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More's Utopia and The City of God

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2019

Martin N. Raitiere
Martin N. Raitiere*
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Columbia University
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Extract

Homas More ‘read for a good space a public lecture of St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, in the Church of St. Lawrence in the Old Jewry’ shortly after his appointment about 1501 as Utter Barrister in Lincoln's Inn. Stapleton tells us that More's lectures did not treat The City of God ‘from the theological point of view, but from the standpoint of history and philosophy’; but Stapleton is relatively late (1588), and it is unclear whether he was rather inferring from More's situation as a layman and a common lawyer than speaking out of any real knowledge of the content of More's lectures. The lectures are not extant, but Stapleton's report together with the humanists’ anti-intellectualistic bias helps to shape conjecture on their character; Chambers thought they ‘may have embodied some of the criticism of social evils which More later put into Utopia’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in the Renaissance , Volume 20 , 1973 , pp. 144 - 168
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 01

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References

1 William Roper, The Lyfe of Sir Thomas Moore, ed. E. V. Hitchcock (London: Published for the Early English Text Society by H. Milford, Oxford Univ. Press, 1935 [for 1934]), p. 6. Also Nicholas Harpsfield, The Life and Death of Sir Thomas Moore, ed. E. V. Hitchcock, with historical notes by R. W. Chambers (1932; rpt. London: Published for the Early English Text Society by the Oxford Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 13-14; Thomas Stapleton, The Life of Sir Thomas More, trans. Philip E. Hallett and ed. E. E. Reynolds (London: Burns & Oates, 1966), pp. 7-8; More, letter to John Holt, in E. F. Rogers, ed., The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1947), pp. 3-5, trans, by M. A. Haworth, S.J., in E. F. Rogers, ed., St. Thomas More: Selected Letters (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 1-2. In the letter to Holt which Rogers dates c. November 1501, More says that his Greek teacher William Grocyn ‘recently made a very successful start’ on his lectures at St. Paul's on the Celestial Hierarchies of 'Dionysius’; Harpsfield says that More's lectures came ‘about the same time’ as Grocyn's. It was apparently Grocyn as vicar of St. Lawrence Jewry who invited his student's lectures: see Harpsfield's Life, note to 13/23-25.

2 Stapleton, loc. cit.

3 R. W. Chambers, Thomas More (1935; rpt. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1958), p. 83.

4 The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, Vol. 4: Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz, S.J. and J. H. Hexter (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), p. clxvi. References to Utopia will be to this edition.

5 Ibid., pp. clxvi-clxvii.

6 See, e.g., A. W. Reed, ‘Sir Thomas More’, in The Social and Political Ideas of Some Great Thinkers of the Renaissance and the Reformation, ed. F.J. C. Hearnshaw (1925; rpt. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1949), p. 138.

7 A. Prévost, rev. of Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz, S.J. (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1964), Moreana, 1, no. 4 (Nov. 1964), 94. Prevost is reviewing the paper issue of the Yale Utopia, with its own introduction; Surtz's opinion here on the influence of The City of God does not differ from that in the parent edition: ‘Contrary to likely conjecture, Augustine's City of God, on which More had lectured publicly, seems to have influenced Utopia, only in a quite general and vague way’ (p. xiii). See also PreVost,. Thomas More et la crise de la pensie europienne (Lille: Mame, 1969), pp. 55, 193-194.

8 Herbert A. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York and London: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963), p. 241.

9 Utopia, p. xciii.

10 Ibid., p. bariv.

11 Ibid., p. xcviii.

12 See J. W. Allen, A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (1928; rpt. London: Methuen, and New York: Barnes & Noble, 1960), p. 313.

13 I have depended especially on Herbert A. Deane, op. tit. Deane's essay is also an anthology of Augustinian views on the social order.

14 Utopia, p. xli.

15 Etienne Gilson, foreword to the English translation of The City of God in the series called the Fathers of the Church (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1948- ), 1 (1950), xl. Quotations from this translation unless otherwise noticed

16 Theodor Mommsen, ‘St. Augustine and the Christian Idea of Progress’, JHI, XII, no. 3 (June 1951), 346-374, reprinted in Mommsen, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. E. F. Rice, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 289-290.

17 Cf. Gilson, op. at., pp. xli-xlii.

18 See, e.g., The City of Cod 2.18.

19 See The City of God 5.12-15.

20 Gilson, op. cit., p. xliii, quoting Augustine, Letter 138 3.17.

21 H. W. Donner, Introduction to Utopia (1946; rpt. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), p. 81.

22 R. W. Chambers, Thomas More, pp. 125-131. For the tradition of this interpretation of Utopia, see Donner, loc. cit.

23 Henry Paolucci, introduction to The Political Writings of St. Augustine (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1962), p. xviii.

