The English cleric John Colet (1467–1519), Dean of Saint Paul's Cathedral and founder of Saint Paul's School, has been the subject of considerable interest and an equal amount of disagreement about almost every aspect of his life, including his education and influences, theological convictions, and vision for reform of English Church. Interest has increased in the past century and a half ever since Joseph Lupton first published Colet's writings in the 1870s.Footnote 1 In the first half of the twentieth century, scholars have acknowledged the controversial nature of the history of Colet criticism, stemming from Erasmus's portrait of Colet in his letter to Jodocus Jonas of 1521 as a Catholic, but also a humanist and anti-scholastic, much like Erasmus himself.Footnote 2 From those beginnings, a vigorous tug-of-war arose between supporters of Catholic or Protestant readings of Colet on key issues of divine grace and human freedom. This form of the controversy can be witnessed in the sixteenth-century biographies by John Foxe, who championed Colet's Protestant leanings, and Thomas Harding, who defended Colet as a pious Catholic.Footnote 3
In the 1930s Albert Hyma summarized and Eugene Rice later acknowledged “the essential discrepancies—on the influence of Augustine, on monasticism, ‘primitive religion,’ the classics, predestination”—as heavily influenced by Erasmus's biographical sketch of Colet as a “primitive theologian,” but then enhanced by Lupton himself and Frederic Seebohm, who promoted the idea of the Oxford Reformers. All that served as background to Rice's own defense of Colet as essentially Augustinian in his theology.Footnote 4 Also in the 1950s, E. W. Hunt, in a study devoted specifically to Colet's theology, repeated the vignette about the time when Erasmus and Colet went to the shrine of Thomas Becket: Erasmus described Colet as recoiling from venerating the relics and was disgusted by the ostentation and silk vestments, gold candlesticks, and jewels.Footnote 5 Fifteen years later Leland Miles also wrote of “the Dean's distaste for pilgrimages, relic-veneration, and praying to saints,” which are “vividly described in Erasmus' account of their visit to the Becket shrine.”Footnote 6 Hunt added a note of caution, however: “it is debatable whether Colet ever openly condemned image-worship. He was said to have been accused of this, but that may be false.”Footnote 7 Miles raised the stakes when he added, “An even more striking contrast between Colet and St. Thomas [More] exists in the area of sacraments. . . Colet's Pauline commentaries (as distinguished from the Dionysian trilogy) advocate the view, later associated with Protestantism, of the sacraments as mere symbols.”Footnote 8 Miles spoke of Colet as an orthodox Christian, but a pre-Protestant. Miles also claimed that “in all of his writings Colet studiously avoids using the term ‘saint’ even in the innocuous Pauline sense of ‘Christian.’” Instead he uses the humanist Latin term divus for the Christian who has merged with God.Footnote 9 In the humanist Latin of Colet's environment, divus was a near synonym for sanctus, and so no one could call him a humanist on that account; but proponents of a particular interest have not always been able to refrain from presenting their subjects in terms of familiar labels.
By the 1980s, the polarized history of Colet scholarship had induced J. B. Trapp to acknowledge the English cleric as “an enigma, a contradiction. . . He faces both ways.”Footnote 10 Catherine Jarrott, in an irenic spirit, after acknowledging the range of those siding with Colet as a promoter of the Reformation or as a theologian with “Augustinian-Thomistic” (that is, Aquinas) views rather than Lutheran, took a useful turn in the debate to suggest that, at least on the matter of justification, Colet “might better be called simply Pauline rather than Augustinian, post-Thomistic, or pre-Lutheran. In this she embraced a view of P. Bernard O'Kelly, who described Colet as “the last great exponent in Western Europe of a Christian world-vision that was not in any significant way determined by the great controversies that left Western Christendom in fragments.”Footnote 11
Today it is no longer considered appropriate, or useful, to debate whether Colet was Protestant or Catholic. Recent studies of Colet by John Gleason and Jonathan Arnold further downplay the view of Colet as a proto-Protestant who heralded the new Protestant age. Instead, despite some omissions in Colet's Catholicism such as a belief in purgatory, they present him as a traditionalist, pre-Reformation Catholic, a pious Christian humanist, who preached, worked, and wrote for his beloved Church.Footnote 12 In Arnold's case, the focus is on Colet's ecclesiology, that is, on his vision of the Church's mission and organizational structure. Both Gleason and Arnold, however, acknowledge that Colet meant to be a serious reformer, critical of the Catholic Church as it conducted itself in his time. Gleason rightly notes that, in any case, English Reformation does not align with Protestant theology.Footnote 13 The studies of both Gleason and Arnold are revisionist in the sense that they seek to replace centuries of biographical accounts that rely on religious polemics. They did not rely on Erasmus because many of Erasmus's claims can be faulted for rhetorical and polemical distortions, and they did not rely on Harding because he did not consider Colet as having left anything written. Rather, Gleason and Arnold made a more critical, scholarly examination of what Colet himself did indeed write.
