WAYNE A . REBHORN

Thomas X o r e ’ s €ncZosed garden: Utopia and Qnaissunce Humanism

HOMAS MORE has generally been paired with Erasmus as one of the leading representatives of Renaissance humanism, and his Utopia has been widely read as a provocative expression of

humanist ideals. With the works of fifteenth-century humanist educators like Vittorino da Feltre and Aeneas Silvius and of contemporaries like Erasmus, the book shares certain fundamental doctrines: a faith in man’s educability; a conviction of his potential goodness, rationality, and willing- ness to cooperate with his fellows; and a belief in social planning and the transformation of social institutions as the best means both to improve society as a whole and to raise the individual to the heights of human possibility.* However, while More’s Utopia reveals a clear relationship to Renaissance humanism through its sharing of such basic doctrines and assumptions, it also possesses a deeper relationship to the tradition than the existence of doctrinal similarities alone might suggest.

Going beneath the level of doctrine, More is linked to the humanist tradition at the fundamental level of language. His Utopia is organized about a few key images which not only generate his conception of human

1. For More’s relationship to humanism and its optimistic strain, see Peter R. Allen, “Utopia and European Humanism: The Function of the Prefatory Letters and Verses,” Studies in theRenaissance, 10 (1963), 10s; and Robert Peters, “Utopia and More’s Orthodoxy,” Moreana, 31-32 (1971). 148. For More’s relationship to Erasmus and Erasmian humanism, see Edward Surtz, S.J., The Praise of Wisdom (Chicago, i957), p. 17; and J. H. Hexter, Introduction to Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz, S.J., and J. H. Hexter (New Haven, Conn., 1965), Vol. IV of The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, pp. xxv-lxxvii. All citations from Utopia come from this edition. I have altered the Latin text to substitute v’s for u’s in accord- ance with modem usage. Translations are my own.

Wayne A. Rebhorn nature but also inform his vision of the natural order, dictate the construc- tion of Utopia’s social institutions, and even determine the distinctive features of the island’s topography. One critic has argued that for the utopian writer generally, anthropology leads necessarily to ecology,”z and this cryptic maxim, I would claim, is especially applicable to More precisely because in his work he perceives both human nature (anthro- pology) and the natural world (ecology) through the same set of images- both are terrain to be cultivated orfarrned, transformed by the human art of agriculture into a perfect, almost paradisical, garden. More shares with his humanist predecessors and contemporaries these images and the sets of terms they generate in the course of being elaborated, and if he differs from them in any way, it is in the degree to which the images dominate his thought and receive concrete embodiment in his vision of Utopia. Where the humanists thought of education as a kind of agriculture and longed for a world transformed at least metaphorically into a garden of innocence, More’s artistic imagination treats those metaphors literally, making the Utopians into a race of farmers and the Utopian state into an immense walled garden.

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More’s Utopia is based on a particularly unsentimental, Christian view of nature as fallen and in need of human management and labor if it is to be fertile and bear fruit. To be sure, the Utopians speak ofit as a good parent3 because it supplies in abundance all those things truly needful for human existence and buries away underground useless commodities such as gold and silver; nevertheless, Hythloday stresses that Utopia does not possess particularly fertile soil or especially good weather, and he alludes obliquely to the existence of swamps and mountains which certainly could not provide comfortable sites for human habitation.4 Contrary to the opinion of several modern critics, Utopia is clearly not a nostalgically envisioned

2. Michael Holquist, “How To Play Utopia,” in Game, Play, Literature, ed. Jacques Ehr-

3. P. 150: “parens indulgentissima.” 4. P. 178: “. . . quum neque solo sint usquequaque fertili: nec admodum salubri caelo:

adversus aerem ita m e temperantia victus muniunt: terrae sic medentur industria. . . .” Hythloday mentions that streets are laid out so that houses are protected from winds (p. 120) and that suicides are thrown into swamps (p. 186).

mann (Boston, 1968), p. 113.

142 English Literary Renaissance Golden Age where a benevolent Mother Nature makes life soft and easy.5 Rather, its success is due to its inhabitants’ persistent labor, planning, and care, which alone have turned a potential desert into a garden paradise.

From the very first pages of Book 11 More emphasizes the absolute im- portance of human art to the success of his Utopian state. He describes how his ideal citizens have complemented the natural defenses of their central bay and exterior shores with fortresses and garrisons, have thought- fully designed their houses and cities to keep out chill winds, and to pro- tect themselves from the attacks of their neighbors have excavated the huge ditch which severed their state completely from the mainland.6 Within all these protective walls and barriers, the Utopians engage in one art more than any other which epitomizes what all the arts mean for them -the art of agriculture. Defining themselves primarily as “agricolae” (p. 112), rather than lords over the land, they all practice this art which as- sumes that the imperfections of the natural world can be remedied to a large degree by human planning and industry, an art which thus easily serves as a resonant symbolic center for the basic images and values of More’s work. Essentially, agriculture involves nothing less than the incor- poration of nature into culture; literally, the word means the cultivation of the fields, the human act of dwelling upon, possessing, and thus trans- forming a piece of brute and virgin wilderness into a settled suburb of the city of man. Agriculture stands symbolically at the center of More’s work because it is the primal act by which civilization defines itself.