24 In summarizing the arguments of the crucial chapters in this Book, I follow Deane, pp. 118-126, and J. Nevill Figgis, The Political Aspects of St. Augustine's ‘City of God' (1921; rpt. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1963), pp. 59-67

25 De re publica 1.25.

26 Deane, pp. 123-124.]

27 This is the conclusion of Deane, pp. 120-126, and Figgis, p. 64, from whom I have the identification of the view in question as ‘clericalist’. The quotation comes from Sir Ernest Barker's introduction to the Everyman City of Cod (London: Dent, and New York: Dutton, 1945), 1, XXXI. Sir Ernest himself does not accept the clericalist interpretation.

28 See J. W. Gough, The Social Contract, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), pp. 23-24.1 have not consulted Mario d'Addio, L'Idea del Contralto Sociale dai Sqfisti alia Rifortna (Milano: Giuffre, 1954), to which Gough refers: d'Addio regards Augustine as the chief source of the idea of contract throughout the Middle Ages.

29 Salamonius: see Gough, p. 47.

30 For contract in the ancient world see Gough, chap. 1.

31 Gough, p. 12, n. 2.

32 Cf. Dino Bigongiari, ‘The Political Ideas of St. Augustine’, appendix to Paolucci, ed., The Political Ideas of St. Augustine, p. 346.

33 For the doctrine of the two loves, love of self which organizes the civitas lerrena and love of God which organizes the civitas dei, see The City of God, Book 14.

34 See Barker, op. tit., p. xviii.

35 The City of God 2.19.

36 See the texts quoted in Deane, pp. 96-99, and see p. 289, n. 84.

37 The City of God 19.12. Cf. Gilson as quoted in Deane, p. 290, n. 93.

38 From Pensées, fr. 294.

39 Deane, p. 134.

40 See Deane, pp. 134-143.

41 The City of God 19.6, Dods tr. (many eds.).

42 Deane, p. 136.

43 Deane, pp. 141-142, quotes De Ordine n.4.12.

44 J. H. Hexter, More's Utopia: The Biography of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1952), p. 80.

45 Utopia, pp. xli-xlv: ‘The Perdurable Milieu: Utopia and the Family’.

46 Ibid., p. xlii.

47 Hythloday's attitude to his relatives and friends is quite unsentimental: ‘As for my relatives and friends … I am not greatly troubled about them, for I think I have fairly well performed my duty to them already. The possessions, which other men do not resign unless they are old and sick and even then resign unwillingly when incapable of retention, I divided among my relatives and friends when I was not merely hale and hearty but actually young. I think they ought to be satisfied with this generosity from me and not to require or expect additionally that I should, for their sakes, enter into servitude to kings’ (Utopia SS/23-31).

48 Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York: Schocken, 1964), chap. 13.

49 Deane, p. 153.

50 Confessions 1.7. One might compare the Hobbesian theme of the infans robustus (preface to De Cive).

51 Individual reason not as opposed to grace but as the competence of the individual to grasp moral notions independently of social conditioning: i.e., in the Platonic scheme, morals are not ‘taught’—since judgment cannot be inserted into the mind—but ‘recollected’ with the aid of dialectic from the reservoir of Ideas. The individual erected wit, in this sense, does not oppose, in fact it is fulfilled in, grace. See below.

52 Utopia, p. 518.

53 The City of Cod 2.7; cf. 10.1, 10.3. Father Surtz refers to this passage at Utopia, p. clxvii. For Augustine's praise of the Platonists in The City of God, see 8.1-13.

54 Utopia, pp. cix-cx.

55 Deane, p. 156.

56 See Deane, p. 310, n. 18, who quotes a passage from Quaestionum in Hepta/euclmm.

57 Deane, p. 161. Chap. 5 generally: ‘War and Relations Among States’.

58 Ibid., p. 155.

59 The City of God 15.4, 19.12.

60 Utopia, p. 499.

61 For ‘the basic structure of the criterion problem’ with respect to the exchange between Erasmus and Luther on freedom of will, see Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes, rev. ed. (New York: The Humanities Press, 1964), chap. 1. It may be well to distinguish More's skeptical and ‘Lucianic’ Augustinianism from that of the reformers. The latter finds a convenient emblem in Luther's peevish rejoinder to Erasmus in the De Servo Arbitrio (1525): ‘Spiritus sanctus non est Scepticus.’See Popkin.

62 The City of God 22.22. The argument here differs from, though it may recall, the humanist formulation that education ‘repairs the ruin of our first parents’. Similarly, in Utopia, education is a question of inspiring morale rather than of realizing potentialities, erecting the wit. Or, to be fair, it is a question of both, but one recalls especially the former. The streak oiotium in Utopian life takes its place in the naturrechtlich component of the work.

63 Utopia, p. cxiv

64 Professor Joseph A. Mazzeo has discussed the theme of the ethical irrationality of the state in connection with Machiavelli: see the essays on Machiavelli in Renaissance and Seventeenth Century Studies (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964). A classic modern statement of this theme is Weber's essay ‘Politics as a Vocation’ (From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans., ed., and introd. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1946], chap. 4). Weber was perfectly aware he was secularizing a Christian attitude: ‘the early Christians knew full well the world is governed by demons and that he who lets himself in for politics, that is, for power and force as means, contracts with diabolical powers and for his action it is not true that good can follow only from good and evil from evil, but that often the opposite is true. Anyone who fails to see this is, indeed, a political infant’ (ibid., p. 123).

