iption of the island commonwealth somewhere in the New World. Since the Utopians live according to the law of nature, they are not Christian. Indeed they practice a form of religious toleration. Utopia provides a second life of the people above and beyond the official life of the "real" states of the Sixteenth Century. Its author took the radical liberty to dispense with the entire social order based on private property, as Plato had done for the philosopher elite in his Republic. More took the communism of Plato's republic or of the "golden age" supposed by Ovid and later adapted by the Christian fathers.[7] But he kept the fallen human nature that Augustine believed to be the curse of the Fall. He then created a literary carnival, allowed himself the freedom of speculating on the sort of commonwealth would arise from a juxtaposition of seemingly contrary ideas. No wonder that the little poem that introduces the work, supposedly done by "Mr. Windbag," the son of Raphael's sister, declares, Plato's Republic now I claimTo match, or beat at its own game.[8]More's work aims to take into account a "true" and pessimistic view of human nature, one quite different from Plato's Socratic optimism. If Utopia is truer, it is therefore better. So if we look at Utopia with More's Augustinian eye, we see a witty play on how life might develop in a state that tried to balance these two impulses--human depravity and a communist system aimed at checking the destructive individualism of corrupt human nature. It is carnival, a festival, not a plan for reform. When the carnival is over, and we come to the end of the book, reality reasserts itself with a crash. More did not see in Utopia a plan of revolutionary reform to be enacted in Christian Europe. Remember the subtitle "On the best state of a Republic and of the new island Utopia, a book truly golden, not less salutary than festive." The key word is "festiuus,"[9] usually translated "entertainin...
