Utopian College of Priests

The Utopian College of Priests is a small religious institution entrusted with worship, moral oversight, and the education of the young. Its influence is deliberately distinct from the coercive authority of magistrates: priests admonish and guide, while public officials impose legal punishment. In war, however, their sacred standing gives them a direct role in protecting people from violence and helping bring hostilities to an end.

Membership and Appointment

There are thirteen priests in each town, one for each temple, and one high priest stands over the others. The people choose priests by secret ballot, as they choose magistrates; secrecy is intended to prevent factions from shaping the election. After selection, priests are consecrated by the College. The institution remains small in part because priestly dignity is held in exceptional esteem and is thought to require unusual virtue. The account also gives a practical reason for limiting numbers: so few priests are needed that their work can be maintained without diminishing the order’s reputation through a larger membership.

Women rarely serve as priests, and those who do are chosen from among elderly widows. Priests’ wives, meanwhile, are described as the most distinguished women in the country. These details place the institution within a wider social hierarchy of honor while showing that its religious office is not absolutely restricted to men.

Duties and Limits of Authority

The priests are responsible for sacred matters and the worship of God, and they inspect the people’s manners. Their role in correcting misconduct is nevertheless limited: they may exhort and admonish, but the Prince and other magistrates retain the power to punish. The priests’ most severe sanction is exclusion from communal worship. Because religious observance is held in deep reverence, that exclusion brings public disgrace and private spiritual anxiety. If an excluded person does not soon demonstrate genuine repentance, the Senate may take the matter up and punish the person for impiety. Religious discipline thus works through a combination of priestly censure and civil enforcement, rather than through an independent priestly court.

Education is another central responsibility. The priests help form children’s minds and conduct, placing particular emphasis on early moral and civic instruction rather than letters alone. The account presents childhood as a formative period: beliefs impressed on young people are expected to accompany them through life and help preserve political peace. The priests’ educational work therefore connects religious teaching to the stability of the commonwealth.

Religious Pluralism and Public Worship

The institution serves a society containing several kinds of religion, including local worship of celestial bodies and the veneration of eminent people from the past. Many of the wiser inhabitants worship one eternal and incomprehensible divine being; across the different beliefs, people agree that a supreme being made and governs the world, commonly called Mithras. The public religious order makes room for these differences: each sect may perform its distinctive rites in private, while worship in the temples avoids forms that would contradict the convictions of other groups. There are no images of God in the temples, and prayers are framed so that people of different persuasions can use them.

This pluralism has limits, but the distinction is between belief and conduct that threatens civic peace. Utopus established freedom to follow and argue for a religion through persuasion and amicable, modest means, forbidding coercion and religious abuse. The law followed his conquest of a population divided by religious quarrels, divisions that had made it easier to subdue. The policy is meant both to prevent renewed conflict and to allow religious truth to prevail through argument rather than force. A newly baptized man was exiled not simply for criticizing other religions, but after his public denunciations inflamed the people toward sedition. The case illustrates the boundary the law draws between religious disagreement and incitement.

The arrival of Christianity exposes a further institutional question. After hearing about Christ, his teaching, and the steadfastness of the martyrs, many Utopians accepted baptism. The surviving visitors who instructed them were not priests, however, so they could baptize but could not administer the other sacraments. The converts wanted access to those rites, and some debated whether a priest chosen locally could perform priestly duties without authority from the Pope. They appeared prepared to make such a choice, but had not done so when the narrator left. The episode shows that conversion had begun while the means of establishing a local Christian ministry remained unsettled.

Priests in War and the Order’s Standing

When the Utopians go to war, seven priests accompany the army; seven others take their places at home until the first group returns. The returning priests resume their duties, while those who served in their absence attend the high priest until a vacancy arises. During battle, the accompanying priests wear sacred vestments and pray for peace, then for their own side’s victory, especially one achieved with little bloodshed. If victory comes, they enter among their troops to restrain further violence. Enemies who reach or appeal to them are protected, and those able to touch their garments are promised safety for their lives and property.

Their intervention can also halt a retreat from becoming a further round of killing and plunder. The priests have at times stood between a disordered army and its pursuers, separated the sides, and helped secure peace on reasonable terms. This work makes their ritual authority practical: reverence for their persons among neighboring peoples helps protect both Utopians and their enemies.

No magistrates receive greater honor. Priests are not questioned or prosecuted for crimes; their punishment is left to God and conscience, because they are considered dedicated to God. The account justifies this extraordinary immunity by pointing to careful selection, the small number of priests, and their lack of formal power beyond the respect accorded to them. It acknowledges that a priest might become corrupt, but argues that such a case would be rare and would cause limited public harm. The institution’s design thus places great trust in personal virtue while attempting to contain the consequences of its members’ exemption from ordinary prosecution.