Seems utterly at odds with his other beliefs (even if the surely apocryphal tale of something similar happening in his own house is to be believed) and certainly not seriously intended. Showing the woman, be she maid or widow, naked to the wooer There is further evidence for such a case. Then again, it is also arguable, given More’s insistence, for example, that the King could not divorce Catherine of Aragon, that he was a man of theological traditionalism, and that his advocacy of euthanasia is strong evidence that he did not intend his work to be taken entirely seriously. By most Christian standards of the era, the idea of euthanasia would be an abomination, a terrible crime against God but the passage advocating it in Utopia does not appear in the slightest ironic, and it is conceivable that More’s biblical interpretation allowed him to diverge from the mainstream of Christianity on this issue. If Utopia is seriously divergent from the kind of values which he would have held dear it is impossible that it can be meant to be taken as a straightforward manifesto for a better kind of society towards which Europe should aspire.īut then there is the problem of deciding what those values were. More was a man who died for his faith it is safe to say that he took it seriously. The context in which this text must be taken, then, is one of 16th century Christian values. Similarly, laughing at ‘fools’ - in this context, the mentally disabled - would be acceptable in very few parts of modern western society, but would have not been anything out of the ordinary in 1516. But by sixteenth century standards, slavery is not at all outlandish, and still widespread in, for example, Russia, whilst serfdom in More’s homeland was essentially the same thing and in a climate of religious hatred - a climate such that More himself had proudly engraved on his tombstone ‘ burner of heretics’ - any form of toleration was a fairly remarkable concept. No man should conceive so vile and base an opinion of the dignity of man’s nature as to think that the souls do die and perish with the body, or that the world runneth at all adventures, governed by no divine providence We may feel a certain revulsion at the use of slavery as a form of punishment, for example, or consider the supposedly liberal allowance of religious toleration so long as Compared to a Western world which was in the middle of an era of absolutist monarchy in which kings would attack each other for little reason beyond la gloire and a base desire for expansion for its own sake, Utopia might very well have seemed like a haven of reason and calm.Įqually, it is important not to impose twenty-first century values on to a sixteenth century text. Utopians are delighted to be living in ‘the best state of a commonwealth’ on earth. Utopia never goes to war unless it has to Utopia knows the absurdity of the superficial Utopia runs like clockwork. It is a harmoniously organised little nation, a society where everyone has a role to play and everyone embraces this role fully. When compared with 16th century Europe, Utopia may very well initially appear to be a direct successor to Plato’s republic. Written with reference to Ralph Robinson's first translation from the Latin there is a more accesible and excellent modern version available in Penguin, translated by Paul Turner. And being also my first noded univeristy homework. But still perhaps being of some interest to those who have not read the book, as an introduction to the kind of thing one may expect to encounter. Being a detailed discussion of whether or not Thomas More's Utopia is in fact an ideal society at all and being more useful to those with some knowledge of the text than the layman, who should consult one of the above writeups first, though not the ' Everybody'sCyclopaedia' one, since it be full of inaccuracies, the most glaring of which is the assertion that Utopia represents England.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |