Mithras and the Utopians

Mithras and the Utopians are connected through a shared name for the divine that gives a religiously diverse society a point of unity without requiring uniform worship. The Utopians describe Mithras as the supreme being who made and governs the world; their common religious language coexists with differing accounts of whom or what each community worships.

A shared name amid diverse beliefs

Utopian religion includes worship of the sun, moon, or planets, as well as the elevation of people remembered for virtue or glory to divine status. The wiser and greater part, however, worships an eternal, invisible, infinite, and incomprehensible deity, understood as the Father of All and the source of the beginning, growth, change, and end of all things. Across these differences, the Utopians agree that one supreme being made and governs the world, and call that being Mithras in their own language. They disagree over whether their particular god or image is the supreme being, but accept that the divine being—whoever it is—is owed the honor and majesty recognized by all nations.

This common name does not erase disagreement. It makes room for multiple conceptions of divine identity while locating them within a shared conviction that the world is governed by a supreme power. The account also describes religious change as gradual: people turn away from varied superstitions toward the religion regarded as best and most widely accepted. That movement is not entirely free of fear, since misfortunes following efforts to abandon a cult have been taken as signs that its god intervened against its rejection.

Worship in common spaces

The shared name Mithras shapes public worship. Utopian temples contain no images of God, leaving each person free to form a conception of the divine in accordance with their religion. Nor do public prayers use a different name for the divine essence: Mithras is the common name, and the prayers are composed so that adherents of different beliefs can use them without contradicting their own convictions.

The temples accommodate difference through both architecture and ritual arrangements. They are spacious but deliberately subdued in light, which the priests believe helps recollection and devotion. Distinctive rites belonging to particular sects take place in private houses, while public temple worship avoids forms that would conflict with other persuasions. The result is neither a single compulsory creed nor the disappearance of religious practice, but a common devotional setting organized around what the different groups can share.

Toleration, conversion, and civic boundaries

The Utopians’ account of Christianity shows that their religious plurality can include conversion. After hearing about Christ’s teaching, life, and miracles, and about the constancy of the martyrs, many Utopians accepted Christianity and were baptized. The narrator leaves open whether this response came from divine inspiration or from the apparent affinity between Christian communal ownership and a principle already dear to the Utopians. The converts nevertheless lacked access to the other sacraments because none of the surviving travelers was a priest; they discussed whether a priest chosen among themselves could administer them without authority from the Pope, but had not made that choice when the narrator departed.

Utopus’s enactment of a law of religious toleration reflects the island’s history of religious division. Before his conquest, conflicts among the inhabitants had divided them so deeply that they failed to unite against him. His law allowed each person to follow a religion and to seek converts through argument and modest, friendly persuasion, but forbade reproach and violence; those who used them could be banished or enslaved. The law thus protects both private belief and peaceful advocacy, while treating religious incitement as a threat to civic order. A newly baptized man was banished after repeatedly preaching in a manner that inflamed the people toward sedition—not simply for preferring Christianity or condemning other rites.

Belief, conduct, and the limits of inclusion

The common religious bond extends beyond the name Mithras to beliefs about providence and life after death. Utopians regard the soul as immortal and believe that divine rewards and punishments follow death. Their ethical account joins reason and virtue to reverence for the divine and to efforts to advance the happiness of others. Against that background, they view denial of the soul’s survival or belief that the world is governed by chance as especially damaging to civic life: they fear that someone who expects no consequence beyond earthly law may disregard communal rules when private appetite invites it.

That suspicion creates a boundary within the society’s toleration. The Utopians do not force such people to pretend to believe, since they hold that belief cannot simply be commanded and regard compelled dissimulation as a kind of fraud. They nevertheless deny them honors, offices, and public trust, restrict their defense of these views before the common people, and permit or encourage private disputation with priests and other serious thinkers. Mithras therefore names a shared theological center, but the political relationship around that center is conditional: religious difference is accommodated so long as it does not become coercive agitation or, in the Utopians’ judgment, undermine the moral commitments on which civic trust depends.