Faith, Reason, and Virtue: The Religion of Utopia

Last week’s post on Thomas More’s Utopia promised this week I’d focus on the religion of the Utopians. Some of you might have been puzzled by Mildred Campbell’s understanding of More’s Christian humanism as a “fusion of faith with the pagan belief in reason and virtue…a kind of humanitarian deism which abhorred religious intolerance.”

“Isn’t that what we progressive Christians believe?” you might have asked yourself, “What’s pagan about reason and virtue?”

Though I’ll get to that, I first want to point out what I’ve been saying all along on this blog. Progressive Christianity is not new, it is traditional. Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians who say that our ideas are some kind of contemporary accommodation to modern day values and beliefs are mistaken. Actually, they are the new kids on the Christian block.

Let me clarify that when I use the term “evangelical” I mean the political movement bent on enforcing their limitations on belief and behavior. I happen to consider progressive Christians as evangelical in the traditional—since Jesus—sense of the term, as bearers of good news (gospel).

American founding fathers and mothers are best described as humanitarian deists, in my view, not as fundamentalist or evangelical Christians. Their faith was as much informed and inspired by the Enlightenment (Reason) as the classical concepts of virtue and truth. They may have read some Bible stories literally, but they recognized truth and virtue beyond its pages and valued human reason.

So now I get back to explaining Campbell’s reference to More’s faith, mirrored in that of his Utopians, as being combined with “pagan belief in reason and virtue.” More was influenced by Plato, a “pagan” only because anyone who was not Christian was so-called, and frankly, in Plato’s defense, he preceded Christ by four centuries. But Plato has something in common with the monasteries of More’s age as well as the first church: his support of communal property. More believed deeply in the ideals of monastic orders, which included shared property.

Not surprising then, that More’s “mouthpiece” explaining Utopia, the mariner Raphael Hythloday, would explain that in Utopia there was no private property. (See last week’s post.) There were other monastic influences on the religion of Utopia, including the belief that meditation and worship focused better in the shadows of worship centers, lit by candlelight and stained-glass windows. But in Utopia, women could be priests, though reserved for the widowed and very old.

What is surprising is how Utopia itself came to be. It makes me think of our own religious and political divisions in this country and beyond. Its predecessor nation was so divided by religion and religious quarrels, King Utopus could use their divisiveness against them to conquer the country. (Think, win the election!) Their religious divisions resulted in political divisions that prevented their unifying to fight him off! Thus, when he assumed control, he decreed freedom of religion, believing that “God likes and inspires a variety and multiplicity of worship” and further, that such freedom would increase rather than diminish religion.

Utopians did resist those who refused to believe in the human soul, or who believed “that the universe is carried along by chance without an over-ruling providence,” disallowing them from public service, but no more, “for [Utopians] are persuaded that no one can make himself believe anything at will.”

When the mariner’s colleagues introduced Christianity they gained some converts (especially Utopians appreciated that early Christians held all things in common). But one whose zeal and testimony “began to wax so hot on his subject that he not only praised our religion above all others, but also utterly despised and condemned all others, calling them profane, and the followers of them wicked and devilish and children of everlasting damnation,” was punished not for his different beliefs but as “an inciter of dissension among the people.”

The most and wisest number [of Utopians]…believe that there is a certain divine power, unknown, everlasting, incomprehensible, inexplicable, far above the capacity and reach of [human] wisdom, dispersed throughout the world, not in size, but in virtue and power. … To [this God] alone they attribute the beginnings, the increasings, the proceedings, the changes and the ends of all things.

One person commented on last week’s blogpost about Utopia that she had read the book as “dystopian” rather than “utopian,” because of its seeming inability to incorporate all human conditions. But, like what I said about saints not being perfect: utopian treatises point the way without necessarily arriving.

The preamble to the U. S. Constitution includes the high-minded goal, “in order to form a more perfect union,” and we’ve been trying to get there ever since!

