Common Knowledge

Welcome to Quietism Part 5.

Thank you. But why am I here?

Part 5 includes essays that bear on a question you and I have discussed, fruitlessly, more than once. I thought you should know.

Kind of you. Which fruitless questions?

Did Sir Thomas have to become Saint Thomas More? Was there no way he could have dodged martyrdom?

Ah. Those fruitless questions.

"Patient Suffering" and "Prudential Concealment" are phrases in the titles of essays we are publishing. Then there's "Quietism Now?", which is more or less the [End Page 223] question you tend to ask me (though I suppose you'd italicize the adverb). I assume you've read Hilary Mantel's paean to Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall, so I expect More's on your mind these days. He was quiet enough in the early mid-1530s but was not, I'd say, a political quietist. And wasn't quietism, in the political sense, a condition of life (as opposed to death) under Henry VIII and Cromwell?

"Cowardice can be defended bravely without self-refutation"-yes, old duck, I have read (if no one else did) what you wrote on martyrdom. Here, let me remind you of what you said. You said: "The opposite of cowardice is not courage, but bravado. A scholar doing scholarship can teach quietism quietly." I like the scholar part better than the cowardice part there, but I take your point (though is it a logical point or a rhetorical one?) about bravado. "An example," you continue, on the topic of scholarship, "is Reading Judas, a revaluation of the bad apostle, by Elaine Pagels and Karen King." Their aim, you say, is "to show how some early Christians thought that the apostles (and the bishops who succeeded them) were reckless and un-Christian in encouraging martyrdom and in making the church's central rite a celebration of it. Eventually, the antimartyrs were silenced by accusations of cowardice and inadequate zeal"-and yes, I did think of Thomas More when reading this bit. Mantel, you're right, does a number on More's zealotry, his intolerance of heretics. But-

But-

But what if we are at the End of Time? I mean, really at the end? I mean the death of the planet as we have known it since departing Eden. How do we screw quietism into that context? Why even bring it up now? The book of Daniel has become every ecologist's bedside reading. Is the Henrician Reform (the Stripping of the Altars and all that-show trials, burnings, beheadings) the best context for a discussion of Now? How are we post-Edenics to behave in what is turning into a disaster to make the Last Days of Pompeii look like a flash in the pan? It is the big question, dwarfing and subsuming all the rest, as the rocks and trees and men and women and children and dogs and arts and crafts were engulfed in the lava flow at Pompeii. The men who stayed at their posts, the men who ran for their lives, the families who boarded themselves in defiantly, the families who turned their faces to the wall-all of them were consumed totally.

The lava flow at Pompeii . . . and did you call me "old duck"? You are evading my question, CR.

No, I am supplementing your question. I am saying that saying-or for that matter, refusing to say-is not doing. Not taking action is worse than useless, [End Page 224] though in More's time and place, the best action available was delay. It looks as if delaying tactics-you accuse me of evasion-are all that even the most God-fearing can devise under the axe. If More could not think of another way, I am pretty sure that none of us is able to do so. Thomas Cromwell understood Thomas More's silence, his delay, as resistance; but it was merely a gesture. Cromwell was, though, right to this extent-that More...