VOLUME 3

AN ANSWERE VNTO SIR THOMAS MORES DIALOGE

LOCATION
KEY Commentary Side Textual Bibliographic Scriptural

simpell people vnder / they compell them to serue their lustes and wily tiranny / with out respecte of any comen welth. Whych wily tiranny / because the trueth rebuketh it / is the cause why they persecute it / lest the comen people seynge how good they shulde be and felynge how weked they are / shuld wythdraw their neckes from their vnrightwesse yocke. As ye haue ensample in Herode / in the scribes and Phareses and in many other.

Herode. Cf. Luke 2.7–8.

scribes and Phareses. Cf. Matt. 23.2–3.

M. Item that there is no purgatory. T. beleue in Christ and thou shalt shortely finde purgatoryes ynow / as ye now make other fele.

no purgatory. Cf. CWM 6/1.354/32.

M. Item that all soules lye and slepe tyll domes daye. T. and ye in puttynge them in heuen hell and purgatory / destroye the argumentes wherewith Christ and paule proue the resurreccion. What god doeth with them / that shall we know when we come to them. The true fayth putteth the resurreccion which we be warned to lokefore euery houre. The hethen philosophoures denyenge that / did put that the soules did euer liue. And the pope ioyneth the spirituall doctrine of christe and the fleshly doctrine of philosophers to gether / thynges so contrary that they can not agre / no moare then the spirite and the flesh do in a Christen man. And because the fleshly mynded pope consenteth vn to hethen doctrine / ther fore he corrupteth the scripture to stablish it. Moses sayth in Deute. / the secret thynges perteyne vn to the lorde / and the thynges that be opened pertayne vn to vs / that we doo all that is written in the boke. Wherfore Sir if we loued the lawes of god and wold occupye our selues to fulfill them / and wolde on the other syde be meke and lett god alone with his secretes and

slepe tyll domes daye. Cf. CWM 6/1.354/33, CWM 8/1.288/9–10, 8/2.702/34–36. See 118/3–6n. (JW)

The hethen . . . stablish it. A current of Christian patristic thought culminating in Augustine gladly absorbed the Platonic and Neoplatonic doctrine of the soul's natural immortality, even to the point of finding here the attribute by which the human person most resembles God's image and likeness (Gen. 1.26–27). Medieval scholastic thought offered a cluster of philosophical arguments for individual immortality, especially in response to the 13c Parisian Averroist doctrine of a collective immortality. The Italian Renaissance celebration of human dignity climaxed in Marsilio Ficino's Theologia platonica, sive de immortalitate animorum (1483), which provided a remote backdrop for Lateran V's doctrinal affirmation of the soul's immortality in Apostolici regiminis (DS 1440–41; Neuner-Dupuis 410), promulgated in 1513 against Averroists at Padua such as Nicoletto Vernia and Pietro Pomponazzi. Tyndale represents a resolute return to the NT doctrine of the resurrection of the whole person (e.g. John 5.25–28, 1 Thess. 4.15–17, 1 Cor. 15.12–56). (JW)