Problem of Uncertainty and Natural Law

Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
Natural Law and the Problem of Certainty: Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons"
Author(s): Patrick J. Whiteley and Robert Bolt
Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Winter, 2002), pp. 760-783
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
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PAT R I C K J. W H I T E L E Y
Natural Law and the Problem of Certainty:

Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons
"T~ he question of whether law is, by definition, a moral

proposition-a view central to natural law theory-has
occupied philosophers of law for thousands of years.
The main alternative to natural law theory, legal posi-
tivism, the dominant force in modern Western law, posits no neces-
sary relationship between law and morality. In the last century,
however, particularly after World War II, the hegemony of legal
positivism has increasingly come into question. Is it possible, some
legal philosophers wonder, that the German legal system's com-
plicity in the Nazi atrocities could be attributed to a dominant legal
positivism that separated morality from law? In the 1950s and
1960s, the Harvard Law Review debates between Lon L. Fuller, advo-
cating natural law theory, and H. L. A. Hart, who went on to write
the seminal modern defense of legal positivism, The Concept of Law
(1961), grappled with the whole question of whether natural law
theory could be recuperated in the mid-twentieth century. Their
debates inspired discussions leading up to John Finnis's elaborate
defense of natural law theory, Natural Law and Natural Rights
(1980), and more recently to Robert P. George's two collections of
essays, Natural Law Theory (1992) and The Autonomy of Law: Essays
on Legal Positivism (1996). A central obstacle to these attempts to
rehabilitate natural law theory is the fact that in its traditional
dress, natural law theory, one of whose early and most influential
exponents was Thomas Aquinas, is rooted in moral absolutism.
A mainstay of the law and literature curriculum, Sophocles'
Antigone is among the purest examples of natural law theory. It
Contemporary Literature XLIII, 4 0010-7484 / 02/ 0004-0760

? 2002 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
W H I T E L E Y ? 761
contains the moral absolutism that underwrites traditional natural
law theory and suggests dramatic contrasts with legal positivism.

Antigone, the consummate natural law heroine, decides to follow
the divine law that mandates that her treasonous slain brother be
properly buried and defies King Kreon's positive law that declares
that her brother shall lie unburied. Kreon is the antagonist who
detaches positive from divine (natural) law for the political expedi-
ency of deterring rebellion. The play memorably dramatizes the
superiority of the natural law by depicting Antigone's moral vic-
tory and Kreon's remorse over his audacity. One particular literary
work rarely mentioned as part of a law and literature curriculum,
however, Robert Bolt's two-act play, A Man for All Seasons (1960),
puts the debate over natural law theory into a contemporary con-
text, in terms surprisingly similar to those in which legal philoso-
phers have debated natural law theory since the 1950s. Bolt's play
is an underappreciated but surprisingly rich literary site for the
modern debate over law and morality. It not only frames the debate
to address the issue of moral absolutes, and the epistemological
problem of accessing those absolutes, but also considers what con-
temporary legal theorists such as Finnis, Kent Greenawalt, Neil
MacCormick, Frederick Schauer, and Jeremy Waldron have ques-
tioned: whether natural law theory is as irreconcilable with legal
positivism as it once seemed, and whether natural law theory com-
ports with moral relativism.
At first glance it would seem that Bolt's play is no less compro-
mising in dramatizing the moral absolutism of natural law theory
than Antigone is. Bolt, after all, dramatizes the sixteenth-century
conflict between England's Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More, and
the historical conflict between them lends itself to exemplifying, as
straightforwardly as does Sophocles, the opposition between natu-
ral law's moral absolutes and positive law theory's relativism. We
recall that More, the loyal Roman Catholic, believing that any law
worthy of obedience must be imbued with moral legitimacy, acted
upon his religious scruples over Henry's remarriage and was there-
fore beheaded in 1535, a victim of perjurious testimony, after refus-
ing to recognize Henry's authority in sanctioning his own second
marriage without papal annulment of the first. Even prior to his
conflict with Henry, of course, More's allegiance to traditional nat-
762 * C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E
ural law theory is easily discerned in his writings. His philosophi-

cal romance Utopia (1516) alone suggests that More, a trained and
practicing lawyer, subscribed to jurisprudential views quite consis-
tent with Thomas Aquinas's. In a classic formulation, Aquinas had
defined law in terms that would be quite familiar and acceptable
to More: "every human law has just so much of the nature of law
as it is derived from the law of nature. But if in any point it departs
from the law of nature, it is no longer a law but a perversion of
law" (784). In his recent biography of More, Peter Ackroyd vividly
renders the attitudes that saturated More's early legal training:
"Religion and law were not to be considered separately; they im-
plied one another." It is no surprise then, as Ackroyd reports, that
"It is of the greatest significance in understanding his behaviour
... to realise that he wrote about the law in precisely the same way
he described the Church," a fact that explains "why he understood
at once the nature of Martin Luther's heresy, when the German
monk spoke of judgement 'according to love ... without any law
books'" (63).
More's falling out with Henry, then, seen from a distance, repli-
cates the pattern of Sophocles' paradigmatic literary depiction of
the natural law heroine's conflict with positive (socially con-
structed) law. Like Antigone, More asserts the superiority of divine
law over any opposing mandate. Even more important, we might
well expect the opposition between More and Henry, like that be-
tween Antigone and Kreon, to mark the opposing sides of two sup-
posedly incompatible and separate jurisprudential theories.
In fact, however, Bolt's play is a far more nuanced depiction of
natural law theory than it might have been, and this is what makes
it a rich literary site for law and literature students to revisit, recon-
sider, and thereby refine their understanding of this long-running
jurisprudential argument, just as legal scholars have revisited it in
the last half of the twentieth century. To be sure, certain features
of the historical conflict itself between More and Henry VIII, mat-
ters that are part of the historical record long before Bolt adapted
it for his literary purposes, render the opposition between natural
law and legal positivism a sometimes inadequate means for under-
standing the events. To his credit, however, it is Bolt's daring to
grapple with the conflict's complexities-in particular his ability
W H I T E L E Y ? 763
to render Henry as a complex and profoundly conflicted charac-

