71. Humanism in England. (Chapter 8. The Renaissance.) (History of the Christian Church) (Schaff, Philip)

Use well temporal things: desire eternal things.

Humanism reached England directly from Italy, but was greatly advanced by Erasmus during his three sojourns at Oxford and Cambridge and by his close and abiding friendship with the leading English representatives of the movement. Its history carries us at once to the universities where the conflict between the new learning and the old learning was principally fought out and also to St. Paul's school, London, founded by Colet. It was marked with the usual English characteristics of caution and reserve, and never manifested any of the brilliant or paganizing traits of the Italian literary movement, nor did it reach the more profound classical scholarship of the German Humanists. In the departments of the fine arts, if we except printing, it remained unresponsive to the Continental leadership. English Humanism, like the theology of the English Reformation, adopted the work of others. It was not creative. On the other hand, it laid more distinctive emphasis upon the religious and ethical elements than the Humanistic circles of Italy, though not of Germany. Its chief leaders were John Colet and Sir Thomas More, with whom Erasmus is also to be associated. It had patrons in high places in Archbishop Warham of Canterbury, Cardinal Wolsey and John Fisher, bishop of Rochester.

The English revival of letters was a direct precursor of the English Reformation, although its earliest leaders died in the Catholic Church. Its first distinct impetus was received in the last quarter of the 15th century through English students who visited Italy. It had been the custom for English archdeacons to go to Italy for the study of the canon law. Richard de Bury and Peter de Blois had shown interest in books and Latin profane authors. Italians, Poggio and Polidore Virgil1 among them, tarried and some of them taught in England, but the first to introduce the new movement were William Sellyng, Thomas Linacre and William Grocyn.

Sellyng, of All Souls' College, Oxford, and afterwards prior of Christ Church, Canterbury, 1471-1495, made a visit to Italy in 1464 and at Bologna was a pupil of Politian. From this tour, or from a later one, he brought back with him some Greek MSS. and he introduced the studying of Greek in Canterbury. Linacre, d. 1524, the most celebrated medical man of his day in England, studied under Sellyng at Christ Church and then in Oxford, where he took Greek under Cornelio Vitelli, the first to publicly teach that language in England in the later Middle Ages. He then went to Florence, Rome and Padua, where he graduated in medicine. On returning to England, he was ordained priest and later made physician to Henry VIII. He translated the works of Galen into English.

While Linacre was studying in Florence, Grocyn arrived in that city. He was teaching Greek in Oxford before 1488 and, on his return from the Continent, he began, 1491, to give Greek lectures in that university. With this date the historian, Green, regards the new period as opening. Grocyn lectured on pseudo-Dionysius and, following Laurentius Valla, abandoned the tradition that he was the Areopagite, the pupil of St. Paul. He and Linacre were close friends of Erasmus, and that scholar couples them with Colet and More as four representatives of profound and symmetrical learning.

At the close of the 15th century, the English were still a barbarous people in the eyes of the Italians. According to Erasmus, who ought to have known what a good school was, the schoolteachers of England were shabby and broken down and, in cases, hardly in their senses. At the universities, the study of Duns Scotus ruled and the old method and text-books were in use. The Schoolmen were destined, however, soon to be displaced and the leaves of the Subtle Doctor to be scattered in the quadrangles of Oxford and trodden under foot.

As for the study of Greek, there were those, as Wood says, who preached against it as dangerous and damnable and, long after the new century had dawned, Sir Thomas More wrote to the authorities at Oxford condemning them for opposition to Greek. A course of sermons, to which More refers, had been preached in Lent not only against the study of the Greek classics but also the Latin classics. What right, he went on to say, had a preacher to denounce Latin of which he knew so little and Greek of which he knew nothing? How can he know theology, if he is ignorant of Hebrew, Greek and Latin? In closing the letter, More threatened the authorities with punishment from Warham, Wolsey and even the king himself, if they persisted in their course. Of the clergy's alarm against the new learning, More took notice again and again. To Lily, the headmaster of St. Paul's school, he wrote, No wonder your school raises a storm; it is like the wooden horse for the ruin of barbarous Troy. But, if there were those who could see only danger from the new studies, there were also men like Fisher of Rochester who set about learning Greek when he was 60. For the venerable Sentences of the Lombard, the Scriptures were about to be instituted as the text-book of theology in the English universities.

The man who contributed most to this result was John Colet. Although his name is not even so much as mentioned in the pages of Lingard, he is now recognized, as he was by Tyndale, Latimer and other Reformers of the middle of the 16th century, as the chief pioneer of the new learning in England and as an exemplar of noble purposes in life and pure devotion to culture.

