat only as much as an unyielding discretion with respect to temperance judges sufficient to maintain [your] life, and not as much as [your] appetite demands.” Set times for eating; set portions proper to your condition; “more than anything else,” respect the judgment of your conscience. “Integrity of mind is closely connected with an empty stomach.” Abstinence is necessary if not sufficient to achieve such integrity, but “the desire to gourmandize…is the first thing that we must trample upon.” Like Olympians, spiritual athletes must attend first to their diet in order “to compete in the higher contests.” No less a saint than the Apostle Paul “wrestl[ed] strenuously with his flesh.” Such a man strives “to make himself pure for God so that he may deserve to welcome Christ in himself as his guest” in his heart. While doing so, do not concentrate on your ‘self’ alone, as so many ‘dieters’ do. “It [is] better to practice the virtue of hospitality and love than to display the strictness of our abstinence and daily rigor of our chosen orientation” to our visitors.

Our “second struggle” is the “savage war” against fornication, a war “longer than the others and of greater duration,” “completely won by only a few.” This passion “gains in strength by the weakness of both body and soul,” since fasting alone cannot cure it but must be “preceded by a contrite spirit and by persevering prayer against this most unclean spirit,” along with “toilsome manual labor,” which “restrains and recalls the feckless wanderings of the heart.” As with the cure for any vice, the contrite spirit must first be animated by “true humility” within the heart, which commands the flesh. And abstinence alone will not do; chastity, “a disposition of integrity and incorruption,” a virginity not only of the flesh but of the mind, must prevail. Humility is indispensable because “the soul cannot escape being attacked by this vice until it realizes that waging this war is beyond its own powers,” that it needs “the assistance and protection of the Lord” if it will win the victory. We will know that we have achieved this “if either no unlawful image occurs to us as we lie at rest and relaxed in slumber or at least, when one does surface, it does not arouse any movements of desire,” since “the character of our thoughts…is made trial of in the calm of night,” when relaxation of the mind brings to the surface “the hidden depths of the soul,” the “hidden fevers of seething emotion.” 

Avarice or the love of money differs from gluttony and fornication because it is not natural, not “inborn.” The other passions at least have their root in God-given necessity: gluttony is a deranged desire for food, fornication a deranged desire for replenishing the earth, and so on with the rest of the sins. But “this disease arrives later and comes upon the soul from without”; in this, its only simulacrum is envy.  And once it enters the soul it is “much more dangerous than all the others and is that much more difficult to get rid of,” becoming the proverbial root of all evils. Avarice sneaks up on us, beginning with making a brother “concerned about a very small sum,” providing him with “certain justifiable and, so to speak, reasonable grounds for holding money back and keeping it for himself”: Does he not need more than what the monastery supplies in order to maintain his health? Does he not need to travel in order to relieve himself of his restlessness behind the narrow confines of the monastery? Does not the prospect of infirm old age ruin his sense of security? “And so the unhappy soul is agitated and tied up in serpentine entanglements.” Hoarding, then desiring material goods, then an attenuation of zeal for holy goods will put him into retreat from the spiritual war. In the end, he will “not shudder to commit a crime of lying or perjury or theft, nor to break faith, nor to be filled with the guilty fury of wrath.” Instead of conforming his way of life and their way of thinking to “the meaning of Scripture,” he will “adapt the power of Scripture to their own wanton desires by looking to harmonize it with their own opinions.” After all, if it is more blessed to give than to receive, must I not have something to give, the more the better? In my now lukewarm faith, I then “refuse to be satisfied with either manual labor or the frugality of the monastery.” Instead, “not only the possession of money” but “even the desire itself should be utterly cast out of one’s mind.” Do not be a Judas, ready to “sell the world’s redeemer and the author of human salvation for thirty pieces of silver.”

Anger is a “deadly poison” that “must be totally uprooted from the depths of our soul” because it “blinds our mind’s eye with its harmful darkness”—the mind being the nous, reason. Wise Solomon’s Book of Proverbs admits that “anger destroys even the prudent.” Biblical references to God’s anger are not to be taken literally. “The disturbance of anger (not to mention wrath) cannot be attributed to that immutable nature without monstrous blasphemy,” any more than the ascription of physical attributes—God’s “mouth,” His “eyes,” His “hands,” His “arm,”—can be literally applied to a purely spiritual Being. God’s “mouth” denotes “that conversation of his which he is wont to carry on softly in the inmost recesses of our souls, or what he spoke to our fathers and to the prophets.” His “eyes” refer to his capacity to see all things, “the fact that nothing that is done or will be done or that is thought by us is hidden from him.” His “hands” is a metaphor by which “we should understand that providence and activity by which he is the creator and author of all things,” while His “arm” refers “to that power and governance by which he sustains, directs, and rules all things.” God’s anger and wrath have nothing to do with “lowly human disturbances,” denoting instead his role as “judge and avenger of every wicked deed in this world,” one we should fear “as the terrible repayer of our acts,” anything we do “against his will.” This is the import of Jesus’ command to remove the “beam of wrath” from your own eye instead of complaining about the speck in the eye of another. Be indignant at your own sins, “the wanton movements of our heart,” at “things that we are ashamed to do or to say in the sight of human beings but that have found their way into the recesses of our heart.” Consider the bad example of irascible souls, who “turn the poison of their wrath back to their own destruction, brooding over it in their hearts and in glum silence digesting it within themselves.” Their anger blocks them from prayer, and especially from prayer for their enemies, which God commands us to do. And further, “as long as we attribute our own wrongdoing to other people,” as long as we resent, “we shall never be able to get near to patience and perfection.” On the contrary, our anger is under “our own power,” quite apart from what others do or say. And “lastly,” never abuse prayer, never pray to God “when we are anger,” when we are likely to petition Him for our enemy’s ruin. “Keep before our eyes the uncertain state of our human condition,” which dictates that we will die, abandoning all the earthly goods we are so indignant to lose.

