Philosophical Review

The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More by Elizabeth RogersReview by: Roy W. BattenhouseThe Philosophical Review, Vol. 57, No. 6 (Nov., 1948), pp. 619-622Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2181803 .

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REVIEWS OF BOOKS

just one," and "for no." Ernst Kris contributes a paper entitled "The Nature of Psychoanalytic Propositions and Their Validation."

The essay by Arthur L. Swift, Jr. ("Belief and the Social Struc- ture of Religion"), seems to me to be a remarkably fair treatment of this difficult topic. He emphasizes, what many contemporaries forget, that an evaluation of religion must depend in part upon the question whether there is any truth in the beliefs which the religion involves. And this question, he feels, is by no means settled. But if it should be impossible to find anything corresponding to man's faith in "the ob- jective existence of spiritual power," then "the vast institution now called organized religion is doomed to destruction" (p. 322).

A Foreword by Alvin Johnson discusses Kallen's association with the New School for Social Research. This and a Postscript by Bryn J. Hovde pay tribute to Kallen's many achievements as philosopher, teacher, and citizen. A bibliography of Kallen's writings indicates, but only partially, the extent of these achievements.

RODERICK M. CHISHOLM Brown University

THE CORRESPONDENCE OF SIR THOMAS MORE. Edited by ELIZABETH ROGERS. Princeton University Press, 1947. Pp. xxiii, 584.

The letters here collected are only a trickle of the correspondence More carried on in his lifetime; the rest has been lost, much of it destroyed with the papers seized at his execution. But it is a trickle representative of the stream of the man's life. There are witty letters to his humanist friends, and vigorous ones for his Lutheran adver- saries; reports to the King's Council on diplomacy abroad, and ad- vices to wife and daughter amid troubles at home. Most of the letters are in Latin, but the moving ones from the Tower are in English and show how magnificently the language could be written even at this early date. They show also the ingrained piety of More's mind and the tender tenacity of his will. His titles of Sir and Saint are both warranted.

In all, Miss Rogers has listed 218 letters, two-thirds of them from More, and the rest from certain of his correspondents, e.g., Erasmus, Bude, Wolsey, and Margaret Roper. The Erasmus letters are not reprinted but catalogued in their chronological position, with a cross reference to Allen's edition. The style of editing, too, leans on Allen. Footnotes supply the reader brief biographies of names appearing in the text. Dedicatory letters are included, e.g., More's charming pre- face to his translation of Pico's Life, and his hugely playful preface to the Utopia; also letters written originally as tracts, against the sacramental views of Frith or to expose the antinomian gospel, as

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THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW

More thinks, of the "cacangelist" Bugenhagen. Miss Rogers has done us a great service in assembling these scattered materials. Her edition reflects in its thorough excellence the care she has given to it over many years.

More's personality has attracted in our time a great deal of restudy and re-evaluation. The late R. W. Chambers, literary critic and Angli- can churchman, has perhaps contributed most by his already classic biography. The Reed and Campbell edition of the English Works has also helped immensely. The result is something of a revolution in our understanding of More the martyr. He is no longer the bundle of inconsistencies Sir Sidney Lee thought him, not the latter-day bigot repudiating his own liberal youth, as was the common interpretation since Burnet. He is, rather, both humanist and catholic churchman at one and the same time. A good illustration is the significant letter he wrote to Oxford University in I5I8 soberly taking note of the anti- Greek antics of certain theological politicians there. (T. S. K. Scott- Craig has translated this letter in Renaissance News, Summer, I948, issue.) One of these modern Trojans, More complains, has ridiculous- ly called students of Greek "heretics," and teachers of Greek "chief devils," despising by implication not only the Bible and almost all ancient philosophy but also the tradition of Greek learning in the church's Doctors. Are we to suppose, he asks, that theology can be squeezed into the limits of those petty "questions" which the modern scholastics so glibly pose and answer with their modicums of Latin? Can Theology, august Queen of Heaven, be thus confined? Augustine and Jerome, Basil and Bede, were no despisers of Greek learning; and it is through cells such as theirs that Theology has for centuries pur- sued her pilgrim way. Our modern Trojan, says More ironically, may without humane studies "possibly preach a sermon acceptable to an academic group" but he must "certainly fail to reach the common man."

