Spinozism in More's Utopia

In Book 1 of More’s Utopia, there is an extended exchange between the character Thomas More and his informant Raphael Hythloday. In it Hytloday defends the Socratic idea that the philosopher should stay out of politics in imperfect polities against More’s suggestion that the philosopher can deploy an indirect art of persuasion in order to shape a leader’s art of government.

The passage I am about to quote is from Raphael’s side of the exchange. It starts with a restatement by Raphael of his general claim, and then he offers an example (about the relationship between priests and their flock) to make it specific. My interest is in the example, but the larger point — that the indirect approach makes people comfortable doing evil — is not irrelevant for what follows.

‘People who have made up their minds to rush headlong down the opposite road are never pleased with the man who calls them back and points out the dangers of their course. But, apart from that, what did I say that could not and should not be said everywhere? Indeed, if we dismiss as outlandish and absurd everything that the perverse customs of men have made to seem alien to us, we shall have to set aside, even in a community of Christians, most of the teachings of Christ. Yet he forbade us to dissemble them, and even ordered that what he had whispered in he ears of his disciples should be preached openly from the housetops. Most of his teachings are far more alien from the common customs of mankind than my discourse was. But preachers, like the crafty fellows they are, have found that people would rather not change their lives to fit Christ’s rule, and so, following your advice, I suppose, they have adjusted his teaching to the way people live, as if it were a leaden yardstick. At least in that way they can get the two things to correspond in some way or other. The only real thing they accomplish that I can see is to make people feel more secure about doing evil.

So, Raphael believes that Christ’s true teachings are unacceptable to mankind because they deviate from what they believe. The resistance to these teachings seem to be three-fold: they violate custom; they are too demanding on us; they violate our felt interests. The first of these three is explicitly mentioned, I think the latter two are implied because Raphael is presupposing that Christ lived and taught a species of communism. (Not much hinges on this if you dislike the last sentence.)

On Raphael’s view, preachers have accommodated and distorted Christ’s teachings to — stipulating the truth of Christ's teaching — the prejudices of their audiences (just like More suggests the philosopher ought to do in the King’s council, and, I may add, Adam Smith suggests the true statesman ought to do with the people). Lurking here is a kind of cultural selection story that the preachers and teachings that have endured did so. The mechanism proposed works at any given time, and simultaneously generates a tradition of accommodation to people’s prejudices.

Not to put too fine point on it, Raphael is claiming the Church teaches heresy, and necessarily has to teach heresy because it were to teach truth it wouldn’t last. (It is also complicit in promoting evil.) You might think he is a kind of proto-protestant, but, in fact, on his view Calvin and Luther will have to make the same accommodation. (I would argue that Raphael’s view is anticipated by Ibn Khaldun, but let’s leave it aside.)

The accommodation of one’s teachings to the prejudices of a people is not just an implication of the kind of indirect speech More (the character) advocates. It also follows from what one might call a functional account of law and legislation. This sounds a bit abstract. But I have a particular passage in mind (that I discussed in my NewAPPS days).

In the midst of a critical treatment of the practice of executing convicted thieves, a further argument is added (during an exchange between Raphael and, More’s former mentor, John Morton, Archbishop and Cardinal of Canterbury, and at that time also Lord Chancellor of England):

To be short, Moses' law, though it were ungentle and sharp, as a law that was given to bondmen; yea, and them very obstinate, stubborn, and stiff-necked; yet it punished theft by the purse, and not with death. And let us not think that God in the new law of clemency and mercy, under the which he ruleth us with fatherly gentleness, as his dear children, hath given us greater scope and license to execute cruelty, one upon another.

In context, Raphael offers a battery of arguments against the severity of the criminal law of England. Now one of these arguments appeals to the authority of revelation to insist that much capital punishment may be immoral. Since I have discussed that before, I skip it here.

In the quoted passage Raphael relies on an explicit and an implicit contrast. The official contrast (i) is between Moses's legal code and the more gentle rule of Christianity. But there is also an implied contrast (ii) between the way one rules a barbarous people (recently liberated from slavery and tyranny) and the way one rules a more civilized people. The implied contrast (ii) effectively historicizes Moses’ law-giving, whose commandments are now understood as fitted to a people at a particular time and place in need of strict rule. (This strategy is pursued more relentlessly in Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise (e.g., chapter 5; III/75).) That is, Raphael offers a functional analysis of Moses’ lawgiving.

Raphael, clearly implies that the present law ought not be harsher than the Biblical one. And he seems to suggest that in more civilized times the law should be less strict than during Biblical times. In immediate context, the argument creates a normative, historical baseline from which one can evaluate the moral and practical features of one's institutions. It allows one to deploy the Hebrew Bible in order to suggest that one's present institutions need to be less strict than those in Biblical times.

But in reflecting on Raphael’s treatment of Moses, he de facto implies that Moses, not unlike the later crafty preachers, also adjusted the law to what’s apt for his audience. The Bible story itself makes this process a bit explicit because at various points Moses’ implied audience literally rebels against his teaching. To what degree this has engendered a change in the content of Moses’ legislation is a bit left opaque.

But as I have noted before (recall), Exodus 18:19-20 is rather explicit that Moses learns the art of legislation from Jethro. And that prior to that he was improvising. There is no articulation there of the functional interpretation of legislation. But it does suggest that once made proper, peace will be its consequence (and that also entails no popular resistance).

My intention was to remark that both of Raphael’s episodes that I have discussed here are echoed in the preface to Spinoza’s Theological Political Treatise. But after yesterday’s class, one of my students noted that there is another episode in Book 1 of Utopia that relates to this material during Raphael’s discussion with the cardinal about the various effects of enclosure, the rising cost of living, and the fact that great lords are not providing for a great class of retainers (which create a class of criminals, etc.) At this point, Raphael says, “For they leave no land free for the plough: they enclose every acre for pasture; they destroy houses and abolish towns, keeping the churches – but only for sheep-barns.”

Now, one can read this literally as a description of the long term population (and agricultural life-stock) effects of enclosure. The churches are used as sheep-barns. But one may also read it — viz., “keeping the churches… only for sheep-barns” —metaphorically as one of the effects on the church of a society organized around profit and property. (This was the suggestion of my student Thore Koelemijer.)

There is, in fact, a lot of evidence Raphael thinks property is the root of all social evil (“The social evils I mentioned may be alleviated and their effects mitigated for a while, but so long as private property remains, there is no hope at all of effecting a cure and restoring society to good health.”) In such a context, the church itself attracts types who are careerists and won’t rock the hierarchical boat, but lack intrinsic motivation to serve Christ. That would be a surprisingly hostile thing to say to the Cardinal, but some of the churchmen who enter discussion don’t distinguish themselves in holiness (as the Cardinal himself explicitly observes.)

I am not sure there is anything I can say about this last example that can convince the skeptical. Unlike the first two cases, it reeks of Straussianism. Fair enough. But somewhat oddly all three episodes have counterparts in the Preface (and the wider argument of) Spinoza’s Theological Political Treatise.+ And are also thematized in Bensalem in Bacon’s New Atlantis, which explicitly mentions Utopia and is a book naturally read as being about the governance of a domesticated, sheep-like population. To be continued.

+Spinoza doesn’t mention Utopia in the TTP. But he does explicitly criticize it in the Political Treatise.