Thomas More on Statesmanship.

Gerard B. Wegemer. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1996. x + 262 pp. $49.95. ISBN: 0-8132-0836-X.

This work, written together with a "popular" biography, Thomas More: A Portrait of Courage (Princeton: Scepter Press, 1995), is a model of traditional humanistic scholarship presenting a More, quite different from the daemonic character depicted by G. R. Elton, Alistair Fox, and Richard Marius, who is consistently self-conscious, principled and rational in politics. Remarking that More's views can "only be appreciated by long and careful consideration of his entire corpus"(23), Wegemer displays impressive control of that corpus and the scholarly literature in a tripartite analysis of More's use of Socratic methods learned from Plato, Lucian, Cicero, and Augustine, within a statesmanship "based on freedom, law and conscience" (211).

The first of the book's three parts develops More's lifelong concern with personal virtue and with government as rational control of free citizens. While evil and ignorance call for strong law enforcement, tyranny can be avoided only if leaders and citizens are vigilant in love of liberty and virtuous self-control of sinful pride and imagination. Such self-control requires free will based on consciences informed by revelation of "an objective law of nature written in the human heart" (73) and humanity's subordination within a created and fallen world.

The second part, a nuanced and profound rereading of Utopia, discusses More's use of satire and irony as tools for a dialectical restoration of political prudence, especially as seen in the confrontation between the prideful incivility of a "gnostic" Hythloday and the civil and humanistic reformism of Morus. This part also develops a compelling analysis of Ciceronian and Augustinian subtexts, which, Wegemer argues, perform much of the dialectical work of Utopia.

The third part argues that More's anti-Reformation writings and actions manifest the same appeal to Christian conscience, lawful order and English freedom found in his earlier career. Assuming Luther and Tyndale to be beyond his help, More addresses the consciences of the parliamentary classes and a king tempted to tyranny. He adds invective to his rhetoric of satire and irony, striving to generate recognition that the prideful independence of Protestant and imperial versions of human autonomy, because it makes free will and objective conscience impossible, also makes virtue and justice impossible.

As an interpretive construct, this account of More's politics, persuasive as it may be, necessarily runs the risk of having imported the consistency it discovers. It also makes More's humanism excessively rationalistic for a project based on oratorical persuasion of hearts in which affect, will and reason are unified by habit as much as by insight. In addition, More seems overly objectified by Wegemer's systematic literary method, a perfectly formed Christian activist dusted with saint's plaster. He is also an inveterate Whig more suitable to the pages of Samuel Rawson Gardiner, the Victorian historian of parliamentary liberalism, than to the life of late medieval England.

These criticisms are, however, minor when compared with Wegemer's accomplishment. His book sets out to present a synthesis of More's works that will aid appreciation of the moral and cultural depths of More's Christian humanism while resolving inconsistencies which Wegemer sees as misreadings of the texts and hence as specious occasions for theorizing an enraged, melancholiac or sex-possessed Thomas More. At the very least, his compelling reading of Utopia and his coherent approach to the anti-Reformation works so reconstitute the basis of debate that his book will have to be confronted by anyone who would build a case for inner conflict, emotional crisis or bad faith as a leading element in More's life and works.

WOOD BOULDIN Villanova University