THOMAS BECKET is one of the most puzzling as well as one of the most spectacular of medieval figures. No other period in history could have produced his unique blend of turbulence and gentleness, heroism and obstinacy, ambition and selfabnegation. He has not the perfection or the intelligence of Saint Anselm, the lucidity or the strength of Saint Bernard, the sheer saintliness of Saint Hugh of Lincoln. Yet his reclame was greater than theirs, and today his name and his fate are familiar to every schoolboy.
His character, however, is not so clear; it has perhaps been obscured by the sacrilegious melodrama of his end. It has also been badly damaged by the cynicism and the stupidity of his later biographers as well as by the misinformed panegyrics of his friends. He is a man of many colors and the colors do not always mix easily. He began by being a diplomat of great persuasiveness; then became a civil servant, a soldier, and a statesman; and ended as an archbishop, a martyr, and a saint. He is still a legend in a country which is notable for its scepticism toward the Middle Ages. And although there must be many great churchmen who receive more fervent suffrages from the faithful, he has always been a success upon the stage.
There is, indeed, a sense in which he was himself an actor. He seemed to be able to change his character as an actor will slip from one part into another. And whatever he chose to be, he was. As secretary to Archbishop Theobald he was as supple and successful as any papal nuncio of our own time. He could talk with cardinals on their own high plane of policy, and there was something in his appearance and his address which marked him down for preferment. His part had been written for him by Theobald and he played it to the best of his ability. It was a very ultramontane role—the binding of the English Church ever more closely to its Roman Mother—and there is no reason to think that Thomas was spiritually at one with the arguments which he so skilfully uttered. But you do not ask of an actor that he should believe in the part he is playing.
When he became Chancellor to Henry II, at Theobald's instigation, he so enlarged his office that he was soon the second man in the kingdom. He lived magnificently, but never vulgarly, on the secular level. His hospitality was lavish, and his court was more splendid than the King's. He had a special care for the graces and formalities of life and a sharp sense of what was befitting his office and his person. No breath of scandal touched him. He would accompany Henry everywhere except into the exploits of illicit love. He was quite possibly reacting against the rigors of Theobald's establishment at Canterbury, but his reaction was in perfect taste. His nature and temperament were aristocratic, and he was glad to be able to live like a lord.
His political achievement was remarkable. No one did as much as he to reduce the anarchy of the kingdom, to which his master had succeeded, or to restore the rights of property and the rule of justice. He was not, perhaps, the initiator of these policies, for his talent was of the administrative rather than the creative order. He could do, admirably, what he was told and better the instructions given him. In every way he was the necessary complement to the King. Where Henry was volatile he was steady; where Henry was erratic he was methodical; where Henry was graceless he was courtly; but where Henry was affectionate he was affectionate also. They had the differences and the identities of friends, and their union was a political blessing. Only the saintly and sagacious Theobald, wasting toward his death at Canterbury, wondered what wouldhappen to the Church. Who was to be its effective ruler, the national King or the supranational Pope? Theobald had trusted Thomas to supply the right answer.
But Thomas was in military harness, fighting Henry's battles against Toulouse. His personal share in the campaign was particularly irresponsible, since it was directed against Louis VII of France. He had himself arranged the betrothal of Henry's heir to the French King's daughter, and now he was urging Henry to an assault against his feudal overlord in complete disregard of the diplomatic consequence. But Thomas was enjoying himself, and the dynastic battlefield of medieval Gaul was no place for political prudence. The Chancellor, whose own military experience was nil, himself led his knights into action and taught them tactics of the fray. He was conspicuous for personal valor and unhorsed one of the most famous soldiers of France in single combat. The good, second-class mind often works the fastest, and Thomas, who was never an original thinker, had a compensating quickness in assimilation. His memory had always been remarkable, and it was just these facilities which fitted him for the conduct of great affairs. There was nothing he did not seem able to pick up.
