How something happened to utopia between Plato and Sir Thomas More; and how utopia was discovered again, along with the New World. CHAPTER THREE 1 There is a span of nearly two thousand years between Plato and Sir Thomas More. During that time, in the Western World at any rate, utopia seems to disappear beyond the horizon. Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus looks back into a mythical past; Cicero’s essay on the state is a negligible work; and St. Augustine’s City of God is chiefly remarkable for a brilliant journalistic attack upon the old order of Rome which reminds one of the contemporary diatribes of Maximilian Harden. Except for these works there is, as far as I can discover, scarcely any other piece of writing which even hints at utopia except as utopia may refer to a dim golden age in the past when all men were virtuous and happy. But while utopia dropt out of literature, it did not drop out of men’s minds; and the utopia of the first fifteen hundred years after Christ is transplanted to the sky, and called the Kingdom of Heaven. It is distinctly a utopia of escape. The world as men find it is full of sin and trouble. Nothing can be done about it except to repent of the sin and find refuge from the trouble in the life after the grave. So the utopia of Christianity is fixed and settled: one can enter into the Kingdom of Heaven if a passport has been granted, but one can do nothing to create or mold this heaven. Change and struggle and ambition and amelioration belong to the wicked world, and bring no final satisfaction. Happiness lies not in the deed, but in having a secure credit in the final balance of accounts--happiness, in other words, lies in the ultimate compensation. This world of fading empires and dilapidated cities is no home except for the violent and the “worldly.” If the idea of utopia loses its practical hold during this period, the will-to-utopia remains; and the rise of the monastic system and the attempts of the great popes from Hildebrand onward to establish a universal empire under the shield of the church show that, as always, there was a breach between the ideas which people carried in their heads and the things which actual circumstances and going institutions compelled them to do. There is no need to consider these partial, institutional utopias until we get down to the nineteenth century. What concerns us now is that the Kingdom of Heaven, as a utopia of escape, ceased to hold men’s allegiance when they discovered other channels and other possibilities. The shift from a heavenly utopia to a worldly one came during that period of change and uneasiness which characterized the decline of the Middle Age. Its first expression is the “Utopia” of Sir Thomas More, the great chancellor who served under Henry VIII. 2