I
A hundred years pass, and the man who next conducts us into Utopia is a Humanist scholar. After the manner of his time, he answers to the latinized name, Johann Valentin Andreae. He is a traveller, a social reformer, and above all things a preacher; and so the vision he imparts to us of Christianopolis seems occasionally to flicker into blackness whilst he moralizes for us and tells us to the point of tedium what his views are concerning the life of man, and in particular the conceptions of Christianity which his countrymen, the Germans, are debating about. Sometimes, when we are on the point of coming to grips with his utopia, he will annoy us by going off on a long tirade about the wickedness of the world and the necessity for fastening one’s gaze upon the life hereafter—for Protestantism seems just as otherworldly as Catholicism. It is the Humanist Andreae rather than the Lutheran Andreae who paints the picture of a Christian city. While Andreae sticks to Christianopolis his insight is deep, his views are sound, and his proposals are rational; and more than once he will amaze us by putting forward ideas which seem to leap three hundred years ahead of his time and environment.
It is impossible to get rid of the personal flavor of Andreae: his fine intelligence and his candor make our contacts with Christianopolis quite different from the dreary guidebook sketches which some of the later utopians will inflict upon us. The two other utopians who wrote in the same half century as Andreae—Francis Bacon and Tommaso Campanella—are quite second-rate in comparison; Bacon with his positively nauseating foppishness about details in dress and his superstitious regard for forms and ceremonials, and Campanella, the lonely monk whose City of the Sun seems a marriage of Plato’s Republic and the Court of Montezuma. When Bacon talks about science, he talks like a court costumer who is in the habit of describing the stage properties for a masque; and it is hard to tell whether he is more interested in the experiments performed by the scientists of the New Atlantis or the sort of clothes they wear while engaged in them. There is nothing of the snob or the dilettante about Andreae: His eye fastens itself upon essentials, and he never leaves them except when—for he is necessarily a man of his age—he turns his gaze piously to heaven.
This teeming, struggling European world that Andreae turns his back upon he knows quite well; for he has lived in Herrenburg, Koenigsbrunn, Tuebingen, Strasbourg, Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Geneva, Vaihingen, and Calw; and he is in correspondence with learned men abroad, in particular with Samuel Hartlib, who lives in England, and with John Amos Comenius. Like the Chancellor in Christianopolis, he longs for an “abode situated below the sky, but at the same time above the dregs of this known world.” Quite simply, he finds himself wrecked on the shore of an island dominated by the city of Christianopolis. After being examined as to his ideas of life and morals, his person, and his culture, he is admitted to the community.