ter-that makes his play an interesting contribution to the jurispru-
dential discussion. Furthermore, in dramatizing the conflict, Bolt
has ascribed to More certain attitudes that are more probable in a
post-Romantic era than they are in the early sixteenth century.
Though well within an acceptable range of literary license, and of-
fering no serious threat to the coherence of More's characterization,
these anachronisms apply revealing pressures to traditional natu-
ral law theory, a theory that some modern legal philosophers
would just as soon dismiss as a museum piece, an interesting arti-
fact of the past, but with little credibility in an enlightened world.
By dramatizing the problem of certainty, and by running anachro-
nistic and dramaturgical risks in the process, Bolt's A Man for All
Seasons is a literary instance of the resistance faced by contempo-
rary legal philosophers in their attempts to rescue natural law the-
ory by drawing it into a twentieth-century philosophical context.
In order to appreciate Bolt's contribution to this debate, we will
revisit certain details of a "purer" example of natural law theory,
the Antigone of Sophocles. This will entail a brief comparison
of the conflict between Kreon and Antigone, on the one hand, with
the conflict between Henry VIII and Thomas More on the other.
This comparison will help us to appreciate epistemological differ-
ences in the plays' disclosures of moral deliberation. We will
thereby better understand More's expressions of uncertainty, an
uncertainty that, combined with certain anachronisms in Bolt's pre-
sentation, has concerned the play's best critical readers. Those un-
certainties of More's prove quite relevant to Bolt's presentation of
natural law theory in its contemporary guise.
Kreon against Antigone, Henry against More

In Sophocles' Antigone the conflict between Kreon and the heroine
of natural law theory runs conveniently parallel to the main points
of disagreement in their views of law. Antigone is as clearly en-
trenched in the divine law as Kreon is in politically expedient law.
He knows that a single unpunished act of blatant rebellion, such
as hers, could invite another, while she must remind him that pre-
paring for the next life is an ultimately shrewder goal than ensuring
764 . C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E
safety in the present life. Sophocles magnifies the gulf between her
natural law convictions and his legal positivism by commencing
the drama after Kreon lays down the law. It is after he has made
his command, and while he is insisting that it be obeyed, that we
can see him as defending positive laws that run against the course
of divine law. Sophocles affords scarcely any insight into Kreon's
deliberations when creating the law. That is important because his
deliberations would have contained at least some moral consider-
ations that could obscure his conflict with Antigone: the conflict is
between one person who believes in divine law and another who
tries to uphold already mandated positive law, not between two
persons with different convictions about morality or about divine
law. Matters are quite different in Bolt's play, where Henry is in
flux, presenting a series of legally binding edicts through the course
of the drama, some of which involve the workings of Henry's
moral conscience in response to More's refusals to obey. This con-
trast between the two plays helps us to appreciate that the ascrip-
tion of positivism to a legal system is meaningful in relation to laws
already made, not to laws being made.
Immediately after Antigone admits to him her disobedience,
Kreon asks her if she has dared break his law in full knowledge
of his proclamation. She responds:
Yes, because I did not believe

that Zeus was the one who had proclaimed it;
neither did Justice,
or the gods of the dead whom Justice lives among.
The laws they have made for men are well marked out.
I didn't suppose your decree had strength enough,
or you, who are human,
to violate the lawful traditions
the gods have not written merely, but made infallible.

These laws are not for now or for yesterday,
they are alive forever;
and no one knows when they were shown to us first.
I did not intend to pay, before the gods,
for breaking these laws
because of my fear of one man and his principles.
W H I T E L E Y . 765
I was thoroughly aware I would die

before you proclaimed it;
of course I would die, even if you hadn't.
Since I will die, and early, I call this profit.
(39)
Antigone's conflict with Kreon neatly marks the contrast between

their legal philosophies: for her the source of legal validity is the
natural order created by the gods; for him the obligation to obey
the law is centered on his political position. At first glance, More's
opposition to Henry similarly delineates that between natural law
and legal positivism.
To begin with, we have Henry's allies, whose conflict with More
may be driven either by principled objection to his position or by
a self-interested desire to do the king's bidding. Early in the play
More faces off against one of these allies, Cardinal Wolsey, who at
this time is Henry's lord chancellor. Holding an office traditionally
occupied by a cleric, the lord chancellor, owing partly to his role
in adjudicating equity court cases, is the legal embodiment of the
king's conscience. It is therefore no surprise that Henry should be
pressuring Wolsey to persuade the pope to annul his first marriage.
Having More's support in persuading the pope would allow
Cardinal Wolsey to bear Henry's pressure far more comfortably,
especially since the pressure is to support what More regards as
unscrupulous means for persuading the Holy See to view matters
Henry's way. The important question here is whether Cardinal
Wolsey ranks satisfying his king above satisfying his church. Given
his political realism, his implicit attitudes toward law decidedly
oppose More's: "You're a constant regret to me, Thomas. If you
could just see facts flat on, without that horrible moral squint; with
just a little common sense, you could have been a statesman" (19).
Later, implicitly conceding that More's influence already makes
him a virtual statesman, Wolsey tells him, "Oh, your conscience is
your own affair; but you're a statesman," implying that matters of
state entail ignoring one's conscience, whereas More readily admits
that he would just as soon run the country with his prayers. As
clearly as it is in the case of Sophocles' Kreon, for Wolsey law is a
practical concern best exercised through realism, in opposition to
766 . C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E
which is the moral concern that More refuses to set apart from his
political or legal concerns. More points out to Wolsey, "when
statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their
public duties ... they lead their country by a short route to chaos.
And we shall have my prayers to fall back on" (22; ellipsis points
in original). If Wolsey's ambition is to preserve social order at the
cost of maintaining a link between English common law and the
rule of the church-amounting in More's view to severing the tie
between political rule and moral concern-then Wolsey's alliance
with Henry seems clearly to delineate an opposition against More
that marks a divide between natural law and positivist attitudes.
There is room for doubt, however, that Wolsey has cast aside all
moral scruples. However subordinate his concerns for serving his
church may seem at times, it is at least arguable that Cardinal Wol-
sey is not aiming merely to please Henry or to maintain his own
position; he is also concerned with the safety of his nation, and
that concern evinces moral conscience. In a discussion of this scene,
Barry Jay Seltser has done well to point out this easily overlooked
feature of Wolsey's position:
Wolsey justifies his distasteful support for the King's position in the inter-
ests of peace. More objects in the interest of conscience. But Wolsey also
has a conscience, and his argument is that, if one's conscience recognizes
the horror and evil of civil war, then action must be taken to avoid it.
The problem is not (as More would have it) a simple choice between polit-
ical power and personal conscience.
(31)
Wolsey's moral conscience engraves a vivid memory of the dy-