The debate has shifted, but questions remain over Colet's vision whether historians now see him as “evangelical,” “modernist,” or a “reformer” with a puzzling and unique mixture of various persuasions.Footnote 14 This essay sheds new light on efforts to understand the nature of the reform that Colet tried to promote. It seeks to do this without influence by the Catholic-Protestant debate or by the even later forms of Victorian idealism. The purpose is to examine Colet's interest in outlining a reformed Church with reference to practices and themes that are characteristic of the Orthodox East, an aspect of Colet's ecclesiology and theology. What were the impulses, for example, behind Colet's translating the Pater Noster into English instead of Latin and showing a preference for the vernacular in worship settings (a preference for which he was criticized to a degree that is still uncertain)?Footnote 15 How does one correctly understand Colet's willingness to accept a divinely ordered ranking among secular and clerical leaders and subjects that led him to earn a place on the King's Council and earn his protection, despite his denunciation of war, which earned him the disfavor of Henry VIII?Footnote 16 More significantly, how does one read Colet's emphasis on direct interpretation of scripture in light of his lectures at Oxford on Paul's Letters when the emphasis there was still to lecture on the Sentences of Peter Lombard? And when it comes to scriptural exegesis, Colet's historical sensibility and his limited use of allegorical exegesis, trends that characterized the new or rather renewed hermeneutic of his day, what do they tell us about Colet's ecclesiology in particular?Footnote 17 And how does one correctly understand the interest he took in the Greek language, enough to make his St. Paul's school the first in England to teach Greek, even if he never learned much Greek? If he was a traditionalist unsatisfied because of neglected practices and abuses of the Church of his time, but was not advancing the kinds of reform that would be able rightly to be considered proto-Protestant, what was he advocating? This study first re-evaluates some of the characteristics that influenced earlier historians to judge Colet either as a proto-Reformer, or a loyal Roman Catholic who was critical of abuses in his day, or as an idiosyncratic churchman influenced by the new humanism. Then, this article presents a new and useful pattern that emerges when reading Colet in light of patristic sources and in comparison with the Christian perspective of the Orthodox East. Colet's above-mentioned acceptance of the vernacular for prayers, his commitment to the ultimate authority of Christ under which kings exercise jurisdiction over Church and State, his concern for the application of biblical teaching, and his general avoidance of scholastic disputation are consistent with the main outlines of Orthodox piety.
I. Colet's Polarized Past
Most important is his ecclesiology, on which topic Colet expressed himself abundantly. He was not anti-clerical but rather extremely clerical and a firm proponent of a hierarchical structure. As Arnold puts it, “Colet's ecclesiology sought to uphold Church structures and hierarchy.”Footnote 18 Colet was not Protestant regarding Church polity. He advocated the higher ranking of clergy over laity: ministers, priests, and bishops, the threefold structure he derived from the Dionysian text.Footnote 19 And despite the time he spent at the English Hospice in Rome in 1492–1493, Colet was, at best, lukewarm about the See of Peter. He was frequently critical of the papacy and is critical of the Popes for having usurped power for personal uses. As one might expect, there is division among scholars over what that criticism entailed. Hunt wrote that Colet never questioned the authority of the Pope; and indeed Colet wrote of the Pope, “ille quidem qui summus est, quem nos papam vocitamus.”Footnote 20 But on Colet's understanding of the Pope's authority vis à vis other bishops, Arnold observes that
Colet's interpretation of [this] ecclesiological emphasis was not one of pontifical absolutism. Indeed, he could be said to have had conciliarist tendencies; although he referred to the Pope as “a weighty authority,” he did not consider him to be the only, or necessarily the greatest, authority in the Church. . . . Bishops rather than the Pope (although he was Bishop of Rome), became Colet's focus of attention in the hierarchy of the Church because they were endowed with the ultimate ecclesiastical responsibility of passing on God's love to the lower orders of the Church hierarchy.Footnote 21
Arnold adds: “although there is no direct evidence to suggest that Colet was familiar with conciliarist thought, his call for more provincial and general councils, aimed at promoting reformation, echoes conciliar idealism.” Colet might pray for the Pope “but his emphasis is on the supremacy of bishops.” Conciliarists too would pray for the Pope but they questioned the range of papal power.Footnote 22 Arnold's description of Colet's understanding of ecclesiastical hierarchy is accurate and points in the right direction toward understanding Colet's ecclesiology. An analogy Colet draws in his Ecclesiastical Hierarchy especially at chapter 2.2 is between the bishop—“every” bishop—and God, and between the priests under him and Apostles.Footnote 23 In that hierarchical scheme there is no easy path to the supremacy of Peter over all bishops. When Colet says reform must start at the top, he means with the hierarchs/pontifices, at each level.
Other recent historians affirm this steadfast structure in Colet's ecclesiology. Daniel Lochman observes that Colet meant to use the idea of ecclesiastical hierarchy as a cudgel to reform the papacy.Footnote 24 Elsewhere Lochman writes: “of the three pontifical ranks, Colet notes the pontifical [here used in the particular sense of the word as ‘episcopal’] office is the highest, and therefore the bishop should be able to perform everything that every lower minister can.”Footnote 25 But did not Colet's 1515 sermon on Wolsey's installation as Cardinal reflect on the title cardinal, what it meant? Yes, but Arnold notes that Colet endorsed Catholic hierarchy and the king's authority, but saw the cardinalate as a rise in temporal power rather than spiritual authority, which was already in place since Wolsey was Archbishop of York.Footnote 26 Colet likely saw the cardinalate as an administrative office somewhat akin to that of the bishop, distinct from the religious status of the hierarch/pontifex.
When he criticizes the practice of awarding indulgences, Colet says that the power of loosing and binding is not men's but God's, which is akin to the Orthodox understanding of the role of the priest in the Sacrament of Penance.Footnote 27 Was Colet accepting of a married clergy, as are the Orthodox? To this question, the evidence of Colet's proposed reforms as dean of St. Paul's presents a resounding no. But the impact of Colet's idealism must also be considered, since Colet also called for vergers, that is, lay ministers who assist the clergy, to be celibate.Footnote 28 That idealism looked toward the fulfillment of the vision where Christ the Bridegroom fulfilled the true meaning of Matrimony as spouse of his beloved Church, and as such it accords with monastic piety.
