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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 January 2017
Once upon a time men who read and wrote about Sir Thomas More, the author of Utopia and Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor, were convinced that he was a modern man, by which in some measure they seem to have meant their kind of man. This conviction became fully standardized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Those, however, who saw him as a modern man — Lord Acton, Bishop Creighton, Principal Lindsay, Sir Sidney Lee — could not help but view More with impatience. For in their eyes he reneged on his modernity. He did not in the end stand firm for free thought, or for toleration, or for emancipation from the bondage of medieval bigotry and superstition. And although Karl Kautsky was sure that at the horizon Sir Thomas had seen the red light of the Marxist dawn, More did not even throw himself into the struggle for socialism. Instead he approved of the execution of men who were burnt at the stake because they rejected the spiritual control of the medieval church; and in the end he died a martyr for the unity which through the centuries that orthodox and persecuting Church had imposed on Europe.
1. Chambers, R. W., Thomas More (London, 1949), pp. 16, 353–5Google Scholar.
2. Kautsky, Karl, Thomas More and His Utopia, tr. Stenning, H. J. (New York, 1927)Google Scholar.
3. Chambers, pp. 357, 360, 363, 386-7.
4. Ibid., p. 368.
5. Ibid., p. 355.
6. Desiderius Erasmus, The Epistles of Desiderius Erasmus, tr. F. M. Nichols, 3 vols. (London, 1901-1918), passim, esp. I, 406-407 (to Richard Whitford); III, 387-401 (to Ulrich von Hutten).
7. More, Thomas, The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More (Princeton, 1947), letter 60Google Scholar.
8. Ibid., Letters 15, 75, 83.
9. Chambers makes this point in section 1 of his “Prologue” (Chambers, p. 16) and section 4 of his “Epilogue” (p. 369); also pp. 130-1, 366-8.
10. Ibid., p. 23.
11. Ibid., pp. 124, 257-67, 359-68.
12. More, Thomas, Utopia, ed. Lupton, J. H. (Oxford, 1895), pp. 266–98Google Scholar. All subsequent references to Utopia ill be to the above edition. Translations, however, will not reproduce those of Robinson printed in the Lupton edition; with some small modifications the translations will follow those to appear in the Utopia volume of the edition of The Works of St. Thomas More, to be published by the Yale University Press.
13. Chambers, pp. 226-7.
14. Ibid., pp. 9, 131-44, 384-7. On the contrast between More's medieval Catholic collectivism versus Bacon's modern, Protestant, scientific individualism, p. 263.
15. Some of the deviations resulted from the partial incompatibility of the ethics of a warrior aristocracy with the Christian ethic, but that was already a very old story by 1515.
16. Chambers, pp. 353-5.
17. , F. and Sullivan, M. P., Moreana 1478-1945 (Kansas City, 1946), s. v. Utopia Google Scholar.
18. Claude Jenkins, Sir Thomas More (Canterbury, 1935), pp. 19–20 Google Scholar.
19. Lewis, C. S., English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Oxford History of English Literature III (Oxford, 1954), p. 169 Google Scholar.
20. Utopia, facing p. lxxvi.
21. Mesnard, Pierre, L'Essor de la Philosophie Politique au XVIe Siede (Paris, 1951), pp. 141–177 Google Scholar.
22. Utopia, pp. 101, 106.
23. Ibid., p. 269.
24. , R. W. and Carlyle, A. J., A History of Medieval Political Theory, 6 vols. (London, 1903–1936), I, 23–4Google Scholar.
25. Ibid., I, 132-42.
26. Ibid., II, 136; Schwalm, M. D., article on “communisme”, Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, III, 579–586 Google Scholar.
27. Utopia, pp. 104-7, 156-7, 269, 299-300, 306-7.
28. Quoted in Carlyle, I, 138, n. 2.
29. The unfocussed character of what the Church Fathers had to say about property, authority, and so on comes out clearly, if one traces Carlyle's references to the views of the Fathers back to their sources in the Patrologia Latina. Systematic thought centered on the social order was very rare indeed among the Fathers.
30. Utopia, pp. 106-8.
31. Ibid., pp. 108-9.
32. Ibid., p. 113.
33. Ibid., p. 118.
34. Ibid., p. 132.
35. Ibid., p. 118.
36. Ibid., pp. 150-1 (dress), 161-6 (meals), 159-61 (the ailing), 141-3 (education, work, and hours of labor), 143-5 (leisure).
37. Ibid., p. 299.
38. See the very shrewd remarks on this point in Mason, H. A., Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period (London, 1959), p. 111 Google Scholar.
39. Utopia, p. 157.
