In the book, Utopia is an island that housed such a perfect "Utopian" society within its walls. There is no private ownership of goods, everyone dresses the same, everyone learns a trade and works 6 hours a day. Every household has two slaves who are weighted down with chains of gold so as not to be the kind who escape, but the community is one in which gold is of little or no value except for holding criminals in chains or making chamber pots.
Utopia, in More's book, is a welfare state, with free healthcare, including euthanasia, provided by the state. It's a moral region where priests are allowed to marry, divorce is permitted, and premarital sex as well as adultry is punished as a criminal act. The law of the land is made so simplistic that there is no doubt to anyone living there as to what is right and wrong, except in the case of religion... they are all right. In utopia, only the atheists are despised. and this because they represent a danger to the state. More’s work, still draws the approval and praise of many people, most of whom are socialists, for their ideal world is much like that place of "Utopia."
Besides being a writer, back in his day, More was a lawyer and he served as Lord Chancellor, the highest judicial position in England, in service to King Henry the VIII. His main focus in upholding law and justice was that of ridding England of so-called "heretics." He was so concerned about heretics in fact that he wrote another book, titled, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, this in response to the in response Willaim Tyndale's publishing of an English translation of the Bible.
More hated these heretics with a vengeance because they dared to put the bible in a language the common man could understand. Theeheretics believed that scripture needed no church authority to interpret scripture, taught against praying to saints and worshiping images, and denied the necessity of making pilgrimages. He claimed they were those who believed that reason was incompatible with faith. and he worked very hard to remove them from England. Even as he awaited his own death from prison, in writing his own epitaph he said about "heretics, "I find that breed of men absolutely loathsome, so much so that, unless they regain their senses, I want to be as hateful to them as anyone can possibly be." ( St. Thomas More: Selected Letters. ed. by Elizabeth Frances Rogers. Yale University Press, 1961; pg, 180.)
As chancellor, More was a man who was entrusted by the king to many positions of authority within the king's rule. However, More opposed King Henry's plan to divorce his wife Catherine and he refused to take the Oath of Supremacy, the Preamble to the Act of Succession, in which he would have to swear allegiance to King Henry and state that he held rank over all foreign rulers including the pope. More refused and as a result he was charged with high treason, imprisoned in the London Tower and ultimately he was beheaded. his head displayed on the London Bridge for a month, as an example of what happens to traitors.
The Roman Church considered him a martyr for the faith, and to this day, upholds that More was a saint, not because he was a man of faith, but because he defended the position of the authority of the Pope, or as the St Thomas More Society of Florida says, "because he did not compromise his own moral values in order to please his king, and realized that true allegiance to authority can not be mere blind acceptance of everything the authority wants."
It's ironic that in the end, though he hated pesky heretics who denied the right of the king of England to “make any law or statute for the punishment of theft or any other crime, by which law man should suffer death, "More himself was legally punished for disrecting the authroity of the King to rule and reign, even as Supreme Head of the English Church "as far as the law of Christ allows" and his punishment, was death.
More is often described as a "Christian humanist, ” one which the Roman Catholic Church now recognizes as a "saint." It took a while for More to become a "saint" for though he e breathed his last in 1535, it was not until 1886 that More was beatified. Then in 1935 he was canonized as a "saint" of the Roman church by Pope Pious XI.
Today More, the man with the utopian idea, the Christian humanist is known as the patron saint of lawyers, and politicians is not just "Sir Thomas More", he is St. Thomas More and he is not soon forgotten. Churches and schools bear his saintly name. Even more recently, in October 2000, Pope John Paul II restated a public declaration of More's sainthood to the Roman Catholic world.
It should be noted that the word "Utopia" is derived from the Greek, words, "ou" and "topos" which World Book Encyclopedia, Vol 20, (1980) says means, "nowhere." This is food for thought as men seek to create a perfect society on our iland earth.
Is there a perfect place besides God'shly kingdom? Is there any other place of peace, love and harmony where everyone free gives as they have freely themselves recieved? Where is that perfect place men yern for their hearts, that holy place where justice and love supremely rule the human heart and mind?
Utopia, created by men who reject the knowledge of the truth... complete with the idea of "goodness" existing in a man who refuses to submit his heart to God, is futile, as time and history have proven, for we have seen it played out time and time again. Utopian ideas taken to their end may very well prove to be only a figment of the imagination and nothing real, located nowhere, as the name implies, and this except maybe hell itself.
Heaven, on the other hand, a place created by God for those who love him, is very real and it exists like everything else that is in existence. Heaven exists, and God saves sould from heall, not because we imagine it to be that way, but simply like everything else, because God said it to be so.
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