Given the various elements of Colet's ecclesiology supporting a traditional hierarchical structure while rejecting many late-medieval practices, the movement away from the Protestant–Catholic debate as a way to frame Colet's perspective gains momentum. Historians instead sought to present Colet's vision as deeply personal and even unique. John Gleason in particular points to the many aspects of Colet's ecclesiology that seem to him to be the vision of a perfectionist. Gleason's Colet sought no structural or doctrinal change to the existing order, but the renewal of people's minds and a perfected Church for the glory of God. And with all the marshaling of evidence, of which several points have been summarized thus far in this essay, Arnold is ready and willing to accept Colet as a problematic, even puzzling figure whose ecclesiology is an aspect of an individual vision:
Colet does not fall easily into any historical, intellectual, or ecclesiastical category. He was not part of a humanist club, but he was a humanist; he was not a proto-Protestant, but he was critical of the Church; he was not a Lollard, but he was suspected of heresy; he was not an Oxford reformer, but he was, for a time, an Oxford intellectual; most importantly, he was not a reformer who actually changed things, although he dearly wished to be. Ultimately, Colet escapes identification with any other set of contemporaneous idealists because his vision was his own. His ecclesiology set him apart because it combined a huge and eclectic range of ideas into an individualistic vision of perfection.Footnote 29
That is an eloquent statement, and correct as far as it goes. But it still leaves the description of Colet's ecclesiastical vision incomplete. It has been said that Colet reconfigured the private and political, that is, mystical and clerical elements of Dionysius's thought as to make a unique ecclesiastical vision. Arnold's discussion of the sources of Colet's perfectionism mentions Dionysius, then Pauline theology, Platonism and Neo-Platonism, Augustinianism, and the Franciscan tradition. But if there are problems fitting Colet's ecclesiology with Protestantism on one side, and Roman Catholicism, even a reform-spirited Catholicism, on the other, a closer fit can be understood through Dionysius to the tradition of the Eastern Fathers and the traditions of Christian Orthodoxy. Colet's commentary on Romans 12:2 in his Exposition on Romans, for example, states that the mission of the members of the Church was
to withdraw themselves wholly from the defilements of this world . . . and submit themselves, as matter fit and cleansed, to the divine reformation. Thus at length, as we ask in the Lord's Prayer, God would reign on earth as in heaven, and exercise dominion among men themselves.Footnote 30
But rather than think immediately of Augustine or Francis, it is possible to hear the words of the Cherubic Hymn of the Orthodox Divine Liturgy of John Chrysostom before the Lord's Prayer is recited and the Eucharist is administered to the people: “Let us set aside all the cares of life that we may receive the King of all, invisibly escorted by the angelic hosts.”Footnote 31
It is helpful to examine Colet's ecclesiology with a focus on his treatise on the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy of pseudo-Dionysius. Dionysius is the patristic author whom Colet discusses the most in all his writings. In addition to the two treatises by Colet, on the Celestial Hierarchy and the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, Colet quotes from Dionysius fourteen additional times, of which ten are from that patristic writer's Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. For the Celestial Hierarchy and Divine Names of Dionysius, Colet used the Latin translations of Traversari, and it has been shown that Colet used the edition published by Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples in 1499.Footnote 32 He may also have used Ficino's translation of the Celestial Hierarchy, but Ficino did not translate the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy.Footnote 33 And within Colet's circle at the dawn of the sixteenth century, William Grocyn brought back from the Continent a manuscript copy of Dionysius in Greek as well as in Traversari's translation; and Grocyn lectured on Dionysius in London at that time, well before the first printing of Dionysius by Junta at Florence in 1516.Footnote 34 This living commentary on Dionysius would have caught Colet up in the growing reception of Dionysius throughout Europe and England. We know that the ecclesiology described in the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy of Dionysius does not reflect the order at the time of Saint Paul but the Church in the sixth century, the period during which the foundations of Byzantine Orthodoxy began to flourish, from the age of Justinian through the completion of the Church's ecclesiological and doctrinal structures with the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787. Although the identity of Dionysius was debated East and West, some Byzantine scholars doubted, and doubted earlier than their Western counterparts, whether Dionysius was from the first century. The prologue to the Scholia on Dionysius by the sixth-century bishop John of Scythopolis, for example, shows that there were those who already suspected that Dionysius was not the disciple of Paul but a much later writer.Footnote 35 For our purposes, the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy is the more important since, of all of Colet's extant writings, that tractate is the one focused on the Church militant, that is, on earth, but also the situation in that Church of his own time. The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy is an ideal text for this, since it divides the living among the clergy, the initiated, and those who do not participate in the life of the Church. This is evident, for example, in Colet's eloquent lament for the degenerated practices of his day when compared with the age of the Church Fathers:
But now to have departed from custom is to be lamented, when we ought surely to be much more eager to preserve what our fathers have instituted than were the Hebrews in retaining their traditions, in that our [teachings] are more excellent and clearer, of greater truth and purer significance than theirs, whose principle and fitness the apostles undoubtedly perceived, to whom the spirit disclosed all so that it could not be but that they wisely understood what to fit appropriately, each to each; and that they portrayed spiritual truths by fit signs, with due elegance—what has befallen afterwards—changed I know not how without foul crime—when it is to be believed that those taught by the holy spirit established everything in the Church.Footnote 36
Colet is remarking specifically about the disuse of the rite of the consecration of monks, including tonsure, which was performed from the early Christian centuries and which is still performed in the Eastern Church at Baptism of all lay persons as well as in monastic initiation and clerical ordination. Colet's elegant Latin prose offers readers both an emotionally charged expression of that loss and a reasoned argument, comparing those customs of the early Christians with the customs the ancient Hebrews, a less precious inheritance in his view but one which, as he argues, their heirs have preserved more faithfully. The strategy of comparing earlier and contemporary customs and practices, and deploring the latter, is widespread in Colet's time as the rising spirit of reform and the cultivation of a highly charged and polemical form of rhetoric in humanist culture coalesce, although the corrupt present age was more often compared to the classical, apostolic, and patristic ages instead of the ancient Hebraic.Footnote 37 Despite the strong likelihood that Colet was influenced by the climate of such rhetorical laments among his contemporaries influenced by the new humanism, he does not separate rhetorical embellishment from moral purpose. What was a conventional literary device was also a cry for practical reform of the Church's hierarchy, liturgy, and sacramental essence that was seriously meant.
