A series of typed notes related to “Natural and Revealed Communities,” presented as the Thomas More Lecture in the Humanities at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts, 22 April 1987, later published in Myth and Metaphor (289-306). The typescript for Notes 58-6 is located in the NFF, box 36, file 8.
[1] The Prince and the Courtier were the two primary social facts in the secular life of the Renaissance. The idea of each collided with each other. The perfect courtier was an individualized educational Utopia: he was to be sensitive to every cultural aspect of his society, and to pull [put] all this knowledge and skill at the service of his prince. But the prince was ideally a figure of unconditioned will who wanted glory and greatness, not the kind of advice that would make him a middle-aged justice of the peace. Castiglione is reluctantly aware that the social importance of the courtier is nugatory: the prince won’t listen, and according to Machiavelli he shouldn’t listen.1
[2] It’s this unresolvable paradox that’s implied in the distinction between Hythlodaye [Hythloday] and More. Hythlodaye [Hythloday], as his name indicates, represents the fourth quarter of secular society (the third is the statesman, represented by More himself), namely the fool.2 So Machiavelli’s Prince, Castiglione’s Courtier, More’s Utopia and Erasmus’ Praise of Folly just cover the secular Renaissance spectrum. Naturally the social Fool isn’t just a fool: he’s the voice of outspoken criticism that adds predictability [unpredictability?] to society, the voice of an unspoiled nature that can’t help telling the truth. Of course Erasmus’ conception of “folly” is the opposite of this, but he does recognize that he’s socially a Fool for writing the book.
[3] More and Erasmus were liberals presented by Luther with a revolutionary situation.3 A revolutionary situation sets up [an] antithesis in society, and the revolutionary can always say to the liberal: your liberal dreams are just that: if you’re going to get anywhere, you have to join us. But once a revolution consolidates its power, it has the task of establishing continuity with what’s preceded it, and it has no resources for doing that, so it’s bound to turn simply repressive, replacing one repressive structure with a new one. On the other hand, history must go through the revolutionary process, which is why history never gets anywhere: it simply sets up an adversary situation that may last for centuries.
[4] The liberal envisages a far greater and more radical reform than the revolutionary can ever conceive of, preoccupied as he is with the strategies of power. All revolutions are betrayals of liberalism: More was technically a Catholic (conservative) saint martyred by Protestants, although that’s pretty wide of the mark: Henry VIII had no religion except self-worship. Lafferty’s Past Master and its paradox.4
[5] So the opposition between liberal and revolutionary is closely related to the opposition between the courtier’s vision (which culminates in a vision of love) and the prince’s absolute will. The situation is repeated of course in Burke’s view of the French Revolution and in all the “God that failed” people in relation to Russia.5 Most disillusioned revolutionary supporters turn violently reactionary, because, again, they haven’t the intellectual resources for doing anything else.
[6] My other distinctions will come in: the contrast between software and hardware science fiction: the former descends from More and the latter from Bacon’s New Atlantis.6 The dystopia is often a Utopia (in the sense of a eutopia) looked at in a different way, as Bellamy’s Looking Backward was by Morris.7
[7] The Utopia and The Arcadia: it’s the latter in particular that gets buggered up by Christianity. I think [Walter Pater’s] Marius the Epicurean is really all about that. The reason is that the Arcadia represents a “natural society,” the paradox of Montaigne’s essay on the cannibals (positive), Swift’s horses (negative), or Rousseau’s society of nature and reason. Christianity is based on the fact of man’s fundamental maladjustment to nature.8
[8] More’s book was not a highbrow jeu d’esprit: that’s the crap of muddled Catholic Thomists terrified by the fact that the book was read with appreciation by Communists.9 Everybody at the time, and later to at least the Elizabethan period, knew that he meant the book very seriously. We tend to notice the rigorous discipline; his contemporaries would have noticed the humanity and gentleness.
