The execution of Saint Thomas More upon London’s Tower Hill on July 6, 1535 is an event so well-known it needs no introduction. Since that day More has captivated many, remembered as the witty humanist Lord Chancellor of England to King Henry VIII and author of Utopia who died for his fidelity to papal primacy. Yet there is one dimension of the man that has largely escaped notice: his vast written defense of the Catholic faith.
Few are aware that More is the author of several thousand pages of apologetics in which he articulates the teachings of the Church on the seven sacraments, the Bible and oral tradition, ecclesiastical authority, the veneration of saints, relics and holy images, and the existence of purgatory. Over a span of twelve years More wrote nine apologetic works, seven in the period from 1528–1533, including his most comprehensive book, the massive Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer.
In a December 1526 letter exhorting Erasmus of Rotterdam to take up his pen in defense of the Church, More speaks of apologetical writing as a matter of carrying out “the cause of God.” It was More’s passionate dedication to the unity of the Church—manifested by his habitual recourse to Cyprian’s work De Unitate Ecclesiae (On the Unity of the Catholic Church)—that inspired all his apologetic works, as he responded forcefully to attacks such Martin Luther’s on the ecclesiology of Catholicism (the text given here is from Luther’s 1520 work, The Babylonian Captivity of the Catholic Church):
“This glorious liberty of ours and this understanding of baptism have been taken captive in our day, and to whom can we give the blame except the Roman pontiff with his despotism? . . . [H]e seeks only to oppress us with his decrees and laws and to ensnare us as captives to his tyrannical power. By what right, I ask you, does the pope impose his laws upon us . . .? Who gave him power to deprive us of this liberty of ours . . .?
“I lift my voice simply on behalf of liberty and conscience, and I confidently cry: No law, whether of men or of angels, may rightfully be imposed upon Christians without their consent, for we are free of all laws.”
Similar views were expressed by the foremost English protege of Luther, William Tyndale, as in his 1528 work, The Obedience of a Christian Man:
“[A]ll their [the hierarchy’s] study is to deceive us and to keep us in darkness, to sit as gods in our consciences and handle us at their pleasure and to lead us whither they lust; therefore I read [i.e, advise] thee, get thee to God’s word, and thereby try all doctrine, and against that receive nothing.”
Thomas More saw such rejections of hierarchical authority as inimical to Christ’s intention for his Church “that they may be one” (John 17:22). For More this ecclesial unity is in particular the work of the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, whom More refers to as the “Holy Spirit of unity, concord, and truth,” in stark contrast to the “spirit of error and lying, of discord and of division, the damned devil of hell.” More lays as the foundation of his ecclesiology the two promises of Christ in the Gospels that he would send the Holy Spirit to lead the Church into all truth (John 16:13) and that He would remain with us always even until the end of the world (Matt. 28:20).
These two Scripture citations are a constant refrain throughout More’s apologetic writings. For him these assurances that God would be with his people down through the ages are not to be viewed as sentimental abstraction but as a guarantee that our Lord would be present to the Church in a tangible way by making her an authentic custodian of his teachings:
“[W]e say also that God by the mouth of our savior hath promised that himself with his Holy Spirit shall ever be assistant with his Church and that he shall always instruct his Church and lead it into every truth. And we say that he keepeth, and ever hath kept, and ever shall keep that promise. And therefore we say that he teacheth his Church all truth, I mean all truth necessary as himself meant for their salvation . . . yet will he never suffer [the Church] to err and be deceived in the knowledge of his law to which he will have it bound.”
But how was this deposit of truths to be faithfully transmitted and interpreted over the centuries? In More’s view such a task could only be accomplished by means of a visible teaching authority established by Christ Himself: the apostles and their successors, in particular Peter. “[H]e appointed Saint Peter for his successor, and head and chief shepherd to feed and govern his whole flock after his death, and so forth the successors of him ever after.”
Seeing the pope as the “best and greatest of primates, who ought to take precedence over all learned men’s votes,” “the supreme prince of Christendom” who speaks “as if with the authority of a divine oracle,” More notes that his own favorite Church Father, Augustine, “saw the succession continued in the see of Saint Peter, to whom our Lord had after his resurrection committed the feeding of his sheep . . . from Saint Peter’s days unto his own time.” More also points out that the Christian nations of his time “now do and long have recognized and acknowledged the pope, not as the bishop of Rome but as the successor of Saint Peter, to be their chief spiritual governor under God and Christ’s vicar on earth.”
