Thomas More, as the chancellor of England, the king’s lawyer, refused to sign an oath which would have vindicated the King in his proposed marriage to Anne Boleyn. He refused to bend to the king’s order that he sign an oath declaring true what many knew to be false. His signature would simply be one of hundreds. More’s story is about the refusal of one lawyer to engage in the banality (the ordinariness) of evil. For he was not being asked to do anything openly dishonest, and he was not leading a revolution. He was being tempted by unspectacular, ordinary evil.
Robert Bolt, the author of A Man for All Seasons, asks, “Why do I take as my hero a man who brings about his own death because he can’t put his own hand on an old black book and tell an ordinary lie?” The answer appears to rest in these words spoken by More to his daughter Meg. “When a man takes an oath, Meg, he’s holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. And if he opens his fingers again he needn’t hope to find himself again.” There is something very sacred about these words. They call me to a higher vision of myself as a minister of God. So the requirement that More take an oath in violation of his conscience would rob More of that “something in himself without which life was valueless.”
More is aware that virtue is not a pragmatic matter. “If we lived in a state where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good and greed would make us saintly.” Virtue is not always profitable as the world counts profitability. So common sense is not enough. Common sense can easily tell lies. “But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, sloth, lust, and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude , justice, and thought, and have to choose to be human at all … why then perhaps we must stand fast a little even at the risk of being heroes.”
More sees the disconnection of action from moral conviction inevitably filtering down into the populace. Public action based on moral conviction serves justice and order. “When statesmen forsake their private consciences for their public duties they lead their countries by a short route to chaos.” Thomas More, who was first trained in theology and spiritual disciplines before becoming a lawyer, has a moral compass and spiritual awareness that are stellar. He is always living as a disciple. Because our formal education in law, business or education has typically given us no moral or spiritual compass from which to practice our professions, that education must come from the Spirit through scripture, and the disciplines of silence, prayer and mutual submission to intimates in Christ .
More writes The Sadness of Christ while in prison, immediately before he is executed. He is keenly aware of the struggle of Christ among slumbering disciples. Yet the traitor, Judas, is wide awake. Why is that? More is indicting the slothful failure of the bishops of his day to rouse their people to the spiritual and moral challenges of the day. He serves as prophet to the bishops as well as the lawyers and the politicians. More’s sense of his own integrity, his wholeness before God, calls us to live as he did. He saw fundamental issues very clearly even as he lived within the violent crosscurrents of Henry The Eighth’s Court.
The stories of public witnesses such as Thomas More and Dietrich Bonhoeffer , who was hanged by the Nazis in 1945 two weeks before the allies liberated his prison, are anything but boring or predictable. Their integrity inside the dramatic cross-pressures of their cultures is very inspiring and challenging. Their unpredictable goodness and faithfulness compels us from across hundreds of years to “live a life worthy of the calling.” All of their peers who saved their lives and lost their integrity are forgotten. While the witness of these two, now members of the Church of the Living Dead, simply never dies.
Now it is our turn! What will be our legacies?