The Failure of Humanism – Thomas More, and more – When you lose at the spy game, you never admit it
Thu 5:50 pm +00:00, 10 Sep 2026
Source: https://mileswmathis.com/more2.pdf
[My guest writer Pedro Ormazabal hit Thomas More four years ago, but I have some additions now.]I was watching A Man for All Seasons again, since I remember liking it. It is extremely well acted and
produced, but this time I could see something was wrong. I could see right through it. The Jewish
writers and producers were selling Thomas More as a great man when I knew he couldn’t have been
anything like that. Though at least they cast someone extremely Jewish to play him (Paul Scofield,
supposedly not Jewish). That was a partial giveaway, though no one but me ever saw it, I would guess.
So anyway, I got bored with the movie and decided to research More and the period once again. I have
hit Henry VIII and that period many times, but there is a lot to cover and I have barely even begun to
unwind it. I now suspect More’s death was faked like the rest, to get him out of the way. They made
up some gruesome execution to scare everyone, as usual. Almost everything is a bluff in this world.
But that isn’t why I am here today. Beyond his fame for resisting the rise of Protestantism, More is
most famous for his Renaissance Humanism. That is different than Modern Humanism, which has
become much more noxious, but the one led to the other. In researching Renaissance Humanism, I
eventually was taken back to Petrarch in the 1300s, and his famous trip to Mount Ventoux in Provence.
Up until that fateful day Petrarch had been one of the first tourist hikers, loving to climb these lower
peaks of central Europe. But that trip soured him on the experience for some reason. He treated it as
an epiphany, though I would say it was a reverse epiphany, caused by a minor local devil or a bad
lunch.
Petrarch was dazed and stirred by the view of the Alps, the mountains around Lyons, the
Rhone, the Bay of Marseilles. He took Augustine’s Confessions from his pocket and
reflected that his climb was merely an allegory of aspiration toward a better life. As the
book fell open, Petrarch’s eyes were immediately drawn to the following words: “And
men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the
sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the
stars, but themselves they consider not.” Petrarch’s response was to turn from the outer
world of nature to the inner world of “soul”: “I closed the book, angry with myself that I
should still be admiring earthly things who might long ago have learned from even the
pagan philosophers that nothing is wonderful but the soul, which, when great itself, finds
nothing great outside itself. Then, in truth, I was satisfied that I had seen enough of the
mountain; I turned my inward eye upon myself, and from that time not a syllable fell from
my lips until we reached the bottom again. … [W]e look about us for what is to be found
only within. … How many times, think you, did I turn back that day, to glance at the
summit of the mountain which seemed scarcely a cubit high compared with the range of
human contemplation.”
Ah, it was worse than a local devil, it was Augustine. I remind you that Augustine is a Roman name,
so we can tell he was a Phoenician without further research. But in this case, Augustine’s words are
fairly innocuous, Petrarch apparently reading a lot of nonsense into them. Augustine seems to mean
that most men could use a bit more self-reflection along with their admiration of the world, which is
true. So how Petrarch got from that to “there is nothing great outside the human soul” is a mystery.
Though you can indeed see how that one sentence seeded all of history since then, which has become
more and more solipsistic and ridiculous, ending in the present time when we are told in all seriousness
by “scientists and great thinkers” that we create our own reality or are living in a simulation.
But the ideas of Petrarch and More were almost as blasphemous seven and five hundred years ago, so it
is hard to understand how any historian sells them as Christian. Though the blasphemy isn’t just
against a Christian God: the idea is blasphemous to any possible religion or god. Chief Joseph would
have found it just as blasphemous as your average priest. Whatever happened to humility in the face of
God’s works? Can a human create a kitten, much less a mountain? No, we can’t create even an
amoeba. Which means almost everything great is outside ourselves. Yes, we can create some pretty
things on our own level: paintings, poems, buildings, songs, but they do not compare to the world we
live in, which we certainly did not create and which we seem in a rush to destroy.
