Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas More

Pluralism, in More's hands, is never just an ethnographic flourish; it's a scalpel aimed at Europe. When he notes that in this imagined island "even in every town" religion splinters into local varieties, he’s not marveling at exotic superstition. He’s quietly indicting the violent absurdity of insisting on one salvific brand of belief back home, where doctrinal hair-splitting was already edging toward bloodshed. The line works because it presents religious diversity as banal civic weather: of course different neighborhoods worship different things. Once plurality is normalized, persecution starts to look less like piety and more like political vanity.

The choice of objects - sun, moon, planets - matters. These are visible, shared, and indisputably real in a way late-medieval theological claims often weren't to the layperson. More uses "natural" worship to reframe religion as a human response to awe and uncertainty, not merely submission to institutional authority. It’s a clever destabilization: if sincere devotion can attach itself to the sun, then the moral test of a society cannot be correct metaphysics alone; it has to be how people live together under competing metaphysics.

Context sharpens the irony. More, a Catholic martyr in England’s Reformation convulsions, writes Utopia before the schism, as unity frays and power hunts for sacred justifications. The tolerant island becomes a mirror held up to Christendom: if even pagan planets can coexist, what excuse does "civilized" Europe have for turning faith into a pretext for coercion?