Appropriately, More describes his Utopian isle in such a way that agriculture seems to determine totally the features of its topography. Since all its cities are situated twenty-four miles from one another and surrounded by twelve miles of cultivated fields, almost the entire space

5 . See Harry Berger, Jr., “The Renaissance Imagination: Second World and Green World,” Centennial Review, 9 (1965), 61-78; and Robbin S. Johnson, More’s “Utopia”: Ideal and Illusion (New Haven, Conn., 1969), pp. 48, 73-95. For a telling response to these critics, see the solid article of Robert Coogan, “Nunc vivo ut volo,” Moreana, 31-32 (1971), 29-45.

6. The Utopians have also used their art to invent ingenious war machines (p. 214) and to learn with tremendous speed all the knowledge that Europe could offer them (p. 108). In a passage which shocks some modem interpreters, Hythloday praises the Utopians for hatch- ing eggs by heating thein and then having the chicks follow humans as their parents (p. 114). While this passage may be a bit whimsical, it is nevertheless consistent with More’s-and his culture’s-decided preference for nature transformed and managed by man’s art rather than left raw and undomesticated. It also seems perfectly appropriate that the Utopians should praise victories in war won not by force, but by guile and art, means they consider particu- larly characteristic of man (p. 202).

Wayne A. Rebhovn 143 between them must logically be occupied by cultivated fields and pastures. Looking at Utopia from above, one would see an endless succession of fields, interruptcd only occasionally at regular intervals by cities, and descending lower, one would see within those cities rows and rows of houses all enclosing their own sets of interior gardens (p. 120). Gardens within gardens, all surrounded by protective walls and barriers, all sym- metrically Iaid out within those almost mathematically regular boundaries -Utopia is an immense Renaissance garden where man’s art has civilized and domesticated practically every aspect of the natural world.7

Instructively, in the one passage where the existence of a Utopian forest receives passing attention, Hythloday is actually praising the Utopians for having transplanted it from one location to another on the isle (p. 178). Traditionally, from Dante to Shakespeare, the forest was presented as antithetical to the city and its gardens; it was outside the boundaries of human culture. Evaluated positively, it could be seen as a place of refuge, an oasis into which one might retreat or flee, if only temporarily, from an oppressive or perverted civilization. But it was also depicted as a savage wilderness dangerous to man’s body, a dark wood of error perilous for his soul. In every case, the forest, whether Arden or Dante’s “selva oscura,” was never considered man’s home. In the passage from Utopia alluded to above, More effectively obliteratcs the dichotomy between forest and civilization by incorporating the former into the latter. The forest becomes something man plants and transplants at will. It is put under the control of human agriculture which neutralizes its dangers, transforming it into just one more fertile precinct within the Utopian walled garden which is man’s best home on earth.

In depicting Utopia as a walled garden, More deliberately invokes comparisons with the earthly paradise. He even suggestively locates his island, to follow one interpreter of his text, at the Antipodes, where some medieval and Renaissance cartographers thought the earthly paradise to be.* More’s garden differs, to be sure, from Eden in one absolutely crucial respect: it is not the result of God’s benevolent creation and maintenance on behalf of man, but is due to human effort, intelligence, and persever-

7. For a different, but complementary view of Utopian topography, see the remarks in Robert Klein, “L’Urbanisme utopique de Filarete B Valentin Andreae,” in Les Utopies d la Renaissance: Colloque international, 1961, Vol. I of Travaux de l’institrrtpour l’ttlrde de la Renais- sance et de l’hunianisme (Brussels, 1963), pp. 209-30.

8. Hans Ulrich Seeber, “Hythlodaeus as Preacher and a Possible Debt to Macrobius,” Morcana, 31-32 (ig71), 79-81. See also George B. Parks, “More’s Utopia and Geography,” journal of English and Gerriianic Philology, 37 (1938), 224-36.

144 English Literary Renaissance ance. Utopia is fallen man’s attempt to re-create something of Eden in the midst of a fallen world.

As testimony to the fundamental, imagistic unity of More’s Utopia, human nature is presented in the same agricultural terms used for the natural world.9 Man is conceived metaphorically as soil which must be cultivated if he is to prosper and bear fruit, and the cultivation of Utopia’s citizens, for which Hythloday commends them (p. iiz), is every bit as thorough as that which their island receives at their hands. The repressive social institutions and constant monitoring of behavior which mark Uto- pia testify to a fear that nature-human or otherwise-will never be fruitful if left to its own devices and will be drawn to evil more easily than to good.10 Thus travel is restricted and idleness discouraged; only slaves are allowed to hunt or butcher meat, lest good citizens come to enjoy the act of slaughter; and marriage is protected by rigorous laws, since men would naturally prefer the pleasures of casual fruition. Finally, just as the Utopians have eliminated wild and dangerous natural terrain by subjecting it to cultivation, so they have subjected human society to a process of total cultivation, eliminating all those wild and hidden places-taverns, ale- houses, brothels-into which men might slip away from the ever-watchful eyes of their fellows in order to dally joyfully with vice (p. 146).