Yes, our spirit is connected to the great spirit, and we are children of God like anything else, but
humans are not the center of the universe or the measure of all things, much less the arbiters of
anything. We did not create ourselves, and all we do is but a paltry imitation of Nature. Not only can
we not control her, we cannot even begin to understand her, except partially and intuitively.
The tenets of Humanism are so violently anti-Christian and anti-religious we know these famous guys
like Petrarch, Erasmus, and More couldn’t have been real Christians. I have already proved that
generally in previous papers, using genealogies and other means to show you they and all like them
were schismatics inserted into government and the Church by the Phoenicians to undermine both.
Which is another reason I know More wouldn’t have died for his Catholic beliefs. We are supposed to
accept that he went blithely to the executioner’s ax, dropping clever quotes, rather than admit Henry
outranked the Pope, but nothing could be more absurd. More, being a Humanist, couldn’t have cared
two figs for the Pope, and certainly wouldn’t have died for his honor. If More chose the Pope over
Luther or Tyndall up to that point, it wasn’t because he was such a great believer, it was because he was
already fully invested in the Pope. And yes, I mean invested in the pecuniary sense. All his wealth and
position had come up to that time as an actor for the Catholic church, and turning on a dime for Henry
simply couldn’t be done. His financial losses would be too great, not to mention the target that would
then be on his back from agents of Rome (which were still everywhere in that decade). Remember, we
may assume More learned a lesson from Cardinal Wolsey, who had come up against the same dilemma
before him, also probably faking his death. These deaths weren’t faked to hide from the King, who
likely sanctioned the fakes, but to hide from the Pope. The King needed to replace them with agents
like Rich who were not already working for the Pope, but he had no need to kill them. The deaths were
a convenience not for the King, but for Wolsey and More themselves, whose investments could
perhaps be saved by these fake deaths. If the Pope believed they had gone down fighting, he would not
strip their families of all assets, you see. And it apparently worked. It is still working since Rome still
believes the story. The film was made in the 1960s to assure that Rome continued to believe the story,
and it worked. More and Fisher are now saints. Or perhaps Rome knows and is just trying to save
face. When you lose at the spy game, you never admit it.
Remember, in that previous paper from four years ago and in several before it, I suggested More and
Wolsey were agents paid by the King to make sure there was a break with Rome, while making it look
like they were supporting Rome. The Tudors/Stanleys were preparing to steal all ecclesiastical assets
in England—as their cousins had already done in Germany and would do a bit later in France—and the
annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine was just the excuse for breaking with Rome. So what we
really have here is the usual reversal of covert Intel. More and Wolsey were only pretending to support
Rome, while doing everything in their power to undermine it. But they had become very wealthy as
pretend agents of Rome, and it wouldn’t do to have their cover blown at last. So again as usual, they
had to fake their deaths on the way out.
But why would these producers in the 1960s care whether Rome continued to believe a 500-year-old
story? We have seen the same thing, remember, with The Three Musketeers and Spotlight and many
other Hollywood movies, selling similar stories. Rome cannot repossess anything from these families
500 years later. No, but the same families still run the world and they are still squabbling 500 years
later, often along the same lines. Rome is still there causing trouble and the Protestants are still there
causing trouble and the Phoenicians are still there, crouching beneath both, jockeying for position in
these very same families. So they have to continue to salt in these very old lies, whether it is the lies of
Thomas More, the lies of Abraham Lincoln, or the lies of John Kennedy. Their world is built on lies
and so they cannot let them die.
I also remind you that these families ARE still repossessing things from eachother, decades and
sometimes centuries later, and using the media to do it. The most obvious example being artwork
allegedly stolen by the Nazis and then returned decades later. You are supposed to think this has
something to do with owners being Jewish, but if you look closer you find all owners of the art—
before, during, and after—were Jewish. Like Spy v. Spy, but Jew v. Jew. Thief v. Thief. No one has
anything worth stealing except the Jews, so they have to steal from eachother.