The son of Sir Henry Colet, several times lord mayor of London, the future dean of St. Paul's was one of 22 children. He survived all the members of his family except his mother, to whom he referred, when he felt himself growing old, with admiration for her high spirits and happy old age. As we think of her, we may be inclined to recall the good mother of John Wesley. After spending 3 years at Oxford, 1493-1496,1 young Colet, like a merchantman seeking goodly wares, as Erasmus put it, went to Italy. For the places where he studied, we are left to conjecture, but Archbishop Parker two generations later said that he studied a long time in foreign countries and especially the Sacred Scriptures. On his return to Oxford, although not yet ordained to the priesthood, he began expounding St. Paul's Greek epistles in public, the lectures being given gratuitously. At this very moment the Lady Margaret professor of divinity was announcing for his subject the Quodlibets of Duns Scotus. Later, Colet expounded also the First Epistle to the Corinthians.

At this period, he was not wholly freed from the old academic canons and was inclined to reject the reading of classic authors whose writings did not contain a salutatory flavor of Christ and in which Christ is not set forth.... Books, in which Christ is not found, are but a table of devils. Of the impression made by his exposition, a proof is given in Colet's own description of a visit he had from a priest. The priest, sitting in front of Colet's fire, drew forth from his bosom a small copy of the Epistles, which he had transcribed with his own hand, and then, in answer to his request, his host proceeded to set forth the golden things of the 1st chapter of Romans. His expositions abound in expressions of admiration for Paul.

At Oxford, in 1498, Colet met Erasmus, who was within a few months of being of the same age, and he also came into contact with More, whom he called a rare genius. The fellowship with these men confirmed him in his modern leanings. He lectured on the Areopagite's Hierarchies, but he soon came to adopt Grocyn's view of their late date. The high estimate of Thomas Aquinas which prevailed, he abandoned and pronounced him arrogant for attempting to define all things and of corrupting the whole teaching of Christ with his profane philosophy. Some years later, writing to Erasmus, he disparaged the contemporary theologians as spending their lives in mere logical tricks and dialectic quibbles. Erasmus, replying to him, pronounced the theology which was once venerable become, almost dumb, poor and in rags.

As dean of St. Paul's, an appointment he received in 1504, Colet stands forth as a reformer of clerical abuses, a bold preacher and a liberal patron of education. The statutes he issued for the cathedral clergy laid stress upon the need of reformation in every respect, both in life and religion. The old code, while it was particular to point out the exact plane the dean should occupy in processions and the choir, did not mention preaching as one of his duties. Colet had public lectures delivered on Paul's Epistles, but it was not long till he was at odds with his chapter. The cathedral school did not meet his standard, and the funds he received on his father's death he used to endow St. Paul's school, 1509. The original buildings were burnt down in the London fire, and new buildings reared in 1666. The statutes made the tuition free, and set the number of pupils at 153, since increased threefold. They provided for instruction in good literature, both Latin and Greek, but especially for Christian authors that wrote their wisdom with clean and chaste Latin. The founder's high ideal of a teacher's qualifications, moral as well as literary, set forth in his statutes for the old cathedral school, was that he should be an upright and honorable man and of much and well-attested learning. Along with chaste literature, he was expected to imbue the tender minds of his pupils with holy morals and be to them a master, not of grammar only, but of virtue.

St. Paul's has the distinction of being the first grammar-school in England where Greek was taught. The list of its masters was opened by William Lily, one of the few Englishmen of his age capable of teaching Greek. After studying at Oxford, he made a journey to Jerusalem, and returned to England by way of Italy. He died in 1522. By his will, Colet left all his books, imprinted and in paper, to poor students of the school.

As a preacher, the dean of St. Paul's was both bold and Scriptural. Among his hearers were the Lollards. Colet himself seems to have read Wyclif's writings as well as other heretical works. Two of his famous sermons were delivered before convocation, 1511, and on Wolsey's receiving the red hat. The convocation discourse, which has come down to us entire, is a vigorous appeal for clerical reform. The text was taken from Rom. xii:2. Be ye not conformed to this world but be ye reformed. The pride and ambition of the clergy were set forth and their quest of preferment in Church and state condemned. Some frequented feasts and banquetings and gave themselves to sports and plays, to hunting and hawking. If priests themselves were good, the people in their turn would be good also. Our goodness, exclaimed the preacher, would urge them on in the right way far more efficaciously than all your suspensions and excommunications. They should live a good and holy life, be properly learned in the Scriptures and chiefly and above all be filled with the fear of God and the love of the heavenly life.

According to the canons of the age, the preacher went beyond the limits of prudence and Fitz-James, bishop of London, cited him for trial but the case was set aside by the archbishop. The charges were that Colet had condemned the worship of images and declared that Peter was a poor man and enjoyed no episcopal revenues and that, in condemning the reading of sermons, Colet had meant to give a thrust to Fitz-James himself, who was addicted to that habit. Latimer, who was at Cambridge about that time, said in a sermon some years later, that, in those days Doctor Colet was in trouble and should have been burned, if God had not turned the king's heart to the contrary.