Agriculture and the terms describing its operations thus effectively de- termine the moral categories of Utopia. From the very start of the book, when More recounts Hythloday’s travels in the New World, he establishes the basic moral opposition between the cultivated and the rude and rustic as he contrasts the savage lands and peoples of the torrid zone with the more civilized lands and peoples of the temperate (p. 52). Later, he will criticize the Zapoletans (Swiss mercenaries) who live in wild and rugged mountains and have become so “agrestis” (p. 206) that the Utopians rejoice whenever one of them is killed. Most strikingly, More’s basic moral dichotomy appears in his praise of Utopian colonization which has

9. In the passage where Hythloday described the Utopians’ lack of fertile soil and healthy climate, he also celebrated their industry which enabled them to remedy those defects by shaping their own natures to counteract the bad air and by shaping the natural world to improve the soil (p. 178). Laboring to improve human nature and laboring to improve the natural world are seen as analogous processes, and Hythloday praises the end-products of both efforts in a revealingly parallel construction: “ut nusquam gentium sit frugis, peco- risque proventus uberior: aut hominum vivaciora corpora: paucioribusque morbis ob- noxia” (p. 178).

10. Cf. J. H. Hexter, More’s “Utopia”: The Biography ofan Idea (New York, igp), pp. 58-60.

Wayne A. Rebhovn 14s aroused the ire of more than one modern critic of the book.11 Coloniza- tion, it should be remembered, derives from “colo,” which means “to cultivate,” and by extension, “to settle land,” and those individuals who carry it out are called “coloni,” a word which means both farmers and colonists and which More uses interchangeably with “agricolae.” Thus, since colonization and cultivation are really the same process, it should hardly be surprising that More would praise it through Hythloday’s mouth.12 Colonization is not presented as the suppressing of an inferior by a more powerful people, but essentially as the extension of Utopian agriculture, civilizing an otherwise barren land by transforming it into yet another garden.

More’s basic moral opposition between the cultivated and the unculti- vated underlies Hythloday’s vitriolic attack on sheep-raising in England. He paints a depressing picture of a land where no soil is tilled and the farmers, the “coloni” (p. 66), have been forced into work condemned as sterile and unfruitful (p. 240). They have been replaced by sheep whose wool they cannot afford to buy and whose meat does not serve to nourish them. Those sheep are depicted as monsters which devour not only men, but cities andfields as well. England, once a green and pleasant land, has become a parodic inversion of civilization, a dreary “solitudo” unfertile because uncultivated (p. 66). No wonder More places Utopia at the Antip- odes from his native land!

If agriculture generates an opposition between the cultivated and the uncultivated, it also generates one between domestication and wildness, between the taming of nature, whether animal or human, which allows it to be brought safely within the walls of the city or garden, and an untamed, wild, bestial nature which presents a constant threat to man and his culture. Thus the torrid zone near the equator is described not only as uncultivated, but also as full of wild beasts (“effera” and “belua,” p. 52), whereas in the temperate zone all things grow mild and tame (“omnia mansuefacere”). Similarly, the Zapoletans are condemned as ferocious (“ferox,” p. 206) creatures who love war, an activity twice deplored as fit only for beasts (pp. 56-58 and 198). Even worse, the English have become a race of beast-men: the landlord class serves the serpent of hell (“Averni serpens”),

ii. See Johnson, More’s “Utopia”: Ideal and Illusion, pp. 73-95, and Berger, “The Ren- aissance Imagination,” pp. 69-70. 12. More even underscores the morality of Utopian colonization by stressing that the

subjugated peoples committed the unpardonable crime of failing to cultivate the lands they inhabited (see p. 136).

146 English Literary Renaissance the wild beast of pride (p. 242); their idle retainers and mercenaries are labeled, respectively, drones (“fuci,” p. 62) and wild animals (“beluas,” p. 64) ; and the poor peasants, whom all the others have chased from the land and the civilizing pursuit of agriculture, have become mere beasts of bur- den (“iumenta,” p. 238) whose lives are pitied as even worse than those of beasts. England offers a monstrous inversion of the whole process of do- mestication where sheep, normally tamed and raised to provide men with clothing and food, have become wild again (“indomitae,” p. 66) and metaphorically devour those who should literally devour them. In this context, it is entirely appropriate to recall how More praised Hythloday for not coming to Europe with strange tales of monsters which eat men- the monsters were already there !

