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For Friends and For Enemies: Sir Thomas More on the Lost Virtue of Christian Friendship

2021; University of St. Thomas; Volume: 24; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/log.2021.0029

1533-791X

Stephen W. Smith,

Multicultural Socio-Legal Studies

For Friends and For EnemiesSir Thomas More on the Lost Virtue of Christian Friendship Stephen W. Smith (bio) It is a challenge to introduce a commanding figure like Thomas More (1478–1535), the versatile and talented author and statesman about whom G. K. Chesterton wrote: "A mind like More's was full of light like a house made of windows; but the windows looked out on all sides and in all directions. We might say that, as the jewel has many facets, so the man had many faces; only none of them were masks."1 When one considers the fifteen volumes of the Yale Complete Works, or the 1500 pages of our new collected edition, The Essential Works of Thomas More, any number of roads present themselves for exploration and introduction. To begin, one might contemplate [End Page 136] the midsummer of More's early humanism—the surprising glories of the Utopia and Epigrams, for example, or the meditation on liberty and virtue in The Life of Pico, or yet again the intense vision of his Richard the Third, with its probing of tyranny and wild blindness, and its mingling of tragic and comic insights. As an alternative, the reader might plunge into the dramatic and messy middle of More's public career, as he weathered England's storms and addressed religious and legal controversies in works such as the 1529 Dialogue of Sir Thomas More, which C. S. Lewis considered perhaps the best example of Socratic writing in English.2 Finally, one could look at his two late masterpieces, both composed in the Tower of London, The Sadness of Christ and A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, the latter of which is More's response to, and perhaps improvement upon Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, praised by More as "beautiful and holy" in a letter to his children in 1521.3 For this article, however, I choose to open at the ending of More's life, and introduce him through a beautiful Latin letter he wrote in the Tower of London, to his old friend, Antonio Bonvisi. More composed this letter as he lived out the last month of his long imprisonment, a personal drama that he described as a "riddle, a case in which a man may lose his head and have no harm," as he said in a conversation with his daughter Margaret Roper.4 So what does this late letter reveal about the mind and heart of More—his focus—and the field of his attention under such trying circumstances and tremendous pressures? What perspective does a great author bring to bear on experience like this, in "seasons such as these," as Shakespeare put it amidst the storm of King Lear? In those long and often silent months of imprisonment and waiting, what did Thomas More discern about himself, his life, and others? At the end of all things, what did the author of Utopia desire and love, and what are some ways in which this letter connects to his other better-known writings? There is an ancient saw that we should never call a person happy until he or she has died. Perhaps it's also true that we only glimpse [End Page 137] the truth of a life, of the final directions of mind and heart, in light of death's approach, and through the struggle of those last hours upon the stage—and page. Let's place ourselves together in More's Tower cell, then, right there along the silver-streaming Thames, and encounter the author again through this letter, his parting address to Antonio Bonvisi, "most trusty of all friends, and most beloved by me," as More calls him in a tender adieu.5 This letter—so personal and revealing of More's mind and heart, of his lifelong character in season and out—will serve as a fit introduction to the first great writer of the English Renaissance, an author who understands himself, in the first place and to the last, as a friend at the service of others. More's Letter to Antonio Bonvisi, June 1535 More's Latin letter to Antonio Bonvisi, a prosperous Italian banker and...