Salve, Maria!
Thank you, Mithrandylan, for recommending me his last letters. I found the following version: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1164478206/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1164478206&linkCode=as2&tag=httpwwwchanco-20 Did you know that one? This version includes an introduction by Cardinal Gasquet.
1stly, thank you for the recommendation, SeanJohnson. The biography by E. E. Reynolds looks interesting. I have two points of concern:
1) whether it is possible to talk about this topic in only 400 pages;
2) the same author wrote a biography of St. John Fisher called "St. John Fisher: Reformer, Humanist, Martyr." The subtitle sounds strange to me. Link: https://www.bookdepository.com/St-John-Fisher-E-E-Reynolds/9781953746399?ref=grid-view&qid=1611081832199&sr=1-13
Hello Diego-
I haven’t read Reynolds’s book on St. John Fischer (though I intend to), so I can’t really say.
But where he references St. Thomas More as a “humanist,” he means “renaissance humanism,” as opposed to contemporary humanism or conciliar humanism.
The former stressed a revival of antiquity (Greek, Hebrew, the arts, poetry, etc., and insofar as this movement impinged upon theology, it intended to return to the sources, but not in the same way conciliar humanism did: As an excuse to nullify scholastic and Tridentine theology, in order to redevelop theology in a new direction), while contemporary humanism implies the glorification of man at the expense of God (hence secular humanism).
But one could see how humanism, even of the renaissance variety (good, in and of itself), if it gained a predominance over ones love of theology, could poison it, and some other famous humanists like Erasmus (a friend of St. Thomas More) lost their bearings.
One needs to approach humanism in the same way one would approach Newman’s development of doctrine: Is it merely making the implicit explicit (yes!), or is it what the conciliarists have made of it (dogmatic evolution into contradiction and corruption).
Humanism can be hijacked in the same way.
But that St. Thomas More was a humanist (and one of the greatest) will not be denied by any pre-conciliar biographers or historians.
I just get a bit resistant when some like James Monti seem (to me) to insist a bit too much on the humanist aspect, because to me, what made St. Thomas a Saint were not his considerable intellectual and academic accomplishments, but his moral courage in standing for a principle.
With Reynolds, I did not get the impression that the humanist aspects of St. Thomas’s life took precedence over the moral and spiritual elements, and for that reason I recommended it.