THE UNIVERSITRY OF LATVIA
Faculty of Foreign Languages
Thomas More
“Utopia”
Open University
5 course
Contents
Introduction
“Utopia”
The Second Book
Conclusion
Bibliography
Introduction
The “dark” Middle Ages were followed by a time known in art and
literature as the Renaissance. The word “renaissance” means “rebirth” in
French and was used to denote a phase in the cultural development of
Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries.
Thomas More, the first English humanist of the Renaissance, was born in
London in 1478. Thomas More wrote in English and in Latin. The
humanists of al1 European countries communicated in the Latin language,
and their best works were written in Latin.
His style is simple, colloquial end has an unaffected ease. The work by
which he is best remembered today is “Utopia” which was written in Latin
in the year 1516. It has now been translated into all European
languages.
“Utopia” (which in Greek means “nowhere”) is the name of a non-existent
island. This work is divided into two books.
In the first, the author gives a profound and truthful picture of the
people’s sufferings and points out the socia1 evils existing, in England
at the time. In the second book more presents his ideal of what the
future society should be like.
“The word “utopia” has become a byword and is used in Modern English to
denote an unattainable ideal, usually in social and political matters.
But the writer H.G. Wells, who wrote an introduction to the latest
edition, said that the use of the word “utopia” was far from More’s
essentia1 quality, whose mind abounded in sound, practical ideas. The
book is in reality a very unimaginative work.” (Harry Levin, “The Myth
of the Golden Age in the Renaissance.” 1969.)
Thomas More’s “Utopia” was the first literary work in which the ideas of
Communism appeared. It was highly esteemed by all the humanists of
Europe in More’s time and again grew very popular with the socialists of
the 19th century. After More, a tendency began in literature to write
fantastic novels on social reforms, and many such works appeared in
various countries.
“Utopia”
The historical Thomas More, the author of Utopia, was an extraordinarily
complicated man who tied up all the threads of his life in his heroic
death. The real man is to me much more interesting than the plastic
creation adored by his most fervent admirers. The Utopia is the sort of
complicated book that we should expect from so complicated a man.
It is heavy with irony. Irony is the recognition of the distance between
what we say and what we mean. But then irony was the experience of life
in the Sixteenth Century – reason enough for Shakespeare to make it
perhaps his most important trope while the century was drawing to a
close. Everywhere in church, government, society, and even scholarship
profession and practice stood separated by an abyss.
In Utopia three characters converse and reports of other conversations
enter the story. Thomas More appears as himself. Raphael Hythlodaeus or
Raphael Nonsenso, as Paul Turner calls him in his splendid translation
is the fictional traveler to exotic worlds. More’s young friend of
Antwerp Peter Gillis adds an occasional word.
Yet the Thomas More of Utopia is a character in a fiction. He cannot be
completely identified with Thomas More the writer who wrote all the
lines. Raphael Hythlodaeus’s name means something like “Angel” or
“messenger of Nonsense.” He has traveled to the commonwealth of Utopia
with Amerigo Vespucci, seemingly the first voyager to realize that the
world discovered by Columbus was indeed a new world and not an appendage
of India or China.
Raphael has not only been to Utopia; he has journeyed to other strange
places, and found almost all of them better than Europe. He is bursting
with the enthusiasm of his superior experiences.
But how seriously are we to take him? The question has been much
debated. The Thomas More in the story objects cautiously and politely to
Raphael’s enthusiasms.
Anyway, the main point about renaissance dialogues and declamations such
as Utopia is that their meaning depends on how we hear them. How we hear
them depends on what we bring to them.
“More was one of the most thorough and consistent thinkers in the
Sixteenth Century. He argued everything like the splendid lawyer he was.
I believe that when we read Utopia dialectically, through his other
works, we may penetrate to some degree the ironic screen that he has
thrown over the work. Even so, complete certainty about his meaning
sometimes eludes us.” (Harry Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the
Renaissance, New York, Oxford University Press, 1969.)
The Second Book
The second “book” or chapter in More’s work – the description of the
island commonwealth somewhere in the New World. I shall leave aside the
fascinating first book, which is a real dialogue–indeed an argument
between the traveler Raphael Nonsenso and the skeptical Thomas More. I
shall rather discuss the second book, Nonsenso’s description of this
orderly commonwealth based on reason as defined by the law of nature.
Since the Utopians live according to the law of nature, they are not
Christian. Indeed they practice a form of religious toleration – as they
must is they are to be both reasonable and willing to accept
Christianity when it is announced to them.
What is the Utopian commonwealth? What does the little book mean?
“As opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival
celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the
established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank,
privileges, norms, and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of
time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all
that was immortalized and completed.” (Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His
World, Indiana University Press, 1984.)
Utopia provides a second life of the people above and beyond the
official life of the “real” states of the Sixteenth Century. Its author
took the radical liberty to dispense with the entire social order based
on private property, as Plato had done for the philosopher elite in his
Republic.