By contrast, the Utopians receive great praise as domesticators. They breed poultry and utilize the ox for both farming and food (pp. 114-16). But what is more important, they constantly strive to domesticate them- selves and set up institutions for monitoring behavior lest the beast lurking in every man take possession of him. Appropriately, the Utopians con- demn as beasts (“pecuini,” p. 220) those citizens who commit crimes like theft and violence as well as those who simply reject fundamental religious tenets. Criminals who rebel against the just punishment of servitude are

untamed beasts” (“indomitae beluae”), and the Utopians feel no qualms about slaughtering (“trucidantur,” p. 190) creatures who have fallen so far beneath the dignity of human behavior. On the other hand, they willingly release those slaves whom servitude has rendered tame (“domiti,” p. 190) and thus restored to the proper condition of man.

Agriculture also involves a third set of opposed terms in Utopia, since it means not only cultivation and domestication, but also an effective segre- gating of the clean and healthy from the dirty and diseased. Living in a fallen world ever ready to invade and corrupt their island paradise, the Utopians have to maintain a constant vigilance against the evils that could easily contaminate them. They must build walls around their communal gardens and set rock barriers and fortresses around their island. They must constantly weed and chase away pests that would impair the fertility and productivity of their land, and they must similarly protect and guard their physical and moral life from contamination by disease and evil. Many Utopian institutions reflect an intense concern with the segregation of good and ill. Amaurotum, the model for all Utopian cities, is located on a river which insures an abundant supply ofpure, fresh water, and all animals are slaughtered outside the city so that their filthy remains (“tabum ac

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Wayne A. Rebhorn 147 sordes,” p. 138) can be washed away at once in another river, thus pre- serving the purity of the city and the entire island. Similarly, the sick are quarantined in hospitals located outside the walls of each city, and unclean things are not allowed inside lest they infect the air the Utopians breathe (p. 138). Nor should it seem surprising that a people so obsessed with excluding dirt and disease from their world would require prospective marriage partners to inspect one another naked, a practice justified by the argument that one would not buy a horse unless one checked it first for disease (p. 188).

If the Utopians seem anxious to avoid contact with filth and disease which corrupt the body, they are equally anxious to protect the mind from moral infection. Thus slaves perform all kinds of dirty work (pp. 140, I ~ o ) , lest free citizens develop bad habits. To extinguish the monster of pride, which elsewhere takes pleasure in piling up gold at others’ ex- pense, the Utopians teach an utter disdain for gold by using it not only for children’s toys, thus identifjring pride as infantile, but also to make cham- ber pots, thus identifying it with excrement. Similarly, they condemn all those who fall below their standards of humanity as filth or disease or excrement. The Zapoletans are scornfully dismissed as “that dregs of a people” (“illa colluvie populi,” p. 210). Suicides who commit their des- perate act when not terminally ill are thrown into swamps (p. 186), a symbolic consigning of the foul to the foul. Most strikingly, the Utopians develop their own philosophy in which health is considered something positive and good in itself, not merely the absence of disease and pain or a precondition for other, real pleasures. The word for health, moreover, applies not only to man’s physical, but also to his moral and spiritual, condition. Finally, the Utopians think of their entire state as a collective entity which can enjoy health or be afflicted with disease (“per- nicies”), and they recognize their own responsibility in choosing magis- trates and instructing the people so that health and salvation are main- tained (p. 196).

This imagery of sickness and health, filth and cleanliness, dominates Hythloday’s description of Utopia and fits perfectly his conception of Europe’s problem and his personal role as a healer of souls (Raphael means the “healing of Hythloday explicitly criticizes European

13. On the name and function of Hythloday as a healer of souls, see Hans Ulrich Seeber, Wandlungen der Form in der literarischen Utopie (Goppingen, 1970), pp. 51-53, and his “Hythloday as Preacher and a Possible Debt to Macrobius,” pp. 71-74. See also Elizabeth McCutcheon, “Thomas More, Raphael Hythloday, and the Angel Raphael,” Studies in Englith Literature, g (1969), 21-38.

66 9 , sanitas,

148 English Literary Renaissance monarchs as infected from childhood with perverse opinions (“perversis opinionibus . . . infecti,” p. 86), and sees himself proposing “decreta sana” in order to cure the disease. He characterizes the sheep which trouble Eng- land as a plague (“pestis,” p. 68), and attacks the idlers who abound in Europe as just so much filth (p. 130). Most effectively, he argues that one cannot cure the basic disease ofEurope, its pride and greed and inhumanity, merely by treating symptoms or local infections. To achieve public salus,” the entire system must be changed and vice eradicated from Eu-

rope as completely as possible (pp. 104-06). While images of filth and cleanliness, disease and health, may seem

