The following passage will show, in Colet’s own words, how, following the lead of such men as Pico and Ficino (with whose writings, we have seen, he was acquainted), he was led to regard the Jewish traditions of the Cabala as genuine Mosaic traditions, committed to writing by Ezra; and, in like manner, to accept the Pseudo-Dionysian traditions as genuine apostolic traditions, committed to writing by a disciple of St. Paul; and, further, it will place in a clear light the connection between his faith in Dionysius, his grief over the scandals of the church, and his zeal for reform.
Colet sees the difference between the Dionysian and the Papal rites.
‘I know not by what rashness of bishops, in later ages, the ancient custom fell into disuse—a custom which, owing to its apostolic institution, had the highest authority.... And had not St. Dionysius (who seems to me to be such in our church as was Ezra in the synagogue of Moses, who willed that the mysteries of the old law should be committed to writing, lest in the confusion of affairs and of men the record of so much wisdom should perish)—had not Dionysius, I say, in like manner, as though divining the future carelessness of mankind, left written down by his productive pen what he retained in memory of the institutions of the apostle in arranging and regulating the church, we should have had no record of this ancient custom.... How it befel, (Colet continued) without grievous guilt, that these became afterwards wholly changed, I know not; since we must believe that it was by the teaching of the Holy Spirit that they ordained all things in the church. For the words of our Saviour in St. John are these: “Howbeit, when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself, but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak; and he will show you things to come.” It is because their most holy traditions have been superseded and neglected, and men have fallen away from the Spirit of God to their own inventions, that, beyond doubt, all things have been wretchedly disturbed and confounded; and, as I said before, unless God shall have mercy upon us, all things will ‘go to ruin.’[133]
Purity of the Dionysian standard.
The truth was that the Dionysian writings, though not of apostolic origin as Colet supposed, presented, nevertheless, a picture of the ecclesiastical usages of an age a thousand years earlier than Colet’s; and putting the earlier and the later usages in contrast, it was impossible for him not to perceive at once how much more pure and rational in its spirit and tendencies was the ancient Dionysian system than the more modern Papal one.
The Dionysian sacerdotal and ritualistic system is radically different from the Papal.
The object of religion not to propitiate the Deity, but to change the heart of man.
Cur Deus Homo?
Colet on the ‘marvellous victory’ of a ‘suffering Christ.’
Both were sacerdotal and ritualistic; but the sacerdotalism and ritualism of Dionysius were radically opposed in spirit to those of the more modern system. During the interval between the fifth and the fifteenth century, sacerdotalism had had time to turn almost literally upside-down, and ritualism with it. It was thus quite natural that Colet, in the light of Dionysius, should find ‘all things wretchedly disturbed and confounded.’
The Dionysian theory, however speculative and vicious as such, at least according to Colet’s version of it, did not, like the modern theory, tend towards that grossest heathen conception of religion, according to which its main object is the propitiation of the Deity, rather than the changing of the heart of man.
Its gospel was not that Christ offered his sacrifice to propitiate an unreconciled God—to reconcile God to man. On the contrary, it told of a God who is ‘beautiful and good,’[134] who had created all things because He is good, because He is good recalling[135] all things to Himself, by the sacrifice of Himself redeeming them, not from His own wrath, but from the power of Evil.
The following passage may be taken in illustration of this:—‘When, directly after the creation, foolish human nature was allured by the seductive enticements of the enemy, and fell away from God into a womanish and dying condition, and was rolling headlong down with rapid course to death itself, then at length, in His own time, our good, and tender, and kind, and gentle, and merciful God, giving us all good things at once in place of all that was bad, willed to take upon Him human nature, and to enter into it, and rescue it from the power of the adversary, overthrowing and destroying his empire. For, as St. Paul writes to the Hebrews, “Forasmuch as the children”—or servants—“are partakers of flesh and blood,” ... therefore also God himself “made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant,” and “himself likewise took part of the same” flesh and blood—that is, human nature—“that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage:” that he might destroy, I say, that enemy, not by force, but (as Dionysius says) by judgment and righteousness; which he calls a hidden thing and a mystery.[136] For it was a marvellous victory, that the Devil, though victorious, in the very fact of his conquering, should be conquered; and that Jesus should conquer in the very fact of his being vanquished on the cross; so that in reality, in the victory on each side, the matter was otherwise than it seemed. And thus when the adversary that vanquished man was himself vanquished by God, man was restored, without giving any just cause of complaint to the devil, to the liberty and light of God. There was shown to him the path to heaven, trodden by the feet of Christ, whose footsteps we must follow if we would arrive where he has gone. A suffering Christ, I say (most marvellous!), and dying as though vanquished, overcame.... By that death we have been rescued from the dead, and are the servants of God.’[137]