The Wrongs of Thomas More (Wrong 5)
18 comments
·February 24, 2025rossdavidh
gjsman-1000
It's widely forgotten that burning heretics was widely accepted in Christian theology, especially at the time.
The rationale is quite simple: They believed in an eternal Hell. Unrepentant heresy places you in eternal Hell. Hell also has levels and is not the same for everyone; not necessarily Dante's circles, but not far off. This is easily proven, just look at Saint Thomas Aquinas, who warned that sins against the deliberate intellect (heresy, blasphemy, schism) are much more inexcusable than sins of the passions and nature (lust, sloth); even if both are damnable. Vice versa, Heaven also has levels, and it was (and is) a pious opinion that no two people are ever at exactly the same level.
If Hell is eternal, and it is possible for you to make your own Hell worse, killing you if you refuse to repent directly prevents you from making your eternal punishment worse. It also prevents bringing other people with you, and the guilt you would bear for influencing other people. In a way, it is an act of charity to other people and yourself; causing some Saints and scholars to comment at the time to do otherwise would actually be hateful. There's also the issue of, if someone was going to repent, the logical assumption that going to the noose or stake is a much stronger motivator than dying in your sleep at 73.
In line with the above, the very act of burning itself was seen as somewhat of a charity. A public spectacle to warn against following them (charity to the viewers); but also a constant suggestion, even to the end, to the burned of what is waiting for them eternally, giving them one last chance to repent. For what it's worth though, Historians tell us that most of the burned died by suffocation and not by the actual burning, which would have been probably also been known at the time.
(Worth remembering, both the Reformers and the original Catholics burned at the stake for similar rationales.)
null
bregma
It seems to me "Thou shalt not kill" is pretty clear and unambiguous.
All I can say is history is inevitably determined by the sick fucks that rise to the top.
gjsman-1000
Even an amateur Christian theologian can tell you that this only refers to unjust death / murder; as the original Hebrew text also espouses more clearly than the English translation (לא תרצח - lo tirtsah, form of ratzach, murder). The Ten Commandments also come from the book of Leviticus Chapter 19 and not just Exodus, and Leviticus 20 onward is well known for the death penalty for several offenses described in the broader Mosaic Law; forming the religious objection that otherwise, God's chosen leader (Moses) himself ordered violations of the 10 Commandments in the very same book.
flerchin
They burned people, alive, for literally nothing. Your 4 paragraphs of apologia are simply that.
gjsman-1000
I have no doubt, nor question, that some people were burned alive, for no actual crime; just as I have no doubt, nor question, that some people are imprisoned for stupid reasons today. The principles matter; and explaining the cold logic behind it, should not be interpreted as an apologia.
On that note, "for nothing" implies an automatic bias towards lack of belief; not shared by the majority of people on earth. While Christians no longer burn at the stake, Islamic countries still stone for adultery.
Joker_vD
> He could have simply agreed with them.
Ha. That's the most brilliant joke in this whole write-up. Of course he could not agree with them. Just as Luther simply could not stop himself from raising his 95 questions.
> No reasonable human, then or now, believes that there's any institution, made up of fallible humans, that's never wrong.
One of the basic tenets of (both Orthodox and Catholic) Christian theology is that the Church, as the whole, can't be wrong because it is explicitly guided by the Christ himself through the Holy Ghost. That's why ecumenical councils were (and are, in the Orthodox branch) considered so important: if the brightest and most pious would come together and, while praying for the divine guidance, try to resolve a theological matter, then they will come to the correct answer. The Catholic church, as I understand it, has largely decided that this approach is overly cautious and expensive since a decision of a single person (by the virtue of being the pope of Rome) is already guaranteed to be correct.
vessenes
Hmm. I think Neal is aware of the ins and outs of this portion of Christian religious culture and history.
The question of infallibility was not open then or now to most ‘thinkers’ in the church: that is while it was a matter of public doctrine and thus a rule for the parish, in private elites debated and discussed. More was a contemporary of Erasmus, and the church had an entire concept of anti popes for goodness sake, popes that had deceived the church. These are frameworks for acknowledging precisely this point - mistakes are made, new things happen.
Modern Catholicism (to this outsider’s eye) has many vigorous sects and differences of opinion carried out regionally and locally. Perhaps on those terms More was correct - if you stop burning people at the stake they tend to disagree more volubly.
What Neal sketches and I think is intriguing is that More seems to have had the bad taste to have been a hard hard ideologue, principled in that he died for his ideology, but not someone who say wanted to stick around to be father to his daughter or husband to his wife if it meant turning a blind eye to Henry VIII’s marriage plans.
bombcar
I think part of it is that most people can agree that someone could believe in something so strongly that they wouldn't compromise it, even if it meant death.
