Thank you for this article and very timely. Do you have any background to respond to Stephen Fry’s claim that More was indefensibly promoting torturing heretics?
I'm not an expert on More by any stretch, and I'd have to see the specifics of Fry's accusation to make a complete response. However, off the top of my head, I'm guessing that Fry is imposing a modern, secular understanding of the world onto More and his time in such a way that More's defense of punishing heretics (if he did in fact defend it) appears preposterous to us. But we have to try to understand the issue the way that More would have. For a devout Catholic like More, heresy is among the greatest evils in human society because it leads souls to hell and it disrupts the social order (which was, right up until More's time, built on the unity of the Christian faith). Thus the argument that would have been made at the time would be something like this: it's even more necessary to physically punish heretics than, say, murderers, because the former is attacking people's immortal souls with error, whereas the latter is merely attacking their bodies. In addition, besides the eternal damage done by heresy, it also causes temporal damage by dividing society and inciting conflict. Finally, the punishment would be an attempt to procure the heretic's repentance in order to save his own soul. Punishing heretics, from that perspective, would be something the state would engage in for the sake of the common good.
Of course, this makes little sense to the modern person living in a liberal, secular society, where individual rights to autonomy are held as sacrosanct.
But if one begins from the premises of More and his time, there is a logic to his position, within that worldview.
I also think that the physical punishment of heretics was a last resort used a lot less frequently in the Middle Ages and Renaissance than modern critics would have us believe. But I'm also not a historian...
Thank you. I think that's an excellent point and one that extends far beyond the More question. Society really does seem to have completely disposed of spiritual good/evil/reality in exchange for an apparently more real physical reality. Mass spiritual malaise, you could argue, is the result.
Thank you for this article and very timely. Do you have any background to respond to Stephen Fry’s claim that More was indefensibly promoting torturing heretics?
I'm not an expert on More by any stretch, and I'd have to see the specifics of Fry's accusation to make a complete response. However, off the top of my head, I'm guessing that Fry is imposing a modern, secular understanding of the world onto More and his time in such a way that More's defense of punishing heretics (if he did in fact defend it) appears preposterous to us. But we have to try to understand the issue the way that More would have. For a devout Catholic like More, heresy is among the greatest evils in human society because it leads souls to hell and it disrupts the social order (which was, right up until More's time, built on the unity of the Christian faith). Thus the argument that would have been made at the time would be something like this: it's even more necessary to physically punish heretics than, say, murderers, because the former is attacking people's immortal souls with error, whereas the latter is merely attacking their bodies. In addition, besides the eternal damage done by heresy, it also causes temporal damage by dividing society and inciting conflict. Finally, the punishment would be an attempt to procure the heretic's repentance in order to save his own soul. Punishing heretics, from that perspective, would be something the state would engage in for the sake of the common good.
Of course, this makes little sense to the modern person living in a liberal, secular society, where individual rights to autonomy are held as sacrosanct.
But if one begins from the premises of More and his time, there is a logic to his position, within that worldview.
I also think that the physical punishment of heretics was a last resort used a lot less frequently in the Middle Ages and Renaissance than modern critics would have us believe. But I'm also not a historian...
Hope that helps.
Thank you. I think that's an excellent point and one that extends far beyond the More question. Society really does seem to have completely disposed of spiritual good/evil/reality in exchange for an apparently more real physical reality. Mass spiritual malaise, you could argue, is the result.
What a shame we have strayed so far from this approach. I wonder if we will ever recover, or will the downward spiral continue?
I think it will be recovered. There's already a resurgence of traditional models of education in some quarters.