Thus in the Dionysian doctrine that God is inscrutable—that all human knowledge is relative—that man cannot rise to a knowledge of the absolute—that therefore no conceptions men can form of God can be accurate, and no language in which they speak of Him can be more than clumsy analogy—in this principle there is the germ of a rational understanding of the necessary conditions of Divine revelation involving the admission of the necessity of accommodation and the human element in Scripture. Again, in the doctrine that whilst, in this sense, the knowledge of God is impossible to man, the love of God is not so, there lies the basis of truth on which alone science can be reconciled with religion, and religion itself become a power of life.
Lastly, in the very attempt, so striking throughout Dionysius, to find out in the sacerdotal and sacramental system a symbolic meaning, who does not recognise the attempt to find out a rational intention in its institution, which should make it believable in an age of reviving philosophy and science?
V. COLET LECTURES ON ‘I. CORINTHIANS’ (1497?).
Colet’s lectures on Corinthians. MSS. at Cambridge.
If the manuscript exposition of the 1st Epistle to the Corinthians preserved at Cambridge, apparently in Colet’s own handwriting, with his own latest corrections,[152] may be taken as evidence of what his lectures on this epistle were, it may be of some value, apart from its own intrinsic interest, in enabling us to judge how far he adhered to the same leading views and method of exposition which he had before adopted, and how far, in preceding chapters, we have been able to judge rightly of what they were.
I think it will be found that this exposition of the Epistle to the Corinthians is in perfect harmony with all which had preceded it, and that it shows evident traces of those phases of thought through which Colet had been passing since his arrival at Oxford.
Its striking characteristic, like that on the ‘Romans,’ would seem to be the pains taken to regard it throughout as the letter of a living apostle to an actual church.
Colet’s love for St. Paul.
On the one hand, it teems with passages which show the depth of Colet’s almost personal affection for St. Paul, and the clearness with which he realised the special characteristics of St. Paul’s character; his extreme consideration for others,[153] his modesty,[154] his tolerance, his wise tact and prudence,[155] his self-denial for others’ good.[156]
Colet studies the character of the Corinthians.
Pride of the Greek nation.