The claim that this cry was sincere, however, invites the question: what is Colet's vision of reform for his Church in England at the turn of the sixteenth century? As mentioned, some historians like Arnold point to Colet's idealism and perfectionism instead of revisiting the anachronistic Catholic–Protestant debate.Footnote 38 Colet speaks of a desire to recall the Church to its prisca religio. What he means, of course, is a return to the customs and ethos of the Church of the Apostles, the Church under Roman persecution, the Church of the Desert Fathers, the Church of Nicene Orthodoxy, for practice in his time. But a living wing of the Church that itself was not part of the Catholic–Protestant conflict is the Orthodox East, where many early practices and perspectives continued and which did not share in Western practices that Colet had distaste for, such as temporal indulgences and, except for a few Orthodox enthusiasts like Demetrios Kydones in the fourteenth century and George Gennadios Scholarios in the fifteenth, the Scholastic method of theological disputation.
While there was to be no presence of the Orthodox Church in England until the century following Colet's death, it is right to see that Colet so received and adjusted Dionysius's descriptions of an ecclesiastical structure and ethos that Colet's reformed Church would have taken on many structures of a first Orthodox Church in his native country since the Schism between East and West in the eleventh century. It is further possible to suggest that the Reformation would have moved in the direction of Orthodox theology and spirituality had more Reformers known of its living structure in the East. For Italy, Peter Martyr Vermigli's own leanings toward the Christian East have been observed, based largely on his rejection of the doctrine of transubstantiation, and Luther's consubstantiation.Footnote 39 There is no intention, however, nor need to suggest here that Ps. Dionysius himself completely or even faithfully reflects Orthodox theology and ecclesiology.Footnote 40
The subject of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, however, does provide its own approach to the major reform issues such as the nature and composition of clergy and laity, the nature and administration of sacraments, and the particular ethos of the way the Church community works to implement the Gospel mandate concerning love of God and neighbor that accord well with the Greek East. The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy is important also for the opposite reason, that although Dionysius was an author also much used by Western medieval commentators, it was overwhelmingly in reference to the Celestial Hierarchy. By contrast the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy was rarely referenced in Scholastic literature, and although Thomas Aquinas cites Dionysius over 1,700 times, fewer than two hundred references, just over eleven percent, are from the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy.Footnote 41 A major reason for this is that the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy describes an ecclesiology that was markedly different from that of the Church in the medieval West. On this point Lochman has rightly remarked that
[Commentators before Colet] avoided the messier issues prompted by Dionysius's liturgical oddities and disturbing ecclesiology. From the twelfth century on, theologians conversant with the hierarchies smoothed the rough edges pertaining to liturgy, sacraments, and the Church and even appropriated Dionysius's metaphysical structure to justify the authority of the papacy and the existing ecclesiastical hierarchy.Footnote 42
The point we make here is that Colet did not follow this trend of avoiding those issues that were “messier” from a Western perspective, but interpreted even the passages of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy that were controversial for the Church in the West. A good example of Colet's preference for describing the Dionysian practices even when they do not reflect those of the Western Church is his mutual discussion of the eucharist being administered immediately with baptism and confirmation (or Chrismation) as part of a rite offered even to infants:
No one is perfectly a member of Christ's body until he has been a partaker of holy communion and the food of life, through participation wherein he becomes one with the body. In the early Church all those baptized and at the same time confirmed by the holy anointing were admitted without delay to the communion of divine nourishment. It is noteworthy that Dionysius speaks about confirmation in such a way that he describes it not as a distinct sacrament but a certain something for baptism's completion with the result that it and baptism ought to be one sacrament. Yet no less must it be observed that the custom in the early Church was that all the baptized would immediately take communion so that they may be regarded as existing by means of a common nutrition derived from Christ's mystical body. Otherwise, though baptized, they are not considered to be from the [mystical] body. For that communication joins and binds through a shared nutrition, and it perfects by a final completion. Therefore at one time it was imparted even to baptized infants, and about them this is read in ancient books on Eucharistic rites: if a bishop is present, [the infant] ought to be confirmed immediately, then made a communicant. If a bishop cannot be present, prior to mass a priest should give the infant communion of the Lord's body and blood before it is suckled or has ingested anything, even though necessity should threaten, so that [the infant] immediately may become a man purified, illuminated, and perfected in Christ.Footnote 43
The bishop was the presider over the entire baptismal, confirmation, and eucharistic rite. This was the regular practice in the Church that Dionysius describes. The Orthodox Church kept the three sacraments in immediate relation to each other even after the increasing Christian population prevented the bishop himself from administering chrismation to all at the time of baptism and first communion. In the West, the bishop retained the exclusive privilege to administer confirmation, which resulted in the three sacraments becoming completely separated. Confirmation in particular was administered irregularly and generally separate from the candidate's baptism by several years.
