John Colet

“ It was Colet who had been the first of the little group of Oxford Reformers to proclaim that Christianity had nothing to fear from the ‘new learning,’—witness his school, and the tone and spirit of his Oxford [Pg 368] lectures. Erasmus, too, had shared in this same faith. In his ‘Novum Instrumentum’ he had placed Christianity, so far as he was able, in its proper place—at the head of the advanced thought of the age.
But More had gone one step further. The man who believes that Christianity and the laws of nature were thus framed in perfect harmony by the same Founder must have faith in both. ”

“ For as earnestly as Colet himself was now seeking to bring the Christianity and advanced thought of his age into harmony, the early Schoolmen had tried to do the same thing in theirs. The misfortune of the Schoolmen was, that they had inherited from St. Augustine, and the Pseudo-Dionysius, the vicious tendency to fill up blanks in theology by indulging in hypotheses, capable of receiving the sanction of ecclesiastical authority, and then to be treated as established, although altogether unverified by facts. ”

“ Dean Colet was charged by the Archbishop with the duty of preaching this opening address.
It was a task by no means to be envied, but Colet was not the man to shirk a duty because it was unpleasant. He had accepted the deanery of St. Paul’s not simply to wear its dignities and enjoy its revenues, but to do its duties; and one of those duties, perhaps the one to which he had felt himself most clearly called, had been the duty of preaching. Probably, there was not a pulpit in England which offered so wide a sphere of influence to the preacher as that of St. Paul’s. ”

“ What Colet thought of the ‘Novum Instrumentum.’
‘What you say about the New Testament I can understand. The volumes of your new edition of it [the “Novum Instrumentum”] are here both eagerly bought and everywhere read. By many, your labours are received with approval and admiration. There are a few, also, who disapprove and carp at them, saying what was said in the letter of Martin Dorpius to you. But these are those divines whom you have described in your “Praise of Folly” and elsewhere, no less truly than wittily, as men whose praise is blame, and by whom it is an honour to be censured. ”

“ The family was far larger, on the average, in the sixteenth century than it is now. One can hardly think of any man in this generation with as many as a dozen children; it is possible to mention several of that time with over twenty. Anthony Koberger, the famous Nuremberg printer had twenty-five children, eight by his first and seventeen by his second wife. Albert Dürer was the third of eighteen children of the same couple, of whom apparently only three reached maturity. John Colet, born in 1467, was the eldest of twenty-two brothers and sisters of whom by 1499 he was the only survivor. ”

“ As he will not shrink from accepting the results of science and philosophy, so he will not shrink, on the other hand, from carrying out Christianity into practice in every department of social and political life.
Accordingly More had fearlessly done this in his ‘Utopia.’ And this Colet also had done in his own practical way; preaching Christian politics to Henry VIII. and Wolsey, from his pulpit as occasion required, believing Christianity to be equally of force in the sphere of international policy as within the walls of a cloister. ”

“ The ‘young More,’ with whom Colet and Erasmus had fallen in love twenty years ago, was now past forty. [766] The four motherless children, Margaret, Elizabeth, Cicely, and John, awhile ago nestling round their widowed father’s knee, as the dark shadow of sorrow passed over the once bright home in Bucklersbury, were now from ten to thirteen years old. The good stepmother, Alice Middleton, is said to have ruled [Pg 498] her household well, and her daughter had taken a place in the family circle as one of More’s children. ”

“ And yet we may well be free to own that Colet’s not unnatural hatred of the scholastic philosophy had blinded him in some degree to the personal merits of the early Schoolmen. Deeper knowledge of the history of their times, and study of the personal character at least of some of them, might have enabled him not only to temper his hatred, but even to recognise that they occupied in their day a standpoint not widely different altogether even from his own. ”

“ On the contrary, I think there may be traced in the ‘Enchiridion’ [305] a tendency to interpret the text of Scripture allegorically, rather than to seek out its literal meaning—a tendency which must have been somewhat opposed to the strong [Pg 174] convictions of Colet, and even to those of Erasmus, in after years. But he had just then been studying Origen, and it is not strange that he should for a while be fascinated, as so many others have been, by the allegorical method of interpretation adopted by that father. ”

“ You told us that there was no cause of war between Christians, who are bound together by holy ties in a love more than fraternal. And many other things of a like nature did you urge, with so great authority, that I may truly say that the virtue of Christ thus set forth by Colet was seen from afar. And thus did you discomfit the dark designs of your enemies. Men raging against the truth, you conquered with the mildness of an apostle. ”

“ Your words have birth in your heart, not on your lips. They follow your thoughts, instead of your thoughts being shaped by them. You have the happy art of expressing with ease what others can hardly express with the greatest labour.’ [75] Such was the first impression made by Colet’s eloquence upon one of the greatest scholars of the day, [Pg 33] who heard him deliver some of these lectures during another term. ”

“ In expounding the Epistle to the Romans it was impossible to avoid allusion to the great question afterwards forced into so unhappy a prominence by the Wittemberg and Geneva Reformers, as it had already been by Wiclif and Huss—the question of the freedom of the Will. Upon this question Colet showed an evident anxiety not to fall into one extreme whilst avoiding the other. His view seems to have been that the soul which is melted and won over to God by the power of love is won over willingly, and yet through no merit of its own. ”

“ He must be wicked, indeed, who can gainsay or interrupt him. That man is an enemy to England who does not care to give a helping hand where he can.’
Which words in praise of Colet’s self-sacrificing work were not merely uttered within hearing of those who might hang upon the lips of the aged Fitzjames or the bishop who had ‘blasphemed’ the school; they passed, with edition after edition of the ‘Copia’ of Erasmus, into the hands of every scholar in Europe, until they were known and read of all men! [416]
Colet charged with heresy by his bishop. ”