More's concern for the common man explains the style, alternately vehement and patient, of his later expostulations against Tyndale, Frith, and Bugenhagen. At the same time his respect for the testi- mony of the Christian centuries is always at the heart of his argument. Luther, he complains, has blasphemously written that he cares not for ten Jeromes or ten thousand Chrysostoms (p. 329). And Bugenhagen, though a student of Greek, has fallen into errors condemned long ago by the Fathers; in making man's nature like that of a tree, he has mis- understood the human will more damnably than Pelagius (pp. 341-

342). Frith's chief fault is in his "unreasonable reasons... agaynst the possybylyte of Goddes almyghty power," reasons which any Ox- ford disputation could make short work of, and which lead him to substitute for the literal interpretation of Christ's words, insisted on for centuries by the church's expositors, an allegorical reading of his

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own (pp. 457-458). More here refers to King Henry's book on the sacraments and to Henry himself as "a most faythful Catholyke prynce." This is in I532; it may be put beside the reference, in the Oxford letter of I5S, to "our most Christian King" Henry, defender of the liberal arts. But More had cautioned the orthodox Henry, quite early, against too much insistence on the Papal primacy as a thing established by God; and he was even more opposed to Henry's notion, later, of his own primacy. In More's view the Papal primacy could not be disowned without the consent of a General Council. "Never thought I the Pope above the generall counsaile," he writes; but such a Council's authority must be "taken for vndowtable," else "every mannes affectionate reason" would bring all to confusion.

More the lawyer takes his stand thus on tradition. For him the religious order of England is a part of that of Christendom, based on centuries of consent. Religious order in Utopia, it is only fair to recog- nize, is quite something else; for Utopia has never received Christian priests from beyond the seas, never adopted Christian dogmas, but merely tolerated its teachings "within reason." Utopia is a land of Plato and of Mythra, where virtue has sub-Christian foundations, and where divorce and even suicide are approved. It is a land where none of the follies satirized by Erasmus exist. But it is not More's England, as the Dialogue of Comfort makes plain by contrast. Much as More admires Erasmus and respects Greek (for "secular education does train the soul in virtue," but "no one has ever claimed that a man needed Greek in order to be saved" -letter to Oxford), I think he knows that Utopia's river is "water-less" and that Hythlodaye's reason-without-the-sacramental-life is a "babble of nonsense" (Letter 25). Not absolutely, but relatively -relatively to the nature of man as he is in sin and grace. The Utopia, I would suggest, is complemen- tary to The Praise of Folly, a reverse twist on the same level. Therein lies both the irony that permeates Utopia and the ambiguity of More's humanism: that the unaided reason, while so delightful a critic of a degenerate Christian society, is itself no substitute for the faith. There- fore, let Erasmus, the praiser of More, take note of Folly (Reason) and remember its limitations!

Perhaps we should today call More a "dialectical theologian." Reason and Revelation are for him in interplay rather than synthesis. Reason is regarded not as a foundation for Christian faith, even in part, but as a preparation for it, a path through which to travel to theology (p. i i6), and later a tool, largely rhetorical and dialectical, by which to ward off the foolish reasoning of heretics (e.g., p. 454). It must be admitted that More is not a subtle metaphysician. He over- simplifies the refinement, or shall we say reduces the ambiguity, in his opponents' thought. He meets his adversaries by appeal to tradi- tion and an exposure of the practical consequences of departing from

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THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW

it. As a man of the Renaissance, he is in that tradition of grammatical exegesis of the Bible so common among the early Fathers, rather than in the logical tradition of the Scholastics. Primarily a moralist and rhetorician, More would use philosophy for speculation and for natural piety (hence his Platonic sympathies), and the Scriptures for faith. Paganism's treasures are for him ornament, the right and joy of every educated man, but they are hardly part of the architecture of theology.

Roy W. BATTENHOUSE Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, Mass.

IMAGES OR SHADOWS OF DIVINE THINGS. By JONATHAN

EDWARDS. Edited by PERRY MILLER. New Haven, Yale Univer- sity Press, I948. Pp. viii, I5I.

Jonathan Edwards is a philosopher who seems never to be safely buried in a mere antiquarian limbo. Scholars in nearly every gen- eration since his death in I758 have discovered new facets of his genius. His unpublished manuscripts, mainly at Yale University, have been a tantalizing source of new insight into his philosophy and into the eighteenth-century New England of which he was so central a figure.

Professor Perry Miller has now made available one of the minor manuscripts upon which hitherto very little work has been done. Like most of the other material at Yale it was a private notebook not intended by the author for publication. It consists of 2I2 items or notes of varying length on aspects of nature which seemed to Edwards to furnish analogies to corresponding aspects of the theory and prac- tice of Christianity. It was probably prepared by Edwards as a reser- voir from which to draw in the preparation of sermons and more formal writings. But whatever the purpose of the author may have been the document throws light on his scientific knowledge and interests.

It has long been commonly known that Edwards was competently conversant with the works of Newton and Locke and that out of his intense early study of them he germinated and developed his distinc- tive idealistic philosophy. In one of his earliest papers he boldly de- clared that it was a "gross mistake" to "think material things the most substantial beings, and spirits more like a shadow, whereas spirits only are truly substance." From such an early conviction it was but a matter of time for him to dwell upon the theme that the material world was a shadow and an image of the spiritual one. Professor Miller believes that the present work was begun in early youth and

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