McWilliams, Saving Place
28
of the multitude of a city.” Raphael was God’s political messenger. Second, Raphael’s
Hebraic name means “the healing of God,” and so St. Raphael “became a symbolic
physician who cures souls as well as bodies and illuminates darkened minds.” Finally,
and crucially, Raphael was the patron saint of travelers, “a type of the pilgrim and a
guardian who guides men on their journeys both in this life and through it.”
61
Hythloday appears to be a true Raphael on earth. For one thing, he claims to be
primarily concerned with the best state of a commonwealth. He takes on the role, in
Utopia, of a political messenger. He also wants to be a healer; “his technique, like his
archangelic prototype’s, is a question of illumination.”
62
Hythloday aspire to heal the
European states, which, he implies, are more diseased than they know; they lie almost
beyond salvation. Moreover, of course, Hythloday is a traveler. He is an archetypal
traveler. He speaks as one of the first travelers in an age that will boast many, many
more. “Nothing could have been both more natural, and more witty,” Elizabeth
McCutcheon has written, “ than to move from St. Raphael, patron saint of travelers, to
Raphael, world traveler and explorer, former companion of Amerigo Vespucci.”
63
Perhaps at the same time, nothing could be more serious. It is almost as if
Thomas More wants to drive home, in a fairly visceral way, the idea that the modern age
is going to produce many Raphaels, men who have traveled around the world and who
boast that they have found the secret of healing. These are men who will concern
themselves with the question of the proper order of the commonwealth, though they will
be attached to no commonwealth. They will arrive from afar, bearing souvenirs and
promises of salvation. How could they not seem, immediately, like angels? Here they
61
McCutcheon, 22-23.
62
Ibid., 37.
63
Ibid., 33.
Convention