Review: A Man For All Seasons
Going into the film, Thomas More is a saint and a martyr. Most people consider a saint to be a man of principle, and a martyr is a man who dies for his beliefs.
Perhaps, in fact, More stands for the perils of being perceived as a saint or a moral man. Throughout the film, characters—including Chapuys, Cromwell, and the king—view More as a representative of a concept rather than as a person. His consent is important to the king and to Norfolk because it would make them feel and appear moral. Chapuys too sees More as an upstanding moral and religious man, and Chapuys takes comfort in the fact that the virtues More represents contradict the king’s actions.
Though More was much later sainted for his refusal to swear an oath to King Henry’s supremacy to the pope, I don't think More is depicted as someone who ascribes to religious dogma of any sort. As a hero, More is more existential than religious, because he looks inwardly for his motivations and does not rely on any external ideals to guide his speech and actions. In fact, More’s morals are continually shifting, and he surprises Chapuys and other characters with his sharp wit and unexpected pragmatism. If an ideal agrees with his conscience, More will do his best to live up to it; if not, he will discard it. In this sense, he breaks the mold of what we might expect a martyr to be—More dies because there’s no other way out for him, not because he wants to make a political or religious statement.
What I see in the film is the address that the apparent contradiction between Thomas More’s upright moral sense and his periodic attempts to find legal and moral loopholes. More strongly opposes Henry’s divorce, yet he hopes to avoid rather than speak out against the Oath of Supremacy. Therefore, he sees man’s law as the best available guide to action, even if it occasionally contradicts God’s law or lets some evildoers off the hook. More’s reverence for being practical is rooted in his love for the law. As is shown that the letter of the law held an important place in More’s conscience, albeit a notch below that held by the Church of Christ and the kingdom of heaven. Unable to know the nature of the cosmos, More put his faith in society’s system of judgment—the law.
In his approach to moral action, More is thoroughly pragmatic, but
