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.