The Life of Thomas More (34 page)

More was joining an argument which for many years had been conducted by schoolmen and rhetoricians, but was now of greater import to the Northern humanists with whom he was acquainted. The debate between reason and revelation had particular civic and juridical consequences, after all, since it affected the very nature of society. Was the state a product of revelation, and therefore of law descending from God and king, or was it the result of natural agreement and association between human beings? In the latter case power ascended from the citizens to their government.
Utopia
provides a paradigm for this, too, with an electoral process which begins with the suffrage of individual families.
Utopia
was not some isolated exercise in fantasy, but a spirited and elegant contribution to a European discussion; that is why More composed it in Latin and why it was eventually published by printers in France and the Netherlands.

Yet the ramifications, for More, were religious rather than social. When the Utopians curiously maintain that there were cities in their world before men appeared in Christendom, it might be taken as an argument for urban democracy on the model of the Greek
polis
; but, for More, it is evidence that the Utopians have no notion of the origin of humankind and therefore no knowledge of original sin. They have no sense of an imperfect world, or of human corruptibility; in that respect, as far as More is concerned, the joke is on them.
Utopia
has
often been treated as a sympathetic piece of narration which does indeed exemplify More’s ideal commonwealth—and that, in particular, he supported what has become known as the ‘communism’ of the Utopians. But, as he himself put it, you can cogently make a case for that which is ‘false and impossyble’: ‘For be the thynge neuer so false and impossyble to, yet may it be putte and admytted, to consyder therby what wold folow or not folow theruppon.’
²⁰
What we may expect to find in this treatise, therefore, is a subtle rhetorical and dramatic performance. The extent to which it has confused critics and commentators is an indication of the extent to which they have forgotten the rules of demonstrative oratory.

In an oratorical exercise of this kind, where a case is being made, it was customary for formal arguments to be advanced on the opposite side. Raphael Hythlodaeus seems, however, to have been given the opportunity to extol the virtue of the Utopians without any challenge. But herein lies the achievement of
Utopia
—an achievement that has a great deal to do with More’s command of rhetoric but also, as in all works of art, with the forces of More’s own temperament and personality.
Utopia
is an ambivalent and ambiguous work in which various absurdities, for example, are paraded in the most apparently innocent and unsatirical manner. But it also harbours various contradictions which render the account of Hythlodaeus very suspect indeed. The counter-argument, the case against
Utopia
in effect, is internalised within the narrative itself.

Consider the role and status of Raphael Hythlodaeus, this sunburnt voyager from another land. Raphael is the name of the guiding angel in the Book of Tobit, but Hythlodaeus, derived from the Greek, means one who is cunning in nonsense or idle gossip. His connection with the journeys of Amerigo Vespucci has always been taken as the token of a real traveller; by the time
Utopia
was being composed, however, the voyages of Vespucci to the New World were dismissed as fabrication or as mendacious attempts to acquire glory. It is now generally accepted that the
Mundus Novus
and
Four Voyages
of Vespucci were indeed forgeries, but that the Portuguese pilot had nothing to do with them;
²¹
in the first and second decades of the sixteenth century, however, the manifold inconsistencies and incoherencies in Vespucci’s supposed account led most people to suppose that he was a boastful liar. (Ralph
Waldo Emerson, some centuries later, described him as ‘a thief’ and a ‘pickle dealer’ who had managed to ‘baptise half of the earth with his own dishonest name’.) So for Hythlodaeus to be described as the constant companion on his travels
²²
was in no sense a compliment. It might even imply that the island of Utopia was his own invention; it is, perhaps, significant that in those spurious accounts of the New World by ‘Vespucci’ it is revealed that the natives have no concept of private property. One of the marginal annotations, composed by Peter Gillis (or perhaps Erasmus), even addresses Hythlodaeus as ‘O
artificem’
(‘You artful man’)
²³
when he claims once more that he has witnessed all the things which he describes. More distrusted pure or abstract philosophising and yet
Utopia
is an island governed entirely by theoretical principles. Hythlodaeus claims to have located a Platonic society in the real world but, with his elaborate and perhaps crazed monologue, he himself is turned into a caricature of the philosopher. With his long beard, and face burned by the sun, he might almost have provided a model for Coleridge’s ancient mariner, who has ‘strange power of speech’ and who is mistaken for the ‘Devil’.
²⁴