Colet's reflection on the eucharist as he read of early Christian practice in Dionysius is indicative of his acquiescence to the practices of dismissing the catechumens, those under instruction, before the mysteries begin, and of dividing the loaf along with the sharing of the consecrated wine from the single cup. Toward the end of chapter 3.3 Colet refers to the communion bread as bread and not unleavened wafers. In fact, Lupton quoting Jewell (1611) felt the need to explain, “it was a great Cake.”Footnote 44 This is correct, since Colet was referring to the practice that Dionysius described, and that reflected the first five centuries of Christianity. In his description of the liturgy Colet also correctly explained the etymology of the Greek verbs catechizo and energeo. Hunt remarked that Colet's statements about the eucharist do not “show any anticipation of the Reformers and no evidence that he did not accept the doctrine of transubstantiation as the Reformers did.”Footnote 45 That negative statement confirms Colet's acceptance of the doctrine of the Real Presence but does not require transubstantiation to explain it. Neither Lupton nor any of the commentators mention the Church's living continuity of those practices in the Orthodox Church.
What do we know about Colet's participation in the revival of sources, particularly Greek patristics? Men in Colet's circle, including More, Grocyn, and Linacre introduced much of the Greek Christian classics into England. And at Cambridge, a year before Colet arrived in 1481, Richard Brinkley owned a Greek New Testament and seems to have studied the Psalter in Hebrew as well as in the LXX translation.Footnote 46 Colet, however, claimed that he knew no Greek until he was “almost an old man.”Footnote 47 Historians including Gleason take that testimony and conclude that for a good part of Colet's life he may not have been interested to learn Greek.Footnote 48 Hunt reminded his readers that Colet could not go to the original Hebrew and Greek texts of the scriptures, because they were inaccessible and he did not know the languages.Footnote 49 But even this did not prevent Colet from quoting from the Greek Fathers, accessing them through Latin translations, before he learned some Greek. And although theirs is still a minority view, O'Kelly and Jarrott, editors of Colet's treatise on 1 Corinthians, show that there is evidence of Colet's knowledge of Greek in that commentary which, as Jarrott and O'Kelly have suggested, may date from 1505. If this dating is correct, and even if it means that Colet is picking up a few words, perhaps with the aid of Grocyn and Linacre and without having gained reading proficiency, that level of familiarity at least was reached over ten years before Colet is assumed to be taking up Greek.Footnote 50
At the dawn of the sixteenth century, Colet published tractates on Romans and 1 Corinthians, and both works contain ample quotations from patristic writers. He has been shown to quote from the Latin Fathers Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, Lactantius, Gregory the Great, Tertullian, and Sedulius; and of the Greek Fathers, Origen, John Chrysostom, and Gregory Nazianzus from Latin translations. He used them as the tradition provided them to him. Enough of Augustine was already in print. Colet cited Origen, for example, for the claim that Moses was a poet. The reference has been traced back to the Contra Celsum, “either at first hand or having been told of it by Erasmus.”Footnote 51Contra Celsum was available in a Latin translation by Christoforo Persona published in 1481. Erasmus included Origen and Dionysius among the patristic writers that Colet read while in Italy.Footnote 52 The Peri Archon in the Late Antique Latin translation of Rufinus as De Principiis was available in manuscript. Although it was to become available in print in a Latin translation in 1503, it is likely that Colet did not know the work was forthcoming in that form from Aldus press. Origen's ideas were also present in a derivative way in Pico della Mirandola, and Pico is the source from whom Trapp has suggested Colet got most of his knowledge of Origen.Footnote 53 The first printed edition of Origen in Greek dates from 1602. It is the place of another study to trace the influence of Origen's influential reflections on Paul's distinction of spirit and flesh in Colet.
That Colet read Dionysius is certain, of course, since he writes extensive commentaries or digests on the Celestial Hierarchy and the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, and, as mentioned, his source was the Latin translation made by Ambrogio Traversari. His encounter with other Fathers of the Church came from manuscripts and secondary testimony, but as with Origen, not from printed editions because he simply pre-dates many of those. For the Bible he had to rely on the Vulgate, although Erasmus could have served as intermediary for access to a copy of the New Testament in Greek. For a time after 1505 Erasmus was at work preparing a new translation on the Greek New Testament. Colet may actually have owned a Greek manuscript of the New Testament. Some of the impetus behind Colet's positive attitude toward the ecclesiology of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy of Dionysius is partly a by-product of the humanist affinity for the Christian classics and a return ad fontes, a preference for patristic source literature merely for its antiquity and un-scholastic form of writing. As the many statements cited here indicate, however, the practices of the Christian Church in Dionysius's time, whether or not Colet accepted Dionysius as contemporary with Paul and not a writer from the sixth century, were not merely textual matters, but a serious path toward reform of the Christian life in Colet's own time.