When Erasmus' Greek Testament appeared, Colet gave it a hearty welcome. In a letter to the Dutch scholar acknowledging the receipt of a copy, he expressed his regret at not having a sufficient knowledge of Greek to read it and his desire to be his disciple in that tongue. It was here he made the prediction that the name of Erasmus will never perish. Erasmus had written to Colet that he had dipped into Hebrew but gone no further, frightened by the strangeness of the idiom and in view of the insufficiency of the human mind to master a multitude of subjects. A much younger scholar at Tuebingen, Philip Melanchthon, had put his tribute to the Novum instrumentum in Greek verse which was transmitted to Erasmus by Beatus Rhenanus. Fox, bishop of Winchester, pronounced the book more instructive to him than 10 commentaries.

Not long before his death, Colet determined to retire to a religious retreat at Shene, a resolution based upon his failing health and the troubles in which his freedom of utterance had involved him. He did not live to carry out his resolution. He was buried in St. Paul's. It is noteworthy that his will contained no benefactions to the Church or provision for masses for his soul. Erasmus paid the high tribute to his friend, while living, that England had not another more pious or one who more truly knew Christ. And, writing after Colet's death to a correspondent, he exclaimed, What a man has England and what a friend I have lost! Colet had often listened to Erasmus' appeals in times of stringency. No description in the Colloquies has more interest for the Anglo-Saxon people than the description of the journey which the two friends made together to the shrines of Thomas Becket and of Our Lady of Walsingham. And the best part of the description is the doubting humor with which they passed criticism upon Peter's finger, the Virgin's milk, one of St. Thomas' shoes and other relics which were shown them.

Far as Colet went in demanding a reform of clerical habits, welcoming the revival of letters, condemning the old scholastic disputation and advocating the study of the Scriptures, it is quite probable he would not have fallen in with the Reformation. He was fifty when it broke out. The best word that can be spoken of him is, that he seems to have conformed closely to the demand which he made of Christian men to live good and upright lives for, of a surety, he said, to do mercy and justice is more pleasant to God, than to pray or do sacrifice to Him. What higher tribute could be paid than the one paid by Donald Lupton in his History of Modern Protestant Divines, 1637, This great dean of St. Paul's taught and lived like St. Paul.

Sir Thomas More, 1478-1535, not only died in the Catholic Church, but died a martyr's death, refusing to acknowledge the English king's supremacy so far as to impugn the pope's authority. After studying in Oxford, be practised law in London, rising to be chancellor of the realm. It is not for us here to follow his services in his profession and to the state, but to trace his connection with the revival of learning and the religious movement in England. More was a pattern of a devout and intelligent layman. He wore a hair shirt next to his skin and yet he laughed at the superstition of his age. On taking office, he stipulated that, he should first look to God and after God to the king. At the same time, he entered heartily with his close friends, Erasmus and Colet, into the construction of a new basis for education in the study of the classics, Latin and Greek. He was firmly bound to the Church, with the pope as its head, and yet in his Utopia he presented a picture of an ideal society in which religion was to be in large part a matter of the family, and confession was not made to the priest nor absolution given by the priest.

With the exception of the Utopia, all of More's genuine works were religious and the most of them were controversial treatises, intended to confute the new doctrines of the Reformation which had found open advocates in England long before More's death. More was beheaded in 1535 and, if we recall that Tyndale's English New Testament was published in 1526, we shall have a standard for measuring the duration of More's contact with the Protestant upheaval. Tyndale himself was strangled and burnt to death a year after More's execution. In answer to Simon Fish's work, The Supplication of Beggars, a bitter attack against purgatory, More sent forth the Supplication of Souls or Poor Seely (simple) Souls pewled out of Purgatory. Here souls are represented as crying out not to be left in their penal distress by the forgetfulness of the living. Fish was condemned to death and burnt, 1533. As the chief controversialist on the old side, More also wrote against John Fryth, who was condemned to the stake 1533, and against Tyndale, pronouncing his translation of the New Testament a false English translation newly forged by Tyndale. He also made the strange declaration that Wyclif, Tyndale and Friar Barnes and such others had been the original cause why the Scripture has been of necessity kept out of lay people's hands. More said heretical books were imported from the Continent to England, in vats full. He called Thomas Hylton, a priest of Kent, one of the heretics whom he condemned to the flames, the devil's stinking pot. Hylton's crime was the denial of the five sacraments and he was burnt 1530. As was the custom of the time, More's controversial works abound in scurrilous epithets. His opponents he distinguishes by such terms as swine, hellhounds that the devil has in his kennel, apes that dance for the pleasure of Lucifer. In his works against Tyndale and Fryth, he commended pilgrimages, image-worship and indulgences. He himself, so the chancellor wrote, had been present at Barking, 1498, when a number of relics were discovered which must have been hidden since the time when the abbey was burnt by the infidels, and he declared that the main thing was that such relics were the remains of holy men, to be had in reverence, and it was a matter of inferior import whether the right names were attached to them or not.

