III
How something happened to utopia between Plato and Sir Thomas More; and how utopia was discovered again, along with the New World.
I
There is a span of nearly two thousand years between Plato and Sir Thomas More. During that time, in the Western World at any rate, utopia seems to disappear beyond the horizon. Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus looks back into a mythical past; Cicero’s essay on the state is a negligible work; and St. Augustine’s City of God is chiefly remarkable for a brilliant journalistic attack upon the old order of Rome which reminds one of the contemporary diatribes of Maximilian Harden. Except for these works there is, as far as I can discover, scarcely any other piece of writing which even hints at utopia except as utopia may refer to a dim golden age in the past when all men were virtuous and happy.
But while utopia dropped out of literature, it did not drop out of men’s minds; and the utopia of the first fifteen hundred years after Christ is transplanted to the sky, and called the Kingdom of Heaven. It is distinctly a utopia of escape. The world as men find it is full of sin and trouble. Nothing can be done about it except to repent of the sin and find refuge from the trouble in the life after the grave. So the utopia of Christianity is fixed and settled: one can enter into the Kingdom of Heaven if a passport has been granted, but one can do nothing to create or mold this heaven. Change and struggle and ambition and amelioration belong to the wicked world, and bring no final satisfaction. Happiness lies not in the deed, but in having a secure credit in the final balance of accounts—happiness, in other words, lies in the ultimate compensation. This world of fading empires and dilapidated cities is no home except for the violent and the “worldly.”
If the idea of utopia loses its practical hold during this period, the will-to-utopia remains; and the rise of the monastic system and the attempts of the great popes from Hildebrand onward to establish a universal empire under the shield of the church show that, as always, there was a breach between the ideas which people carried in their heads and the things which actual circumstances and going institutions compelled them to do. There is no need to consider these partial, institutional utopias until we get down to the nineteenth century. What concerns us now is that the Kingdom of Heaven, as a utopia of escape, ceased to hold men’s allegiance when they discovered other channels and other possibilities.
The shift from a heavenly utopia to a worldly one came during that period of change and uneasiness which characterized the decline of the Middle Age. Its first expression is the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, the great chancellor who served under Henry VIII.
II
In the introduction to More’s Utopia one gets a vivid impression of the forces that were stirring men’s minds out of the sluggish routine into which they had settled. The man who is supposed to describe the commonwealth of Utopia is a Portuguese scholar, learned in Greek. He has left his family possessions with his kinsmen and has gone adventuring for other continents with Americus Vesputius. This Raphael Hythloday is the sort of sunburnt sailor one could probably have encountered in Bristol or Cadiz or Antwerp almost any day during the late part of the fifteenth century. He has abandoned Aristotle, whom the schoolmen had butchered and had made pemmican of, and through his conquest of Greek he has come into possession of that new learning which stems back to Plato; and his brain is teeming with the criticisms and suggestions of a strange, pagan philosophy. Moreover, he has been abroad to the Americas or the Indies, and he is ready to tell all who will listen of a strange land on the other side of the world, where, as Sterne said of France, “they do things better.” No institution is too fantastic but that it might exist—on the other side of the world. No way of life is too reasonable but that a philosophical population might follow it—on the other side of the world. Conceive of the world of ideas which Greek literature had just opened up coming headlong against the new lands which the magnetic compass had given men the courage to explore, and utopia, as a fresh conception of the good life, becomes a throbbing possibility.
III
In setting out for Utopia Sir Thomas More left behind a scene which in its political violence and economic maladjustment looks queerly like our own. Indeed, there are a good many passages which need only have a few names altered and the language itself cast into modern English in order to serve as editorial comment for a radical weekly review.
Consider this man Raphael Hythloday, this errant member of the intelligentsia. Life as he knows it in the Europe of his day no longer has a hold upon him. The rich are fattening upon the poor; land is being gathered into big parcels, at least in England; and turned over into sheep runs. The people who used to cultivate the land are compelled to leave their few acres and are thrown on their own resources. Soldiers who have returned from the wars can find nothing