It is hard to believe that Hythlodaeus ever saw the island upon which he reports in such detail. The dimensions which he gives it form an impossible shape and there are problems of size as well as distance. Utopia itself means literally ‘no-place’; the principal river, Anydros, is again literally ‘river without water’; the name of the city of Amaurotum is derived from the Greek for dark or dimly seen; the governor of the island is called Ademus, or one who has no people. Kierkegaard remarked of Socratic irony that it cannot fashion a picture of the absolute except as a form of nothingness; the same consideration applies here. There are also more practical contradictions. The Utopians are praised as a peaceful race but they engage in savage warfare; they are said to despise gold and silver, yet they hoard it to pay others. One of More’s favourite grammatical manoeuvres in
Utopia
is that of litotes when (to quote from the
Oxford English Dictionary
) ‘an affirmative is expressed by the negative of the contrary’; it is not inconceivable that such a device contributes to the spell of ambivalence and confusion which the entire narrative seems to cast. Many of the Utopian customs extolled by Hythlodaeus are impractical; no doubt following Plato’s suggestion in
The Republic
that both men and women should be recruited as combatants
on the battlefield, for example, Hythlodaeus describes how in Utopian warfare each citizen-soldier is accompanied by his entire family and blood relations. No greater opportunity for confusion and mass slaughter can be conceived. Even the map of Utopia, which acts as the book’s frontispiece, is woefully inconsistent with the succeeding narrative; Hythlodaeus insisted that the buildings were all alike, where the map shows a variety of majestic edifices not unlike those depicted by Van Eyck. The prefatory material to this treatise, complete with letters of commendation and celebratory verses, is an elaborate parody of the learned volumes of the late fifteenth century; even More’s Latin narrative, with its divisions and subdivisions, has been characterised as a satire upon scholastic prose.

One further ambiguity must be mentioned here. More’s subsequent works, which were generally polemical in intent, also display signs of highly formalised constraint and an almost scholastic sense of method. His own life of discipline, and his devotion to the Catholic Church, suggest that he was naturally inclined to the imposed order of authority. That is why
Utopia
, despite More’s own ironic negations and reservations, remains a powerful vision of existence; it radiates from the centre of More’s being and there are aspects of Utopian worship and custom, for example, which are strongly evocative of his own experience in the Charterhouse. In his dream of being appointed king of Utopia, as he told Erasmus, he was arrayed in the habit of a Franciscan. There is perhaps even some intimation that he would like to be subjugated and controlled within such a state. It is significant that both the treatment of the sick and the slaughtering of animals are described as taking place beyond the city walls: all forms of threatening disorder and decay have to be expelled from the ordered centre.

This may, at least in part, explain why
Utopia
has frequently been interpreted as a serious attempt to construct an ideal republic; no wonder John Ruskin described it as ‘perhaps the most really mischievous book ever written’.
²⁵
Certainly it is one of the most elaborate and successful exercises in satire ever to have been composed and it confirms More’s contemporary reputation as a master of humour. That humour was inevitably also directed against his own day, and in
Utopia
he takes advantage of the freedom of fable to mock some of the abuses and follies which he saw around him. In particular he berates the current
practices of diplomacy and treaty-making, at the precise time when he himself was involved in just such activities. He also rids Utopia of lawyers, with a marginal annotation from Gillis that they are all ‘useless’.
²⁶

