UTOPIA

UTOPIA. The impulse to wonder about a more perfect world is at least as old as Gilgamesh's search for the garden of Dilmun (c. 2500 B.C.E.). The dream of an earthly paradise seems to be widespread among the peoples of the earth, as a way of both imagining the ideal and expressing dissatisfaction with the here and now. Gilgamesh's perilous journey is prompted by his shock at the loss of his boon companion Enkidu and his own looming mortality. The propensity for utopian speculation is in part nostalgia for an idealized human existence, believed in the Islamic and Judeo-Christian tradition to have once existed in a paradise now lost. In times of social and political upheaval, such as existed in early modern Europe, authors also used the ideal for satiric purposes. As a result, utopian literature has flourished as a genre.

The first and most significant work of this kind is Sir Thomas More'sUtopia, published in Latin at Louvain in 1516 (1551 in the first English translation). In letters to friends, More called his planned work "Nusquama," from the Latin adverb for 'nowhere'; however, when he chose the title, he transliterated the Greek negative ou into the Latin u and combined it with the Greek topos to create a new word, "utopia," or 'nowhere'. In the commendatory letters from his humanist circle printed with early editions of the work, several observed that this country also ought to be called "Eutopia" (from the Greek eu for 'good'). Thus "utopian" was seen at once as an intriguing but impossible ideal.

More (1478–1535), who served Henry VIII as an adviser and became chancellor in 1529, wrote his classic in the turbulent years just before the beginning of the Reformation. He cast his imaginative flight in the form of a dialogue, a rhetorical strategy that allowed him to express dissatisfaction with current social conditions while maintaining a comfortable distance rhetorically from such dangerous ideas as the abolition of private property. The first part is a discussion between Raphael Hythloday ('babbler of nonsense'), a mariner who had chanced upon a fabulous land where all goods were held in common, and More himself, about the problems of Christian Europe, which was plagued by greed and corruption. Part two (which was written first) is the actual discussion of the ideal society, where Christianity takes root among the Utopians with surprising ease because it is so consistent with the Utopians' communal way of life. At the end, the character More finally admits that he would like to see some aspects of Utopian society put into practice in England, but states that he believes it is unlikely ever to happen. Ultimately, Utopia attempts to negotiate a course between the ideal and the actual and implicitly recognizes that, given the fallibility of mankind, perfection is impossible.

In the aftermath of Utopia, which earned great renown for More, other descriptive works appeared that made use of some of the same literary devices: a shipwreck or other chance encounter with an ideal community, followed by a return to Europe. Ortensio Lando and Anton Francesco Doni's collaborativeEutopia in 1548 (its full title is The Newly Discovered Republic of the Government of the Isle of Eutopia) reverses this scenario by having a Eutopian citizen visit Italy to comment directly upon its excesses, which sparked interest in other utopian imitations.

CHRISTIAN UTOPIAS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

In the seventeenth century Francis Bacon's (1561–1626) advocacy of a "new" science based on inductive reasoning led others to dream of synthesizing human knowledge with religion to produce a universal knowledge, or "pansophia." This "utopian" myth became the driving force for a new vision of a Christian commonwealth. Bacon's utopian work, The New Atlantis (written c. 1614 and published posthumously in 1627) was a coda to The Great Instauration (1620). It took the form of a voyage to the island of Bensalem, the centerpiece of which is Salomon's House, a research college where the new scientific method leads to discoveries and inventions that greatly enrich the commonwealth. A belief in pansophia had similarly inspired Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) to put forth his vision of The City of the Sun (1623), a sea captain's account of an ideal Christian community, where a single ruler named Sun is assisted by three aides, Power, Knowledge, and Love (with an obvious indebtedness to the Christian Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). The role of science is paramount, with the seven concentric walls that ring the city displaying pictorially the unity of all knowledge. By naming these walls for the seven planets orbiting the sun, Campanella clearly stands with Copernicus on the most important scientific debate of the age.

The vision of a Christian commonwealth founded on scientific principles is at the heart of one of the century's more influential utopianists, Johann Valentin Andreae (1586–1654), a Lutheran churchman who produced several works, notably Christianopolis (1619, published as Reipublicae Christianopolitanae Descriptio [Description of a Christian republic]), which garnered praise from learned readers such as Robert Burton. Framed as a traveler's tale, it describes a Christian city in which an elite brotherhood possesses a secret wisdom and oversees the further exploration of nature's secrets through scientific experimentation. Andreae had been part of a youthful circle at the University of Tübingen that had produced a series of utopian pamphlets around 1610 (Fama Fraternitatis and the Confessio Fraternitatis [The Fame of the Fraternity and the Confession of the Fraternity]), advocating a Protestant brotherhood to bring about reform within the Lutheran church. These pamphlets caused an extraordinary sensation when published in print, often called the Rosicrucian furor. Andreae's ideas greatly influenced the Moravian reformer Jan Comenius (c. 1592–1670) and passed into England through Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600–1662), who brought out an English translation of another treatise by Andreae (A Modell of a Christian Society [London, 1647]) to help reform England in the aftermath of the Civil War. With some justification, the Royal Society (founded in 1660) can be considered the fruition of the dream of a Baconian research college to aid the commonwealth.

UTOPIAN THOUGHT AMONG THE PHILOSOPHES

The rationalists of the Enlightenment who helped prepare the way for the revolutions of 1776 and 1789 did not produce any recognized utopian classics. There were, however, utopian elements in variousworks, suchasFénelon's Adventures of Telemachus (1699), Montesquieu's Persian Letters (1721), the sketch of El Dorado in Voltaire's Candide (1759), and Condorcet's Esquisse (1794), that were influential at the time.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Andreae, Johann Valentin. Christianopolis. Introduced and translated by Edward H. Thompson. International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol. 162. Dordrecht and London, 1999.

Bacon, Sir Francis. The New Atlantis and the Great Instauration. Edited by Jerry Weinberger. Arlington Heights, Ill., 1989.

Campanella, Tommaso. The City of the Sun. Translated by Daniel J. Donno. Berkeley, 1981.

More, Thomas. Utopia. Translated by Edward Surtz. New Haven, 1964.

Secondary Sources

Dickson, Donald R. The Tessera of Antilia: Utopian Brotherhoods & Secret Societies in the Early Seventeenth Century. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, vol. 88. Leiden, New York, and Cologne, 1998.

Manuel, Frank E., and Fritzie P. Manuel. Utopian Thought in the Western World. Cambridge, Mass., 1979.

Negley, Glenn. Utopian Literature: A Bibliography with a Supplementary Listing of Works Influential in Utopian Thought. Lawrence, Kans., 1977.

DONALD R. DICKSON

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