Oct
12
Reason, Religion, and Discipline
Filed Under Catholicism, High School, Scripture | Leave a Comment
An Essay Concerning Sir Thomas More’s Utopia
As one of the more ambiguous works in English literature, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia is a work whose content has been mulled over by many great minds to try and uncover the underlying message hidden amidst its pages. In the end, critics have almost unanimously decided to label the book more as a work of fiction or satire than one of political thought. It is undeniable that Utopia is a work filled with the jests and parodies of an author’s private thoughts and feelings. Alistair Fox observed “Once the degree of whimsy in this self-projection is grasped, some of the book’s thematic problems become more comprehensible” (Fox 155), and C. S. Lewis warned “it appears confused only so long as we are trying to get out of it what it never intended to give” (Lewis 219). It is important to realize just how easily More’s work can be taken out of context. The task, then, of understanding More’s Utopian commonwealth and the nature of a good civilization becomes a search which requires consistency. This consistency is found most strikingly in the way More illustrates the cooperation of reason and religion, in and through a thoroughly disciplined culture, as a fundamental and necessary idea for the formation of a good civilization. Throughout the explanation of this theme, an in-depth analysis of the current civilization based on More’s Utopian society will become a very useful asset. Through such analysis, the theme can be both explored and verified with a practical application relating to what the reader is most familiar with in his own experience.
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