Similarly, regarding Colet and “pagan” classical sources, Leland Miles focused on Colet's well-attested Platonism and called it “middle of the road,” and, as he labeled it, “Clementine” more than either “Tertullian” or “Florentine,” by which he meant that Colet's use of Platonism is more akin to the positive but selective approach to Greek philosophy taken by the Greek Church Father Clement of Alexandria rather than the rejection of it by Tertullian and the broad embracing of it by Ficino.Footnote 54 Thus, although Colet did not know as much Greek as Grocyn, Linacre, More, and Erasmus, Sears Jayne says that the entire group should not be called the Oxford Reformers, or the Oxford Humanists, but rather the Oxford Hellenists!Footnote 55 While we accept that as an overstatement that also runs the risk of adding yet another label to Colet, whose Greek was not sound, we have enumerated evidence that there is good reason to concur with Jayne to consider Colet in having played an early role in what Jayne called the Tudor Hellenization of [English] Christianity. Jayne points to Saint Paul as the keystone, whose thought was believed to be deeply Hellenized. Then the link is to Stoicism via the Seneca correspondence, via Ficino, via Dionysius. For the etymology of Greek words Colet could use Perotti's Cornucopia and the Enchiridion of Epictetus. He read Ficino's Epistolae, which is a series of comments on the Theologia Platonica. He likely read Pico's Heptaplus as well. Thus it may be concluded that the state of Colet's interest in Greek thought and letters, as they impact Christianity, was sufficiently strong for him to engage them as the limitations allowed.Footnote 56
Commenting on Dionysius's Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, Colet drew closer to themes developed by the Eastern Fathers without Augustinian influence. His chief sources, then, of the Greek Fathers are Latin translations that he read presumably while he was in Italy, and quotations of the Greek Fathers by Western writers. Robert Peters summarized Colet's knowledge and use of the patristic authors by saying that, on the debit side it shows the obvious restrictions placed upon the patrologist of his day. These were mainly the focus on fourth-century authors and the lack of reliable texts. On the credit side is the fact of Colet's use of genuine works of the Fathers and applying them in their original context, which is important for our efforts to relate Colet's ecclesiology with Byzantine Orthodox Christianity.Footnote 57
Colet also shows concern for understanding the original context of the biblical texts he treats in his commentaries. Scholars have noted, for example, that when Colet discusses 1 Corinthians and Romans he praises Paul's wise strategy of praising what he could about the people there, giving thanks for their faith to make them receptive to hearing his message, and his prudent consideration of the ethos of that historical Greek community, proud people, as Colet says, arrogant even, and inclined to take offense.
In making that observation for his readers, Colet's remarks echo John Chrysostom's commentary on the same place in Paul's letter:
So long as there was need of expressions as harsh as these, he refrained from drawing up the curtain, and went on arguing as if he were himself the person to whom they were addressed; in order that the dignity of the persons censured tending to counteract the censurers, no room might be left for flying out in wrath at the charges.Footnote 58
Such attention to historical context, labeled a departure from “the usual biblical exegesis of his day,” has been taken as a sign of Colet's humanism. Jerome is known to have made historical observations in the Vulgate, but where Jerome makes them in his prefaces, Colet makes them in the very course of his exegesis. Such historical awareness, of course, does not mean that Colet's interest was antiquarian. He interpreted the words of Paul and the message of all of sacred scripture and the literature of the early Church as a witness to eternal truth, and he evaluated the situation of his own time in relation to that truth. This has been considered an example of Antiochian exegesis, like Chrysostom's. Chrysostom's exegesis may offer the closest parallel to Colet's affinity with Orthodoxy. Colet was the first in England to comment on Paul's Letters from the perspective of trying to understand them as St Paul wrote them, with only limited recourse to allegorical meanings or to medieval glosses, before Erasmus's Novum Instrumentum (1516) and its strong influence on the study of the Bible in Greek.
II. New Aspects of Colet's Ecclesiology
Having thus surveyed the various strands of Colet's ecclesiology mainly by reconsidering the evidence from previous studies, we present from the tractate on the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy additional evidence of the affinity between Colet's Hellenism and ecclesiology and the Christian Church of the East in his time, particularly in light of the serious though failed attempt to reconcile the differences between East and West at the council of Ferrara-Florence in Colet's recent past.
