Abstract

This dissertation examines a literary choice--the choice of genre--facing Thomas More, the Catholic apologist, and the converging classical and Christian influences that determined it. Commissioned in 1528 by Cuthbert Tunstall, the Bishop of London, to dissuade Englishmen from the Lutheranism newly imported from the Continent, More composed a literary dialogue, the Dialogue Concerning Heresies. In the late twentieth century, after the ecumenism of Vatican II and amid increasing calls for cross-cultural exchange, dialogue seems the all but inevitable form of religious discussion. But to an orthodox Christian and Renaissance humanist like More, dialogue with dissidents would pose two problems. First, traditional Academic dialogue would imply that Christian truth is a matter of reason rather than revelation, to be arrived at by careful dialectic. Second, the initiator or dialogue would seem to concede some legitimacy to the opposition, a concession More was loath to make. However, both the classical and the Christian elaborations of literary dialogue, as it was transmitted from Plato through Cicero to Augustine, provided More with countervailing advantages. For one, the increasingly personal involvement of the author of dialogue, often like More a speaker himself, undercuts a hostile position. Beginning with the Platonic conventions of Socratic modesty and proceeding to framing devices like the letter and the preface employed by later writers, dialogue is often less open-ended than it seems at first. More important still, the balance between textuality and orality that literary dialogue embodies parallels the Christian distinction between letter and spirit. The Church Fathers regularly portrayed heresy as an interruption of the intercourse between man and God. The trope of speech in literary dialogue served More as a metaphor for the Apostolic transmission that seemed to him the surest safeguard of authentic Christianity. In this context, the thesis considers the 1523 Responsio ad Lutherum as a sort of embryonic dialogue, displaying the same emphasis on orality and some of the same formal features as the later Dialogue, which capitalizes more fully on the conventions of classical dialogue to refute Luther in form as well as substance