Hence the idea articulated by Luther and Tyndale—that the faith of the individual believer is in and of itself a sufficient authority for discerning true doctrine from false—is to More absurd: “[S]o will it not agree with reason that every man in the Church bear as much rule as the Pope.” While More does not use the word “infallible” in referring to papal primacy he does implicitly assert papal infallibility, for he speaks of the teachings of the Church as “infallible doctrine,” teachings he saw as authoritatively taught by the episcopacy and in the first place by the pope. Moreover, he does not hesitate to endorse specifically the strong defense of papal primacy given in his contemporary St. John Fisher’s treatise Assertionis Lutheranae Confutatio.
If More saw the assent of the faithful to the doctrines transmitted by a visible teaching magisterium as an essential hallmark of ecclesial unity, how did he view the phenomenon of dissent? Citing Augustine that pride is “the very mother of heretics,” More observes that dissenters “make idols of their own false opinions” and would have the people “reject and refuse the faith” that “holy martyrs lived and died for.” Aware that dissenters justify their beliefs as a matter of freedom of conscience, More warns that “never shall God’s precepts be obeyed if every man may boldly frame himself a conscience with a gloss [interpretation] of his own making, after his own fantasy put unto God’s word.” In a 1532 letter to his friend Erasmus, More observes that the popularity of dissent is often a matter of wishful thinking rather than reasoned conviction: “[S]ome people like to give an approving eye to novel ideas. . . . [T]hey assent to what they read not because they believe it is true but because they want it to be true.”
In his 1533 work, The Apology, More returns to this idea, noting that such people are afraid to read arguments in favor of Church teaching lest such arguments prick their consciences. “[T]hey do not cleave to these foolish heretics for any thing that they think them to say truth, but because they would fain it were truth whether it be or no, and that they show their forwardness therein very plainly, while their hearts abhor and cannot abide to read any book by which their own conscience giveth them that they shall find their opinions plainly proved false, and their arch-heretics plainly proved fools.”
The bedrock upon which the dissenters of More’s own time—the founding fathers of the Protestant Reformation—built so much of their theology is the well-known proposition of sola scriptura, that all revealed truths of Christianity, all teachings of Christ, are found in Scripture alone, to the exclusion of any ecclesiastically transmitted oral tradition. In response to this More reminds his readers that in the Church’s beginning there were no written Gospels:
“Christ our Savior himself preached more than his word was written, and promised also without writing, and was believed then without writing, that he would send the Holy Ghost that should teach his Church all truth without writing, and Christ full truly fulfilled his promise without writing—and yet will not Tyndale now believe him without writing.”
More also stresses that the authority of Scripture rests on the same foundation as that of the oral tradition—the Catholic Church—for it is the Church that has defined the contents of the Bible, establishing what are or are not inspired writings. In this context More repeatedly cites Augustine’s comment, “I should not believe the gospel except as moved by the authority of the Catholic Church.”
It is in defense of the Church’s teachings regarding the Eucharist that Thomas More writes most effusively. He would devote three whole works to the subject: Answer to a Poisoned Book, in which he develops at length St. John Chrysostom’s assertions of the Real Presence of Christ in this sacrament; Letter against Frith, a shorter treatise published at the same time as the Answer (December 1533); and A Treatise to Receive the Blessed Body of Our Lord, a devotional work regarding the worthy and fruitful reception of Holy Communion. More’s scriptural commentary A Treatise upon the Passion includes an extended apologetic exposition on the Mass and the doctrine of transubstantiation.
In Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer More speaks against Tyndale’s rejection of the doctrine of the Real Presence no less than twenty times, observing that dissenters such as Tyndale “would destroy the leaven . . . which Christ hath himself put in our bread, such as for the more part would take his own blessed body out of the sacrament, and leave there for our souls nothing but unsavory bread.” More sees Christ’s continual presence in the Eucharist as the fulfillment of his words at the Last Supper, when he “commanded the same to be done forever in his Church after in remembrance of his passion, and did in so commanding make a faithful promise, that himself would be forever with his church in that holy sacrament.” He sees the Real Presence also as the fulfillment of our Lord’s promise at the end of the Gospel of Matthew “to abide perpetually with us, according to his own words spoken unto his Church, when he said, ‘I am with you all days unto the end of the world.’”
