This biography seeks to examine Thomas and his actions in the context of his faith, a faith that was deepened through a gradual transformation that took place following his appointment as archbishop. Two keys help us to understand how this transformation took place: the simple piety his mother taught him as a child, and a sense of duty that at first served his ambition and allowed him progress through work well done, but later led him to serve another and greater Master. That progress from self-ambition to an ambition to serve God, marked by the four sections of this biography, was gradual. It is a spiritual drama in which, over time, and through various struggles, one master gave way to another, as Thomas increasingly died to self, as Jesus urges us in the Gospel. Some have considered Thomas an enigma — and he may have been one, even to himself, but not to heaven. Something about his life, his final struggle, and his death won favor with God. We know this because — to the astonishment of king, courtiers, Church officials, and even his friends — miracles abounded from the moment of his martyrdom. What did God see in this man? What did he make of his stubborn stand against his king? What was the meaning of his death? Without doubt, the answers to these questions can be seen in the fact that God made him a saint, as the miracles testify; the Church, in humble obedience, would confirm this even as her clergy scratched their heads, mystified. Thomas’s glorification was a sign that God approved of his struggle, both his personal struggle and that with the king; and that his death was a true martyrdom
As the battle between Church and state resumed and rolled on in the years to come, Thomas’s sainthood would certainly prove useful. But what of his life? Thomas’s friends and enemies, scholars, and theologians would spend centuries poring over every deed, every word spoken or written, and every event to discover what made him acceptable to God. Was it simply his death? Was Thomas a victim or a martyr? Does God raise up victims, or was Thomas indeed one of the Church’s great heroes whose relevance extends well beyond their time and personal situation?
In A Short History of England, G. K. Chesterton describes Thomas as “a great visionary and a great revolutionist.”5 The saints have relevance for every age, and though some ages may forget certain saints, other ages realize how poor they are without them and turn once again to these heroes of the faith to intercede for us and to help us make sense of the Gospel in the age in which we live. Thomas is more relevant now than ever as secularism leans over faith and seeks to destroy it. Chesterton suggests that Thomas was an impractical man living in a practical age and that his impracticality came from the Gospel, where mercy and pardon outweigh the burden of justice.6 In Chesterton’s eyes, the dispute was between the state, which could only work with the machinery of punishment, and Thomas’s Catholic Church, which worked with the machinery of pardon. This is certainly one way of looking at the dispute — as a case of two visions clashing as much as two individuals fighting on a deeply personal level. But it was more than that.
Both Thomas and his nemesis, King Henry II, were baptized Christians; both claimed to be Catholics and faithful sons of the Church, and yet the quarrel between them concerned the Church, its way of life, its relationship with its members, and its relationship with a state that also claimed to be Christian. How was a dispute possible? In Thomas’s life and experience, we see how it was possible and indeed necessary. The Christian Thomas clashed with the Christian Henry because Thomas finally understood what the Gospel was all about and what it meant to be a Christian, a disciple of Christ. In wisely calling him a visionary and a revolutionist, Chesterton points to the radical nature of Christian discipleship. Speaking of Thomas as impractical, Chesterton is saying that the kingdom the Christian disciple must inhabit is not of this world. The values of this kingdom are utterly impractical in the eyes of the world — they are otherworldly — and that is why they are the only values that will work here to create a more just and human society. These values raise the mind, heart, and soul of a person to God, the Creator. Thomas understood this as a canonist, but he grew to understand it even more as a Christian and most radically as a priest. In analyzing the conflict with Henry, one must never forget that Thomas was a priest, because becoming a priest changed everything for him.
One aspect of Thomas’s life that has fascinated historians and writers alike is the nature of his friendship with Henry. For many, the story of Thomas and the king is a story of two men in conflict. There is no doubt that the dispute between the two was aggravated by an intensely personal dimension, and it may have been the cause of the dispute, as Henry expected Thomas to conform to his will for the sake of their friendship as much as for the sake of his being a subject. One author in the twentieth century, the playwright Jean Anouilh, reflected on this in particular. His play Becket,7 the basis of the 1964 movie of the same name,8 explores the exterior conflict between archbishop and king. However, both play and movie are flawed because Anouilh’s work is historically inaccurate. For one, he thinks the issue of the dispute was not only personal in terms of a broken friendship but also a clash between the Anglo-Saxons, which he believed Thomas to be, and the Normans, represented by Henry.9 When later informed that Thomas was a Norman, Anouilh did not correct his error but left the play as it was; and though he acknowledged that it contained historical inaccuracies, he was quoted as saying that history might eventually “rediscover” that Thomas was a Saxon after all.10 Another inaccuracy leads to Anouilh’s ultimate failure to understand Thomas: Despite the piety and strength he portrays in his protagonist, he does not delve deeper and sees only a man in conflict with another man, the destruction of a close friendship. Without question that did happen, but there was a lot more going on. There is always the danger of concentrating only on the external and superficial when trying to understand Thomas — a complex man who, with every passing year, was delving more deeply into profound mysteries, sometimes despite himself.
Another notable work of the twentieth century is the poet T. S. Eliot’s drama Murder in the Cathedral, written for the Canterbury Festival in 1935.11 This work delves much deeper than does Anouilh’s. This is a spiritual drama in which Eliot tries to understand Thomas’s inner conflict as he faces martyrdom. The theme of the play is pride and the character of the archbishop as he struggles with temptations to pride, first in fleeing martyrdom but then in succumbing for the wrong reason. Eliot sums up this tension in these famous lines: “The last temptation is the greatest treason: / To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”12 Eliot also offers his version of Thomas’s Christmas Day sermon and allows the four knights time at the end of the play to explain why they killed the archbishop. They at first appeal to the audience’s sense of honor to hear their side of the story, but end by ordering the audience to disperse quietly to their homes and do nothing that might provoke any public outbreak.13
Eliot is correct to reflect on Thomas’s inner conflict. When Thomas became archbishop, he had to die to self. The simple piety that had sustained him until then was no longer enough. Sterner stuff was required now, and that was radical holiness. As he returned to England in December 1170 after six years of exile to face what he knew was coming — martyrdom — he may have remembered Saint Paul’s words that it is not easy to die, not even for a good man (see Rom 5:7). Yet he, Thomas of London, made archbishop of Canterbury, would have to face such a fate. As he crossed the water from exile to martyrdom, he may have mused on his life,