Explore "The Story of Utopias" by Lewis Mumford on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
How the new Humanism of the Renaissance brings us within sight of Christianopolis; and how we have for the first time a glimpse of a modern utopia.
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.