“ Colet’s opinion on them.
‘O Erasmus! of books and of knowledge there is no end. There is no thing better for us in this short life than to live holily and purely, and to make it our daily care to be purified and enlightened, and really to practise what these “Pythagorica” and “Cabalistica” of Reuchlin promise; but, in my opinion, there is no other way for us to attain this than by the earnest love and imitation of Jesus. Wherefore leaving these wandering paths, let us go the short way to work. ”

“ Colet probably had known More from childhood. Their fathers were both too much of public men to be unknown to each other, and though Colet was twelve years older than young More when they most likely [Pg 25] met at Oxford in 1492-3, their common studies under Grocyn and Linacre were likely to bring them into contact. [56] More’s ready wit, added to great natural power and versatility of mind, were such as to enable him to keep pace with others much older than himself, and to devote himself with equal zeal to the new learning. ”

“ Colet had rather set it down to anything but that. For it lies in the essence of love, he [Pg 118] said, that it should cast out fear, turn sorrow into joy, think nothing of itself, sacrifice everything for others. It could not be that He who loved the human race more than anyone else should be inconstant and fearful in the prospect of death. In confirmation of this view he referred to St. Jerome, who alone of all the church fathers had, he thought, shown true insight into the real cause of Christ’s agony in the garden. ”

“ In the meantime it may be readily imagined that, to a man of such deep feeling and impulsive nature, as the occasional outbursts of burning zeal in his writings show Colet to have been, such a disappointment would leave a sore place to which he would not care often to recur in conversation with his friends. ”

“ The exact course of the conversation we have no means of following. All we know is, that Colet took one side, and Erasmus and the divine the other, and that the chief bone of contention was the suggestion thrown out by Colet, that Cain had in the first instance offended the Almighty by his distrust in the Divine beneficence, and too great confidence in his own art and industry, and that this was proved by his having been the first to attempt to till the cursed ground ”

“ Lupton for the suggestion that when Ammonius, writing to Erasmus (Epist. clxxv.) , says ‘tuus Leucophæus salvere te jubet,’ he alludes to Colet: ‘Leucophæus’ being a Greek form of the same nickname as ‘Pullus’ might be in a Latin form. Mr. Lupton has also shown that ‘Gratian’ is a rendering of ‘John.’ See his introduction to his edition of Colet on the Sacraments of the Church, pp. 6, 7. So that the identification of Colet with the Gratianus Pullus of the Colloquy is now complete. ”

“ Colet’s views on ‘Inspiration.’
After remarking that whilst the lower forms of life produce the most numerous offspring, the highest forms of life tend towards unity of offspring, he argues that the Holy Spirit gives birth in the Scripture, according to its own power, to one and the same simple truth. What if from the simple, divine, and truth-speaking words of the Scriptures of the Spirit of Truth, whether heard or read, many and various persons draw many and varying senses? ”

“ The Dionysian theory, however speculative and vicious as such, at least according to Colet’s version of it, did not, like the modern theory, tend towards that grossest heathen conception of religion, according to which its main object is the propitiation of the Deity, rather than the changing of the heart of man. ”

“ But I, who have learned to live in solitude, know well how imperfectly I am furnished for such a task; nor do I lay claim to sufficient learning to justify my [Pg 132] undertaking it. Nor do I judge that I have strength of mind enough to enable me to sustain the ill-will of so many men stoutly maintaining their own ground. Matters of this kind require not a tyro, but a practised general. Nor can you rightly call me immodest in refusing to do what I should be far more immodest to attempt. You act, my dear Colet, in this matter as wisely as they who (as Plautus says) “demand water from a rock.” ”

“ Its defenders adopted, and in perfect good faith applied to the Vulgate, the words quoted from Augustine: ‘If any error should be admitted to have crept into the Holy Scriptures, what authority would be left to them?’ If Colet and Erasmus should undermine men’s faith in the absolute inspiration of the Scriptures, it would result, in their view, as a logical necessity, in the destruction of the Christian religion. ”

“ Still, sharing Colet’s hatred of persecution, More represented that it was one of the oldest laws of Utopia ‘that no man is to be punished for his religion.’ Every one might be of any religion he pleased, and might use argument to induce others to accept it. It was only when men resorted to other force than that of persuasion, using reproaches and violence, that they were banished from Utopia ”

“ That the life and writings of such a man should have awakened in his breast something of hero-worship [274] is, therefore, not surprising. That he should have singled out these passages, and taken the trouble to translate them, is some proof that he admired Pico’s practical piety more than his Neo-Platonic speculations; that he shared with Colet those yearnings for practical Christian reform with which Colet had returned from Italy ten years before. That a few years after this translation should be published and issued in English in More’s name was further proof of it. ”

“ And in the same way the sacraments were nothing apart from the personal spiritual realities which they were meant to symbolize.
Religion consists in love.
[Pg 73] Underneath, therefore, the wild excess of symbolism and speculation which lay on the surface, and formed, as it were, the froth of the Dionysian theology, Colet seems to have found this basis of eternal truth, that religion is a thing of the heart, not of creed nor of ceremonial observances; that, in Colet’s own rendering of the Dionysian theory:—‘Knowledge leads not to eternal life, but love. Whoso loveth God is known of Him. ”

“ Many abstain from divinity because they are afraid lest they should waver in the catholic faith, when they see there is nothing which is not called in question.
‘Gaspar. I believe firmly what I read in the Holy Scriptures, and the creed called the Apostles’, and I don’t trouble my head any further. I leave the rest to be disputed and defined by the clergy, if they please.
‘Erasmus. What Thales taught you that philosophy?
‘Gaspar. I was for some time in domestic service’ [as More was in the house of Cardinal Morton before he was sent to Oxford] , ‘with that honestest of men, John Colet. ”