The next glimpse of Colet and his labours at Oxford reveals him immersed in the study of the Pseudo-Dionysian writings: writing from memory an abstract of the ‘Celestial’ and ‘Ecclesiastical’ Hierarchies,[130] and even composing short treatises of his own, based throughout upon Dionysian speculations.[131]
The Pseudo-Dionysian writings.
During the most part of the middle ages the Pseudo-Dionysian writings were accepted generally as the genuine productions of Dionysius the Areopagite—i.e. of a disciple of St. Paul himself. It is not surprising, therefore, that Colet, falling into this current view, should regard the writings of the disciple with some degree of that interest and reverence with which he regarded those of the master. For a time it is evident they exercised a strong fascination on his mind.
It has already been mentioned, that the influence of the Dionysian writings upon the Neo-Platonists of Florence was natural, seeing that they were in fact the embodiment of the result of the effervescence produced by the mixture of Neo-Platonic speculations with the Christianity of a thousand years earlier.
But whilst it was their Neo-Platonic element which attracted the attention of Florentine philosophers, it was chiefly, as it seems to me, their Christian element which fascinated Colet.
Their intrinsic power.
Nor can we of the nineteenth century altogether afford to ignore these writings as forgeries. There must have been in them enough of intrinsic power, apart from their supposed authorship, to account for the enormous influence exerted by them for centuries over the highest minds in the church, in spite of the wildness of speculation in which they seemed to revel; just as there was enough of intrinsic power in St. Augustine to account for his mighty influence, in spite of his narrow views upon some points. It is quite possible that, as the very dogmatism of St. Augustine may have increased his influence in a dogmatic age, so, inasmuch as the dogmatic theology of the Schoolmen aimed at a pan-theological settlement of every possible question, their very wildness of speculation may have aided the influence of the Dionysian writings. This may partly account for the remarkable extent to which the works of St. Augustine and Dionysius furnished, as it were, the weft and woof out of which Aquinas wove his scholastic web.[132] But nothing but some intrinsic power in these works themselves, apart from their dogmatism and speculation, could account for their double position as forming the basis, not only of the Scholastic Theology itself, but also of so many reactions against the results of its supremacy. These reactions were not always Augustinian. Some of them were mystic, and the supposed Dionysius was, so to speak, the prophet of the Mystics.
One main secret of the intrinsic power of the Dionysian writings, especially to such men as Colet, lay, undoubtedly, in the severe rebuke they gave to the ecclesiastical scandals of the times. The state of the church under Alexander VI. was such that earnest men in Italy had practically either ceased to believe in it, and in Christianity, as of divine institution; or were seeking a solution of their difficulties through those Neo-Platonic speculations, out of which these Pseudo-Dionysian writings had themselves sprung.
What the Dionysian writings were.
Colet doubtless, when he came to Italy, had the same difficulties to fight. Could this ecclesiastical system, so degraded, so vicious, so hollow and pernicious, be of God? He could not, and probably there was not anyone in Europe at that moment who could, from his standing-point, wholly reject it, without rejecting Christianity along with it. The Dionysian writings presented a way of escape from this terrible alternative. If they were genuine (and Colet believed them to be so), then the hierarchical system and its sacraments, however perverted, were yet of apostolic origin. These writings apparently described, in the words of a disciple of St. Paul, their apostolic institution and their original intention and meaning. But the notion gathered by Colet from Dionysius of the apostolic intention presented an ideal so utterly pure and holy, as compared with the hollowness and wickedness of ecclesiastical practice, as he saw it in Italy, that he must indeed have had a heart of stone had he not been moved by it.