nasty wars that constituted one of the bloodiest episodes in English
history. A statesman who does not work to avoid repeating that
episode is abnegating his moral responsibility: "Do you remember
the Yorkist Wars?" Wolsey asks More. "Let him die without an heir
and we'll have them back again. Let him die without an heir and
this 'peace' you think so much of will go out like that! (He extin-
guishes the candle)" (22).
At this point we enter a gray zone in which moral concern resides
in both the positivist and natural law positions. There may be little
to choose between the morality of Wolsey's effort to conserve the
W H I T E L E Y ? 767
dynasty, on the one hand, and the morality of More's effort to con-
serve England's link to Rome, on the other. Indeed there is a well-
established tradition in legal positivism for defending man-made
law precisely for its agency in conserving social order, in protecting
citizens from the baser aspects of human nature. One need look no
further than Thomas Hobbes's legal positivism to find exactly that
motive. It is the conservation of political order, after all, that largely
defines Kreon's stance. The value of Seltser's observations about
Wolsey's pangs of conscience notwithstanding, Bolt's presentation

of Wolsey does not impress me as a decisive instance of Wolsey
sharing More's passion for conserving the moral essence of law.
The humiliating fate Wolsey suffers, accused of treason and
stripped of his civil office when he fails to help Henry, as it is so
suddenly and jarringly disclosed in prolepsis by the play's narra-
tor, the Common Man, frames the cardinal as a political and moral
failure (35). Bolt stresses the dubiousness of Wolsey's moral posi-
tion even more in his screenplay for the 1966 Fred Zinnemann film
when Wolsey, at his death, is heard to say what his early biogra-
pher, George Cavendish, attributed to him: "But if I had served
God as diligently as I have done the King, he would not have given
me over in my grey hairs" (Cavendish 183). If any legal philosophy
can be attributed to Wolsey, then, it would lean further toward
positivism, at least in Bolt's depiction, than toward natural law the-
ory, making it all the more tempting to understand Henry's opposi-
tion to More as a jurisprudentially meaningful conflict that paral-
lels that between Kreon and Antigone.
Other assistants to Henry's cause would seem more substantially
to magnify the philosophical divide between Henry and More, for
unlike Wolsey they exhibit no pangs of conscience whatsoever. Yet
they, I suggest, cannot ultimately be ranked as More's legal positiv-
ist foes. Cromwell and Richard Rich are primarily concerned with
what they are officially charged to carry out, ensuring Henry's con-
tentment. Their obedience to the king is augmented by their ab-
sence of moral scruples. Law, along with all other matters of public
policy, is a means toward that end, and for them it is an asset to
regard law as an amoral issue. It is no surprise, then, that their
strategies are more blatantly Machiavellian than any used by Wol-
sey. During their conspiratorial discussion of how they can best
assist Henry in dealing with More's scruples, we have this laconic

exchange:
Cromwell. Are you sure you're not religious?

Rich. Almost sure.
Cromwell. Get sure.
(73)
Unlike Wolsey, these two are not concerned with persuading More
but with entrapping him. Their reasoning is that, because Henry
so highly esteems More's opinion, because More has come to repre-
sent Henry's conscience, and because they cannot persuade him to
see matters Henry's way, their best course is to associate him with
some sort of treasonous effort. They understand that the only way
to relieve the king's conscience is to make the king see More as an
evil opponent of the state. Their intended means for trapping More
include deceit, bribery, and suborning testimony. Law itself is a
morally indifferent expedient for their ends: "it [entrapment of
More] must be done by law," Cromwell reminds Rich in a later
conversation. "It's just a matter of finding the right law. Or making
one" (104). Law is an instrument here, a deceptive means to a dubi-
ous end. This attitude stands in stark contrast to the description
that natural law theorist John Finnis offers:
Adherence to the Rule of Law (especially ... conformity by officials to

pre-announced and stable general rules) is always liable to reduce the
efficiency for evil of an evil government, since it systematically restricts
the government's freedom of manoeuvre. The idea of the Rule of Law is
based on the notion that a certain quality of interaction between ruler and
ruled, involving reciprocity and procedural fairness, is very valuable for
its own sake; it is not merely a means to other social ends, and may not
be lightly sacrificed for such other ends. It is not just a "management
technique" in a programme of "social control" or "social engineering."
(274)
As Bolt's depiction makes clear, however, social control and social

