A Man for All Seasons
Authority
The Agnostic Playwright and the Catholic Saint
6:00:00 AMKaitlin Fellrath
Thomas
More, kneeling. Immediately is heard a harsh roar of kettle-drums. There is a
total blackout of the lights at the head of the stairs, while the drums roar.
Then the drums cease.
HEADSMAN:
Behold, the head of a traitor! [1]
Thomas More was beheaded by King Henry VIII in 1535 for refusing to swear to the Oath of Supremacy, which denied papal authority over the English Church. Catholics know Thomas More as a holy martyr, a saint known for "his desire of Christian perfection and his zeal for the salvation of souls," as we read in the homily at his canonization in 1935. [2] More was indeed a martyr who gave his life in defense of the Christian faith. But what is this saint to the non-Catholic and to the non-Christian?
Thomas More was beheaded by King Henry VIII in 1535 for refusing to swear to the Oath of Supremacy, which denied papal authority over the English Church. Catholics know Thomas More as a holy martyr, a saint known for "his desire of Christian perfection and his zeal for the salvation of souls," as we read in the homily at his canonization in 1935. [2] More was indeed a martyr who gave his life in defense of the Christian faith. But what is this saint to the non-Catholic and to the non-Christian?
The
English playwright Robert Bolt identified himself as a staunch rationalist and
secular humanist. Bolt was not Catholic, nor even Christian, but a determined
agnostic. Yet his most acclaimed work, A Man for All Seasons, is about
none other than Saint Thomas More. In the preface to this play, Bolt addresses
his dilemma. He writes, “By what right do I appropriate a Christian saint to my
own purposes? Why do I take as my hero a man who brings about his own death
because he can’t put his hand on a old black book and tell an ordinary lie?” It
is because Thomas More, in Bolt’s own words, is “a hero of selfhood.”
To
further explain how he came to admire Thomas More, Bolt delves into personalist
philosophy.
“What am I?” According to
Bolt, modern man tries to answer this fundamental question in the third person,
as if viewing himself through a window. What am I as I look back upon
myself? I am a human, a student, a daughter, a sister. He refers to
the objective selfhood of the human person. The power to objectify is a
remarkable and uniquely personal power which is destructive only when abused.
To objectify myself is to make myself an object through self-examination. But
is this description really adequate? Does it contain all of who I am?
Objective selfhood alone cannot provide me with an adequate answer to the
question, “What am I?” In its devotion to rationalism, modernity is missing the
true self.
In the
preface, Bolt also hints at another truth about the power to objectify: we must
first be anchored in ourselves. He acknowledges the deficiency in any society
that ignores the subjectivity of the human person in pursuit of rationalism. Subjective
selfhood and solitude are two concepts that are fundamental to
understanding subjectivity as it is revealed in persons. The
selfhood of the person is the inner core of the person. The solitude of the
human person is the way in which a person is set apart from everything
else, the way that he is himself and not another. In A Man for All Seasons, Bolt
ascribes to Thomas More a profound sense of his own selfhood. He describes More
thusly: “He knew where he began and where he left off, what area of himself he
could yield to the encroachment of his enemies, and what to the encroachments
of those he loved.”
In his
preface, Bolt also mentions the power of an oath, which is something more than
a mere pledge or contract. He grounds the swearing of an oath to the selfhood
of the human person, writing, “A man takes an oath only when he wants to commit
himself quite exceptionally to the statement…He offers himself as a
guarantee.” Thomas More had such an awareness of his own selfhood that he knew
that, by agreeing to the oath, he would be swearing against his conscience and
ultimately against himself. In one of the most moving scenes of the play,
More’s daughter comes to visit him in prison and begs him to give in and swear
to the oath for the sake of his family. Again, More refuses, telling her:
“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 then—he needn’t hope to find
himself again.”
Robert
Bolt views Thomas More’s martyrdom as the ultimate assertion of his selfhood.
Although More believes he has been issued a divine obligation to follow
his conscience and remain faithful to the Church of Rome, he is not a slave to
this obligation. Rather, we see that his selfhood is awakened by this moral
imperative. As Dietrich von Hildebrand writes, “In a certain sense this [moral
imperative] is my most intimate and personal concern, in which I experience the
uniqueness of my self.”[3] More understands that it
is he who is being called, and is thus obligated to act through himself, even
to the point of death. This assertion of selfhood is what attracted the
agnostic playwright to the Catholic saint. In Robert Bolt’s own words, “What
attracted me was a person who could not be accused of any incapacity for life,
who nevertheless found something in himself without which life was useless, and
when that was denied him, was able to grasp his death. For there can be no
doubt, given the circumstances, that he did it himself.”
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