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The Platonic Source of Utopia's ‘Minimum Religion’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Leland Miles
Leland Miles*
Affiliation:
Hanover College
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Extract

All the studies of the influence of Plato on the Utopia of St. Thomas More, even such excellent discussions as J. H. Lupton's introduction to his edition of Utopia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895), Ernest Barker's Greek Political Theory (London: Methuen, 1918), and the article by Lina Beger, entitled ‘Thomas More und Plato: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Humanismus’, in the Zeitschrift für die gesamten Staatswissenschaften XXXV (1879), have little to say about the religious thought of the Utopians.

Such cursory treatment of the religious passages in Utopia would seem to be due to the assumption that the Renaissance work and its major classical source are primarily politico-economic treatises.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance News , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , Summer 1956 , pp. 83 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1956

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References

1 Republic IV, 441. All quotations from Plato are taken from The Dialogues of Plato, tr. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Random House, 1937).

2 Republic X, 614.

3 Laws X, 908-909.

4 Ibid., X, 909.

5 Utopia, tr. Ralph Robinson (Everyman's Library, 1910), pp. 100-101.

6 Utopia, pp. 101-102.

7 Ibid., p. 102. Italics added.

8 Ibid., p. 100.

9 Ibid., p. 72.

10 Utopia, pp. 102-103.

11 Ibid., p. 103.

12 Ibid., p. 103.

13 Bilney went to the martyr's fire on August 19, 1531, nine months before More resigned the chancellorship in May 1532. See Dictionary of National Biography II, 505, and XIII, 882.

14 Laws XII, 954.

15 Laws VI, 771-772.