Where Colet got these views.
The question may be asked:—‘Whence came this doctrine of accommodation which Colet here used so boldly?’ It was at least no birth of the nineteenth century, nor of the fifteenth. It belonged to a period a thousand years earlier, when men had (as in Colet’s days and in ours) to reconcile reason and faith—to find a firm basis of fact for Christianity, instead of resting upon mere ecclesiastical authority.
It will have been noticed that the two authors cited by Colet in these letters were Origen and Macrobius. Traces of Dionysian influence are also apparent.[127]
It has already been pointed out, that when, after a thousand years’ interval of restless slumber, the spirit of free enquiry was reawakened by the revival of learning in Italy, the works of the pre-scholastic fathers and philosophers were studied afresh. The works of Origen, Macrobius, and, more than all, of Dionysius, were constantly studied and quoted by such men as Ficino and Pico. And thus it came to pass that the doctrine of accommodation, with other apparently new-fangled but really old doctrines, floated, as it were, in the air which Colet had recently been breathing in Italy.
The Heptaplus of Pico.
The immediate source of some of the views contained in the letters to Radulphus was evidently Pico’s ‘Heptaplus’[128] on the six days’ creation; a work published in beautiful type, shortly before Colet’s visit to Italy, and dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici.[129] Comparing this treatise of Pico’s with Colet’s letters, the small verbal coincidences are too striking to leave any doubt of the connection.
Nor does this tracing of Colet’s thoughts to their source detract from his originality so much as might at first sight appear.
Colet found many different germs of thought in Pico. Falling into congenial soil, this one attained a vigorous growth in his mind, which it never attained with Pico. Other germs which flourished under Pico took no root with Colet. The result was, that the spirit of the letters to Radulphus had little in common with that of the ‘Heptaplus.’ Colet showed his originality and independence of thought by seizing one rational idea contained in Pico’s treatise, and leaving the rest. He caught and unravelled one thread of common sense which Pico had contrived to interweave with a web of learned but not very wise speculation.
IV. COLET STUDIES AFRESH THE PSEUDO-DIONYSIAN WRITINGS (1497?).