When Theobald died, Henry asked the obvious question and Thomas gave the unexpected answer. It seemed to Henry a solution of every difficulty that Thomas should unite in his own person the offices of chancellor and archbishop, but his friend was not attracted by this invitation to virtuosity. It is possible to guess at the reason. His work as the King's minister was done, and he had tasted the fruits of secular ambition in all their infinite variety. He was perhaps satiated by secular glory, as intelligent men are commonly satiated by an excess of worldly things. There was the possibility of other conquests and the prospect of a more subtle, a spiritual dominion. This (he may have thought) would be less subject to sudden overthrow; this, of its very nature, would be more lasting. If his refusal of Henry's proposal to unite the two great offices was not, in its impulse, a sense of divine vocation, it was at least a sense of the possibilites of a new part. He was actor enough to know when the two sides of a role contradict each other and he knew that such a role was not worth playing. What he did not know was the depths and the heights to which the acting of a great part might lead him.
Something happened to Thomas when he received the laying-on of hands. He had walked to his consecration resolved to be a great archbishop and a determined upholder of the Church's rights; he walked away from it with the seeds of sanctity within him. There is no picture of him on which the mind may more comfortably dwell than the picture of these first, unclouded days of his episcopate. It was, in truth, a pastoral scene. He gave himself without reserve to his people, and especially to the poor for whom he had always had an exquisite charity, to his brethren of St. Augustine's Monastery, and to God. He spent (with what ease or difficulty we do not know) a great part of each day in prayer. He celebrated Mass with a swiftness and a kind of impersonal devotion which was remarked upon by all. His sermons were eloquent, persuasive and firmly reasoned. His mortifications included a sustained abstinence from those good things of the table which he liked and, in themselves, approved, and the regular practise of the discipline. He was never lost, however, in that self-regard which is among the snares of the spiritual aspirant. He busied himself incessantly about the needs of others, gave a tithe of all the wealth that came to the monastery to a neighboring hospital, and every afternoon washed the feet of thirteen beggars in memory of Christ. These are the marks of holiness, and only one question remains, the subtlety of which was to torment Saint Thomas to the end. For what purpose was he attempting sancity? His own glorification in the eyes of men and angels, or the glory of God?
Now it is not possible for us, and neither, in all probability, was it possible for him to answer that question with any certainty. The motives of the best of us are inextricably mixed. Saint Thomas Aquinas assures us that a measure of self-interest is not incompatible with holiness, and the selfishness of fear, for those who have not the perfection of love, may be a necessary aid to salvation. Just as Thomas Becket had a facility in learning, in diplomacy, in administration, and in war, so he may have found it easy to pray. But this is no guarantee of virtue. It is possible, also, that he became ambitious for the things of the Church and even the things of the spirit in the same way that he had been ambitious for those of the world. It would have been surprising if he did not. Never, even after his consecration, does a simple picture emerge of him: now he is the incipient saint, now the rigorous ascetic, now the ecclesiastical materialist, now the shepherd of his flock. In the long and bitter dispute with Henry he is brave but seldom tactful, persistent but not always charitable; he enjoyed the lust and not only suffered the necessity of battle.
One thing, however, is certain. He wanted, quite desperately, to die. He possibly believed that his martyrdom was essential for the Church's liberty; he surely coveted the martyr's crown. I have said that he was, in part, an actor and he had the actor's unenviable bias toward the dramatizing of himself. He would always choose his moment and his method, his time and place. His gestures and speech (although he nearly alwayssaid too much) were supremely appropriate to their occasions. When he went to Pope Alexander III at the beginning of his exile, he laid at the Pontiff's feet, in lieu of the customary gift, a copy of the Constitutions of Clarendon. He made a special visit to the great Romanesque church at Vezelay, where Saint Bernard had preached the Crusade, for the purpose, and perhaps the pleasure, of excommunicating his foes. Thomas was undoubtedly a proud man, and, like all people who suffer from pride, he found it very easy to be hurt and very difficult to forgive. Henry was like him in this respect, but they differed in the end because Thomas overcame his pride. The one is a heroic and the other is a tragic figure, because the one was able and the other was never able to forgive.
It was Thomas's ability to accept with grace a reconciliation so palpably hollow, which gives a serenity and at the same time so deep a sadness to his last days. His eyes are fixed on martyrdom with a perfection rather than a striving of the will. He was resigned and glad, where before he had been eager and anxious. He knew that his death was necessary, and one likes to think that he bothered less about whether his reasons had been right. Yet the spirit of the battle never quite died out in him. He would not absolve the bishops he had excommunicated unless they took a vow of obedience to the Pope, and he met his death immediately upon this refusal. But although he was prepared for martyrdom, he was still soldier enough to hurl one of his assailants down the stone staircase, where he was confronting them, with a not very polite imprecation on his lips.