[9] I still think what I said in my Dedalus article,10 that every Utopia is a projection from certain tendencies in society that are desirable but not sufficiently powerful, and that for the Utopia those tendencies are the four natural virtues, justice, temperance, prudence and fortitude. But the deliberate emphasis on monotony as well as discipline comes from the fact that [the] only sensible communities (i.e., societies based on a degree of communism) in More’s day were the monastic communities, and that neither they nor More’s society could get along without the impetus of religion. (We know from such things as the Epistola Virorum Obscurorum11 that the average monk was a horse’s ass, bigoted, superstitious, ignorant, bumptious, and all the rest of it. Did More draw a distinction between the monks and the mendicant friars, and ascribe all the horse’s-ass qualities to the latter? We make quite a song and dance about Henry VIII’s dissolution of the beautiful and charitable monasteries, but if they were anything like the ones on the Continent described by Erasmus and other humanists they must have been thoroughly shitty, for all the occasional piety and sanctity one would find in them. Check this, if you can without doing any {ugh} work.
[10] Anyway, the discipline in Utopia is there partly because More, like everyone else in his day, thinks in terms of a natura naturata, an order or system man has to fit into. He’s not, like Rousseau in the Emile and elsewhere, thinking of a natura naturans, human nature as a force or energy being released.12 To the extent that that kind of energy is released it’s dangerous, to More.
[11] I suppose the choice of Utopia or Nowhere as a title really brings More’s community very close to Spenser’s later conception of “Faerie”: a ghostly imaginative form of the actual country.13 Erasmus said that Utopia resembled Britain. I’ve been reading Rider Haggard, and while there’s no future now in this age of helicopters writing stories about lost civilizations buried in the interior of Africa or Asia or (Heart of the World) Central America, still those communities could “exist” as spiritual forms of various aspects of human physical communities.
[12] The revealed community would have to be based on some such conception as Christ, who is conceived metaphorically, as an interpenetrating force we’re a part of and yet is also a part of us. That’s the great weakness, I think, of fictions like Huxley’s Island, where the religious impetus is too humanistically conceived.
[13] This conception of revolution betraying liberalism is of course not new: it’s another aspect of my “pre-revolutionary” point about education, and of my culture as a state of innocence in history point. Whether my conception of real realities as constructed ones belongs here or not I don’t as yet know.
[14] The great tragedy of the liberal is that by refusing to impoverish himself by joining the revolutionaries he is forced back on the reactionaries, and impoverishes himself still further.
[15] Types of Utopian satire: the eutopia or good place, the dystopia or bad place, the mirror-world of Mundus alter et idem,14 the allegory of the wise man’s mind.15 Erasmus’ Praise of Folly is mirror-satire: folly is what he describes; he himself is the Fool in the functional sense, the “natural” who tells the simple truth. Hence closely related to Utopia, and not only by dedication. Butler too: in him again the reasonable liberal is the opposite of the rational revolutionary. And Castiglione comes very close to being the Platonic allegory of the individual’s discipline.
[16] The unresolvable paradox between the Prince of unconditioned will and the Courtier who painfully educates himself to be at his Prince’s service, only to find that his prince hasn’t any consistent use for him, comes down from the two great Utopian works of antiquity, Plato’s Republic and Xenophon’s Cyropaedia.
[17] It seems clear that Socrates’ republic is really an allegory of the wise man’s mind, and Socrates practically says so at the end of the ninth book. The Cyropaedia was the Renaissance favorite, and begot, as is well known, a host of imitators, including Erasmus’ Enchiridion and, in one of its aspects, the Faerie Queene. Machiavelli also praises the Cyropaedia, but where? Why, in Chapter 14 of The Prince, which begins with the statement that the Prince ought continually to occupy himself with the art of war, and never get seduced into thinking of the arts of peace as anything but tentative intervals in warfare.16
[18] Plato’s guards have their wives in common because females symbolize the arts of peace, which the guards have nothing to do with. In Utopia, on the other hand, the nuclear family is the basis of society: the women fight along with their men, who fight all the more valiantly to preserve their families. But then More’s Utopians are thought of as actual people, not as allegories of the will as a thought police force hunting down vices and weaknesses, of which the most insidious is “lechery.”
