John Colet

John Colet (born 1467, London—died Sept. 16, 1519, Sheen, Surrey, Eng.) was a theologian and founder of St. Paul’s School, London, who, as one of the chief Tudor Humanists, promoted Renaissance culture in England.

The son of a prosperous merchant who had been Lord Mayor of London, Colet studied mathematics and philosophy at Oxford and then travelled and studied for three years in France and Italy. He returned to England c. 1496 and was ordained in 1498. He lectured at Oxford University, to which he invited Desiderius Erasmus, the brilliant Humanist of the northern Renaissance. In addition to Erasmus, Colet collaborated with and influenced such prime Humanists as Sir Thomas More and Thomas Linacre, prototype of the scholar-physicians of the Renaissance. Colet was appointed dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1504 and founded St. Paul’s School c. 1509.

Colet’s devotion to Humanism was diversely expressed. His insistence that the classics be taught diffused a sounder knowledge of Greek and Latin and of ancient life and thought. He revered the 3rd-century philosopher Plotinus, founder of the Neoplatonist school; Marsilio Ficino, one of the leaders of Renaissance Platonism; and Dionysius the Areopagite, allegedly an early Christian convert regarded as the author of The Mystical Theology of the Celestial Hierarchies, on which Colet wrote a treatise. His contempt for contemporary ecclesiastical abuses was so intense that his denunciation of the sins of the clergy caused him to be suspected of heresy.

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Colet’s works, mainly unpublished until the 19th-century editions of J.H. Lupton (1867–76), include commentaries on Romans and Corinthians and treatises on the sacraments and the church. With Erasmus and John Lily, he wrote a Latin grammar that was widely used for many years.