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JOHN COLET'S CHRISTIAN HUMANIST SPIRITUALITY AND THE ENGLISH CONTEMPLATIVE TRADITION (ENGLAND)
Abstract
John Colet, Oxford scholar and Dean of St. Paul's, has been categorized as a forerunner of the Reformation, an Augustinian ascetic, a Florentine Neoplatonist, and a Catholic theologian. This study acknowledges all this, but seeks to discover the inspiration for Colet's complex personality by examining his relationship to traditional English spirituality, via a comparative study of Colet's works, and those of three fourteenth-century mystics--Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, and the unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing. My analysis of certain notions concerning man's condition, Christ's intervention, and the human response thereto, indicates that Colet shares with the English mystics certain affective, antispeculative, and moralistic qualities firmly grounded in a dynamic interpretation of scripture, reflecting Augustinian, incarnational spirituality, but also different from the German manifestations thereof. The thesis then compares Colet's English spirituality with the thinking of Thomas More and Erasmus and demonstrates that all three share a purgative and illuminative piety which the English mystics deemed appropriate for priests and laypersons with secular responsibilities. The dominant issue than became, how to integrate the this-worldly, active, and objective traits of humanism, with the other-worldly, passive, and introspective qualities of contemplation. This required my examining misconceptions in the Renasissance distinction between action and contemplation, formulated in antiquity as an antagonism between rhetoric in the public forum and philosophic contemplation in rural retreats. My resolution focusses on Colet's Augustinian view of history, whereby the free and mysterious distribution of the Spirit's gifts demands the integration of action and contemplation. Colet's model for this integration was St. Paul's raptus, blindness, and his journeys, a symbolic unity of the ecstatic, prophetic, and pedagogic roles in the church, respectively. I conclude that Colet's vocation as a priestly teacher was nourished by his purgative experience and illuminative wisdom, supported by the ecstatic witness of the English mystics, and the active prophecy of Erasmus.
Subject Area
European history|Biographies
Recommended Citation
FASAN, VADA BELSHAW, "JOHN COLET'S CHRISTIAN HUMANIST SPIRITUALITY AND THE ENGLISH CONTEMPLATIVE TRADITION (ENGLAND)" (1984). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8423781.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8423781