The central fact is clear. It is very difficult in
Utopia
to gauge or determine More’s own opinion upon any particular matter. Irony was the most powerful and complicated literary tone in a society where formal appearances were becoming less and less appropriate to the actual realities of power, and where traditional beliefs and authoritative customs were beginning to decay. It is the tone of Erasmus, and of Rabelais, as the cultures of the Middle Ages were gradually being displaced. It may also help to account for the popularity of dialogues in the period, where ambiguity can be sustained indefinitely. More himself remained a master of ambivalence; his written texts seem to offer both public and private meanings and study of his style demonstrates how he establishes parallels and contrasts while simultaneously trying to resolve thematic oppositions. He will often jot down two alternative phrases to express the same meaning, and moves from legal nicety to rhetorical amplification. Cresacre More has reported how he would make a quick or funny remark while remaining apparently serious, and how he ‘spoke alwaies so sadly that few could see by his looke whether he spoke in earnest or in jeaste’.
²⁷
This is the author of
Utopia.

More completed the second book, the description of ‘no-place’, while still in the Low Countries and then on his return, according to Erasmus, worked on a section of preparatory dialogue
‘ex tempore’
²⁸
in odd moments of leisure. It shows signs of being hastily written and was conceived and composed at a time when More was indirectly involved in great changes within the affairs of state. Thomas Wolsey was rising to pre-eminence in the months
Utopia
was being finished, and by the time it was completed he had attained a position of settled superiority. It might even be said that Wolsey helped to inspire the first book of
Utopia
, concerned as it is with the condition of England, and there are indications that More originally intended to dedicate the work to him.

More introduces himself as a character within this first section, which is couched as a debate or argument between himself and Hythlodaeus; and, since it takes the form of a dialogue, he is able to make specific points without necessarily affirming any opinion of his own. The cloak of invisibility was useful at the time, since in this introduction to an
ideal commonwealth he dramatises the objections of Raphael Hythlodaeus to the current state of English life. In particular Hythlodaeus objects to the penalty of death meted out to convicted thieves, when some form of restitution or public service would be preferable as a punishment, and launches a wholesale attack upon the policy of land enclosure for the rearing of sheep, which had led to the removal of fields for cultivation, the destruction of houses and the eviction of tenants. The central point here is that Wolsey was known to More as a reforming chancellor—and that More had every reason to suppose that Wolsey was about to act upon the problem of enclosure. The arguments of
Utopia
, then, might easily find a willing and receptive audience. More also includes an encomium upon the sagacity and statesmanship of his old patron John Morton, one of Wolsey’s predecessors as an ecclesiastical dignitary and Lord Chancellor, which might plausibly be seen as another sign of tacit approval or even flattery. By attacking foreign monarchs for their policy of war and previous monarchs for their habits of taxation, More is also able (through the voice of Hythlodaeus) to suggest the standards of polity which the new king of England might reasonably adopt.

So there are two distinct, and distinctive, narratives within the same book; one remains practical and conversational, while the other is wholly abstract and theoretical. We may again call upon More’s knowledge of Plato, and his commentators, to elucidate this Janus-like form. There seems little doubt that he had read that philosopher’s
Parmenides
as well as his
Republic
if only because it uncannily anticipates the method of
Utopia
itself. Plato composed the first section of his now lesser-known dialogue in the manner of a debate between Socrates and Parmenides; there then follows a second section, in which Parmenides launches into a long theoretical argument which seems to be riddled with incoherence and inconsistency.

The two great interpreters of the
Parmenides
were Marsilio Ficino, whom Colet reverenced, and Pico della Mirandola, whose biography More had translated. Ficino celebrated
Parmenides
as a holy work, to be approached with devotion; Pico della Mirandola, however, considered it to be a theoretical exercise in dialectics where the dangers of unintelligibility are continually emphasised. It was ‘a treatise in logic’ rather than a philosophical hymn.
²⁹
As a late twentieth-century commentator
has put it,
Parmenides
is filled with deliberate mistakes and ‘multiple contradictions’; the challenge for the reader is ‘not simply to notice errors but to diagnose them’.
³⁰
This is precisely the challenge which More established in
Utopia.