A Book for All Readers.

The Life of Thomas More, by Peter Ackroyd (Doubleday, 447 pp., $30)

ERASMUS addressed him as mellitissime Thoma and famously proclaimed that his sweetest Thomas was omnium horarum-a man for all seasons, whose affability remained constant through fair weather and foul. It's true that Thomas More joked even on the scaffold, but Erasmus, who liked puns and double meanings, may also have alluded to the many people who had no idea what made him tick.

Foremost among them was the upfront Dame Alice More, whose letter to Henry VIII pleading for her husband's life made it clear that she considered him a little touched. Even Erasmus, who probably understood him as much as anyone could, was reduced in the end to throwing up his hands and crying, "If only he had left theology to the theologians!"

The philosopher's outburst highlights More's greatest contradiction: he was an ascetic man of the world. Grandson of a rich merchant, son of a King's Bench judge, exposed while a page in the household of the Archbishop of Canterbury to the highest gloss of savoir faire, he was the master mold of urbanity and the very glass of sophisticated social ease, yet underneath his silks and velvets he wore a hair shirt.

A perplexing duality marked his every thought and deed. He died in defense of papal authority and always bowed to his father, even in adulthood when he outranked him, but he himself was a permissive father who spanked his children with feathers. His attitude toward women was almost schizoid. More the dominant male married his first wife solely to avoid the sin of fornication; when she died giving birth to their fifth child, he remarried a month later solely because he needed a housekeeper. Yet More the feminist was the first Englishman to champion education for women and personally instructed his daughter Margaret in Latin and Greek, fashioning her into the most erudite woman of her time.

The King himself was caught short by his contradictions. More's detached, ironic personality seemed ideally suited to the divorce situation. Surely this easily amused courtier would not scruple to tinker with the law for the sake of Henry's pressing marital needs, nor would the author of Utopia be one to object to reforming society along more progressive lines. Yet when Henry made More his Lord Chancellor with this purpose in mind, he found he had acquired a Nathan.

More's latest biographer, Peter Ackroyd, does not fully understand him either-many of his conclusions are prefaced with, "It is possible that . . ."-but he presents More in a way that invites readers, especially conservatives, to identify with him. Born in 1478 as the Middle Ages were turning into the Renaissance, More "embodied the old order of hierarchy and authority at the very moment when it began to collapse." Anxiety is the unavoidable fate of people who bridge two epochs. Those who today live with an ever-present gnawing sense of dislocation brought on by the Sixties' assault on traditional values can easily understand how Thomas More must have felt.

Like today's neo-cons, he was for a time part of what he later fought. His friendship with Erasmus grew out of their mutual enthusiasm for the "new learning," a movement opposed to priestly control over education. For centuries, the medieval church had maintained that the Bible, Aristotle, and the canon law of Justinian comprised the totality of knowledge and obviated the need for more. These three sources being finite, however, learning had turned back in on itself and descended into "Scholasticism," which flirted with lunacy. The famous story of monks debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin may be apocryphal, but Scholastics did argue the difference between vinum bibi bis (wine I drank twice) and bis vinum bibi (twice wine I drank).

Thomas More called this stultissima solertia (foolish ingenuity) and promoted the teaching of Greek and Roman literature and rhetoric on grounds that the precision logic and lucid eloquence of classicism would infuse piety with clarity and hence strengthen faith.

Because the New Learning extolled human reason over church authority, it was called "Humanism." Erasmus was in the vanguard, writing (in seven days during a stay at More's home) In Praise of Folly, a satirical look at greedy churchmen and lazy mendicant friars that became the most famous secular work of the sixteenth century. Thomas More took a leaf from Plato's Republic and described a perfect society called "Utopia." The word was his coinage, taken from the Greek elements meaning "no place," but this subtlety was lost on many. Like all liberal movements, Humanism got hijacked and all hell broke loose.

Thomas More and Martin Luther never met, but "the battle between the two men is like an internalized conflict between the warring selves of sixteenth-century civilization." More, now a member of the King's Council, wrote a scathing response to Luther. Luther was a dishonest liar (improbe mendax), an ape (simium), he deserved to have someone defecate (incacere) in his mouth, he celebrated Mass on the toilet (super foricam), and he wriggled his bum (clunem agitat) when preaching. In his reply, Luther compared the Catholic world to a gigantic anus and himself to an incipient bowel movement and predicted, "We will probably let go of each other soon."

Scatology was in common usage in an age when people lived close to their wastes, but More and Luther crossed the line into what Ackroyd calls "a reverse world of the medieval imagination, filled with frantic symbols of fear and disorder." Their cloacal and bestial imagery makes the same psychological statement found in "babooneries," the dramatic tableaux and puppet shows of the Middle Ages in which the sacred was represented by the profane. It was a battle between control and release: More stood for the one and Luther for the other, but they expressed themselves with the same language.

When Lutheran tracts found their way into England, More took up duties not covered in the two movies about him. He became a heretic hunter, raiding homes and university rooms and sending the guilty to the stake. Ackroyd does not give an exact count but records several of More's satisfied appraisals, e.g., "He was well and worthely burned in Smythfelde."

It was during the heresy crisis that Henry VIII turned into Bill Clinton. The entrance of Ann Boleyn into his life inspired him to read the Bible, specifically Leviticus, where he made an amazing discovery. After 18 years of marriage to his erstwhile sister-in-law, Catherine of Aragon, he suddenly realized that he had uncovered his brother's nakedness and should therefore be granted an annulment.

Obsessed by his idea, he singled out More for intense consultations, even coming to his Chelsea home and walking in the garden with his arm slung around his councilor's neck. Next to the tall, burly Henry, the short More must have looked like Bruce Lindsey in a codpiece.

We can hear Henry-Bill thinking: heretics aren't so bad after all, might in fact be useful. . . . He began secretly to read their confiscated tracts-Ann slipped him one by William Tyndale-looking for a loophole that would get him out of the marriage without risking his new title of Fidei Defensor. The situation turned into a Tudor version of the Keystone Kops: More chasing heretics and Henry granting them safe conduct in case he needed them later.

The author fleshes out the familiar story of More's arrest and trial with a wealth of detail that occasionally becomes turgid and redundant, but his attention to cases from More's early legal career makes the crux of the matter clear. The English schism was an inevitable extension of Praemunire, the fourteenth-century statute that maintained the rights of King and Common Law against the Pope and the clerical courts.

The Life of Thomas More is hard going. The Latin is fun and instructive but ye olde Englysshe ys nott. The protagonist's complexity and detachment may wear thin for some-I ultimately found him too much of a Catholic Ashley Wilkes-but the rich background of late-medieval life is superbly done. Ackroyd's evocative accounts of pageants, Corpus Christi plays, maypoles, comets, omens, mad nuns, schoolboys on tall stools reciting declensions, and the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow marking the liturgical day are not to be missed. Whatever your opinion of Thomas More, this is a book for all readers.