THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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communist island; it stands as an extremely secular heaven above Utopia. Even more striking is the abolition of religious controversy: Thomas More, since 1935 a saint
of the Catholic Church, seems with his tolerance almost like an early Roger Williams, not to say Voltaire. Certainly on this point he is a close forerunner of Jean Bodin,
the ideologist (though for different reasons) of a non­denominational state. This surprising contradiction enabled a late bourgeoisie no longer interested in utopias to turn
More solely into a churchman and to disinfect him of any revolutionary odour. Among other things a philologist with capitalist interests, Heinrich Brockhaus, furnished a
hypothesis which considers precisely this communist­Epicurean­tolerant ‘foreign body’ in the ‘Utopia’ and carefully eradicates it. For according to Brockhaus (Thomas
More's Utopia­work, 1929) More's work, as it exists and has had a continuing influence down the centuries, as a democratic­communist document, is supposed to be
a forgery. According to him, More was not the author but only the official editor, or rather: More also wrote a ‘Utopia’, but what was later circulated under this name is
no longer the original but a distortion of the original Utopia perpetrated by another hand. The other hand is that of Erasmus of Rotterdam; the Epicureanism of the work
originates from him, not from More, as well as the communism, the six­hour day, the religious tolerance. Eradicated by Erasmus, however, was ‘the main sharp
reforming content’, that is to say the non­political, exclusively religious interest which is allegedly supposed to have motivated More in the drafting of his original Utopia.
This interest is interpreted by Brockhaus on the assumption that More wanted to restore to the Church at the last moment the ascetic conscience and its salutary dignity,
a year before the catastrophe of the violent, schismatic Reformation occurred in 1517. Accordingly, it is not England that is supposed to have been criticized in the
original Utopia but the Pontifical State, and above all: the model for this ideal was by no means the primitive commune of American islanders but — the monastery on
Mount Athos. Instead of England and the primitive commune, More is solely supposed to have contrasted the two centres of Christianity: Rome and Athos; Utopia is
nothing other than ‘the land of Athos reconstructed with the help of additions’. Hence it was not an outline of the best state that More intended, in particular and in
general, but a reform of the Church; but Erasmus spoilt this plan by spoiling the plan of the original Utopia, which already lay ready for dispatch to the decisive council
in the Vatican. Thus Brockhaus's theory would like to rid More of the foul odour of communism, as well as the zest for life, as well as religious tolerance;