The hard part is understanding someone doing that about something YOU wouldn't care about.
zdragnar
There is a rather important distinction, in that Papal infallibility and the patriarchs and ecumenical councils all apply to very narrow circumstances.
The Church is a duality that mirrors Christ's dual nature: as both mortal man and God the son, so too is the Church made up of mortal people and God the holy Spirit. The divine part is infallible, the mortal part is still very much human.
All of which is to say that yes, Catholics and Orthodox Christians both agree that the institutions can get things wrong, most especially when people in power fail. After all, the Pope was once one of the patriarchs of what is now the Orthodox Church. It is impossible for the two to be in schism if the institution was infallible prior to the schism itself.
bombcar
That was basically my reaction to the whole thing - I was expecting some amazing exposé of More but it was ... More being More.
And 1+ billion Catholics believe that the specific institution of The Church, which is made up of fallible humans, is never wrong on matters of doctrine and morals - because it is the Body of Christ and cannot be wrong.
They may get into major arguments and quibbles about exactly what that means but the concept of infallibility is pretty well cemented.
Wait until the author digs deeper and learns that many, many intelligent people of the time and before thought burning at the stake was the best option for the burned - and really, truly believed that, and had deep arguments for why.
Also I have to love the recency bias, clearly Henry VIII can only be understood through the lens of a recent and current president!
To further confuse our friend, he can visit the Church of England's website: https://www.churchofengland.org/prayer-and-worship/worship-t... and search "Thomas More" finding July 6th.
Juliate
> And 1+ billion Catholics believe that [...] The Church [...] is never wrong on matters of doctrine and morals
It's a bit exaggerated to say that. Not all Catholics believe in the infallibility, neither in every single dogma, which are not articles of faith (and not believing in them, discussing them doesn't make one less Catholic than an other).
Even wondering what proportion of Catholics know about all of them.
gwd
Interesting deep-dive; but I'm afraid the diagnosis for authoritarianism at the end doesn't really ring true to me. He sees More defending things he must know deep down can't be true; but he doesn't actually see why, he's only making conjectures. So I don't think his model will be very useful in helping inoculate people against authoritarianism, or cure them once they've been infected.
tptacek
Despite the obscurity of the book, GPT 4o easily "translates" the archaic blackletter and attributes it to More; presumably, it's been trained on this text.
codeulike
Thats fascinating. Wolf Hall has a lot about Thomas Moore in it ... I should note Wolf Hall is essentially fiction but largely based on things that did happen - I guess you can view it as "lets imagine how the story of Henry VIII would work if much maligned Thomas Cromwell was actually the good guy"
... anyway in Wolf Hall, the character of Thomas Moore as written is largely consistent with what the OP is finding in that old manuscript - someone quite keen on their own cleverness and relatively comfortable with interrogations and burning people at the stake. In Wolf Hall his death is stubborn and needless, and in defiance of the wishes of his wife and daughter. At first I took those parts of Wolf Hall as an exercise in "lets see if its possible to invert the plot of A Man For All Seasons". But then this document "A dialoge concerning heresyes" seems to actually back up the Wolf Hall picture of Moore.
throw4847285
As an aside, the "inversion of A Man For All Seasons" aspect is brilliant. The scene of More and Cromwell together in the Tower of London has this incredible exchange where Cromwell predicts that their dispute will be replayed throughout time and he fears he is being already typecast as the villain. I don't have the book in front of me, so I'm likely misremembering it. But the way that it tips its hat to the play was really moving to me.
I'm obviously preaching to the choir, but damn, Hilary Mantel was brilliant.
tptacek
The burning of Thomas Hitton plays a role in Mantel's book, too.
Interesting, but I believe Stephenson is completely wrong about the motivation. Thomas More, as his writings in Utopia make clear, was most worried about the all-against-all that comes from anarchy. Moreover, in some sense, he and his fellow anti-Reformation thinkers were correct; the Reformation did lead to enormous trouble.
The Wars of Religion, from Luther's 95 Theses to the Treaty of Westphalia, lasted for 100 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion). The anti-Reformation thinkers could see perfectly well that they would be the near-inevitable result of letting just anybody set forth their own interpretation of Scripture. From our own vantage point, the Reformation was undoubtedly a good thing, even if you are Catholic, because it established freedom of thought (relatively speaking), but it was several generations of conflict that was often vicious even by the standards of war.
If More had had perfect knowledge of the future, looking at the Wars of Religion that the Reformation would lead to, he would not have been at all surprised. If he thought that burning half a dozen heretics was preferable to several generations of civil war, well, he might have been incorrect, but it doesn't make him a monster. It makes him a man afraid of the storm that's coming, and desperate to avoid it by any means possible.