Utopia

unfolding them, therefore, act as they do, believing them to be partly the chains of Gordius the legendary knot that was impossible to untie, and partly as tricks, not greatly to be wondered at, even if they possess the wealth of a thousand citizens, and often that of individual cities or even more. And these same men are called, in the same breath, wealthy, thrifty, and magnificent collectors. Indeed, in these centuries, with these institutions, these morals, and among these nations that have decreed this to be the law, everyone has as much faith and authority as the greatest wealth they have built for their household, themselves, and their heirs! And this is all the more so, the more they have accumulated—in competitive bursts of growth—the patrimonies earned by their ancestors for their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren, that is, the further and wider they have pushed away their neighbors, relations, kin, and blood relatives. But truly CHRIST, the creator and moderator of possessions, sanctioned the Pythagorean communion original: "Pythagoricam communionem" — referring to the sharing of all goods as practiced by the early disciples and charity left among his followers with a striking example, having condemned Ananias a figure in the New Testament struck dead for holding back property from the community for violating the law of communion. By this institution, certainly, CHRIST seems to me to have abrogated for his own people all those voluminous and argumentative books of civil and papal law—a law that today we see holding the citadel of prudence and ruling our fates.