St. Thomas More - 2

St. Thomas More – 2
St. Stephen, the first Martyr, cinops be gone, Friday, December 26, 2008

James Monti’s biography is about a saint who is a giant of a man. It is about Thomas More’s victorious pursuit of the mind and heart of Jesus Christ. As the role model for statesmen and politicians the following excerpts from the book will not do him justice.

More’s Early Years - 1

Thomas More was born in London, England of Feb. 6, 1478, during the reign of King Edward IV. Thomas was the second of six children to be born to John and Agnes Moore: three girls, Joan, Agatha, and Elizabeth, and two boys, Thomas and Edward.

About the year 1485, when Thomas More would have been in his 7th year, his father enrolled him in the institution reputed to be one of London’s finest schools for your students: Saint Anthony’s on Threadneedle Street. It was here that the boy would have received his first systematic training in Latin, the language that was to serve as the cornerstone of his lifelong endeavors as an accomplished scholar.

Probably in 1492, the year of Columbus’s landmark voyage to the New World, More became a student at Oxford University, sponsored by Archbishop Morton. At the school and on all but special occasions students were required to communicate with one another and the faculty in Latin – violators were fined. Members of the student body were required to attend Mass daily, a habit that we know More observed the rest of his life.

William Roper does tell of his father-in-law learning Greek and deepening his proficiency in Latin at Oxford, while Cresacre More speaks of his great-grandfather studying rhetoric, logic, and philosophy at the university. A statute dating from 1431 specifying the requirements for licentiate in arts gives us a broad idea of the subjects taught, listing courses in seven traditional disciplines of grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy, and utilizing the works of Aristotle, Boethius, Cicero, Ovid, and Ptomely: the study of the three branches of philosophy – natural, moral and metaphysical – are also prescribed, with Aristotle used in all three cases.

It may possibly be that More’s love for the Fathers of the Church, and particularly for the writings of Saint Augustine, could have first taken root during his brief sojourn at Oxford. It is particularly likely that his knowledge of the theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas began at Oxford for the university was a stronghold of medieval scholasticism.

While Oxford may have nurtured the young More’s aspirations to seek “things that are above,” (Col 3:1), John More had very different ambitions for his son. Hence it seems likely that Thomas’ transfer around 1494 from the halls of the university to London institution that trained students destined for the career in law, It was also at this time that the seeds of More’s career as a writer were sown when several epigrams composed by the young scholar were published as part of the student grammar book which appeared some time between 1497 and 1500.

It was also at this juncture that there entered into the life of the young More two significant figures: the humanist scholars John Colet (1466-1519) and Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536). It is not possible to date precisely when More first came into contact with Colet, but we know that by 1504 More had begun to avail himself of Colet’s spiritual direction. More initially met Erasmus in the year 1499, when the famous Dutch scholar visited England for the first time....
George H. Kubeck