“A consuming sadness” is also a sin, inasmuch as Christians eventually will see God in eternity and, in the meantime, “it cuts us off totally from the vision of the divine contemplation” while “weaken[ing] and oppress[ing] the mind itself,” discouraging it from “carry[ing] out its prayers with its customary eagerness of heart” and blocking it from “dwell[ing] upon the remedies of sacred scripture.” Sadness can follow sustained, frustrated anger or the failure to achieve “some gain.” “Occasionally we are even provoked to fall into this misfortune for no apparent reason.” Patience remedies sadness, in particular when we seek to win over someone we have offended or injured. So does rightly directed hope, as the natural benefit of sadness comes “when we conceive it out of repentance for our sins and are inflamed by a desire for perfection, and by the contemplation of future blessedness.” 

Acedia is the term for “a wearied or anxious heart.” Similar to sadness, “it makes a person horrified at where he is, disgusted with his cell, and also disdainful and contemptuous of the brothers who live with him or at a slight distance,” rendering him “slothful and immobile in the face of all the work to be done within the walls of his dwelling.” Acedia causes the mind to fill “with a kind of irrational confusion.” David suffered from it, as seen in Psalm 119:28: “My soul slept from weariness” or “heaviness.” It cannot “be avoided by flight but overcome through resistance.” To do so, don’t compare yourself with your brother monks, pay no attention to gossip, work with your hands, “walk honorably for the sake of outsiders,” and “desire nothing of anyone.” Take your stand on the Word of God, on His promises of salvation, on your coming entry into His regime, the Kingdom of God.

Vainglory is a spiritual rather than a fleshly sin. Indeed, “persons who could not be deceived by carnal vices are all the more brutally hurt as a result of their spiritual successes”; their lack of sin tempts them to sin. Vainglory is accordingly more complex than many of the other sins. “Multifarious, multiform, and varied,” it conceals itself under virtues. It pursues souls even into solitude. “One [man] is tried because of his great knowledge, another because he reads much, still another because of his frequent vigils.” For these things, he is likely to be praised, even flattered. For this reason, “a monk must by all means flee from women and bishops.” Or, if an academic, from women and deans. Do not boast, and “avoid those things that could set us apart from others and that would gain us praise from human beings, as if we were the only ones who could do them.” Do not “do for the sake of human beings what we should have done” for the sake of God.

In many ways, Cassian has commended humility as the cure for the sins. The eighth and final sin is pride, “the final one in the combat with the vices” but “first in terms of origin and time.” Unlike most of the other vices, it cannot rest satisfied, however temporarily, when it achieves its telos. Nor does it confine itself to the corruption of one virtue, as gluttony corrupts moderation, lust charity, anger patience. “Like a most savage tyrant it lays waste and overturns the whole city from its foundations.” Rebellious Lucifer would have destroyed the Kingdom of God. His pride made him rely “on the power of his free will”; he no longer believed that he needed God. He tempted Adam into sharing it with him, bringing the first man to believe “he could attain to the glory of the Godhead by his own free will and effort.” But genuine theosis depends entirely upon understanding that our virtues are gifts bestowed upon us by the grace of God. This is why monks are so vulnerable to pride; they can easily suppose that their spiritual victories are their own. On the contrary, we must remind ourselves of our dependence upon Him.

“How great the evil of pride is, that it deserves to have as its adversary not an angel or other virtues contrary to it but rather God himself!” The cure for it may be seen in the words of the Apostle Paul in First Corinthians: “Not I, but the grace of God in me.” “A person cannot be cleansed of his carnal vices if he does not realize that all his efforts and attempts are insufficient in view of the great end of perfection, and if he does not recognize that this cannot be grasped apart from the compassion and help of God.” “Never will a person’s own effort and human diligence be equal to the divine gift, if it has not been granted by the divine compassion to the one who desires it.” To say this does not “nullify human effort” or redirect men from “diligence and intense toil.” Indeed, “God’s mercy and grace are bestowed only on those who toil and labor,” “given to those who will and those who run,” to those who ask for God’s blessing, knock at God’s door, search for God. But one must hope for “the rewards of the life to come not by reason of [one’s] own works but on account of the Lord’s mercy,” giving themselves “no credit for the great circumspection of heart that they [have] in comparison with others.” Do not flatter yourself. God was the one who “created us rational, gave us the power of free will, bestowed on us the grace of baptism, and granted us the knowledge and help of the law,” protecting us from evil by His providence. 

“This is the true humility with respect to God, this is the unspoiled faith of the most ancient fathers, which remains pure in their successors up to the present day.” Not by philosophy, with its “dialectical syllogisms,” or rhetoric, “Ciceronian eloquence,” but by the “experience of an unspoiled life and by the most upright behavior, as well as by the correction of their vices and, to speak more truly, by visible indications,” the fathers of the faith “learned that the nature of perfection is contained” in “simplicity of heart.”