engineering would be lofty names for Rich and Cromwell's assis-
tance to Henry. Nothing as unprincipled as their behavior consti-
tutes a viable philosophical challenge to More's natural law convic-
tions.
The depiction of Henry himself, not just the disposition of those
W H I T E L E Y ? 769
who assist him, therefore, holds the last remaining promise for un-
derstanding his opposition to More as jurisprudentially meaning-
ful, as an affront to More's natural law convictions. The matter is
complicated, however. To begin with, we must face the fact that
there is reason to doubt that any sovereign whatsoever can act
upon genuine principles of legal positivism. In his recent defense
of legal positivism, Kent Greenawalt has offered some insights that
explain why: the usefulness of the positivist label is contingent on
the vantage point of the one whose philosophy of law is in ques-
tion. For example, the positivist label is often sufficient in account-
ing for the outsider's vantage point, because an outsider analyzing,
say, a foreign legal system will tend to use positivist methodology:
an outsider is more likely to use pedigree tests for determining
what rules have legal status, as opposed to using some moral
touchstone (which may not be useful for understanding the legal
system of a society whose moral system one does not accept or
understand). "Suppose the question is asked whether in the United
States a military draft is constitutionally permissible or constitutes
'involuntary servitude' in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment,"
Greenawalt suggests. "An observer would say that a military draft
is permissible because judges have said that it is and no one now
expects a contrary conclusion" (20). In short, an outside observer
would use a sort of pedigree test, and legal positivism would seem
to be the right label for that person's approach to discerning legal
legitimacy. By contrast, an insider, particularly one whose position
involves the making of law or the declaration of which laws are
valid, would seem to take a natural law position almost by default:
"For the participant-decision-maker," Greenawalt concludes, "at
least one on the highest court, law is not reducible to social facts,
law is not separable from morality" (24).
Though Greenawalt's argument features enriching complica-
tions that are beyond the scope of our present concern, it would
suffice to say that Henry's position as an insider-in particular his
position as one who is virtually making the laws whose moral im-
plications he deeply cares about-would seem sufficient reason
alone for not regarding him as a positivist. He would be a natural
law theorist, as it were, by default. Furthermore, during Henry's
reign, the early Tudor notion of the divine rights of kings, still hold-
770 - C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E
ing sway, could alone implicitly define his position, inasmuch as

it attributes to God the source of the prince's authority. Henry's
position, however, renders his jurisprudential attitudes far more
interesting than this conclusion would suggest, for in fact Henry
actively fights for divine law-not simply because he believes in
the moral power of his own leadership, but because he conscien-
tiously searches for ways of aligning his understanding of divine
law with the operations of the positive law under his watch. By
contrast, we recall, Sophocles' drama commences after Kreon has
laid down his law; in Bolt, the king is in the throes of a crisis that
motivates his creation of new edicts designed to preserve an align-
ment between divine will and English law.
We can appreciate Henry's search for moral-legal alignment if
we recall what Bolt's play stresses, that Henry's wish to divorce
his first wife, Catherine, is owing in significant part to his interpre-
tation of the death of every male child she has borne. He reads
the absence of a male heir as a providential judgment against the
marriage with Catherine in the first place. He had married her with
papal dispensation, for she was Henry's brother's widow, and a
marriage between in-laws, thought to be the equivalent of incest,
was declared scripturally forbidden. During their one private face-
to-face confrontation midway through the play, Henry explains to
More the moral dilemma and stresses his concern with bringing
divine law back in line with positive law:
Thomas, Thomas, does a man need a Pope to tell him when he's sinned?
It was a sin [to have married a sister-in-law], Thomas; I admit it; I repent.
And God has punished me; I have no son . . . Son after son she's borne
me, Thomas, all dead at birth, or dead within the month; I never saw the
hand of God so clear in anything.... It is my bounded duty to put away
the Queen, and all the Popes back to St. Peter shall not come between me
and my duty!
(54; ellipsis points in original)
His way of seeing the hand of God, his reading of divine law, is a
primary motive for Henry's opposition to papal authority and to
More-and in Bolt's play, it is the most significant motive. We
therefore cannot understand Henry's opposition to More as one
that is grounded in an ontological dispute over the essence of law,
W H I T E L E Y ? 771
certainly not over the question of whether divinely sanctioned mo-

rality is essential to law.
Defined this way, Henry's conflict with More importantly differs
from Kreon's with Antigone. In Sophocles' dramatization, Kreon
and Antigone do not disagree over what the divine law is. Their
dispute is over the power and priority of divine law in relation to
positive law, not over what divine or natural law favors, nor over
how it can be known. By contrast, Henry and More's is an ulti-
mately epistemological dispute over how divine law can be dis-
cerned, not over its priority or power in relation to positive law.
In Sophocles the epistemological problem does not even arise:
Antigone's access to divine law is rendered as direct and utterly
unproblematic.
The differences between Sophocles' and Bolt's dramas are in-
structive. The conflict between natural law theory and legal positiv-
ism, like Kreon and Antigone's, is a dispute that clarifies the prior-
ity of divine law over positive law, whereas the conflict among
natural law advocates like Henry, More, and his son-in-law Roper
clarifies one of the least appreciated features of natural law theory:
the wide region of epistemological disagreement and uncertainty
that natural law theory encompasses within its own boundaries.
Access to Divine Law
Antigone's unproblematic access to divine law matches Henry's.

Henry claims to know God's will without the aid of papal or any
other mediation. His is direct knowledge. This degree of certainty
is just what we might expect or insist on in a natural law hero. The
gravity of Antigone's conflict with Kreon tolerates no moment of
uncertainty about the moral rightness of burying her brother in
the face of the positive law that forbids it, just as the intensity of
Henry's conscience tolerates no uncertainty about God's opinion
of his first marriage. By contrast, in Bolt's depiction, More's com-
plexity entails a surprisingly high degree of uncertainty about di-
vine law. We arrive, then, at this question: Can the natural law
hero exhibit his uncertainty about divine law without significantly
compromising the very natural law principles for which he lives
and dies? The remainder of my discussion will explain why he can
772 ? C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E
do so and how. As we have seen, natural law theory is an ontologi-

cal claim about the essence of law, but a claim traditionally compla-
cent about the problem of how natural or divine law is known. In
Bolt this complacency is unsettled by More's complexity, which
includes surprising uncertainty about divine law complemented
by uncommon certainty about the workings of positive law.
To understand more fully Bolt's approach to More, we must in-
spect one particular aspect of his literary design, which he explains
in the play's preface, dated September 1960, two months after the
play's English premiere. In the preface, Bolt explains how the play
relies upon a metaphorical pattern, woven into the characters'
speeches, that establishes how he conceptualizes the nature and
importance of law in More's world. Bolt's metaphorical pattern is
built upon an overarching contrast between order and chaos. Soci-
ety, held together by a network of laws, is the principal site of or-
der. There, Bolt stresses, human beings feel very much in their ele-
ment and therefore feel secure; after all, his reasoning goes, human
beings are social creatures whose rational powers create the social
forces of order that evoke their sense of security. As Bolt describes
this zone of order, the powers of reason and social patterning are
mutually supportive. Law figures prominently in the construction
of order. As Bolt explains it,
If "society" is the name we give to human behavior when it is patterned

