This Oxford divine did not display any peculiar bigotry or blindness. He did but follow in the well-worn ruts of his scholastic predecessors. It had been solemnly laid down by Aquinas in the ‘Summa,’ that ‘inasmuch as God was the author of the Holy Scriptures, and all things are at one time present to His mind, therefore, under their single text, they express several meanings.’ ‘Their literal sense,’ he continues, ‘is manifold; their spiritual sense threefold—viz. allegorical, moral, anagogical.’[69] And we have the evidence of another well-known Oxford student, also a contemporary with Colet at the University, that this was then the prevalent view. Speaking of the dominant school of divines, he remarks: ‘They divide the Scripture into four senses, the literal, tropological, allegorical, and analogical—the literal sense has become nothing at all.... Twenty doctors expound one text twenty ways, and with an antitheme of half an inch some of them draw a thread of nine days long.... They not only say that the literal sense profiteth nothing, but also that it is hurtful and noisesome and killeth the soul. And this they prove by a text of Paul, 2 Cor. iii., “The letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.” Lo! say they, the literal sense killeth, the spiritual sense giveth life.’[70] And the same student, in recollection of his intercourse at the Universities with divines of the traditional school in these early days, bears witness that ‘they were wont to look on no more Scripture than they found in their Duns;’[71] while at another time he complains ‘that some of them will prove a point of the Faith as well out of a fable of Ovid or any other poet, as out of St. John’s Gospel or Paul’s Epistles.’[72] Thus had the scholastic belief in the verbal inspiration of the sacred text led men blindfold into a condition of mind in which they practically ignored the Scriptures altogether.[73]
Colet’s lectures.
Such was the state of things at Oxford when Colet commenced his lectures. The very boldness of the lecturer and the novelty of the subject were enough to draw an audience at once. Doctors and abbots, men of all ranks and titles, flocked with the students into the lecture hall, led by curiosity doubtless at first, or it may be, like the Pharisees of old, bent upon finding somewhat whereof they might accuse the man whom they wished to silence. But since they came again and again, as the term went by, bringing their note-books with them, it soon became clear that they continued to come with some better purpose.[74]
Colet’s style of speaking.
Colet already, at thirty, possessed the rare gift of saying what he had to say in a few telling words, throwing into them an earnestness which made every one feel that they came from his heart. ‘You say what you mean, and mean what you say. 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, who heard him deliver some of these lectures during another term.
Colet’s method of exposition.
From the fragments which remain of what seem to be manuscript notes of these lectures, written by Colet himself at the ‘urgent and repeated request,’ as he expressed it, ‘of his faithful auditors,’[76] and now preserved in the Cambridge Libraries,[77] something more than a superficial notion may be gained of what these lectures were.
Not textarian.
They were in almost every particular in direct contrast with those of the dominant school. They were not textarian. They did not consist of a series of wiredrawn dissertations upon isolated texts. They were no ‘thread of nine days long drawn from an antitheme of half an inch.’ Colet began at the beginning of the Epistle to the Romans, and went through with it to the end, in a course of lectures, treating it as a whole, and not as an armoury of detached texts.[78] Nor were they on the model of the Catena aurea, formed by linking together the recorded comments of the great Church authorities. There is hardly a quotation from the Fathers or Schoolmen throughout the exposition of the Epistle to the Romans.[79]
Colet points out the marks of St. Paul’s own character.
Colet’s personal interest in St. Paul.