The Life of Thomas More Read Free

paraded before them by the pious guides. He drew back in disgust from a holy arm which still had some flesh adhering to it; he was ‘of ardent temper’, 8 too, and berated one priest for not distributing some of the riches of the shrine, bedecked in gold and silver and jewels, to the poor people of the area. There was one other characteristic touch when Colet, offered a piece of linen once supposedly used by Becket as a handkerchief, ‘disdainfully replaced it; pouting out his lips as if imitating a whistle’. 9 The little
moue
which Colet made is entirely recognisable; he was a man of fastidious temperament, abstemious to a fault, disturbed by ‘indecent or ambiguous words’, 10 and a great preacher upon the horrors of the flesh. After he had become Dean of St Paul’s, he ordered that signs be put on its walls and doorways proclaiming ‘This is a holy place, and urinating is forbidden.’ Colet also had a reputation for irascibility, contentiousness and stubbornness; as More said, he had a habit of
‘disputandi’
11 and was therefore fond of argument. His withdrawal from the finery and pleasures of the world was also emphasised by his dress; he always wore black, while his ecclesiastical rank demanded a scarlet hue. There was without doubt a certain extravagance in Colet’s behaviour, which we may see as characteristic of this era in English life in which dress and gesture and deportment were considered to be indispensable elements in the creation and presentation of character.
    Certainly the strident example of John Colet had a profound effect upon More, and he is described by two early biographers as the younger man’s ‘mentor’. 12 There seems little doubt that Colet introduced the younger man to the work of Pico della Mirandola, whose biography More subsequently translated; perhaps more importantly, Colet’s sermons and arguments provided a model for reconciling More’s intelligence, austerity and devotion. When Colet delivered his commentaries upon the letters of St Paul, for example, he was drawingupon the central texts of the period; the epistles, with their news of awakening and regeneration through the Holy Spirit, were soon to become of crucial importance in the theology of the Reformation; Luther would claim for his own new faith the apostle’s conclusion that ‘a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law’. 13 But Colet was no reformer, at least not in that fundamental sense. In his own commentaries upon the Pauline texts, he chose to interpret the apostle’s notions of grace and illumination within the context of the Neoplatonism Colet himself had imbibed at Florence. The declarations of Paul were taken as indications of the soul’s thirst for the divine presence and of its ascent through the hierarchy of the universe towards the vision of godhead. It might be argued that Colet anticipates Luther in his emphasis upon individual enlightenment, but for Colet it takes place within the stable sphere of the Church upon earth. But his central point, for any understanding of More, is that the life of the spirit could be amplified by reference to classical sources.
    Colet had a particular, angry dislike for the
Summa Theologica
of Thomas Aquinas, for example, and it is in this spirit that we can understand his emphasis upon love rather than knowledge in his
Lectures on Romans.
‘It is beyond doubt,’ he wrote, ‘more pleasing to God himself to be loved by men than to be surveyed, and to be worshipped than to be understood.’ 14 Colet also talks of the need for the loving imitation of Christ, as the true model of active virtue in the world. It is possible to see here how religious devotion and the new emphasis upon classical scholarship are part of the same movement of the spirit—the return to the pristine sources of truth and the avoidance of commentary and interpretation, are part of the same great renovation of piety and learning which More and his contemporaries ardently wished