and orderly, then the Law (extending from empirical traffic regulations,
through the mutating laws of property, and on to the great taboos like
incest and patricide) is the very pattern of society. More's trust in the law
was his trust in his society; his desperate sheltering beneath the forms of
the law was his determination to remain within the shelter of society.
(Preface xvi)
This social sphere that includes positive law is orderly and predict-
able, therefore a source for security. In contrast is the supernal cos-
mic sphere, unpredictable and lawless, incommensurate with hu-
man designs. In Bolt's metaphorical pattern, land is the clearest
image of the orderly social sphere, the sea the clearest image of the
chaotic, "terrifying cosmos." In the course of the play, Bolt points
out, "references to ships, rivers, tides, navigation, and so on" bring
the threatening forces of chaos to our attention (Preface xvii). This
W H I T E L E Y ? 773
is a fairly usual literary association, of course. The sea is the land-

scape most strongly resistant to the settling of human plans and
hopes.
What might be surprising, however, is that this image of the cos-
mos stands at odds with sixteenth-century Christianity. Like any
orthodox Roman Catholic of his age, More would see the cosmos
in logocentric terms. He would see a cosmos that is orderly not
because it is the human mind that habitually maps the chaotic uni-
verse, as is famously the case in Wallace Stevens's poetic vision,
but rather because God made it, because God has an orderly mind,
and because it is reasonable to expect orderly products from or-
derly minds. Yet in terms of Bolt's view of More's predicament,
the cosmos is the site of a terrifying chaos-"Terrifying because
no laws, no sanctions, no mores obtain there; it is either empty or
occupied by God and Devil nakedly at war" (Preface xvi). The pos-
sibility of a conflict between God and the devil may seem to hold
out promise for a Christian conceptualization of the cosmos. In fact,
however, that would not be a fair inference. Though it is not certain
what Bolt means by describing them as "nakedly" at war, this
sounds like a war between two forces without allies, a war which
the devil could as probably win as God. In that case, he is describ-
ing a dualistic rather than Judeo-Christian cosmos. Above all, Bolt
describes a war in which human beings ought not to become in-
volved. Even if the cosmos were the site of moral battles, they
would be battles too large for human designs, certainly not battles
which human constructs, such as law, could either settle or contain.
It would seem that neither human knowledge nor law can hope to
anchor its moral perceptions in the absolutist realm of the superhu-
man cosmos, and the probable consequence is moral relativism: a
vision of the cosmos that the historical More did not embrace. One
doubts that the historical More, complicit in sending heretics to
horrifying deaths (Ackroyd 276-86), would share Bolt's uncertain-
ties about the workings of divine order, that he would be this reluc-
tant to take sides in battles between God and Satan. In Bolt's play,
there is no mentioning of More's role in condemning heretics, and
only the depiction of a slightly comical domestic squabble with his
son-in-law Roper over Roper's earlier Lutheranism even hints at
this side of More (31). Bolt's unfamiliarity with More's complicity
in condemning heretics, unwittingly revealed in a 1969 interview,

could explain this omission (Hayman 81). In any case, the conse-
quence is a depiction that offers More's reluctance to take sides in
cosmic moral battles as a partial reason for his use of law as a sanc-
tuary for his neutrality.
Furthermore, in the same passage we have been discussing, Bolt
asserts, "More's trust in the law was his trust in his society" (Pref-
ace xvi). This claim may well be a valid way for a nonbeliever to
come to terms with More's behavior, but it does not comport with
what we know about More's view of himself or of law. It does not
readily square with his natural law convictions. More's trust in the
law was nearer to his trust in God than to his trust in society, inas-
much as he saw the moral essence of law as an emanation of God's
will, the arm of the law linked to the hand of God. In Bolt's con-
ceptualization, however, law is a social construction that, far from
being rooted in a superhuman cosmos, offers refuge from that
cosmos. Nevertheless, even in Bolt's thinking, law, through its
association with social order, is still bound to moral order, however
unmoored that moral order may be from the superhuman absolute.
If neither morality nor law is anchored in the sphere of absolutes,
they are nevertheless situated together in a realm where, according
to Bolt's metaphorical pattern, they are far more orderly and pre-
dictable than they would be if they were anchored in the terrifying
cosmos. Bolt arrives, then, at the very junction where contemporary
natural law theory has found itself: Can natural law theory survive
relativistic conceptions of law and morality? If More is as uncertain
about the workings of divine order as Bolt's image of the terrifying
cosmos would suggest, then how could his natural law convictions
remain intact? These questions define the pressure that Bolt's dra-
matic conceptualization puts on More's status as the natural law
hero. Bolt's drama ultimately suggests that the natural law hero
who takes full measure of the uncertainties in discerning natural
law is more credible, and possibly more heroic, than those like
Henry and Roper who fail to take these difficulties into account.
Bolt's depiction of Henry's and Roper's certainties, in contrast
to More's uncertainties, illustrates that absolutism can in one sense
undermine the natural law hero's credibility. Henry, as we have
seen, lays claim to seeing the hand of God, and he uses this claim
W H I T E L E Y ? 775
to support his efforts to align divine and positive law. In one scene,
Henry and More face off to discuss privately the question on which
they are so divided:
Henry. You must consider, Thomas, that I stand in peril of my soul. It

was no marriage; she was my brother's widow. Leviticus: "Thou
shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother's wife." Leviticus,
Chapter eighteen, Verse sixteen.
More. Yes, Your Grace. But Deuteronomy-
Henry (Triumphant). Deuteronomy's ambiguous!
More (Bursting out). Your Grace, I'm not fit to meddle in these matters-
to me it seems a matter for the Holy See.
(54)
More's humility about discerning divine law-in this exchange