intrinsically unrelated to agriculture, in More’s thought at least the con- nection is established frequently and with compelling force. For instance, in condemning the Zapoletans, More attacks them for their lack of culti- vation and their wildness and dismisses them as filth, thus utilizing all three of his basic categories almost as though they were completely inter- changeable in his mind. Similarly, the English sheep are fearful monsters who have reversed the processes of cultivation and domestication and are excoriated as a “pestis.” This last term actually admits of two translations which demonstrate the interpenetration of these categories in More’s thought, for “pestis” means both “plague” and “pest,” both disease and destructive, wild animal. In another passage concerned with the fear of contagion felt by the Utopians, disease is described as creeping like a snake from person to person (“ab alio ad alium serpere,” p. 140). Disease thus becomes a sly and dangerous serpent, a “pestis” of particular malignancy, and this image is echoed later when pride is labeled the prince and parent of all “pestes” (p. 242) and is identified as the serpent of hell (p. 244). By contrast, when More praises the Utopians for transforming their not par- ticularly fertile soil into fruitful fields, he speaks of their curing the land (“terrae sic medentur industria,” p. 178), as though lack of fertility were some sort of disease. Finally, when Hythloday speaks of curing the ills of Europe, he repeatedly uses agricultural metaphors: cure vices, he insists, by tearing up the roots (p. 98) which the weeds of depraved opinion have sent down from evil seeds (p. 86); pluck out pride (p. 244); and by ending the use of money, uproot an entire crop of evils (p. 242). Thus More’s language reveals the basic connections he accepted between sound agri- culture, health, and cleanliness, connections which demonstrate the pro- found, imaginative unity of his work.14

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14. Jean Servier relates the antipathy for dirt and filth felt by More and other writers of utopias to the womblike shape of their ideal states. He interprets their response in Freudian

Wayne A. Rebhorn 149

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All these basic categories-cultivation and domestication, health and cleanliness-relate More’s work directly to the humanist tradition. Al- though there is no firm evidence that he knew of Italian educators like Vittorino da Feltre and Guarino da Verona or that he had read the writings of Leonard0 Bruni and Aeneas Silvius, it is unlikely that he was entirely ignorant of the doctrines and concepts they had propounded.15 On the other hand, it is almost a certainty that he knew Quintilian and Plutarch, on whom those Renaissance humanists depended for many of their educa- tional conceptions. Moreover, it is quite unlikely that an admirer of Pic0 della Mirandola and of Florentine Neoplatonism generally would have missed the optimistic note in their assessment of man which they shared with the humanist thinkers and educators mentioned above. Most effective in establishing More’s connection with the thought of Renaissance hu- manism, however, are his deep and abiding friendship, frequent conver- sations and letters, and all the labors shared with the greatest of the humanists, Desiderius Erasmus. Consequently, it should appear no more than reasonable to place More within the humanist camp, to seek parallels and analogues for his major concepts and images in the works of men like Vergerius, Aeneas Silvius, and Erasmus, and ultimately to argue that the Utopia can be read as a brilliant articulation of humanist ideals.

From Vergerius to Erasmus, the humanists argued that nature generally, and human nature in particular, although impaired by the Fall and thus never completely perfectible by human efforts alone, nevertheless were granted a freedom and a potential to develop in almost any conceivable direction.16 Like their ancient mentors, Cicero, Plutarch, and Quintilian, the humanists never tired of praising the liberal arts as those worthy a free man (“liber”), but where the ancient writers thought of freedom pri- marily in a political sense, the Renaissance saw it as metaphysical, moral, and existential. Vergerius, for instance, declared that while a man’s place of birth and family were inevitably determined beyond his control, he could nevertheless distinguish and define himself by means of his virtue acquired

terms as a desire to return to the womb and a consequent repulsion at filth associated with the birth trauma. See his Hisfoire de l’utopie (Pans, 1967), pp. 319-44.

is. R. J. Schoeck, “Thomas More and the Italian Heritage of Early Tudor Humanism,” in Arts libiraux etphilosophie au moyen age (Montreal, 1969), pp. 1191-97.

16. Jean-Claude Margolin, Introduction to Desiderius Erasmus, Declamatio de pueris statim ac liberaliter institrrendis (Geneva, 1966), p. 46. This book will be cited as D e Pueris.

150 English Literary Renaissance through education and training.17 Erasmus envisaged the newly created infant’s mind as a “tabula complanata,” thus anticipating Locke’s “tabula rasa” by two hundred years.18 This blank tablet was morally neutral, dangerously open to the possibility of degenerating to bestial levels, but equally capable of rising up almost to divinity. This double potentiality received its most eloquent expression in the myth which Pic0 used to open his famous Oratio, but Erasmus himself summarized it succinctly in one of his treatises on education: “Nature, when it gives you a child, hands over nothing other than a crude mass. . . . If you disregard it, you will have a wild beast; if you watch over it, you will have, if I may speak thus, a g0d.”19 Essentially, the humanists felt that before being transformed by man’s art, nature was rough and imperfect, filled with unrealized poten- tialities, and man as man did not yet exist. Erasmus declared simply, “men are not born, but made”;20 with a defective-or a missing-education, they could never move beyond the level of the brutes, could never hope to repair the defects of their fallen condition, but with proper care they could indeed realize the potential they possessed, in spite of the Fall, for goodness and rationality and could thus, in a limited measure, cooperate in their own salvation, which God’s grace alone could ultimately insure.