“But at the same time, More took the liberty to suppose a commonwealth
built on the pessimism about human nature propounded by St. Augustine,
More’s most cherished author. Augustine believed that secular government
was ordained by God to restrain fallen humankind from hurtling creation
into chaos. Without secular authority to enforce peace, sinful human
beings would topple into perpetual violence; so the state exists to keep
order.” (Mikhail Bakhtin)
A major source of violence among fallen human beings is cupidity, a form
of lust. Sinful human beings have an insatiable desire for things. For
Augustine there was no end to it.
So if we look at Utopia with More’s Augustinian eye, we see a witty play
on how life might develop in a state that tried to balance these two
impulses–human depravity and a communist system aimed at checking the
destructive individualism of corrupt human nature. It is carnival, a
festival, not a plan for reform. When the carnival is over, and we come
to the end of the book, reality reasserts itself with a crash. More did
not see in Utopia a plan of revolutionary reform to be enacted in
Christian Europe. Remember the subtitle
The six-hour working day in Utopia also represents an eternal check
against the tendency of an acquisitive society to turn human beings into
beasts of burden to be worked as if they had no claim over themselves.
Set over against the misery of peasants depicted in the vision of Piers
the Plowman or against the child labor of early industrial America or
the sweatshops of modern Asia, the Utopian limitation on labor is a way
of saying that life is an end in itself and not merely an instrument to
be used for someone else.
It is perhaps also a rebuke to those of us for whom work and life come
to be identical so that to pile up wealth or reputation makes us neglect
spouses, children, friends, community, and that secret part of ourselves
nourished by the willingness to take time to measure our souls by
something other than what we produce.
The sanitation of the Utopian cities is exemplary. The Utopians value
cleanliness and they believe that the sick should be cared for by the
state. The Utopians care for children. Education is open to all. They
like music, and in an age that stank in Europe, the Utopians like nice
smells. To average English people of the Sixteenth Century – living in
squalor and misery.
But to middle-class people like ourselves, our messy and fragmented
society looks good in comparison to Utopia. Here More’s Augustinian
conception of sinful humankind becomes burdensome to the soul, for in
the Utopian commonwealth, individualism and privacy are threats to the
state. I suspect that we see as clearly as anywhere in Utopia just why
communism did not work. The weight of human depravity was simply too
much to be balanced by eliminating private property. Yet it is worth
saying that More did not ignore that depravity. Utopia is full of it.
“No locks bar Utopian doors–which open at a touch.” (Thomas More,
Utopia, tr. Paul Turner, London, Penguin, 1965, p. 73) The only reason
the Utopians can imagine for privacy is to protect property; there being
no private property, anybody can walk into your house at any time to see
what you’re doing. Conformity is king. All the cities and all the houses
in the cities look pretty much alike. Of the towns Raphael says, “When
you’ve seen one of them, you’ve seen them all.” (Thomas More, Utopia,
tr. Paul Turner, London, Penguin, 1965, p.71)
The Utopians change houses by lot every ten years just so they won’t get
too attached to any endearing little idiosyncrasies in a dwelling. The
Utopian towns are as nearly square as the landscape will allow; that
means they are built on a grid. I can imagine nothing more similar to
Utopian cities in our own day than the sprawling developments outside
our great cities where every house looks like every other house and
where even the people and the dogs in one household bear a startling
resemblance to all the other people and all the other dogs in the
neighbourhood.
I think in fact that Utopian women have a somewhat better time of it. A
small number of Utopians are allowed to spend their lives in study,
freed from the obligation to manual labour that is imposed on everyone
else. Women are among this privileged group. Divorce is permitted if
husbands and wives prove completely incompatible and if the case is
investigated by the authorities. But a husband is forbidden to divorce
his wife merely because she has become ugly. In Utopia no old rich men
throw out the old wife and take a new young trophy wife in exchange. The
same harsh penalties for adultery apply to both sexes. Husbands chastise
their wives for offences. HYPERLINK
“http://www.shu.ac.uk/emls/iemls/conf/texts/marius.html” \l “30#30”
But erring husbands are punished by their superiors in the hierarchy of
men.
Utopia is a male-dominated society. Women have no political authority;
that authority is all placed in the hands of fathers. It is hard to
escape the suspicion that sexuality is stringently limited as part of a
general belief that passion of any kind is dangerous to the superior
rationality that only men can possess.
Conclusion
Let me close by making a point that I implied above. Utopia is thus not
a program for our society. It is not a blueprint but a touchstone
against which we try various ideas about both our times and the book to
see what then comes of it all. It helps us see what we are without
telling us in detail what we are destined to be. Utopia becomes part of
a chain, crossing and uncrossing with past and present in the unending
debate about human nature and the best possible society possible to the
kind of beings we are. Utopia becomes in every age a rather sober
carnival to make us smile and grimace and lift ourselves out of the
prosaic and the real, to give ourselves a second life where we can
imagine the liberty to make everything all over again, to create society
anew as the wise Utopus himself did long before in Utopia. His wisdom is
not ours. But it summons us to have our own wisdom and to use it as best
we can to judge what is wrong in our society in the hope that our
judgment will make us do some things right, even if we cannot make all
things new this side of paradise.
Bibliography
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, tr. Helene Iswolsky,
Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984.
Harry Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance, New York,
Oxford University Press, 1969.
More, Thomas. Utopia. Trans. Paul Turner. New York: Penguin Books, 1965.
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