Abstract: This essay covers More's understanding of the optimal moral qualities of those in Holy Orders up to his polemical career in defence first of his monarch and later, more directly, in defence of his church. Using his biography, letters and publications up to and including Utopia , it tracks More's early and conventional criticisms of clerical overreach (e.g. his 'Merry Jest') through his more cogent presentation of a possible ideal piety open to laymen in his Life of Pico . In this seminal work More provides a basis for evaluating the piety of those in Orders, written while he lived among the Carthusians, whom he thought most ably embodied true Christian charism. Themes of worldliness, contemptus mundi and ambition swirl through these early works, catching up clergy and laity alike. Finally, in his Utopia , he offers a vision of a clergy, both 'secular' and 'regular', shorn of Christian revelation, who nonetheless align impressively with true Christian charism in marked contrast to the clergy Europe knew all too well. It was the last time More exposed the clergy as a group to his humanist sarcasm: once the Lutheran challenge was laid out in full, More rallied to the defence of doctrine rather than the correction of its practitioners.
Seymour Baker House (Mon,) studied this question.