ENCOMIUM MORIAE

[See my entry A Book For All Seasons in the Wishful Thinking section, plus numerous other references to Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), scattered all around. For this obvious reason, the reader ought not to be surprised by how uncharacteristically brief this particular entry has come out to be. Here, it is only a token of our respect for the great man.]

By a strange coincidence, this entry, or rather, its utterly deceptive title, sprang to life on a First of April, as if to have a good excuse to fool the reader about its principal subject. Its subject now is Thomas More, and not our good old friend Erasmus Roterodamus. These two men, friends in life, were, in fact, fairly closely interconnected, Erasmus on the active end of this relationship. The famous movie title about Thomas More, A Man for all Seasons, takes its cue from omnium horarum homo, as Erasmus called More. And, of course, the title of Erasmus’s most famous work Moriae Encomium, The Praise of Folly, represents a clever pun, on Erasmus’s part, on Thomas More’s last name, and therefore, it can be also read as The Praise of More. It is for this latter reason that I have named this entry about More by Erasmus’s title.

More’s most celebrated contribution to humanity, his Utopia, has been discussed in the Wishful Thinking section, and there is no reason for us to return to the same subject here. I will rather look at More’s role as a philosopher, although admittedly it is by no means as remarkable as that of Erasmus, nor can it be put in the same rank of prominence as his political masterpiece of wishful thinking.

As an indirect philosophizer, More does not fall into the traditional category of professional philosophers, but he should be instantly recognized as “one of us” by all Russian philosophizing Intelligents. It is in this sense that we should talk about him as a philosopher, and it is in this sense that his title qualifications are impeccable and undeniable.

From everything we know about Thomas More, he epitomized a combination of unbending principle, very liberal disposition and tolerance, great religious piety, and an unmistakable communistic outlook. As I said before, talking about his Utopia, it is based on the practice of monastic communism, which is based in turn on the Biblical communism of the Acts of the Apostles, in turn, directly attributed to the Holy Ghost. He is an ardent proponent of religious toleration thus allowing for a coexistence of several religious perspectives without allowing any of them to make an exclusive claim to the truth. He advocates a milder criminal law, opposing the death penalty for lesser offences, such as theft (his Utopia opens with a reasoned argument to that account). Despite his stated devotion to the Catholic faith, his view of suicide (particularly in the form of euthanasia) contradicts the tenets of the Church, allowing voluntary suicide of the incurably ill, but with no power given to others to affect the subject’s personal decision.

His views are thus surprisingly modern in many instances, which makes him a true omnium horarum homo, as Erasmus perceptively called him.