65 Pascal, Pensées, fr. 294.

66 ‘Types of Natural Law’, in The Democratic and the Authoritarian State (Glencoe, 111.: The Free Press, 1957), p. 77.

67 For a review of Augustine and the Donatist controversy, see Deane, pp. 174-211. Deane remarks on this contradiction in Augustine between his general view of the state and a theocratic element: ‘Is there a fundamental inconsistency between the view to which Augustine was driven by the exigencies of the struggle against the Donatists—that is, that Christian rulers have the obligation as well as the right to punish those whom the Church discovers to be heretics or schismatics, and, in general, that it is the duty of Christian kings to serve God by making and enforcing laws to prevent sinful men from offering insult to God's majesty and to protect and promote true religion—and Augustine's general theory of the nature and function of the State—that it is an imperfect, though essential, organization made necessary by the Fall of man, whose primary purpose is to guarantee, by the use of the external instruments of coercion and the fear of punishment, the maintenance of earthly peace, security, and justice?’ (p. 216).

68 Cf. Gilson in the foreword cited above and in Les Métamorphoses de la Cité de Dieu (Louvain: Publications universitaires de Louvain, 1952).

69 From Institutes (1541), as quoted in Allen, A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century, p. 69.

70 The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, Vol. 5: Responsio ad Lutherum, ed. John M. Headley (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), 167/21-28, 201/33-205/5, etc. See, in Headley's introduction, pp. 760-765. More in this work (rightly or wrongly) understands reformist ecclesiology to center on the notion of a pure Church, a community of believers which would apparently reject the sinful from membership. His objection to this notion is basically Augustine's, that the two cities are perplexae on this earth. More draws a parallel between reform and Donatist definitions of the Church: both are, in effect, Puritan and rigorist. See 118/22 and note, and 205/3-5. More uses Augustine extensively throughout the Confutation of Tyndale against the rigorism of Tyndale and Robert Barnes, e.g., ‘both saint Cipriane and saint Austine to, dyd take the churche for none other then the knowen catholike church, and knew the church right wel, not for a company of onely good men, but of good and bad both, and so they be still what ever Tyndall saye’ (English Works [1557], 689H). Barnes, according to More, projects ‘such a church as our Logiciens do intentionem secundum, that is a thyng that is no where’ (ibid., 7488); on the satirical view of'second intentions’, cf. Utopia 159/31-35. On the connection between Utopia and More's ecclesiology, see P. A. Sawada, ‘Toward the Definition of Utopia’, Moreana, vm, nos. 31-32 (Nov. 1971), 143-144.

71 The Responsio, 118/11. Either the publisher Pynson or More is responsible for the gloss. Headley notes: ‘If the gloss originated with More, it represents one of his few later references to that work which has become his chief claim to literary greatness’ (p. 887).

72 Headley, introduction to the Responsio, p. 754, referring to 276/2-5.

73 Ibid., p. 756. For Aristotle's understanding of the relation between law and equity, see Nic. Ethics 1137a, b.

74 Luther's Naturrecht does not appeal to the rational faculty.

75 Headley, op. cit., referring to Werke (Weimar, 1883- ), 30/2:109-110. Weber and others have thought Protestantism ‘legitimated the authoritarian state': From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, p. 124.

76 Besides the fact of More's lectures, there is Vives’ edition, with full critical apparatus, published at Basel in 1522. Bernard André, the humanist imported by Henry VII, wrote a commentary on The City of God which survives in manuscript (noticed in William Nelson, John Skelton: Laureate [New York, Columbia Univ. Press, 1939], Appendix 1: 'Bernard Andre's Works’, p. 239). For Augustine's influence on the early humanists, see P. O. Kristeller, ‘Augustine and the Early Renaissance’, Review of Religion, VIII, no. 4 (May 1944), 339-358, reprinted in Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1956), pp. 355-372. Vives’ commentary, which I have consulted in John Healey's Elizabethan translation (1610, actually), has little relevance to the subject being discussed here, except insofar as the whole effort testifies to humanist interest in Augustine's classic: it is straight philology or explication of theology. Vives has occasion in the notes to 2.7 to praise his friend Thomas More. There is an amusing quibble in a dedicatory letter to Healey's translation by Th[omas] Th[orpe], to the effect that Healey, who died before the translation was published, now lives in the civitas dei, or Eutopia, whereas in life he knew only the imaginary just civitas, or Utopia (sig. A3r).

77 G. K. Hunter, in John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), p. 28.

78 Cf. Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1946), p. 166: ‘The political rationalism of the seventeenth century was a rejuvenation of Stoic ideas.’