fully consistent with the attitude of the historical More-is an en-
dearing contrast to Henry's absolute certainty. Soon afterward, in
a conversation with his son-in-law, More admits to Roper: "God's
my god.... (Rather bitterly) But I find him rather too (Very bitterly)
subtle ... I don't know where he is nor what he wants" (67; ellipsis
points in original). Henry's certainty, by contrast, allows for no sus-
picion that his interpretation of scripture is self-serving. Roper, too,
is as absolutely certain about the workings of divine law as Henry,
and Roper's vehement opposition to Henry affords us the opportu-
nity to see how Roper's certainty energizes an eager quest for mar-
tyrdom. Bolt's rather exaggerated version of the historical Roper
serves as a foil to More's conflict with Henry. Even though Roper
and More both oppose Henry, their personalities yield stark and
revealing contrasts. Ironically, just within the time frame of Bolt's
drama, Roper's vehement absolutism leads him to shift his reli-
gious affiliations in a seemingly capricious manner, from Lutheran-
ism back to Roman Catholicism, whereas More's more tenuous
handle on the workings of divine law keeps him to a far steadier
course.
The differences between Roper and More are never more dra-
matically presented than in a heated argument in which Roper tries
to persuade More to have Rich arrested for spying on More's
household. More stresses that Rich has broken no laws; Roper
stresses that Rich's activities, because they are in service to the king,
776 - C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E
are immoral, and that he should therefore be arrested. In a rather

surprising locution, More tells Roper, "I know what's legal not
what's right. And I'll stick to what's legal." Very much comporting
with Bolt's metaphorical pattern, More's next speech emphasizes
his inability to navigate in the chaotic sea of God's intentions: "The
currents and eddies of right and wrong, which you find such plain
sailing, I can't navigate. I'm no voyager. But in the thickets of the
law, oh, there I'm a forester. I doubt if there's a man alive who
could follow me there, thank God" (65-66). To be sure, there is
nothing anachronistic in this particular statement about positive
law and the importance of attending closely to it, even when it does
not comport with one's moral sense. It reminds us, as Finnis does
in the first chapter of Natural Law and Natural Rights, that even in
classic formulations, like Aquinas's, natural law theorists recognize
that even immoral laws can sometimes maintain their moral and
legally binding status-even when, by virtue of their departure

from divine law, they stray from the essence of law-provided that
they belong to a larger rule of law with moral authority. It stresses
More's faith in the power of law to mediate order and justice, a
claim that would not trouble most positivists, but with one natural
law proviso: that the morality in law's power to conserve order be
underwritten by a link between the English common law and
canon law of the universal church.
Roper and More are both potential natural law heroes, then, who
offer very different claims about their access to divinely sanctioned
morality. Furthermore, they differ in their valuation of positive
law. In the same argument with More about curbing Rich's im-
moral service to Henry, Roper suggests that if it were a question
of relinquishing positive law in order to attack the devil or re-
taining the rule of law, he would relinquish law. This is a statement
we could expect from a heroine like Antigone, whose devotion to
natural law inscribes her contempt for Kreon's civil power. More's
response to Roper's dismissal of the rule of law exhibits his more
nuanced approach to the question:
(Roused and excited). Oh? (Advances on Roper) And when the last law was
down, and the Devil turned round on you-where would you hide,
Roper, the laws all being flat? (He leaves him) This country's planted thick
with laws from coast to coast-man's laws, not God's-and if you cut
W H I T E L E Y ? 777
them down-and you're just the man to do it-d'you really think you
could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? (Quietly) Yes,
I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.
(66)
Roper's use of law to enforce his moral convictions often depends

on an untenable denial of even the legal status of laws that do not
comport with his beliefs. Although his position has unfortunately
been taken as a necessary corollary to natural law theory, in fact no
thinker claiming to support natural law theory in Roper's fashion
should hope to be taken seriously. For all its differences from
Roper's vehement attachment to divine law, most importantly for
all of Roper's confidence in his ability to see the hand of God at
work, More's position, albeit refined through anachronistic dra-
matic license, takes into account the problematic epistemology to
which both Henry and Roper are oblivious and thereby emerges
as the more credible version of natural law theory.
More as a Hero of Selfhood

The uncertainties that Bolt ascribes to him render More an unwill-
ing martyr. The consequence is a humanized and endearing por-

trait. At one point, when his wife is fearful about his unwillingness
to placate the king, More tells her first that he is less important
than she thinks and second that "this (Tapping himself) is not the
stuff of which martyrs are made" (60). Nevertheless, these en-
dearing traits carry dramaturgical risks that are relevant to the ver-
sion of natural law theory that Bolt presents through More. The
less certain More is about the hand of God that he is to obey, the
less clear his motive is for facing his imprisonment and execution.
This problem is only magnified by the hardships that his refusal
to give in to Henry visit upon his own family. Even further aggra-
vating the problem of motive are the facts about More's strategy: he
is determined to remain silent, refusing to explain his own position
about the king's behavior, even to his own family, because he is
certain (however naively) that through his silence the law will be
his refuge against execution if not against imprisonment. Bolt's
way of grappling with this dramaturgical problem raises interest-
ing questions about the natural law convictions at the heart of

More's martyrdom.
Bolt copes with this problem by way of another anachronistic
shift: he depicts More as what he calls "a hero of selfhood." In his
preface to the play, Bolt explains his sense that in the contemporary
age the self's integrity is constantly under attack, that there are
fewer ways of defining the boundary between self and society. The
self has become, he worries, "an equivocal commodity," for "There
are fewer and fewer things which ... we 'cannot bring ourselves'
to do." While Bolt concedes that a transcendental definition of the
self-presumably the sort which More's Christianity supplies-

