Thomas More: History and providence

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theorists when they wrenched Roman law texts from their setting and applied them to their theories of corporations. The celebrated adage quod omnes tangit ab omnibus approbetur, originally applied to the law of private tutorship, became the principle of consent. The concepts of plena potestas and major et sanior pars, used to express canonist views of representation, became associated with the idea of a voluntarist sovereignty that was by no means associated with the will of the majority. Moreover, when the canon law model of the corporation was applied to the relationship between a bishop and a cathedral chapter, it was clear that the bishop, once elected, had rights under the constitution of the church. This contrasted with Roman law arguments for popular sovereignty based on the transfer of authority in the lex regiu, supposing that the community could depose as well as elect its head. Within a diocese the bishop was the principal member in a model of mixed monarchy, or corporate headship where canons and others also had rights. At the level of relations between pope and bishop, Tierney finds the seeds of a federalism in which two authorities have defined jurisdictions in the same locality. Having established his ‘foundations’ in the century after Gratian, Tierney rapidly surveys arguments about hierarchy and consent involving Aristotelian and Augustinian ideas of the purpose and origin of social organisation. Here more familiar figures, such as Aquinas, Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham, appear beside the more obscure canonists the author has made his own. Then, in a breathless chapter entitled ‘Popular Sovereignty, Federalism, Fundamental Law’ we leap from ‘Azo to Althusius’ by way of Nicholas of Cues. Even so, bearers of the tradition such as the neoscholastics John Mair and Jacques Almain, together with many important French writers of the later sixteenth century, are omitted. Tierney provides a penultimate chapter on ‘Corporate Rulership and Mixed Constitution’ that is mainly concerned with seventeenth-century English controversialists in general and George Lawson in particular. Yet the main argument here has become more philosophical than contextual. It has little to do with England and much to do with such widely separated figures as Gerson and Besold, who, before Lawson, managed to combine the theory of the authority of the whole community (in either a latent or a constitutive sense) with a corporate headship which could assume the guise of mixed government. Tierney insists that he is less concerned with influence than with similarities and parallel situations, but he also refuses to treat ideas as rationalisations of events and clearly the influence of one theorist upon another is important to him. He is enough of an idealist to think that concepts such as popular sovereignty, mixed government, and federalism have histories of their own, and he relates them to each other both logically and in the actual contexts in which they appear. Historicists may also blanch at such cheerful anachronisms as Duns Scotus offering ‘a choice between Hobbes and Locke at the start of the tradition’ (p. 42). For all this it is a remarkable achievement to sustain so clear an argument over so vast a territory. J. H. M. Salmon Bryn Mawr College

Thomas More: History and Providence, A. Fox (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), 271 pp. + xi, ~517.50. In a recent conversation a historian friend and I were weighing the familiar and entirely whimsical question of which sixteenth-century person was truly likable. My colleague was in the mood for ironies. Unless the person had exercised power, you could never really tell. Without pursuing the fantasy, I did note that an external view of the attitudes expressed in Sir Thomas More’s literary works appears to confirm this