More also sees the Real Presence as prefigured in God’s manifestations of his presence to the Israelites in the desert:
“Have we so soon forgotten the perpetual assistance of the Trinity in his Church, and the prayer of Christ to keep the faith of his church from failing, and the Holy Ghost sent of purpose to keep in the Church the remembrance of Christ’s words and to lead them into all truth? What would it have profited to have put you in the remembrance of the assistance of God with the children of Israel, walking with them in the cloud by day and in the pillar of fire by night in their earthly voyage, and thereby to have proved you the much more special assistance of God with his Christian Church in their spiritual voyage, wherein his especial goodness well declareth his tender diligence, by that he doth vouchsafe to assist and comfort us with the continual presence of his precious Body in the holy Sacrament?”
The Lord Chancellor of England was a vigorous defender of the preeminent dignity and nature of the ordained priesthood when dissenting theologians of his age were denying the very existence of Holy Orders as a sacrament. Tyndale, bent on rejecting an ordained priest’s unique power to confect the Eucharist, went so far as to make himself a sixteenth-century advocate of women’s ordination:
“If a woman, learned in Christ, were driven unto an isle where Christ was never preached, might she not there preach and teach to minister the sacraments, and make officers? The case is possible; show then what should let, that she might not. ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’ doth compel. Nay, [you say] she may not consecrate. Why? If the pope loved us as well as Christ, he would find no fault therewith, though a woman at need ministered that sacrament.”
Responding to this and other remarks of Tyndale asserting the ability of women to confect the Eucharist, More answers that this power is possessed only by those men upon whom God has conferred it through Holy Orders, a power that no good Christian woman would dare arrogate for herself:
“And Tyndale, because a woman must love her neighbor as herself; will have her not touch the ark [of the Covenant] but the blessed Body of God, and boldly consecrate it herself, which neither the blessed mother of Christ nor the highest angel in heaven dared ever presume to think, because God had not appointed them to that office.”
More cites examples from the Old Testament how those who attempted to exercise a ministerial office without having validly received that office from God were punished, including King Uzziah (2 Chronicles), who in the Temple had dared, in More’s words, to “play the priest and incense God himself.” More writes were Tyndale to ask him why women are not called by God to the priestly ministry, ” I would give him none answer to that question other than the ordinance of God’s Spirit, which I see that God hath taught his Church, and else would he not suffer them to believe that it were well done, whereof no man is bound to give a precise cause. But it were over much boldness to think that we could precisely tell the cause of every thing that it pleaseth God to devise.”
He likewise recognizes the wider implications of Tyndale’s attacks upon the ministerial priesthood, part of a pattern of dissent that would lead to the unraveling of the Catholic faith as a whole:
“He [Tyndale] would have all things so far forth set at large that he might bring first in doubt and question, and after in errors and heresies upon the question, every point of Christ’s Catholic faith . . . then lo to make the Gospel truly taught, take away in any wise all the clergy clean, and let Tyndale send his women priests about the world to preach.”
In the course of his apologetical writings More addresses a wide range of other issues, refuting theories of solefideism (salvation by faith alone) and predestination, defending the existence and nature of the seven sacraments, priestly celibacy, the value of “good works” (acts of piety and charity), the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Saints, the use and veneration of relics and holy images, and the validity of religious life. More saw all of these teachings and practices of the Church as deserving a vigorous defense, for as he observed in his Dialogue Concerning Heresies, “He that forsaketh any truth of Christ’s faith forsaketh Christ.”
In the end it would be for his refusal to deny two of these teachings, papal primacy and the indissolubility of marriage, that More was to be imprisoned and put to death. In 1532, already conscious of where events might eventually lead, More writes:
“And because I call these truths [Tyndale’s teachings] heresies, therefore Tyndale calleth me Balaam, Judas, and Pharaoh, and threateneth me sore with the vengeance of God and with an evil death. What death each man shall die that hangeth in God’s hands, and martyrs have died for God, and heretics have died for the devil. But since I know it very well and so doth Tyndale too, that the holy saints dead before these days since Christ’s time till our own believed as I do . . . if God give me the grace to suffer for saying the same, I shall never in my right wit wish to die better.”