The Thomas More / William Tyndale Polemic: a Selection Edited, with An

The Thomas More / William Tyndale Polemic: A Selection Edited, with an introduction and notes by Matthew DeCoursey Hong Kong Institute of Education Texts Series 3, 2010 http://purl.org/emls/moretyndale.pdf © Matthew DeCoursey, 2010 Comments or corrections may be sent to [email protected] 2 CONTENTS Acknowledgements 3 Introduction 4 A Note on the Text 28 Extracts from The Obedience of a Christian Man 35 Extracts from A Dialogue Concerning Heresies 69 Extracts from An Answer to Sir Thomas More's Dialogue 115 Extracts from The Confutation of Tyndale's Answer 170 Glossary 200 Notes 212 Bibliography and Abbreviations 228 3 Most of the work for this edition was done during the term of a postdoctoral fellowship from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, spent at the Catholic University of America and the Folger Shakespeare Library. I am indebted to Christina DeCoursey and Sister Anne M. O'Donnell for their advice and support. Katherine Acheson gave essential advice on the introduction. 4 Introduction From the beginning of the Reformation in 1517, philology was a crucial element of Protestant thought. Sola scriptura, “the scripture alone” was a Reformation slogan, and the nature of that scripture was defined in philological terms. Luther used Erasmus’s edition of the Greek New Testament with a revised Latin translation in an effort to reach the sources of biblical thought. When Luther understood the original languages well enough, he translated the text into German for the common reader. William Tyndale followed his example in English, laying the foundations for most of our King James Version. These new translations were arguably consistent with the original languages, but certainly inconsistent with the Latin Vulgate, the Bible of the Roman church. This break with the past was controversial because it implied a discontinuity in the church, a separation between the church and God. It breached a vision of the church as a unified consensus of the faithful existing continuously since the time of Christ, a vision that motivated More to write the polemical texts excerpted in this edition. Each of the two could discredit the other on his own terms: Tyndale argued that mistranslations of particular words in the Bible had created an illusion that the Bible supported the visible church and its hierarchy; More argued that no one in an imperfect world can reason so well as to justify opposition to a visibly sacred church. When this controversy began, no Lutheran had yet been executed in England for propagating his or her beliefs, but all knew that the questions involved were matters of life and death. In Obedience, Tyndale showed his awareness of the danger, and More in his Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529) defended the execution of heretics (107 infra). At the same time, 5 More knew that his own life was at risk, one way or another. He remarked of Henry, according to his son-in-law, “If my head would win him a castle in France, it should not fail to go” (Roper, 21). For us today, the content of the debate is of more than usual interest. The Reformation in general, of course, changed the course of European and ultimately global history. Nor did these two men merely repeat the conventional arguments made for and against Luther on the Continent. More was a writer of great stature in 1529: at a time when fewer than ten books a year were published either in English, or in Latin by Englishmen, More had published six, all but one in Latin.1 Tyndale would ultimately affect the course of the English language through his deep influence on subsequent English versions of the Bible. They wrote these works in the shadow of violence: besides the threat of execution, the Peasants’ War had already taken place, and the relation between theology and violence was an important issue here, as we shall see. Through their stature with their respective religious communities, both of these two writers would be reprinted frequently in future centuries. The importance of this exchange has been recognized by historians and literary historians for many years, but it has never received the scholarly attention its significance would justify. The main reason for this is simply that it is tremendously long, at almost 2,000 pages, and the parts are not all of equal interest. Specialists in Thomas More or William Tyndale work on their author for decades or entire careers without reading the controversy all the way through. Even when one does read these works, it is difficult to keep track of the flow and exchange of ideas because of the enormous bulk of the material and the forbidding hostility of some of the exchange: the two authors accuse each other of “railing,” and each is right about parts of the 6 other’s work. More’s writings in particular have attracted negative comment even from those who specialize in them. Timothy D’Alton writes that the Dialogue is a “long, often tedious work” (52), and Richard Marius writes that the Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer is an interminable desert, stretching to a hellish horizon under the untempered sun, and we find burning on every page a monotonous fury that deadens the soul. (425) Anne O’Donnell and Jared Wicks wonder whether the Confutation “has ever had more than a dozen readers in any generation” (xxvii). These are typical responses among those few who have read this massive work, but the strength of repulsion masks the virtues of More’s accomplishment: it is in the Confutation that More offers his most cogent criticisms of the Protestant program. Tyndale’s writings were of necessity more concise—they were smuggled, after all—but much of what is in them is responsive. A nuanced understanding of what Tyndale has to say is dependent on a reading of More. The goal of this edition is to bring the major points of the controversy within the reach of both students and specialists. Through this selection, readers can gain an understanding of the relations between the two writers’ ideas, and the ways in which they tried to respond to each other. It also becomes possible to relate the ideas presented here to those in other readings, as for example in the debate between Erasmus and Luther.2 In the interest of accessibility, the text is modernized, and headnotes are supplied to situate each extract, which point out how different parts of the polemic relate together. Scholars, for their part, will find this edition useful when the More-Tyndale controversy is significant but not central to their concerns: as if, for example, they 7 wished to relate the Utopia to its author’s religious commitments. Those who wish to go further in the study of this fascinating conflict may refer to the full, original-spelling editions of the works, More’s from Yale University Press (now complete) and Tyndale’s from Catholic University of America Press (in progress). Both sides of this controversy can be viewed as responses to Martin Luther. Famously, he first came to the attention of Christian Europe when he published his ninety-five theses against the use of indulgences. In this brief work, he already questioned whether the sacrament of penance was of any value, and whether the pope had any power of his own over time spent in purgatory.3 Separately, but shortly after the theses, he also denied the authority of the Scholastic theologians. The principal motivation for these rejections, it seems, was in his view of justification. The church taught that all human beings were born with original sin, but that the sacrifice of Christ wipes out that stain. After that, human beings sinned, and they required the sacrament of penance to gain absolution for their crimes. Luther’s objection was not simply to the use of the penitential process to raise money for Rome: he objected to the entire system. To him, the sacrament of penance could have no power over the state of a believer’s soul, which had to do with his or her own faith in God. Where the church taught that each one must do what he or she can to fulfill the law, Luther believed that no one could even take a step toward fulfilling the law. Everyone deserved to be damned, but God would save those who had a true and sincere faith in him. Therefore, there was no need for a priest to offer absolution. Further, where the church taught that good works such as going to Mass or visiting the sick contribute to salvation, Luther believed that faith alone brings salvation. Certainly, a church that had taught such wrong things for such a length of time was not to be respected, and thus he replaced the authority of the 8 church with the exclusive authority of the Bible, which, by philological method, he translated into German so that all might read it. More was involved in refuting Luther from the beginning. He participated in the production of Henry’s Assertio septem sacramentorum (Assertion of the Seven Sacraments, 1521; Marius, Thomas More, 278). By his own account, he had an editorial role, but he may have been responsible for more, given the obvious wisdom of ceding credit to kings. He went on from there to write a Responsio ad Lutherum (Response to Luther, 1523) and an extended letter to Johann Bügenhagen (1526 or 27), also in Latin, which last was not published until much later. In March, 1528, Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London, wrote a letter authorizing More to read heretical books in order to refute them in English.

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