This is a theological point, but it’s very dear to More’s heart. The political order is not the source of our happiness. command and control economies, regulated lifestyles and fashion, shared gardens and housing for family communes, absence of private property, eradication of human envy, etc), Boyle told Zenit: While remarking on some of the main communist values playfully envisioned in Utopia (e.g. The seminar was attended by Zenit’s Rome correspondent, Ann Schneibel, who published a follow-up interview with Dr. Indeed, Utopia is a work of stunning complexity and sophistication, written especially for More’s renaissance contemporaries,” Boyle said. Indeed, Boyle explained that Utopia was so cleverly crafted in the Latin language that even erudite Renaissance humanists – the audience to whom More addressed the great social-political questions of his time –might not have understood the subtle brunt of his irony: “ Utopia is certainly a puzzling work, which puzzled even More’s contemporaries. The entire work, Boyle said, does not represent a paradise-on-earth scenario the English political genius and martyr actively searched for. Boyle began the seminar by putting Thomas More’s Utopia in its proper place as a work of intellectual sarcasm. We welcomed him to lead our monthly “ Campus Martius” seminar – organized for English-speaking students of the pontifical universities.ĭr.
Ignatius Institute of the University of San Francisco in the late 80s. He is also a former professor of mine from my glory days at the St.
Paul, Minn., and is currently finishing a semester teaching at the University’s Rome campus. Boyle is director of the Graduate Program in Catholic Studies at the University of St. John Boyle, whose April 23 presentation Why Thomas More’s Utopia is not a Communist Manifestoaddressed some of the common misconceptions of More’s political fiction.ĭr. Recently, Istituto Acton (Acton’s office in Rome) hosted an illuminating seminar led by the medievalist scholar, Dr. In Utopia, many modern intellectuals say Sir Thomas More advocates an ideal political and social order without private property, competition, citizens quarreling over worldly possessions, poverty and other “evils” supposedly brought on by a market-based society.Īt least that is the way social liberals, including left-leaning Christians, tend to interpret this great saint’s 1516 literary masterpiece, believing the English Catholic statesman’s work presents his vision of an ideal Christian commonwealth modeled on the early Church (even if those proto-communist experiments failed).
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