But let’s return to Humanism. From More’s example, we can see that Humanism was always just
another covert project to undermine Rome, all the way back to the 1300s. What More and Erasmus
were doing in the 1500s, Petrarch, Boccaccio and many others were doing in the 1300s. While some
like Luther were trying to blow it from the outside, others like More were trying to blow it from the
inside. Why? Not only to steal trillions of dollars of ecclesiastical assets, but also to kill the laws
against usury, which stood in the way of Jewish thieving like nothing else. Those who claim the Jews
were always behind Christianity and the Catholic church have to explain that one. Why would they
ever establish laws against usury in the first place? And why would they write a story where Jesus
overturned the moneychangers tables?
That plays in here, since the laws against usury fell at precisely this time. It was Henry VIII who
passed new laws in 1545 allowing interest on loans. Because it was now legal, interest rates on loans
actually dropped, from about 20% to 10%. This was the selling point to mainstream it, sort of like we
have seen with the legalization of marijuana recently. Once it was standardized, the rates could go
back up, and they did, as you know. But my point was that it is no accident this question of usury was
decided in the 1500s, concurrent with the rise of Humanism and Protestantism. Things were changing
for a reason, and it wasn’t because people were becoming more enlightened, reading more classical
literature, painting better paintings, or writing more poetry, it was because the Phoenix was rising up
from the medieval ashes and the bankers were swarming again. They were infiltrating and buying up
entire governments, and even infiltrating Rome itself (see the Medicis as just one example).
Humanism has that familiar Phariseean or Phoenician stench, and you can almost smell El crouching
behind it.
I find it strange to come down on this side at last, after a lifetime as a painter, poet, and classicist, being
called a Renaissance man (or boy) from my 20s, but that is the fact. Although I remain all those things,
I have less than no use for Humanism and never did. I found it blasphemous from the first moments,
though I admit my reaction was more like that of a Lakota brave than that of a Catholic priest or even
an Amishman. The idea that the soul finds nothing great outside itself is so repulsive it requires no
quoting of scripture to counter it.
This allows us a little diversion. Part of Renaissance Humanism was the return to the old Trivium of
the medieval Carolingian Renaissance (around the time of Charlemagne). This is already odd, because
we are told the Humanists were going back to classical sources to bypass the strictures of medieval
Christianity, but the Trivium wasn’t classical. It was based on the Quadrivium, but that doesn’t make it
classical. Anyway, the Trivium was grammar, logic and rhetoric, with the emphasis on rhetoric—the
art of persuasion. Most people don’t even know what rhetoric is, and maybe you can already see why:
it has been extinct for centuries. Some pretend it still exists as the polemics, that is argument, but as we
are about to see, it has nothing to do with the rhetoric of the Greeks, the Romans, the Aristotelians, or
the Carolingians.
That is because rhetoric was defined as the use of logic, examples, ethics, and style to convince an
audience.
Aristotle also identified three persuasive audience appeals: logos, pathos, and ethos.
The five canons of rhetoric, or phases of developing a persuasive speech, were first
codified in classical Rome: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.
Even if we assume this was ever taken seriously—being more than Tartufferie—logic, ethics, and most
of the rest of that was out the window by Modern times, and by the time of Bernays it was completely
on its head, being the inversion of rhetoric. In other words, the new art of persuasion, propaganda, has
naught in common with rhetoric, being nothing more than stylish lies and other slights of hand/voice.
These masters of the con realized long ago that humans had very little contact with logic, or love for it,
and even less contact with ethics. Neither logic nor ethics impressed anyone. About the only thing the
new style has in common with the old is the use of pathos, except it is now bathos: the manufacturing
and steering of cheap emotions to a desired end. We see that with every new fake tragedy, where the
story leads with balloons and teddy bears and then cuts to prayers for the crying families, before cutting
to their GoFundMe page.
Which is why I laughed so loud when Peter Thiel was recently sold as a great rhetorician. Rhetorics
has been replaced by propaganda in the New World, but Thiel isn’t even a master of propaganda,
lacking all style and only engendering revulsion. Which I guess is why he is now laying low in
Argentina or somewhere. A Phoenician who can’t do propaganda is like a gorilla who can’t do bananas.