[19] Dumezil’s three classes of Indo-European society, the red man of war, the white man of priesthood, the blue man of work, correspond to three classes—at least he said at first they did, but altered his views later in Mythe et Epopee.17 Anyway, Plato has certainly isolated those three classes and settled them according to the principle of justice as he conceives of justice, everybody doing the work he’s best fitted to do. This, as in the Indian caste system, coincides exactly with what he’s born to do. If there’s any discrepancy, lie about it: that kind of lie is “noble.”
[20] The Cyropaedia is really, to the extent that it’s not just a historical romance, a portrait of a charismatic military leader, the first example, and the only one Xenophon had, of the series of world-conquerors that includes Alexander and the Caesars. It’s praised by Machiavelli in a significant place: the end of the fourteenth chapter of The Prince, the one that begins by saying that the Prince should spend his whole time and energy on war, planning new wars when not fighting [cf. par. 17]. The contrast with More’s humane bellum-belua [war is a monster] conception of human life is striking.
[21] Cicero’s De República is a somewhat lukewarm defence of the dying Republic, apparently; there’s the usual song and dance about what’s the best form of government. The imitation of Plato breaks down in the final vision, the Dream of Scipio, which corresponds to the tenth book of Plato, and is fragmentary: Macrobius rescued it.18 The emphasis is on prudence as a form of predictability (provideo), something also missing from the Platonic and Utopian proper [Utopian-proper] tradition.
[22] It’s difficult not to feel that Christianity really is beginning to destroy the Utopia, as More could hardly have conceived of the separation of church and state. The ferocious bigot who insists on being martyred represents the tactics necessary in the late Roman Empire that wouldn’t be necessary in Utopia.19 But sensible secular arrangements, like divorce and married clergy, evidently couldn’t survive, because Christianity would mean Christianity as buggered up by Jerome and such.
[23] Science fiction today is either software philosphical romance or hardware technological romance, sometimes both. The latter type was formulated by Bacon in the New Atlantis, the former by More [cf. par. 6].
[24] The Utopia-Arcadia contrast is a very old one of mine, the Arcadia I first looked at closely was Morris’. Psychological contrast with the More-Bellamy tradition. I’m starting to repeat myself. I probably have also the third type of Utopian construct: there’s the eutopia, the dystopia, and the mirror satire, like Mundus alter et idem [cf. par. 15].
[25] I’ve mentioned [par. 11] the link between More’s Utopia as model in the mind and Spenser’s “Faerie,” as harnessing the apparatus of romance to a moral model of England. But, by way of the Arcadian type of utopian fiction, this conception of “faerie” gets hitched on to a significant sub-cultural theme in our day. The Victorians developed the classical ghost story, which, when unrationalized, is normally evil: the sense of something very nasty in the world threatening emergence into it was strong, and was probably what Freud had in mind when he urged Jung (according to Jung) to make a dogma of sexual causation as barrier against the “occult.”20
[26] Well: along with this there went a sense of “Faerie” as a world of innocence paralleling our own, sometimes reachable by children. Sylvie and Bruno, though the neurotic bachelor in [Lewis] Carroll does his best to put one off, is a remarkable essay on this kind of world; so are most of the best things of George Macdonald; and here’s a remarkable contemporary example, John Crowley’s Little, Big,21 which introduces two characters named Sylvie and Bruno and mentions George MacDonald. I seem to remember too that one of the crazy cults in California during the sixties was a Tolkien cult regarding the Lord of the Rings as the true secret history of its time.