As the humanists elaborated their conception of the art of education, they repeatedly had recourse to the same basic metaphors which lie at the center of More’s thought in Utopia. Vergerius, for example, sees education as the implanting of the seeds of virtue in the child’s mind?’ and, develop- ing this idea of agriculture even further, Aeneas Silvius tells the young prince to whom he addresses his treatise: “just as farmers (‘colini’) sur-

17. In his D e Orafore, Cicero defines the liberal arts as those “quae sunt libero dignae” (1.16), and Vergerius characteristically echoes his words: “Liberalia studia vocamus, quae sunt homine libero digna. . . .” See his treatise D e Ingenuis moribus et liberalibus studiis adu- lescentiae, in Ilpensieropedagogico dell’Umanesimo, ed. Eugenio Garin (Florence, 1999, p. 130. Where Cicero uses “liber” (free man) interchangeably with “ingenuus” (free-born or noble), thus emphasizing the primarily political conception of freedom he accepts (see D e Orafore n.32), Vergerius sees the liberal arts as the essential means by which man achieves a name and identity for himself, thus conceiving freedom as a metaphysical, moral, and existential qual- ity, not just a political one (see De Ingenuis moribus, p. 126).

18. Instifutio Matrimonii Christiani, in Opera Omnia, ed. J. Clericus (Leiden, 1703-06), v, 722c: “In pueris pluribus de causis major celeriorque docilitas est. Primum, quod vacuuni habent pectus, veluti tabula complanata, in qua possis quod velis exarare.”

19. D e Pueris, p. 391: “Natura quum tibi dat fdium, nihil aliud tradit quam rudem massam. . . . Si cesses, feram habes; si advigiles, numen, ut ita loquar, habes.”

20. D e Pueris, p. 389: “homines . . . non nascuntur, sed finguntur.” 21. D e Zngenuis moribus, p. 136: “Nam quod teneris nientibus insitum est, alte radices

mittit, nec facile postea divelli ulla vi potest.”

Wayne A. Rebhorn 1.51

round their hedges with little trees, so admonishments and arrangements (‘instituta’) consonant with a praiseworthy life ought to surround you, so that the most upright seeds of mores may germinate, for the fountainhead and root of honesty is legitimate discipline.”22 Erasmus likewise considers the child’s mind a fertile field which has the potential to become a magnifi- cent garden, although he cannot decide whether the seeds of virtue already lie dormant in the soil or are planted by the preceptor, who, in either case, must, like a good farmer, care for them and remove noxious weeds.23

Just as the humanists thought of education as a process of cultivating the soil of the mind, they also conceived it as domestication, a taming of the mind. This conception was doubtless suggested by the notion of education as “disciplina,” a restraining, limiting, or even punishing, and it must have been influenced by the striking comparisons ancient writers like Plutarch made between animals’ educability and man’s.24 The identification of education with the domestication and taming of man’s potentially wild and bestial nature received its most powerful presentation in a short colloquy entitled Ars notoria which Erasmus wrote to attack the popular

art of memory” (“ars notoria”) because it promised an easy, painless method for acquiring knowledge of all the liberal arts. On the contrary, Erasmus has his spokesman declare that wisdom and learning can be had only through labor, which can indeed come to seem reasonably agreeable, but only after the mind has been tamed so that it can carry out the exercises involved without resistance. Thus, he declares, “Let your first care be that you understand the thing deeply and then that you rehearse and repeat it to yourself. And in this, as they say, the mind is to be tamed, as often as is necessary, so that it can fix itself in cogitation. For if there’s any mind so rustic that it cannot be tamed to do such a thing, then it is scarcely fit for learning.”25

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22. Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pius 11), De Liberorurri educatione, ed. J. S. Nelson (Wash- ington, D.C., 1940), Vol. xn of Strrdies in Medieval and Renaissance Latin Language and Litera- ture, p. 100: “ut sicut coloni su is arbusculis circumponunt sepes, sic tibi consona laudabilis vite instituta admonitionesque circumferant, unde rectissima morum germina pullulent, honestatis enim fons atque radix est legitima disciplina.”

23. Cf. De Pueris, p. 401 and pp. 457-59. 24. On the meaning of “disciplina” and the connection between education and punish-

ment, see H. I. Marrou, A History ofEdcrcation in Antiquity (New York, 1956), p. 221, and Plutarch, “The Education of Children,” in Moralia (Cambridge, Mass., 1927), I, 15.

25. Ars notoria, in Opera Omnia, I, 850~: “Prima igitur cura sit, ut rem penitus intelligas, dein subinde t e a m verses ac repetas: et in hoc circurandus est, ut dictum est, animus, ut quoties opus est, cogitationi possit insistere. Nam si cui mens est, adeo silvestris, ut in hoc cicurari non possit, haudquaquam est idonea literis.”

