Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Happy Feast of St. Thomas More!
St. Thomas More is everything I aspire to be: husband, father, scholar, statesman, saint. He was a man of courage and zeal but also self-deprecating humor. At his trial, all his virtues were on display. He showed himself to be a master of the law, forcing his opponents to use perjury and illegal means to have him killed. He showed himself the king's good servant, but God's first. And he showed himself a man capable of laughter and forgiveness to the very end. St. Thomas More, pray for us!
From Fred Zinnemann's Man for All Seasons, based on the Robert Bolt play of the same name:
The Trial
The Execution
If you are interested in St. Thomas More, let me also suggest Sir Thomas More, a play written by a team of London playwrights, likely including William Shakespeare. Though the play treads lightly on the question of More's execution, it paints a vivid portrait of a man of the highest character who never took himself too seriously.
A tip of the hat to Gerard Wegemer, whose love of More stoked my own. As any student who has ever encountered him knows, Prof. Wegemer is a man of the the greatest kindness, with a sharp mind, a deep faith and a zeal for the truth - a mirror of the saint he studies.
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2 comments:
very historically inaccurate though presents him as a tolerant man and believer in something like modern rule of law.
Edmund, More was certainly a complex man. He believed with unwavering faith in the truths of the Catholic Church, but was also a proponent of the "new learning" and believed that truth was stronger than falsehood (though he wrestled with the ways in which falsehood too can triumph; cf. Richard III). His writings on law mirror this tension: he had no qualms about violating the law if faith absolutely necessitated it, but he also certainly favored using the law to uphold the truth, and even favored the law in a neutral sense. He was no Lockean, to be sure, but he supported the rule of law in his way.
Likewise, contemporary accounts - including that by the team of London playwrights - show him as a lighthearted man who could be forgiving and was willing to be the butt of jokes. Does this, coupled with his Humanist instincts, make him tolerant? Not in the modern sense of the term, but again, in his way.
Much of the problem stems from translating ideas like toleration and the rule of law from the 16th century to the present. Those ideas existed then and they exist now, though in different forms. Cinematic presentations, however worthy, are likely to either err on the side of continuity or err on the side of change. In fact, both are present.
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