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cynical perspective. The playfulness and open-minded humanity of the youthful and private person began to change in the period of the early 1520s the period of More’s public political career. In about 1522, the unfinished The Four Last Things shows More close to repudiating his own rather personal and ultimately positive interpretation of divine providence and history. This view had developed during the perplexities of his early career. The synthesis of ideas that culminated in the expression of it is found in the Utopia and in another unfinished work, The History of Richard III. However, when drawn into religious controversy, at first as a ‘reluctant champion’, More showed an unbridled militancy and zeal in his repudiation of heresy and of the heretics. The encroachments of Lutheran ideas in England coincided with his own public career and it is easy, perhaps far too easy, to see him acting as the agent of the king and morally falling victim to the kinds of political pressure that he himself had predicted in book 1 of Utopia. If he wanted to do ‘as little bad as possible’ he certainly exceeded the requirements of Tunstal’s commission in March of 1528. Both the number and the vengeful tone of the later polemical works was extravagant for the chore that he was meant to perform. Yet, when he forfeited power and would not take the oath to the Act of Succession the objectivity and balance of his personality was restored. He certainly had foreseen that he would not be able to go the whole way with Henry VIII; and, at this stage of events, providence was reconfirmed. In his last writings the politically impotent More both found and offered comfort. Historians have worked long and hard to alter the first myth of More, the image of the gentle and saintly humanist that was already set out in Roper’s and Harpsfield’s biographies. This persona is seemingly confirmed in much of the correspondence with Erasmus and by many of the humane, imaginative and tolerant conditions described in Utopia, his most original work. Many of the enlightened elements in More’s family life-style also reinforced this glowing picture. But what of the authoritarian and almost fanatic elements; and what of the restrictions and cruelties in Utopia? The romance of Thomas More has been dispelled for a while now. Interpreters have been left either with the story of a personality bent by power and only restored when More, at last, took his stand and would not support a break with the universal church; or left with an almost total disjunction of attitudes between the writer of the early works and that of the polemics. The Tower works of the end of More’s life re-establish his own type of dark serenity. Even superficially, the tale of the distortion of a good-hearted man by power does not entirely work. It is clear that the duty of polemicist became a compelling vocation for More. Also, he could certainly have prevented his fall from political grace. One of his own lines of reasoning might have been called forth to persuade himself that good men would be especially needed for work in a Christian community that was wrongly severed from its roots. Alistair Fox’s highly sensitive but unsentimental internal analysis of More’s written works not only successfully dispenses with the fiction of a man who was hardened by the taste of power but also plausibly resolves the apparent disconnectedness of the mentality of More in his early and mid career, and in his last years. More’s personal crisis before about 1504 is well known. He wondered if he had a vocation for the priesthood. Alistair Fox has connected this question with paradoxical elements in More’s character, elements that were already expressed in his early writings. More’s intense search for the spiritual meaning of human experience above all was certainly far more coloured by Augustinian ascetic leanings than by hedonistic attitudes gleaned from classical and Renaissance literature. By the 1520s More had arrived at a psychological and intellectual resolution of the question of historical meaning. Divine providence worked through human history, not in the form of a progressive ascent

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towards the good but as a recurring test. When militancy in God’s cause was lax, providence tried men by allowing painful and exacting circumstances to prevail. In these circumstances righteous men were moved to bring about a new resolution, a resolution among men to do God’s will. Alistair Fox makes it clear that More saw events in the period after about 1522 and 1523 as evidence of this type of trial. More showed the militancy that was required by the situation; but, even more than this, he was terrified by it. If both individuals and humankind could not repeatedly fall from Grace and repeatedly be restored to it, then the spiritual aspect of things was hopeless. Thus, the Lutherian doctrine of justification by faith alone posed an unexpected threat to More’s whole axiom of meaning, to his whole idea of providence and history. He began to despair of his interpretation of the thing that mattered most. The intimacy created by Alistair Fox is almost wholly an intimacy with More as More is presented in his writings. Even personal events like son-in-law Roper’s temporary conversion to Lutheranism in about 1521 are not emphasised. Surely, the very closeness of this threat might have heightened More’s fears and, indeed, Roper’s final abandonment of heresy, after arduous efforts at persuasion by More, would have both confirmed and fortified his militancy. The consolation of More’s resolution in 1533 and 1534 was both swift and brief. He rehearsed the dictum ‘the just man falls seven times a day and rises again’ and, at last, saw it as a metaphor for history. More’s final comfort in this metaphor comes as something of a surprise to the reader. The way that the author presents it makes it entirely believable. Still we remain in the dark about the central reasons for this complex man’s recovery of spiritual meaning. The myths that have been connected with More’s enigmatic character have been put into more realistic perspective in Alistair Fox’s excellent study. Perhaps, indirectly, the author has also contributed to the tempering of the fable of humanism altogether. For, just as Greek temples were really not all painted white, so the thoughts of many Renaissance humanists were as tinted by the fathers of the church as they were by classical authors. Dorothy Koenigsberger The Hatfield Polytechnic

Mediaeval Greece, N. Cheetham (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 341 pp. Nostra autem respublica non unius esset ingenio, set multorum, net una hominis vita, sed aliquot constituta seculis et aetatibus.’ What Cicero wrote about Rome in his De Republica, is applicable in the case of Greece. Yet in the long history of Greece the

Mediaeval era is unfortunately neglected. Although there have been many scholarly studies covering the history of Classical and Byzantine Greece, there has been a curious and indeed unfortunate lack of scholarship covering Mediaeval Greece. This book by Sir Nicolas Cheetham will fill the historical gap for its chosen period; and the author is well equipped to write it. In the introduction of the book the author states his purpose in writing the book. For most people the Greek Middle Ages are a blank. This book seeks to fill the gap and present the main features of the story without entangling the reader in a too fearsome labyrinth of names, dates and events. To a certain extent the very strangeness of the subject invites exactly that risk, and I can only apologise if the reader feels stuck like an armoured Frankish knight in the marshes of the Kephissos. After an introductory

chapter, there are fourteen chapters on the Death of Ancient