The question arises, when we consider this man of brilliant parts and heroic stature—was it all worth while? Was Saint Thomas in the right? And the answer is "Yes" or "No." In so far as he was fighting for the independence of the Church from secular control, he was fighting the battle of human freedom. In so far as he was fighting for certain ecclesiastical privileges, which had no justification in reason and equity, and was taking his stand upon the early medieval conception of theocracy, he was wrong. But the best intellects of that time were wrong with him. The idea that the State was the policeman of the Church and that the State derived its powers from the Church was modified by Dante and the later political philosophers of the Middle Ages into the idea that both derived their particular autonomies from God. The next Archbishop of Canterbury very soon corrected Saint Thomas's extreme conservatism, but the vital fruits of his victory were retained for three hundred years. It was not until Henry Tudor that any English monarch again seriously challenged the liberty of the English Church—the liberty to belong to its Mother.
Poetry Mulier flmicta Sole Woman supremely blest In woman's prime desire To be most richly dressed: Incomparable attire, Blindingly irridescent In robe of cloth-of-sun, With Pleiad-plaited coronet, And slippered with the crescent! Gown sun-spun, Crown star-set, And the moon For her shoon! Woman supremely fit To be so clothed, the one Found truest, best, immaculate! FRAY ANGELICO CHAVEZ. Maine Valley This is the valley where tall elm trees arch Like seraphs fallen asleep upon the march, They touch their wing-tips over barns too vast For any harvest but those of the past. The barns have half returned into the hills, The lilacs have grown wild as whippoorwills, There are no hosts of young men now to lay Such stonewalls up as once shut cows and hay In little universes of serenity. Daisies flow here like whitecaps on the sea, They fill the world with airy, living honey Through afternoons remote and deep and sunny. The houses are the kind men built when life Meant many children when one took a wife, Meant staying in one place until the land Fitted a man as plow-hafts fit the hand, Three generations on a summer's day Working thigh to thigh and making hay, Boys yearning to get married and have sons Before they finished being their fathers' ones. And now the fields are empty, the wild rose Is coming back, the wild honey flows, And the pinewoods are widening again Across the fields that once were tame as men. ROBERT P. TRISTRAM COFFIN. Two Memory Exercise Summon back now, when the sun is whitening that sullen window-square at the foot of your bed, Time's clock-tick beatings in the dark on your eyelids and your thought upon the inexhaustible dead. Here you shall find strength for the day's breaking. Surge of bell-tower sound will be no more an impulse to this emptiness of question like fog upon a low, rock-girdled shore. Small Moment In winter, as in arrested being, I remember spring, summer, and autumn; All color of those seasons withheld Save in the morning and the evening skies. Imperceptibly leaf-bud comes into leaf, And at length it is the moment my hand Moves toward the elder blossom, its beauty Yielding to utility of winestock; This is the moment between and before: Within my hand the balsam seedpod bursts And at my touch the poppy sways upon Its stem like a reptile-headed shaker; Yet my hand withdraws from the orange lichen; Man cannot have his being and retain About him outward vestiges of growth; I choose from all wild and purple asters Before I take the darkest of them all. I know each of these is a small moment, Yet I who take the blossom and the fruit Cannot change all: it is the moment The bittersweet unhasps the brilliant berry, And now in December the last flake shrouds The withered fruit, and partially budded vine. ETHEL B. AREHART. To a Ship's Lantern Your light had winked with starlight on the sea And crept into the circling mist, and hung On crests when waves turned mountains soon to be Hurled down to hissing valleys; you had swung To drowsy rhythms while the island lights Danced out to you from some enchanted shore—And now you glow into whatever nights May find this inland road beside his door. When first his rolling stride had turned this way He said he keeps you with a dream or two .. . To share the little time he has to stay, And you are polished daily, bright as new. He always lights you when the sun goes down—In case a sailor finds the little town! GLENN WARD DRESBACH. Poems Thinking on Stars It is pleasant to remember stars are shining. In the arched dark, not seen for the roof between, they hold a patient, unregarded circling, nor pause to question what their course may mean. And I shall sleep tonight, and for more nights after, soundly, because of knowledge they are there. Grooved in law, against the slow defilement of years, they wheel aloft through the soundless air. EARL DANIELS. [689)