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Copyright © 2019 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

Thomas More's Utopia

The current tenor of politics has given rise to dystopian analogies. As in Handmaid’s Tale, fundamentalist Christians and the state are coercing women to carry unwanted pregnancies in a growing number of states. With similar reasons for the burning of books in Fahrenheit 451, print media is ridiculed as fake news. Like the animals in Animal Farm, all citizens are equal, but some citizens are more equal than others, especially corporations and the very rich. As in 1984, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

So how refreshing by contrast for me to happen onto Sir/St. Thomas More’s utopian fantasy at a yard sale last week, appropriately entitled Utopia. I had read excerpts in my Norton Anthology in college but had never held a full copy in my hands. I treated this 1947 version as if it were the original sacred Latin text from 1516. I resisted my usual underlining and markings in pen and used a less permanent and less damaging pencil instead.

OMG, a few holier-than-thou folk might say, you’re reading another “dead white man,” adding, didn’t you hear about that recent hullabaloo about how harsh More was in the trials of heretics?! Well, as I’ve written before, saints are not perfect people who always got everything right, even as he has been revered as A Man for All Seasons. He got many things right, such as educating his daughters, a counter-cultural move, and, refusing to recognize the king as head of the church (an example we sorely need today), for which he was martyred in 1535 and sainted 400 years later.

In her Introduction to my newly-acquired-for-one-dollar version, Mildred Campbell makes some observations about the times of More’s writing of Utopia that sound familiar:

An expanding economy had many benefits to bestow, but, as More was aware, not all of its effects were beneficial; nor did everyone share in its bounty. … The malpractice in currency manipulation that kings and their ministers indulged in and an increased demand for goods of all kinds were producing an upswing in prices that eventually brought ruinous dislocations to the social and economic systems of nearly every country in Europe. …

It was a period of growing competition… It put a premium on individual initiative and aggressiveness; riches increasingly became the measure of achievement. It was this spirit of competition and materialism that More deplored as much as he grieved over the suffering of those who fell victim to it.

Thomas More carefully put descriptions of Utopia (which means “nowhere”) in the mouth of a fictional mariner, Raphael Hythloday (whose first name comes from the Hebrew for “God has healed” and whose last name comes from Greek words meaning “a skilled conveyer of trifles or nonsense”). In their conversation, More defends private property, as would be expected of an English nobleman, but it is also clear that Hythloday serves as his alter-ego, a representation of his serious bent as a Christian humanist, which Campbell describes as a “fusion of Christian faith with the pagan belief in reason and virtue.” She adds, “It formed a basis for the religion that More gave to the Utopians, a kind of humanitarian deism which abhorred religious intolerance.”

Next week’s post will describe the religion of the Utopians, but this week I lift quotes about their economy with contemporary relevancy from a 1949 translation from the Latin by H. S. V. Ogden, the version used in the Norton Anthology:

But in Utopia where there is no private property and where they zealously pursue the public business, there the name commonwealth is doubly deserved. … In Utopia where everything belongs to everybody, they know that if the public warehouses and granaries are full, no one will lack anything for his personal use. Among them there is no maldistribution of goods. …

Comparing Utopia to other nations, More’s fictional character asks,

What justice is there in this, that a nobleman, a banker, a money lender, or some other man who does nothing at all for a living or does something that is of no use to the public, lives a sumptuous and elegant life? In the meantime a servant, a driver, a blacksmith, or a farmer works as hard as a beast at labor so necessary that the commonwealth could not last a year without it. …

Is not a government unjust and ungrateful that squanders rich rewards on noblemen (as they are called), bankers, and others that do not work but live only by flattery or by catering to useless pleasures? And is it just for a government to ignore the welfare of farmers, charcoal burners, servants, drivers, and blacksmiths, without whom the commonwealth could not exist at all? …

Furthermore the rich constantly try to whittle away something from the pitiful wages of the poor by private fraud and even by public laws. To pay so little to men who deserve the best from the state is in itself unjust, yet it is made “just” legally by passing a law.