Within Colet's discussion of Baptism and the victory over sin, for example, he invokes the theme of Christus Victor:
You must fight so that you may win; you must win so that you may be crowned. Fight in him who fights within you and conquers, Jesus Christ, who has declared war on death and fights within everyone. He it is who conquers within us and we in him, anointed by the holy Spirit who, having overthrown and subdued the empire of death, should be all in all in the kingdom of light. A rule of combat is to imitate the leader, the “Lord who is strong and mighty in battle.”Footnote 59
Colet even revisits the theme of salvation through Christ's victory later in the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy:
For it was a marvellous victory, that the conqueror devil had been conquered by the very fact that he conquered and that Jesus whereby having been conquered on the cross was victorious by the same means, with the result that on both sides the situation concerning the victory itself should in fact be otherwise than it had appeared.Footnote 60
The theme is also resplendent in Colet's Commentary on 1 Corinthians, where he emphasized the way in which reconciliation with the Father was achieved by victory over the devil:
Then when he had conquered death, had routed the devil and ransomed mankind, so that he might have free power of choosing for himself, without the adversary's having any grievance, those whom he wished to choose, might summon whom he would, and might justify those he summoned—when he had thus, I say, vanquished and laid low death and the author of death—living he arose from death, and showed himself alive to many, and confirmed the fact with many proofs.Footnote 61
The emphasis on victory over the devil is a hallmark of the patristic doctrine of salvation which early Christian liturgical theologians almost universally invoked the imagery of battle and victory, alluded to in Ephesians 4.8 as the image of choice: “when he ascended on high, he took many captives and gave gifts to his people.” Christus Victor became the emblem of the Emperor Constantine: Iesous Christos nika. Victory over Satan and death is also the theme of the liturgy of John Chrysostom and of Basil.Footnote 62Christus Victor is closely connected to the recapitulation theme and the Orthodox teaching on divinization brought to light by Irenaeus in Adversus Haereses: “the Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, who did, through His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even what He is Himself.”Footnote 63 Colet wrote, “God made man, was the means whereby men were to be made gods. By His Godhead all are made godlike.”Footnote 64 As is indicated even by the work's title, the theme of Christus Victor is also featured in Erasmus's Enchiridion militis Christiani, first published in 1504. This overwhelmingly popular guidebook for the Christian layman, having appeared in more than fifty editions in Erasmus's own lifetime, presents an intentional play on words suggesting the piece as a “hand-held weapon,” “dagger,” has much encouragement to the reader to practice what can even be called monastic discipline in the spiritual warfare against the devil's temptations in the secular world. Erasmus does not fail to remind his readers that the victory is possible because Christ is followed to victory:
Let it come to thy remembrance that thou strivest not, nor hast not to do with a fresh soldier and a new adversary, but with him that was many years ago discomforted, overthrown, spoiled and led captive in triumph of us, but then in Christ our head, by whose might no doubt he shall be subdued again in us also. Take heed therefore that thou be a member of the body and thou shalt be able to do all things in the power of the head. In thyself thou art very weak, in him thou art valiant, and nothing is there that thou art not able to do. Wherefore the end of our war is not doubtful, because the victory dependeth not of fortune, but is put wholly in the hands of God, and by him in our hands. No man is here that hath not overcome, but he that would not. The benignity of our protector never failed man. If thou take heed to answer and to do thy part again, thou art sure of the victory, for he shall fight for thee, and his liberality shall be imputed to thee for merit. Thou must thank him altogether for the victory, which first of all himself alone being immaculate, pure and clean from sin, oppressed the tyranny of sin.Footnote 65
Erasmus composed the Enchiridion between 1500 and 1503, a time still early in his relationship with Colet, written less than two years from their time together at Oxford.Footnote 66 That is the period when Colet's influence on Erasmus was strongest, as both focused on writing expositions on Paul's Letters. Through their readings of the Fathers West and East, both had reinforced this theme so that it could become a central principle in a non-crusading but spiritually militant Church. Among Western medieval writers, as Gustav Aulén argued back in the 1930s, a more juridical theology of atonement and satisfaction paid to God by Christ, his Son, the sacrificial victim, as developed by Anselm of Canterbury in the Roman Catholic Church, had become the stronger emphasis.Footnote 67
Colet's strongly Christocentric rationale is retained in his emphasis on a hierarchical ecclesiology, so that when discussing Penance, Colet will echo Paul, pointing to Christ as head of his Church and its very wholeness and perfection.Footnote 68 Further, Colet states that whatever the Church, as Christ's agent, binds or loosens on earth, will be bound and loosened in the heavens:
The Church, which (quae) plays the part of Christ, which (quae) loosens or binds everything loosed or bound in the heavens, and which (quae) does not want the death of a sinner but that he be converted and live, receives such as these with joy back into the Church and supports and retains them within the same as much as possible after they have fulfilled the required penitence and become repentant.Footnote 69
Contrary to this echo of Matthew 18:18, literature intending to defend claims of supremacy for the See of Peter features Matthew 16:19, where Christ tells Peter, I will give to you (tibi) the keys.” But Colet reinforces the theme of ecclesia personam Christi agere (‘the Church taking on Christ's role’) by stating that it is the Church that does not want the death of the sinner but that he be converted and live. In that quotation of Ezechiel 18:32, which was frequently adapted in prayers such as the Matins of the Divine Office and the Book of Common Prayer, Colet even substituted for the historical Deus, Dominus, or qui by qu(a)e in reference to ecclesia. Colet also ascribes to Christ's direct intervention what Dionysius has as a charge of the angels. Citing Celestial Hierarchy, chapter 3 Lochman observes that in Colet's interpretation of Dionysius, “wearied in their efforts to reform lapsed humanity, the angels gratefully yielded the task of redemption to Christ.”Footnote 70
At the end of Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 3.2, Colet gives a history of the origin of the office of bishop:
Yet immediately after the apostles those early disciples and followers of the apostles chose and elevated one from among the number of the priests, equal in office and merit, to end legal disputes, settle disagreements, and set limits to differences of opinion through his opinion and judgment, so that the Church may continually dwell in harmony. To him authority was delegated by the universal Church, so that those not finding agreement among themselves may rest in the judgment of him who does not so much stand above other priests in office and merit.Footnote 71
The reference to the “universal” Church refers not to the worldwide Church but, as this is a narrative about the rise of the “bishop” out of the presbyters, Colet has the particular local church in mind. Colet further explains that the priest chosen to be bishop
does nothing more excellent than every priest does [other] than by a certain direction and authority in settling disputes so that in him, so that all the priests who act together with him may find peace, with all disputes settled, as in the resolution of a judgment. From this time, then, he chose to be called “bishop” in particular, the name of all priests under the apostles until one among them had been selected in the manner I have said and for the reason I have stated.Footnote 72
In this Colet emphasizes that the bishop does nothing that a priest does not also do, and has nothing more excellent than an administration and an authority to settle disputes. He appears to be speaking of the bishop of a local church and not a worldwide concept of universal Church, but if the analogy is extended to the difference between a bishop and the bishop of the See of Rome, Colet would be suggesting the Pope's role very well as primus inter pares.