1-52 English Literary Renaissance Finally, all the humanists conceive of evil as filth or disease from which

the individual must be segregated.26 Leonardo Bruni, for instance, speaks of evil as filth (“tabes”) which befouls or pollutes the mind (“mentem . . . coinquinat”),27 and Francesco Barbaro, in his treatise on woman, which includes a long chapter on child-rearing, sees the helpless infant as sucking wickedness and impure diseases (“impuras aegritudines”) along with the milk of a corrupt nurse, thus suffering both body and spirit to be simultaneously infected by the contagious disease of evil (“pernicioso contagio”).2* And, of course, More’s close friend Erasmus has recourse to the same characteristic metaphors when he warns of the ease with which the young child’s tender mind may be infected by passions and desires (“amoribus aliisque cupiditatibus inficiatur”).29

IV The humanists do more, however, than merely anticipate the essential

metaphors which underlie More’s Utopia and receive concrete expression in its topography, institutions and, philosophies. They also anticipate in a limited fashion both the idea of creating an ideal environment to produce and suitably house ideal men, and they characteristically tend to visualize that environment as a garden, especially a garden contained within an ideal palace or city.30

Although the humanists praised man’s potential for self-improvement, they, like More, distrusted the natural in man: men were considered weak, frail beings whose fallen natures exposed them openly and continually to vice and passion, disease and sloth. In the fifteenth century, Aeneas Silvius asserted the characteristic position: man was always prone to sin, but youth especially possessed a particular propensity to imitate evil,31

26. Eugenio Garin notes the prominence given to considerations of health by humanist architects and city planners; see his “La Cite idtale de la Renaissance italienne,” in Les Utopies d la Renaissance, p. 14.

27. Leonardo Bruni Aretino, D e Strrdiis et litteris, in Hunianistischphilosophische Schriien, ed. Hans Baron (Leipzig, igzS), p. 7.

28. D e re uxoria liber, in Prosatori latini del Quattrocento, ed. Eugenio Garin (Milan, igsz), p. 130.

29. Institutio Matrimonii Christiani, in Opera Omnia, v, 722c. 30. On the garden as a humanist ideal, see Johan Huizinga, Erasmus and the Age ofRefrmu-

tion (New York, 1957), p. 104. It should be noted that for the humanists the garden was not considered antithetical to civilization, although it might be presented as the opposite of a decadent, contemporary city. The garden represented nature civilized; formally arranged, it was praised for its artfulness and was usually located at the center of a house or palace or at least enclosed within its walls.

31. Aeneas Silvius, D e Liberorum educatione, p. 188: “pueri nanque nisi ab initio rebus optimis irnbuantur, ingenia depravant. . . .”

Wayne A. Rebhorn 153

Erasmus later claimed that young children clung to evil more readily and easily than to good and were more given to passion than reason,32 and he explained these defects as the result of man’s fallen condition:

. . . that early age, led more by its natural sense than by judgment, will imbibe evil as easily as good, or more easily. . . . The pagan philosophers understood this matter and marveled at it. They could not find the cause w h c h Christian philosophy has offered us, for it teaches that this propensity toward evil was planted in us by Adam, the founder of the human race.33

Man’s fallen nature expressed itself not only in terms of a predilection for vice and an indulgence of the passions, but also in an ultimate unedu- cability afflicting some members of the species.34 Finally, the humanists worried that all men were physically weak, exposed to disease and danger, and thus terribly in need of developing strong, healthy bodies to comple- ment their strong, healthy minds.35

Although confronted with man’s physical, intellectual, and moral weaknesses, the humanists remained confident that education could over- come almost all obstacles to human improvement. However defective nature might be, they felt that man’s art could remedy it within very large and generous limits. “Nature is an efficacious thing,” admits Erasmus, but a more efficacious education will conquer it.”36 Considering the

importance agricultural metaphors had in their thought, it is striking that the humanists turned their particular attention to the environment in which the child would be raised. They saw the creation of an ideally moral and intellectually stimulating environment as essential if education were really to triumph over a less than cooperative human nature.37 Moreover, they felt that this ideal environment had to be segregated from the fallen world about it if any traces of the child’s Adamic innocence were to be preserved

(6

32. D e Pueris, p. 397: “Natura peculiariter addidit aetati primae facilitatem imitandi, sed tamen aliquanto pronior est ad nequitiam quam ad honestatem aemulatio.” Cf. lnstitutio Matrirnonii Christiani, in Opera Omnia, v, 7 1 7 ~ .

33. D e Pireris, p. 419: I‘. . . aetas illa, quoniam naturae sensu potius quam judicio ducitur, pari facilitate aut fortassis majore imbibit prava atque recta. . . . Deprehenderunt hoc et admirari sunt ethnicorum philosophi: nec potuere causam pervestigare, quam christiana philosophia nobis prodidit, quae docet hanc ad mala pronitatem insedisse nobis ex humanae gentis principe Adamo.”

