Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

[Steve Petrica <steve.petrica AT gmail.com>]

On Sat, May 2, 2015 at 12:37 PM, Lauren Stacy Berdy <lauren.stacy.berdy AT gmail.com> wrote:

Now  Dr. Tom More narrating "Love in the Ruins" says these days of "Christ forgetting, Christ haunted death dealing western world".No new Jerusalem etc
Is Percy's Tom More a cynical version of  Sir Thomas More?   Dr More was a diagnostician he wanted to diagnose and heal. ( the deep abscesses in our souls) with the lapsometer. I cant see that part of Sir Thomas More..........as I have read and watch. What do they have in common? other than their name and why did Percy name him Dr Tom More?

You should be a bit more skeptical about Hilary Mantel's depictions of More and Cromwell. She had an often and explicitly expressed hatred of the Catholic Church, which is on full display in Wolf Hall. 

But I have an entirely different theory about Tom More's name. I suspect that Percy's homage is to the Rev. Thomas Verner Moore, O.Cart, M.D., PhD (1877-1969). Moore was a psychiatrist and a psychologist; a priest and a Benedictine-turned-Carthusian monk; chairman of the Dept of Psychology at Catholic University for many years; and a well known author on religion and psychology in the 1940s and 50s. I have not turned up any evidence that Percy knew of Moore, but I think it's entirely plausible that he did.

Steve Petrica