So when I weigh in my mind all the other states which flourish today, so help me God, I can discover nothing but a conspiracy of the rich, who pursue their own aggrandizement under the name and title of the Commonwealth. They devise ways and means to keep safely what they have unjustly acquired, and to buy up the toil and labor of the poor as cheaply as possible and oppress them. …

And yet they are far short of the happiness of the Utopians, who have abolished the use of money, and with it greed. What evils they avoid! What a multitude of crimes they prevent! … Fear, anxiety, worry, care, toil, and sleepless nights would disappear at the same time as money! …

Certainly rich men know this. They also know that it would be more practicable to provide the necessities of life for everyone than to supply superfluities for a few, and much better to eradicate our innumerable evils than to be burdened with great concentrations of wealth.

If that one monster, pride, the first and foremost of all evils, did not forbid it, the whole world would doubtless have adopted the laws of the Utopians long before this, drawn on by a rational perception of what each man’s true interest is, or else by the authority of Christ our Saviour, who in His great wisdom knows what is best and in His loving-kindness bids us do it. Pride measures [its] prosperity not by [its] own goods but by others’ wants.

When Raphael Hythloday finishes his tale of Utopia, Thomas More explains to the reader that he was constrained from questioning Utopia’s values and practices because “I remembered that [Hythloday] had spoken ill of certain men who feared they would not be thought wise unless they could find something to criticize in other men’s opinions.”

Though More says he can’t agree with everything described, he concludes, “Yet I must confess that there are things in the Utopian Commonwealth that I wish rather than expect to see followed among our citizens.”

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Copyright © 2019 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

Manifest Destiny

Please join me in a thought experiment I began during my morning walk. What if we are alone in the universe? What if Earth is the only celestial body in the entire cosmos that has evolved life?

Wouldn’t we want to make the most of this gift? Wouldn’t we want to make this the best possible world and make the best possible neighborhoods and communities and countries and institutions? Wouldn’t we want to be motivated to preserve life and biodiversity, to share wealth and opportunity, to create harmony and beauty?

The truth is, of course, that we long thought we were the only game in town, so to speak, yet managed to steer our way toward conflict, greed, malice, and environmental destruction. But that was in what we thought was a world of limited resources, in which we believed sharing meant losing what belonged to us or our tribe or our nation.

What if we believed in a world of unlimited resources, if not of the material kind, in the kind of ingenuity and imagination and compassion that indeed have improved the world? All those ambitions listed earlier have arisen because we wanted to make this the best possible world.

What if we wanted not only to “people” the universe, but “creature” the universe, introducing our biodiversity onto other habitable planets? Could this be our “manifest destiny”? God knows the phrase has been used to inspire far lesser goals.

I’m not talking colonization, imposing our life forms on other habitable planets to the detriment of native expressions of life. But rather, as in biblical prophecy, helping the wilderness bloom.

Just as we bring the best possible flowers to grandmother’s house, or serve the best possible cuisine to dinner guests, or find the best possible natural settings to show our children, we could bring our best possible selves to our calling to ensure life continues to spread and evolve.

This is the world and calling Jesus lived and proclaimed. This is the world “ruled” by our better angels, our best selves, our highest powers, our most gracious love, our greatest calling. It begins in our hearts, in our own transformation, as we live “as if” this commonwealth already exists. It takes practice, spiritual practice, beginning with a thought experiment such as this, a vision that prompts us to be on our best and kindest and most compassionate behavior.

I know this sounds like science fiction, and you may think I’ve lost it, but teleologically speaking, isn’t this more positively motivating than the apocalyptic or dystopian scenarios we’ve been handed by doomsayers, religious or otherwise?

Presumably Jesus knew little of science, evolution, or the cosmos. But he did know how to inspire the human heart. And he knew to change the world, we need to change our hearts.

As I said, this is just a thought experiment. What do you make of it?

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