Sir Thomas More is often viewed as a model of constancy in a fickle world of change. During Catholic times, More rose to the highest appointed political office in England as Lord Chancellor, but eventually (long after writing Utopia) he opposed the decision of his king, Henry VIII, to divorce a Catholic wife without the pope's blessing. His refusal to back Henry's divorce cost him his job, and his subsequent refusal to recognize Henry as head of the reorganized Church of England cost him his head.

Robert Bolt's screenplay A Man for All Seasons presents well the principled side of the man who was executed as the king's good servant, but first the servant of God. History shows, however, that More could take a head as well as lose one. As Lord Chancellor he dealt cruelly with "heretics." He was no humanist, if we mean by that term secular humanist or one who does without God--or even if we mean one who separates church and state. He was a fierce defender of the faith (ironically this was the title that the pope had given Henry VIII prior to the king's marital squabbles) in a time when many faiths were in development.

Utopia
More wrote political propaganda for the Tudors early in his career, but his masterpiece Utopia reflects his ambivalence toward public service. The piece is written in a typically humanist style known as “serious play” or serio ludere. This stimulating technique was established by More's learned friend Erasmus in The Praise of Folly which, like Utopia, broadly criticizes aspects of society—the monarchy, the church, the professions—and yet makes its analysis through a fictive narrator, or persona. Borrowing the license of the court jester to speak freely, this literary device enabled social criticism and speculation in an age of severe censorship, when offensive words often were punished as treason. As a result, the meaning of Utopia is debatable enough that in the 20th century both communists and anti-communists were able to cite it as support for their beliefs.

Utopia features two speakers: More, who takes the part of a practical statesman, and Hythlodaeus, who is a philosopher. Neither is entirely credible. Though both speak sensibly from time to time, they seem not to agree on any subject, and there is no winner or loser of their debate. Their names identify them as fools. Hythlodaeus means “learned in nonsense.” More, as Erasmus pointed out in The Praise of Folly, stands for folly, as folly is moria in Greek. Readers must decide whether either or neither is making sense and, if so, why. As in Homer's Odyssey, the Platonic dialogues, the tragedies of Euripides and other ancient Greek literature, the reader is put in the position of skeptic. This is not a position that readers generally were asked to take in the Middle Ages. Hythlodaeus' story can be questioned; the story exists for the sake of questioning.

Book I and Book II are discussions before and after dinner, the former Hythlodaeus' biting critique of England (a misruled land of thieves and war mongers) and the latter his fantasy description of Utopia, a proto-Communist commonwealth where work and goods are distributed almost equally. Readers who know Greek will know better than to ask for directions from one place to the other. Utopia means “nowhere.” Nowhere is the country that Hythlodaeus describes. Nowhere is there a country inhabited entirely by rational people who have no use for money or fine clothes or private property or pride. Nowhere is there a rational government, lacking inherited offices (a monarchy or nobility, for example), and giving so little importance to family and individuality in comparison to the state. Is the discussion of this nowhere folly? If it is folly, is it a wise fool who describes it? Book II poses the so-called Cretan liar paradox—“All Cretans lie; a Cretan tells you this.” More is a fool; More tells you this.

Hythlodaeus believes that mankind is or can become entirely free from greed. This may have seemed as absurd in More's time as it does today. Examples of greed were pointed out in sermons and other moralizing literature known to everyone. It was a primary dogma of faith that Jesus had been sent into the world to redeem human beings because, when they fell from paradise, they had lost much of their capacity for rational and disinterested behavior. In this belief system, all descendants of Adam and Eve were marked with original sin, which meant there was no longer any paradise on earth, and there would not be any such place until Christ returned in glory at the Last Judgment.

We may see the Utopians as prototypes of modern science fiction, as robots, as figures of artificial intelligence, but they are philosophical constructions. All that they do is calculated to produce the greatest total happiness. To them, a pleasure is not a real pleasure if in the future it it is likely to bring pain. The reading of literature is valued highly by them because it gives a pleasure that is relatively lasting and harmless (as compared, say, to pleasures of the body).

Book I was composed by More after Book II. It provides depth or background in which to place Hythlodaeus’s account of the ideal state, and it establishes Hylodaeus himself as unorthodox but visionary. He gives an account of social ills that More’s readers would have recognized as plaguing their society, but an explanation for those ills that was novel and penetrating. The policies of England (not original sin or vice) are responsible for creating criminals, and these same policies (not virtues or real justice) are responsible for creating the law enforcement to hang the criminals. Especially blameworthy is the policy of imperialism or foreign conquest which creates large populations of dangerous unemployed and disabled vets. That personal misconduct is caused more by state policy than by human nature is a distinctly modern view, the view of modern liberalism which began in early modern humanism. Nobody had thought to explain to Beowulf or Guenevere that they were simply products of their societies.

Differentiated from Hythlodaeus, the character More attempts to make a case for practicality and realism. He thinks that a society without property ownership will not work, but nonetheless he believes that Hythlodaeus should use his valuable knowledge of the world to advise kings. Hythlodaeus believes that his advice would be unwelcome since kings are uninterested in the public welfare. This debate between More and Hythdaeus anticipates More's struggles in the service of Henry VIII. Were Henry's subjects free to do what they thought was right? If they were the king’s servants, how truthful could they be, given his absolute power? Treatises on the conduct of courtiers presumed that a king would appreciate advice on policies. This assumption, Hylodaeus understood, could be mistaken.

More’s representation of a nowhere land implicated in its irony and extravagance the whole genre of travel literature that in the first quarter of the sixteenth century stirred the ambition of European readers. Piqued by stories of great wealth, armchair explorers imagined how they might improve themselves by traveling to the New World. There is gold in Utopia, but it is not a source of happiness.