I was reading "The Story of England" by Christopher Hibbert and came across something that made me annoyed.
Thomas More was portrayed as going to his death for refusing to deny the principle of Papal supremacy. This may be so.
What is not mentioned is that the so-called "Church of England" asserted the Monarch's supremacy in every way over the English Church, and complete governership in every way of the English Church.
This principle of Monarchical Supremacy is a totally unacceptable principle for any Christian - or any humanist for that matter - and Thomas More had no choice but to refuse to accept this principle. The principle of Monarchical Supremacy is quite wrong. To this very day.
He - and thousands of others - had
no choice but to refuse this "principle".
Many saw it and its implications as quite simply apocalyptic.
Some events of the time were indeed apocalyptic.
The Church of England is neither Catholic nor Protestant but nationalist and imperialist.
And
in this sense it is not really Christian. Pope was simply replaced with Monarch.
There's no avoiding or shying away from this.
"For your one kingdom of England, I have with me all the kingdoms of Christianity."
Saint Thomas More, RIP.
'If Parliament should make a law that God should not be God, would God not then be God?' -
Thomas More.
He also said "I am the King's good servant - but God's first." This is the kind of sentiment that a Protestant would be proud of.
Thomas More was one of England's greatest ever humanists and philosophers - murdered by an English King!
The trivialisation and disparagement of Thomas More by his own culture is one of the greatest crimes in historiography and our cultural life.
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Also it is odd that English people could call my ideas - as expressed in this "think tank" - "Utopian" when the concept of "UTOPIA" seems to have been invented - or at least developed - by this great English filosofer.
In a similar way to Plato's "Republic", More's "Utopia" is a depiction of an ideal human society.
It included - far before their time - equality of the sexes, freedom of religion, representative democracy and no private property.
Furthermore, it is pretty much a slander to disparage and denigrate this concept - usually involving the point that the word means "nowhere".
It means "nowhere" as well as "good and/or better place" (this would be EUTOPIA). It is a word play and a double meaning - of course.
Of course - More was a man of letters and it is very clear that the word is itself a proposition - and it is up to us which meaning we chose!
It is certainly deliberate that it could have two meanings - "good place" and "no place". Very witty!
Show me this ideal place and I will show you a place that doesn't exist! But we never stop trying to create it! Both of these things seem to be human nature! Utopia never arrives and yet we never stop tryng to make it!
It makes us think! Which is a good thing!
The island depicted in the piece is of course fantastical and non-existent, and hence is indeed "no place".
Almost anything created by humans is perhaps "utopian" in the sense that it is designed.
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Latin was a language of Europe as well as being a language of the humanism re-emerging at the time across all of Europe - (in a similar way to Arabic being the language of the Islamic world).
One reason why Thomas More was notorious for opposition to translation of scripture, was because
it changed and changes the meaning. It was not necessarily due to a fanatical and unquestioning religious belief and disposition. Though sadly he certainly had such a disposition.
Latin remains a symbol of humanism for me, though I don't see any point in learning it or studying it as such.
And I would not really have Latin or Ancient Greek at my ideal "one-man university" except as hobbies.
Thanks to wikipedia - and that doesn't embarrass me at all - I now know for the first time that More was very vehemently opposed to the views of Luther.
If he felt that way about Luther, it is hard to imagine exactly how he felt about the idea of the monarch being head of the church. The important point is that making the monarch the head of the church is more unacceptable than the institution of the Papacy itself, even from a Protestant perspective.
