The Life of Thomas More

by Ackroyd, Peter

  It begins in Antwerp itself, outside the cathedral church of Notre Dame where Thomas More has just attended Mass. In the square outside he sees Peter Gillis talking to a sunburnt stranger with a long beard, dressed in a cloak which hangs casually from his shoulders. Gillis introduces him to More as Raphael Hythlodaeus, a Portuguese traveller who has journeyed with Amerigo Vespucci and who has visited many regions of the earth. More promptly invites him to his house where, on a turf-covered bench, Hythlodaeus converses with him on the many unknown countries which exist ‘sub aequatoris linea’.14 And then, on this morning of late summer or early autumn, he tells More of the Utopians. He has lived among them for more than five years and is eager to extol their institutions, which are established upon the common ownership of all property and goods.15 He invokes Plato’s imaginary commonwealth as an apt analogy, and More asks him to give a full account of Utopian laws and customs.

  After dinner, Raphael Hythlodaeus begins to describe Utopia itself. Here was the first marvel: the dimensions of this island are the same as those of England and the number of its city-states equals the number of English counties together with London. It is also approximately the same distance from the equator as England. Its principal city, Amaurotum, is itself like some reversed image of London; it has the same expanse as the city (if you include the urban areas beyond the city walls) and is situated below gentle hills from which a river flows as does the river Fleet. The principal river, however, runs through the city; it has its own tides and is the same distance from the sea as the Thames at London. This river is also spanned by one magnificent stone bridge, while Amaurotum itself is protected by great walls. It is London redrawn by visionary imagination, a pristine city in which, according to Hythlodaeus, there is no greed or pride or disorder—these vices have been altogether banished from the commonwealth of Utopia. The streets and houses of the city are laid out in uniform geometrical pattern, with pleasant houses and gardens which are exchanged between the citizens every ten years; members of the commonwealth learn the craft to which they are most suited, and all wear the same clothes of undyed wool with distinctions only for sex or marital status. Six hours of the day are devoted to work, while the rest of the time is spent in learning or healthful recreation. Meals are eaten in communal dining-halls, with the supervisor of each hall taking free food from the common stock of a central market. The Utopians do not value gold or silver, but use them to manufacture fetters and chamber pots. They have a population of slaves, generally comprising criminals or prisoners of war, which is treated with paternal rather than tyrannical severity. And so Hythlodaeus continues to amplify this catalogue of benevolence.

  Much ingenuity and scholarship have been employed to trace the literary sources of this fabulous island of equality and happiness; among them may be mentioned Macrobius, Aristotle, Seneca, Lucian and Cicero. There is room for the Bible, too, with especial reference to Acts of the Apostles, where ‘they had all things common’.16 But since Plato is mentioned seven times within the treatise, and four times in its accompanying letters, it seems plausible that The Republic also furnished a model for More’s own commonwealth. At the conclusion of Plato’s ninth book, Socrates describes his ideal society as perhaps only a ‘paradeigma’17 residing in heaven; Utopia is an attempt to bring it down to earth. Of course there are many dissimilarities between the two books and the states which they describe. More’s work is less profound, more hastily written and altogether less satisfying than Plato’s great discourse; nor does More address those philosophical questions on the nature of happiness or the principles of harmony that are at the centre of the earlier work. Yet clearly More has taken certain aspects of The Republic—in particular the obligation upon the ‘guardians’ to share everything in common and to own no private property—and proceeded to examine how they might work in practice. Plato insisted that only a philosopher can properly administer his republic, and at the beginning of Utopia More refers to the founder of the state—Utopus—who trained his people to the highest level of ‘cultus’ and ‘humanitas’.18 The conditions, then, are similar to the point where some resemblance is manifestly being suggested.

  And so More devises a republic like that of Plato. In The City of God Plato is extolled as the greatest of pagan philosophers, who can be seen to anticipate Christianity and Christian revelation. But Plato was never vouchsafed that revelation, at least according to Augustine, and his insights were achieved through ‘natural reason’.19 This is also the condition of the Utopians, who throughout their history of 1760 years have been denied the truths of divine law. That is why they encourage euthanasia, condone divorce and harbour a multiplicity of religious beliefs—all of which actions were considered dreadful by More himself and by Catholic Europe. This may be no ideal commonwealth, after all, but a model of natural law and natural reason taken to their unnatural extreme.

  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 travels22 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.