John Colet
John Colet (* 1467 in London ; † September 18, 1519 ibid) was a British Catholic priest and then a prominent London theologian who, as a translator of the New Testament into English, paved the way for the Reformation in Great Britain . As a close friend of the humanist Erasmus von Rotterdam , he founded the Oxford School for the education and training of Catholic theologians in the spirit of humanistic tolerance .
Life
Colet's father was Sir Henry Colet, a nobleman who served twice as mayor of London . His eldest son John was educated in Oxford at St. Anthony's School and Magdalen College . After graduating as a Master of Arts , he decided to become a priest. Through family relationships he received rectorate positions a. a. in Dennington, Suffolk, St. Dunstan's, Stepney, and Thurning, Hunts.
From 1493 to 1496 he went on a study trip to France and Italy . He acquired a basic knowledge of Greek and studied canonical and civil law and patristics . During his travel time he got to know Budaeus ( Guillaume Budé ), some of the writings of Erasmus of Rotterdam and the teachings of Savonarola .
On his return to England in 1496 he was ordained and held a position as dean at St Paul's Cathedral in London . There he read the New Testament in English. Within six months he cast a spell over tens of thousands of listeners in and outside the church building.
At the same time he gave lectures in Oxford, his residence, on the Pauline letters . Here he replaced the usual purely text-based scholastic exegesis , which only commented on individual passages and tried to balance them out, in favor of an overall picture of Paul's personality and the intention of his letters. Colet taught that in the fourfold sense of scripture used by the Catholic Church in interpreting the Bible, not every literal sense is accompanied by an allegorical sense and that, on the other hand, an allegorical sense is always based on a literal sense. He took the view that the sense of writing was simple and universally translatable, so that even uneducated crowds could understand it.
In 1498 Erasmus gave a guest lecture at Oxford. Colet befriended him immediately. Colet continued lecturing on the New Testament for five more years, until he was made Dean of St. Paul's in 1504. There he introduced a regular theological lecture in the church three days a week. During this time he became a close friend and spiritual advisor to Thomas More .
His father died in 1505 and bequeathed him a large fortune, which he donated to public services. In 1509 he began building the new Oxford School for prospective priests, who were to be trained there according to his humanistic ideas. He used all of his remaining fortune for this. At this school, Greek was a compulsory subject on an equal footing with Latin , the Roman Catholic church language. Colet wrote some textbooks himself and oversaw the curriculum under the headmaster William Lilly.
The school building was completed in 1512. That same year, Colet was reported to the Vatican by his bishop for his modern views. But the Archbishop William Warham put down the charge. Despite his arguments with conservative church leaders, Colet saw himself as orthodox and put his work entirely at the service of the church.
In 1514 Colet made a pilgrimage to Canterbury . He preached to introduce Bishop Wolsey as cardinal . He also served as a chaplain for King Henry VIII.
In 1518 he completed a new school constitution. The following year he died of "sweat fever" . He was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral. On his grave in the south choir of the nave there is a stone slab with only his name engraved on it.
Oxford School remained in its original location until it moved to a larger building in Hammersmith in 1884 .
meaning
With his English translation of the New Testament, Colet became a decisive pioneer of the Reformation in England. However, he did not intend to formally break with the Catholic Church. With his powerful way of preaching, he gained enormous popularity, even by the standards of the day. Due to the backing of the London aristocrats, he managed to introduce the humanist movement into England without being arrested and convicted as a heretic.
Influenced by Thomas Linacre , Colet created the first Greek grammar, which was printed in England but also spread across the European continent. His public lectures on the New Testament in English broke both humanist and Reformation ideas in England.
Works
- Convocation Sermon of 1512
- Absoliaissimus de octo orationis partium constructione libellus (Antwerp 1530)
- A righte fruitfull admonition concerning the order of a good Christian man's life (1534)
- Joannis Coleti Theologi olim Decani Divi Pauli Aeditio (1527): a Latin grammar that formed the basis of most Latin textbooks of the 16th and 17th centuries and was often reissued
- Rudimenta Grammatices (London 1539): a first Greek grammar, also often reissued
- Opus de Sacramentis Ecclesiae : preserved as a manuscript, only printed in 1867, published by JH Lupton, then co-director of the Oxford School
- Two Treatises on the Hierarchies by Dionysius (1869)
- An Exposition of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans (ed. 1873)
- An Exposition of St. Paul's first Epistle to the Corinthians (ed. 1874)
- Letters to Radulphus (ed. 1876)
- Statutes of St. Paul's School (1518, often reissued)
He also wrote Bible commentaries, daily prayers and letters. Erasmus of Rotterdam kept many of Colet's letters in his works.
literature
- Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz : Colet, John. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 1, Bautz, Hamm 1975. 2nd, unchanged edition Hamm 1990, ISBN 3-88309-013-1 , Sp. 1093-1094.
Individual evidence
- ^ JH Lupton: A Life of John Colet: With an appendix of some of his English writings . Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2004, ISBN 978-1-59244-493-9 ( google.com [accessed September 24, 2019]).
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Colet, John |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British Catholic priest and theologian |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1467 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | London |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 18, 1519 |
| Place of death | London |