would mitigate the self's erosion, he holds little hope for a return
to that mentality, "for we are rightly committed to the rational,"
and "artists, and for all I know, our men of science, should labor
to get for us ... a sense of selfhood without resort to magic" (xiv).
The question, then, is whether More's natural law convictions can
survive Bolt's post-Romantic version of More's concern with self-
hood-a concern that eclipses the modicum of certainty that we
would expect More to have about divine law.
The most daring instance in which Bolt depicts More's sense of
selfhood appears early in the play's second half. More's closest
friend, in Bolt's rendering of the story, is Norfolk, who is unready
to drop his allegiance to the king and who eventually participates,
on the king's behalf, in the interrogation of More in the Tower. At
this stage of their strained relationship, Norfolk genuinely wishes
to understand the reasons for More's unwillingness to be complicit
in the king's virtual war against the pope. Two factors interfere
with that understanding. First, as Bolt depicts him, Norfolk is none
too bright. Second, More has already begun to use silence as a legal
shield, and that silence most certainly must extend to his dealings
with Norfolk. In a conversation in front of More's wife, daughter,
and her husband Roper, More and Norfolk discuss in purposefully
oblique terms the reasons for More's resignation of the lord chan-
cellorship. When they come to the notion of the Petrine Succession,
the Roman Catholic belief that papal authority derives from the
spiritual lineage of every pope from Saint Peter, we glimpse not
only the uncertainty we have already discussed, but also the cen-
W H I T E L E Y ? 779
trality of More's sense of personal integrity, built upon his sense

of self:
Norfolk. All right-we're at war with the Pope! The Pope's a Prince,
isn't he?
More. He is.
Norfolk. And a bad one?

More. Bad enough. But the theory is that he's also the Vicar of God, the
descendant of St. Peter, our only link with Christ.
Norfolk (Sneering). A tenuous link.
More. Oh, tenuous indeed.
Norfolk (To the others). Does this make sense? (No reply; they look at More)
You'll forfeit all you've got-which includes the respect of your
country-for a theory?
More (Hotly). The Apostolic Succession of the Pope is-(Stops; interested)
. . . Why, it's a theory, yes; you can't see it; can't touch it; it's a
theory. (To Norfolk, very rapidly but calmly) But what matters to me
is not whether it's true or not but that I believe it to be true, or
rather, not that I believe it, but that I believe it ... I trust I make
myself obscure?
(91; ellipsis points in original)
There is no self-evident truth here; validation arrives, if it does at

all, only by virtue of truth's residence within the self that believes
it. More's sense of self, then, eclipses the content of his convictions.
As Michael A. Anderegg has pointed out, his reasoning here exacts
a disjunction between subject and predicate, between his sense of
selfhood and the truth in which he believes, that the historical More
would scarcely claim to understand, let alone embrace (303). Bolt
has denied that this is an anachronism, characterizing More's out-
burst as "splenetic" (qtd. in Hayman 81). In any case, it serves to
preserve a secular audience's sympathy for More: if the audience
cannot accept the truth of the Petrine Succession, they may well
accept More's sense of self. Although Bolt's making More a hero
of selfhood may not ultimately settle the problem of character moti-
vation, it effectively comports with the seriousness with which
More takes oaths, a historically valid component in Bolt's dramati-
zation of More's behavior when giving testimony. For those like
Anderegg, however, who remain uncertain about what exactly it
is for which More is willing to die, his status as hero of selfhood

may be unconvincing (297). The main point here is to measure the
pressure that Bolt's depiction puts on More's status as the natural
law hero.
When Bolt's More places his selfhood above the veracity of his
convictions, he implicitly calls into question the independent, ob-
jective existence of moral facts. He comes disturbingly near to say-
ing that there are no facts which could objectively validate his
moral judgment. In short, Bolt's More, unlike the historical More,
implicitly denies what ethical philosophers sometimes refer to as
"moral realism," the belief that there are facts, existing in some
metaphysical zone independent of human agency, to which one
can appeal in defending one's moral decisions, including decisions
about which laws hold a moral claim for obedience. Because de-
fenses of natural law theory are traditionally founded on moral
realism, this must give us pause. I would suggest that Bolt reached
an impasse, but one with interesting implications for natural law
theory and for the standards of objectivity on which the historical
More grounded his jurisprudence. When the drama demands that
More defend the truths for which he is willing to suffer (and for
which he allows his family to suffer as well), Bolt could proffer no
explanation, no argument by which either he himself or his con-
temporary audience could be persuaded. No facts, no perspective
on divine law conferred the urgency that the historical More obvi-
ously felt.
We arrive at important questions central to contemporary juris-
prudential debates: Does a denial of moral realism substantially
affect relations between law and morality? Could an antirealist
stance comport with even the general parameters of More's natural
law sympathies, expressed so forcefully at the end of the play, after
More's death sentence is passed, when his silence no longer offers
a legal shield? Contemporary explanations suggest that natural law
theory can indeed survive the decline of moral facts from their ear-
lier metaphysical prestige. Bolt's impasse in depicting More lights a
passageway to contemporary attempts to rescue natural law theory
without accepting its traditional metaphysical underpinnings. In
the last three decades, for example, Ronald Dworkin's version of
natural law theory, while claiming that there are correct answers
W H I T E L E Y * 781
to most legal cases, rests on a theory of morality that nevertheless

denies unqualified objective status to moral facts, thereby reducing
the concept of objectivity in ethics, as Brian Leiter describes Dwor-
kin's position, to "a matter of 'susceptibility to reasons'" (84). Ger-
ald J. Postema, in both defining and defending a methodological
objectivity suitable for the domain of law, denies that the ascription
of metaphysical objectivity to moral facts can have any systematic
effect on the processes of legal adjudication: "[N]o assurance that
our modes of legal inquiry and argument are worthy of the respect
they demand of us can come from knowing what kind offacts corre-
spond to the true or correct legal judgments" (131). In defenses of
the authority and objectivity of law, as conducted by the theorists
just mentioned, the traditional metaphysical prestige awarded to
moral facts has disappeared, and Bolt's impasse, making More a
hero of selfhood who grounds his convictions on the fact that it is
he who embraces them, points us in the various directions pursued
by Dworkin, Leiter, and Postema, to name but a few.
Jeremy Waldron's analysis of these questions about the status of
moral facts has the most immediately significant bearing on Bolt's
treatment of More's position. According to Waldron, the facile as-
sumption has been that natural law theorists have a distinct advan-
tage over legal positivists when it comes to grounding their convic-
tions about legal adjudication. Whereas legal positivists usually
deny moral realism, traditional natural law theorists claim the so-
lidity of absolute facts in order to ground morally imbued legal
judgments. Again, Sophocles' depiction of Antigone illustrates just
this pattern of thinking. Waldron suggests that even when the
claim of moral realism is enjoined to support natural law theory,
it does not clinch the argument against legal positivism. For what
moral realists' advocacy of natural law theory lacks is a clear and
persuasive epistemology, a method of accessing the objective moral
facts on whose existence they rely. Without this, even if there are
moral facts, what guarantee is there that they can be reliably ac-
cessed in the process of legal adjudication? How can disagreements
about what those moral facts tell us be settled? In short, Waldron
argues, there is no theory of knowledge that would render the
moral facts as predictable and valid constraints on morally imbued
legal decision making. Moral realists, he plausibly argues, have
failed to "establish connections between the idea of objective truth