[27] The Utopians have women as priests, though More ridicules Luther and Tyndale for advocating the same thing in Xy; Utopia itself has so rigid a patriarchal structure that one wonders what women would ever get the self-confidence to function.22 Re Dumezil [par. 19]: note that in Utopia the blue man has taken power over not merely the red man but the white one, whom he elects. Again, the monastic brother rather than the priestly father.
[28] Rabelais’ Abbey of Theleme is, again, a contrast to the Utopia (which Rabelais of course knew and admired) in that it’s in a natura naturans context: an immense force of energy is being released. So Rabelais is the ancestor of Rousseau as More is of Burke. But neither More nor Rabelais have any notion of a natural man. Montaigne’s cannibal essay comes the closest to that that the 16th c. got, and even he, naturally (!) keeps a deeply ironic reserve.23
[29] Utopian saints, who work hard at disagreeable jobs, don’t try to rationalize what they do: they know there’s a system in nature bigger than reason can compass, but it’s still reason.
[30] Plato’s Republic, after coming to the great allegory of wise mind pause in Book Nine, goes on to Book Ten to give the perspective of life after death. Communist commentators on Utopia would naturally assume that once alienation was abolished the need for a projected life after death would disappear too: according to More, it’s intensified.24 Plato’s tenth book is reinforced by Cicero (and Macrobius) in the Somnium Scipionis [par. 21]. A further perspective is provided by Timaeus (Critias) with Atlantis, which for More had sprung out of the sea again twenty years earlier, at a time when Athens and Jerusalem were scruffy little Turkish towns.25
[31] The word “conspiracy” (look up the Latin, but it’s invariable) indicates the source of a tyrant’s power, including H8’s [Henry VIII’s], and also explains the militant nature of Utopia: the conspiracy is a rival social vision based on society as an aggregate.
[32] What has revelation got that Utopia hasn’t got? In a state as sensible as that we don’t need the tactics of Christian martyrs. But stability and order are genuine passions for them: we can’t totally get rid of the feeling that revelation is stupider than reason and common (note) sense. Especially when the Utopians can’t see the real universal, even the universal “Man,” but are apparently thoroughgoing nominalists. I think all they lack is the transcending of the aggregate vision through the sense of a spiritual body.26
[33] Paradox of death-democracy: positive quality of Lucianic Menippean satire, as with Montaigne’s cannibals. Hythlodaye [Hythloday] as Fool.
[34] Lucian is a profoundly positive influence on Utopia:27 one thinks for example of the assembly of gods called for by Zeus and arranged by Hermes, where Zeus says the gods come represented by their statues, with the golden statues in front, silver behind, base metals, marble and stuff in the bleachers. Hermes objects that some attention should be paid to quality of workmanship, otherwise there’ll be nothing but barbarian statues in front, they being the only ones who can afford golden statues. Zeus admits that quality ought to come first, but gold has to, otherwise the whole economy that sustains the gods will collapse. Not a giant step from here to the Utopian use of gold for the chamber pots and children’s toys.
[35] Also the ridicule of scholastic and philosophic distinctions; also the way Lucian gave direction and point to the still popular danse macabre form.28 The Utopians are as fanatical as Utopians can be about belief in a future life, because their system of valuation makes them ready for it, and isn’t turned upside down like the tyrants and usurers in Lucian’s dialogues of the dead.
[36] Castiglione’s courtier training is embedded in what I’ve called the educational contract: consequently its climax is a Platonic panegyric on love, the individual counterpart of the social and public virtue of justice.29 The latter is supposed to be the context of Cyrus’ life in Xenophon, but cf. what I say about Machiavelli’s view of the book [pars. 17, 20].
[37] I’ve said [pars. 6, 23] that hardware science fiction starts with Bacon’s New Atlantis, as the software variety starts with More. But the “we shall soon be able to” mentality of the gadget-happy technologist runs into the problem of how society is going to digest what it can do: it can’t digest technologies by a long way.