Thanks for prioritising Professor Duffy’s review of the TV rendition of Hilary Mantel’s fictional recreation of Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More in Wolf Hall (The Tablet, 31 January). Here in Melbourne I can’t wait for the local TV take-up. Eamon Duffy’s credentials in the English Reformation are, of course, unquestionable, and I was very happy to see at last in such a staunchly Catholic journal as this his acknowledgement of More’s foulmouthed insults leveled against William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament.
It turns out, of course, that Tyndale was right in recognizing the New Testament’s Greek presbyter as a designation for an elder/senior/wise older man rather than one for a "priest". Right again in declaring that in English the Greek word ekklesia is better represented as "congregation" than as "church". Surprising that More, the scholar, frothed at both as undermining the ecclesial principles of the late medieval church, but I am ready to see his vile denigrations of Tyndale as just part of the great game of the times. Whether it is smart of us, however, following Professor Duffy’s eirenic summation, to think that both men died "as witnesses that truth mattered" is another matter.
Professor Duffy suggests we ought to read it like this, adding that "law and liberty must be rooted in something deeper, more objective and more enduring than personal preference..." (a couple of other roots mentioned are clearly not open to dispute). Could some psephologist inform us whether prepolling surveys indicate to what degree electors are looking for "truth"? Surely the democratic process has indicated that we disdain claims for “the truth” underlying the statements of political wisdom by competing political parties or by independents. The tragic first half of the 20th century illustrates where such claims took us. What we elect instead is those whom we think better equipped to struggle to embody within the ever-changing societies of our times the truths of justice.
That the elected don’t always meet our expectations is obvious to all. The system, maybe, is geared that way. Oh well, chuck the mob out next chance you get. Back to More/Tyndale: the lives and fates of both great men point to the bastardisation at work in their times of the values attaching to the Christian gospel.
Dr John N Collins, Melbourne, Australia
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