34. D e Pueris, p. 439. 35 . See, for instance, Aeneas Silvius, D e Liberorurn educatione, pp. 102, 106, andErasmus,

36. D e Pueris, p. 385: “Efficax res est natura, sed hanc vincit efficacior institutio.” 37. For a fuller treatment of this aspect of humanist education, see my article “Erasmian

Education and the Convivium religiosum,” Studies in Philology, 69 (1972). 131-49. See also the article by Robert Klein cited in n. 7.

D e Pueris, p. 381.

154 English Literary Renaissance and his potential for rationality and goodness realized. According to Erasmus, “it is most true that the largest portion of . . . evil in us derives from impure associations and a depraved education, especially in that period of life when we are weak and easily moved in all direction^."^^ The segregation of the child from evil, a proposition all the humanists endorsed in more or less radical forms, meant essentially a careful selection of schoolbooks, nurses, tutors, playmates, and companions, as well as a specially purified and moral home and school.39 Fearfully aware of man’s tendencies toward evil, the humanists kept pushing back the point at which the child was to be placed in this environment, until someone like Erasmus could even write presciptions for the proper method of sexual inter- course.40 Moreover, the humanists wanted the child’s behavior within his ideal world to be carefully and continuously monitored by parents and educators. They particularly distrusted unsupervised leisure, believing with Alberti-and clearly with More-that “l’ozio si t: balia de’ vizii,”41 and urging the playing of instructional games, healthy exercises, and reading during time spent away from studies. In effect, what the humanists wanted for the child’s education was nothing less than the transformation of the world-or at least a piece of it-into an ideal kinder-garten, an edenic schoolroom, thoroughly moral, separated by firm boundaries from the fallen world about it, and rigorously monitored for any ap- pearance of vice.

Just as important for More’s conception of his ideal state, the humanists came increasingly to feel that an immense and unbridgeable gap lay open between their schoolroom-garden and the rest of the world. Where Italian humanists in the fifteenth century could still envisage an education that led directly to public service and social activity, the education imag- ined by Erasmus and his contemporaries was designed less to prepare the child for the active life in society than to make him an upright Christian. Moreover, as humanism developed between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, thinkers also came increasingly to feel the need to extend the time of education-and hence its ideal environment-further and further

38. D e Pueris, p. 419: “. . . verissimum est maximani huius mali partem manare ex impuro convictu pravaque educatione, praesertim aetatis tenerae et in omnia fledis.”

39. Vittorino da Feltre actually had his school established in a special location to insure his pupils’ health. See William H. Woodward, Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators (Cambridge, Eng., 1897), p. 32.

40. See the comments of Margolin in his Introduction to De Pueris, p. 20. 41. Leon Battista Alberti, I libri dellafarniglia, ed. Cecil Grayson (Bari, 1960), p. 76.

Wuyne A. Rebhorn 1 s s into adult life, until Erasmus could imagine the whole of life as being a continual process of education. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that in his Conuiuium religiosum he should imagine an ideal adult existence spent in an enclosed garden that maintained the essential features of the child’s edu- cational environment intact.42

In the light of all these humanist ideals, More’s Nowhere does indeed appear to be Somewhere. Although clearly influenced by Plato’s Republic, ideas of ancient Sparta, and accounts of kingdoms in the New world, Utopia can also be seen as an imaginative extension of the ideal enclosed garden which several generations of humanists had desired and even, in limited ways, had attempted to create. Utopia simply expands the humanist schoolhouse until its walls reach the borders of the entire state. In its in- stitutions it enshrines the basic features of that ideal environment. Where the humanists wanted a purified, clean, healthy school away from the smoky cities of the fallen world, Utopia totally separates itself from that world and sets up barriers of rocks and fortresses to prevent any intrusion of vice or disease or filth from its neighbors. Where the humanists wanted the child exposed to only the best books and people in order to insure his moral perfection, the Utopians constantly offer models of virtue to their children, erecting statues commemorating good men and ridiculing slaves by means of gold chains and ornaments. Filled with a cautious faith in man’s potential for goodness and rationality, but fearing his ever-present inclination to vice, More follows in the footsteps of the humanists and designs a rigidly controlled environment where freedom of movement, religious dissension, and sexual association are carefully restricted. Not trusting men to amuse themselves honestly, he has their leisure-time activ- ities supervised so that only constructive games, work like gardening, and self-improvement through continuing education are really tolerated. Finally, More takes the constant monitoring the humanists desired to the point where no one in Utopia can ever escape public scrutiny. No wonder Erasmus and Giles, Busleiden and Bud6 wrote admiringly of More’s work-the enclosed garden of Utopia is a colossal version of the educa- tional environment they all desired for their children and dreamed of as a model for a brave new world.

THE U N I V E R S I T Y OF T E X A S , A U S T I N

42. See my article cited in n. 37.