Much of Colet's affinity for the theological perspective of the Christian East comes directly as a result of the Dionysian Ecclesiastical Hierarchy on which he is commenting. The point to make here is that in serving as an interpreter of that text, Colet approves of it as a model of reform, as something closer than scholastic texts to the prisca religio that he desires to restore. He has been called a true mystic, and it has been the aim here to see how the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy helps him translate that mysticism into conduct-oriented guidelines for understanding the nature and function of clergy, community, sacraments, and ultimately its salvation.
To take one additional example: If, as E. W. Hunt asked, the Christian life for Colet the mystic is a journey of illumination and love beginning with baptism, then “how can Infant Baptism have any place in the Mystic Way, since infants have neither been purged nor illuminated?” The answer, Hunt says, is that infant baptism in Colet's theology is proleptic. We might say it is prochronic: The dark spot of original unrighteousness driven away by the coming of the light, but only if the life which ensues participates in the grace of the sacrament. But in spite of this and the inevitable influence of Augustine's rendering of Romans 5:12, in quo omnes peccaverunt, as “in whom (that is, Adam) all have sinned” in the fragmentary Exposition on Romans, Colet's comments on the effects of Adam's transgression on all human nature are not consistently Augustinian (not deterministic of inborn guilt) there or in the complete Commentary.Footnote 73 To be sure, he is no Pelagian; and although he was influenced by humanism, his emphasis on Christian conduct and behavior never runs the risk of celebrating human dignity to the detriment of the idea of the absolute need for divine grace. At Romans 5 in the complete Commentary, for example, Colet states that Adam's sin so affected the human race that “neither by the law of nature nor by the Law of Moses could [it] be restored to life.”Footnote 74 It was in light of such statements that Lupton commented, “we do not observe that strong Augustinian tendency which was predominant in Luther. . . While grace is the cause, and the only cause, of man's salvation, his guilt, and not God's decree, is the cause of his condemnation.”Footnote 75 Colet is able even to write of “all that goes to make up man” as “condemned with one voice and one judgment of the Spirit throughout the entire Holy Scriptures of God.”Footnote 76 His expressions of the effects of Adam's sin sometimes suggests not inborn guilt but weakness, a wounded freedom, leading inevitably on the part of each individual to commit sin.Footnote 77 Colet states, for example, that Adam's sin was effective for calling men away from God (ad eosdem a Deo avocandos) to sin “scienter” knowingly.Footnote 78 Thus, Original Sin does not in Colet amount to subscribing to a doctrine of universal guilt without individual participation.
Just so, as the practice of infant baptism is retained in Colet, it is supported by an ecclesiology that has elements of both Catholic and Orthodox understandings. We have already mentioned that Colet's reference to the practice of following baptism at once by the sacrament of Chrismation (confirmation), which is not administered as proleptic in Catholic ecclesiology with the same understanding as in the Orthodox Church but deferred until after prescribed instruction, as is also the case with the administration of first Holy Communion. Colet's support of infant baptism thus reflects a notion of the state of humankind after the original sin accords with a sense of man's first disobedience as creating the conditions for all individuals to be sinful without saying that guilt itself must be transferred from person to person. He speaks, for example, about the darkness that came into the world after the fall and the subsequent illumination by the Sun of justice:
After the fall of man there existed a world of darkness. The sun of justice and truth, pouring down its rays through the angelic [hierarchy] cast a shadow of that same hierarchy upon the lands. Next, in its own time, the sun itself descended, so that in itself, without intermediary, it might give luster with colors to the shade of the angelic hierarchy and pour forth the light of its truth, whence one may observe on earth the colored image and greater clarity of the angelic city. When the shadow is eventually removed altogether, unmixed light will at last be visible in Christ's glory, “which is our life” concealed in the heavens—which [light] will be visible when he has come in his glory. Meanwhile, “every creature groaneth and travaileth in pain, even till now,” “waiting for the adoption of the sons of God.”Footnote 79
With the image of Dionysian light we think back to the benighted individuals of Plato's cave, but we are also able to hear another echo of John Chrysostom: “For as soon as we are baptized, the soul beameth even more than the sun, being cleansed by the Spirit; and not only do we behold the glory of God, but from it also receive a sort of splendor.”Footnote 80 Thus the emphasis is on salvation as illumination and adoption as sons of God.
Seen in the light of his treatise on the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, there is little reason to struggle to connect Colet's appeal for personal, societal, and ecclesiastical reform to Augustinian or Franciscan traditions or Scholastic intermediaries to the disregard of the Greek East, especially since there are many divergences between Colet's vision and that of the Western medieval thinkers. Instead, focusing on the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite (as Colet always thought of him) and especially Dionysian Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, as well as on the sermons of Chrysostom, Colet had the historical blueprint that showed three levels of Church hierarchy, deacons, priests, and bishops administering three stages of perfection: from purgation, to illumination, and toward divinization. Those triads resound in St. Paul and early Christian Platonism; but later medieval writers for the most part avoided discussing structures that were at odds with the Western ecclesiology then in place. To the contrary, Colet embraced them and for doing so became a true reformer in the patristic spirit. Colet's vision thus offered a new path for the early modern English Church in its reassessment of its Western tradition. The ecclesiology and theology that he endorsed, reflecting, perhaps unwittingly in many cases, distinctive traditions of the Orthodox Church, nevertheless showed readers possibilities of renewal and reform starting with the individual mind and soul and working outward.
