St. Thomas More’s final words, “The King’s good servant, but God’s first,” encapsulate the beau ideal of integralist jurisprudence. He died a martyr for the rights of the Church. During his life, he vigorously and consistently defended law as a servant of the common good, both in his conception of natural law and in his everyday opinions and reforms as common-law lawyer and Lord Chancellor.
More is often presented as a martyr of conscience, as in the film A Man For All Seasons. This is, perhaps, true of all martyrs in a sense, but it is a bit like saying the American Civil War was fought over the abstraction “states’ rights.” Fair enough, but the specific right in question was slavery. Likewise, it is true that St. Thomas More died for his religious beliefs, but specifically for his belief in the concrete rights of papal supremacy and of the Church. More is rightly regarded as a patron of religious liberty by the USCCB, but he was by no means an indifferentist, which is what claims of religious liberty too often amount to. During his life, Thomas More consistently defended the rights of the Church from opponents such as Martin Luther and William Tyndale. Of his death, Pope Pius XI said in his Homily at the Canonization of St. Thomas More:
A strong and courageous spirit, like John Fisher, when he saw that the doctrines of the Church were gravely endangered, he knew how to despise resolutely the flattery of human respect, how to resist, in accordance with his duty, the supreme head of the State when there was question of things commanded by God and the Church, and how to renounce with dignity the high office with which he was invested. It was for these motives that he too was imprisoned, nor could the tears of his wife and children make him swerve from the path of truth and virtue. In that terrible hour of trial he raised his eyes to heaven, and proved himself a bright example of Christian fortitude. Thus it was that he who not many years before had written a work emphasizing the duty of Catholics to defend their faith even at the cost of their lives, was seen to walk cheerful and confident from his prison to death, and thence to take his flight to the joys of eternal beatitude.
More is especially relevant today for his witness to a true jurisprudence of the common good during a time when such jurisprudence was under attack by positivistic expressions of absolute sovereignty. As Brian Murray notes, “More’s life and legal career is an example of the prudent pursuit of traditional notions of virtue and justice within an era dominated by new ideas about the nature of law and justice in political systems.”1 These new ideas of More’s day are with us today in the form of legal positivism and totalitarianism. As Brian Murray continues: “More’s understanding of the types of law, and their purpose in society, contrasts with modern thinkers sympathetic to legal positivism. At the most basic level, More views human law as only one type of four and subservient to eternal, divine, and natural law. On the contrary, legal positivists only subordinate law to the will, or something like Thomas Hobbes’ sovereign.”
More should be remembered as an exemplary jurist, with a penetrating intellect which combined prudence, analytical rigour, and a profound philosophical understanding. His influence is felt not merely in the rarified air of legal philosophy, but also in workaday legal concepts such as chattel mortgages and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.2 Although More was Lord Chancellor for only a short time, he is called the father of equity: “St. Thomas More converted the Chancery into a court of justice; an impersonal tribunal open to all, but not to be used for improper purposes.”3
More was also famed, even in his own time, for his witty, erudite writings. While his Utopia is known and read even today, perhaps less well known are his historical and polemical writings. For example, his life of Richard III has been hugely influential, via Shakespeare, who relied upon it heavily in writing his tragedy, on how successive ages have seen the last Plantagenet. Likewise, his Dialogue Concerning Heresies is praised for its clarity and its style. Very recently, Yale University Press has brought out The Essential Works of Thomas More, which will, one hopes, bring More’s considerable talents as historian and polemicist into focus. It is extraordinary to consider, however, that in More one finds not only a lawyer and politician, but a man of letters—both informed by More’s deep piety.
St Thomas More, pray for us.
Joel AF
- Brian Murray, Chicken Soup for the Legal Soul: The Jurisprudence of Saint Thomas More, 146 J. Catholic Legal Studies, 145, 146 (2012).
- See Garrard Glenn, St. Thomas More as Judge and Lawyer, 10 Fordham L. Rev. 187 (1941), for an excellent overview of More’s importance to the English (and hence American) law.
- Id. at 191.