of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero: the question of the best regime.
In fact, Utopia explicitly
takes as its model Plato’s Republic.
It goes without saying, however, that the regime
depicted in Utopia is very different from that depicted in the Republic. What accounts for
the differences between Plato’s regime and More’s? The most significant phenomenon
distinguishing More’s time from Plato’s is, of course, Christianity. If More raises the
Platonic question of the best regime, then, he does so “in the light of the trans-
constitutional character of Christianity.”
To say this, however, is not to contradict what I
have only now just said and to side with those scholars who read More’s martyrdom into
Utopia. The fact that a man is aware of the prevailing judgment of his age and knows
how he should accommodate himself in public or in writing so as not to appear to
disagree with that judgment, or so as not to ‘rock the boat,’ does not necessarily mean
that he agrees in every respect with that judgment. The differences between More’s
regime and Plato’s, then, may, as one scholar puts it, be “traceable to More’s
understanding of what would be needed in order to make the life of reason vivid, in a way
that would not be either altogether unacceptable or too misleading to a world shaped by
What, though, does this mean exactly? What is “the Christian ethos” and how
would it shape a world such that a different approach to making “the life of reason vivid”
would be deemed necessary? To say the very least, Christianity makes much more vivid
than either classical politics or classical philosophy ever did the longing that exists in all
human beings for eternity. And in claiming a standard that can satisfy that longing,
Christianity offers all men “an allegiance that is trans-political.”
That allegiance is to the
one and only true God. Because “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten
Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life,”
2
Convention