And yet, More resisted certain superstitions, as of the Franciscan monk of Coventry who publicly preached, that whoever prayed daily through the Psalter to the Blessed Virgin could not be damned. He denied the Augustinian teaching that infants dying without baptism were consigned to eternal punishment and he could write to Erasmus, that Hutten's Epistolae obscurorum virorum delighted every one in England and that under a rude scabbard the work concealed a most excellent blade. His intimacy with Colet and Erasmus led to an attempt on the part of the monks, in 1519, to secure his conversion.

More was beatified by Leo XIII., 1886, and with St. Edmund, Bishop Fisher and Thomas Becket is the chief English martyr whom English Catholics cultivate. He died unwilling to jeopardize his soul to perpetual damnation and expressing the hope that, as St. Paul and St. Stephen met in heaven and were friends, so it might be with him and his judges. Gairdner is led to remark that no man ever met an unjust doom in a more admirable spirit. We may concur in this judgment and yet we will not overlook the fact that More, gentleman as he was in heart, seems to us to have been unrelenting to the men whom he convicted as heretics and, in his writings, piled upon them epithets as drastic as Luther himself used. Aside from this, he is to be accorded praise for his advocacy of the reform in education and his commendation of Erasmus' Greek Testament. He wrote a special letter to the Louvain professor, Dorpius, upbraiding him for his attack upon the critical studies of Erasmus and upon the revision of the old Latin text as unwarranted.

More's Utopia, written in Latin and published in 1516 with a preface by Budaeus, took Europe by storm. It was also called Nusquama or Nowhere. With Plato's Republic as a precedent, the author intended to point out wherein European society and especially England was at fault. In More's ideal commonwealth, which was set up on an island, treaties were observed and promises kept, and ploughmen, carpenters, wagoners, colliers and other artisans justly shared in the rewards of labor with noblemen, goldsmiths and usurers, who are called the unproductive classes. The conspiracy of the rich procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth was not allowed. In Utopia, a proper education was given to every child, the hours of physical labor were reduced to six, the streets were 20 feet wide and the houses backed with gardens and supplied with freshwater. The slaughtering was done outside the towns. All punishment was for the purpose of reform and religion, largely a matter of family. The old religions continued to exist on the island, for Christianity had but recently been introduced, but More, apparently belying his later practice as judge, declared that no man was punished for his religion. Its priests were of both sexes and overseers and orderers of worship rather than sacerdotal functionaries. Not to them but to the heads of families was confession made, the wife prostrate on the ground confessing to her husband, and the children to both parents. The priests were married.

Little did More suspect that, within ten years of the publication of his famous book, texts would be drawn from it to support the Peasants' Revolt in Germany. In it are stated some of the sociological hopes and dreams of this present age. The author was voicing the widespread feeling of his own generation which was harassed with laws restricting the wages of labor, with the enclosures of the commons by the rich, the conversion of arable lands into sheep farms and with the renewed warfare on the Continent into which England was drawn.

John Fisher, who suffered on the block a few months before More for refusing to take the oath of supremacy, and set aside the succession of Catherine of Aragon's offspring, was 79 years old when he died. Dean Perry has pronounced him the most learned, the most conscientious and the most devout of the bishops of his day. In 1511, he recommended Erasmus to Cambridge to teach Greek. On the way to the place of beheadal, this good man carried with him the New Testament, repeating again and again the words, This is life eternal to know You and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. That was learning enough for him, he said.

To Grocyn, Colet, More and Fisher the Protestant world gives its reverent regard. It is true, they did not fully apprehend the light which was spreading over Europe. Nevertheless, they went far as pioneers of a more rational system of education than the one built up by the scholastic method and they have a distinct place in the history of the progress of religious thought.

In Scotland, the Protestant Reformation took hold of the nation before the Renaissance had much chance to exercise an independent influence. John Major, who died about 1550, wrote a commentary on the Sentences of Peter the Lombard and is called the last of the Schoolmen. He is, however, a connecting link with the new movement in literature through George Buchanan, his pupil at St Andrews. Major remained true to the Roman communion. Buchanan, after being held for six months in prison as a heretic in Portugal, returned to Scotland and adopted the Reformation. According to Professor Hume-Brown, his Latin paraphrase of the Psalms in metre was, until recent years, read in Scotland in every school where Latin was taught. Knox's History of the Reformation was the earliest model of prose literature in Scotland.