and the existence of procedures for resolving disagreement," and
"Without an epistemology-and an epistemology which is, at least
to some extent, less controversial than the knowledge claims it cov-
ers-there cannot be a theory of expertise" (173, 181-82).
Conceivably, in telling More's story, Bolt could have leaned on
one theory of expertise: the doctrine of papal infallibility. In the
course of the drama, however, the closest that More comes to in-
voking this doctrine to solve disagreements between Henry and
himself is when, as we have already seen, he defers to the Holy
See to interpret the scriptural opinion of marrying one's deceased
brother's widow. To be sure, papal infallibility did not rise to the
level of church dogma until 1870, during the papacy of Pius IX,
although its doctrinal origins as a pious belief long predate the
nineteenth century, making it an only mildly anachronistic theory
for More, though far less troubling than other attitudes that Bolt
has ascribed to More. At the end of the day, Bolt's presentation
offers no viable theory of expertise. At best, in rendering More as a
hero of selfhood, Bolt turns him into a self-appointed expert. More
appoints himself the expert when he asserts, as we have seen, that
the fact that it is he who is the believer is more important than
the truth of what he believes. If Bolt's strategy in dealing with the
problem of expertise in moral realism is question-begging, its
greatest value may be the attention it draws to the problem, for in
the course of trying to establish a viable heroism for More, through
a translation of natural law theory into a contemporary idiom, Bolt
located and uncovered natural law theory's least appreciated chal-
lenges-the problems of knowledge and certainty.
A Man for All Seasons, then, is a play that displays the less ap-
preciated intellectual challenges of natural law theory. It does this
not by staging an opposition between natural law theory and legal
positivism, as Antigone largely does, but instead by depicting the
conflicts among characters who are all at least potential natural law
heroes: Henry, Roper, and More. More stands above the other two
whose certainties about divine law evade the epistemological chal-
lenges that Bolt's More faces head-on. More, reshaped in Bolt's
drama, is a reluctant martyr who realizes a moder heroic ideal:
making the ultimate sacrifice for ultimately uncertain reasons. The
W H I T E L E Y * 783
problem of certainty remains among the least appreciated chal-

lenges in the attempt to rehabilitate natural law theory's power to
reestablish an essential connection between law and morality.
Northern State University
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Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica, part 2. Basic Writings of St. Thomas Aqui-
nas. Vol. 2. Ed. Anton C. Pegis. New York: Random, 1945. 225-1121.
Bolt, Robert. A Man for All Seasons. 1960. New York: Vintage-Random, 1990.
, adapt. A Manfor All Seasons. Dir. Fred Zinnemann. Columbia Pictures,
1966.
.Preface. A Man for All Seasons. Bolt, A Man for All Seasons vii-xx.
Cavendish, George. The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey. c. 1558. Two Early
Tudor Lives. Ed. Richard S. Sylvester and Davis P. Harding. New Haven,
CT: Yale UP, 1962. 1-193.
Dworkin, Ronald. A Matter of Principle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985.
Finnis, John. Natural Law and Natural Rights. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980.
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Leiter, Brian, ed. Objectivity in Law and Morals. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
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MacCormick, Neil. "Natural Law and the Separation of Law and Morals."
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Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

University of Wisconsin Press, Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin

Natural Law and the Problem of Certainty:

"T~ he question of whether law is, by definition, a moral

Contemporary Literature XLIII, 4 0010-7484 / 02/ 0004-0760

contains the moral absolutism that underwrites traditional natural

law theory and suggests dramatic contrasts with legal positivism.

ural law theory is easily discerned in his writings. His philosophi-

to render Henry as a complex and profoundly conflicted charac-

Kreon against Antigone, Henry against More

Yes, because I did not believe

the gods have not written merely, but made infallible.

I was thoroughly aware I would die

Antigone's conflict with Kreon neatly marks the contrast between

Wolsey's moral conscience engraves a vivid memory of the dy-

Wolsey's pangs of conscience notwithstanding, Bolt's presentation

assist Henry in dealing with More's scruples, we have this laconic

Cromwell. Are you sure you're not religious?

Adherence to the Rule of Law (especially ... conformity by officials to

As Bolt's depiction makes clear, however, social control and social

The depiction of Henry himself, not just the disposition of those

ing sway, could alone implicitly define his position, inasmuch as

certainly not over the question of whether divinely sanctioned mo-

Access to Divine Law

Antigone's unproblematic access to divine law matches Henry's.

do so and how. As we have seen, natural law theory is an ontologi-

If "society" is the name we give to human behavior when it is patterned

is a fairly usual literary association, of course. The sea is the land-

in condemning heretics, unwittingly revealed in a 1969 interview,

Henry. You must consider, Thomas, that I stand in peril of my soul. It

More's humility about discerning divine law-in this exchange

are immoral, and that he should therefore be arrested. In a rather

legally binding status-even when, by virtue of their departure

Roper's use of law to enforce his moral convictions often depends

More as a Hero of Selfhood

ing martyr. The consequence is a humanized and endearing por-

ing questions about the natural law convictions at the heart of

self-presumably the sort which More's Christianity supplies-

trality of More's sense of personal integrity, built upon his sense

Norfolk. And a bad one?

There is no self-evident truth here; validation arrives, if it does at

is for which More is willing to die, his status as hero of selfhood

to most legal cases, rests on a theory of morality that nevertheless

failed to "establish connections between the idea of objective truth

problem of certainty remains among the least appreciated chal-

. "Objectivity, Morality, and Adjudication." Leiter 66-98.

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