Divus Dionysius: Authority, Self, and Society in John Colet's Reading of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy

As a reader of Dionysius the Areopagite’s Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, John Colet encountered a theology, liturgy, and social framework that seemed absent from the rites and doctrines of the Tudor church. Dionysius’s orderly ecclesia embodied a social perfection that Colet idealized as a Christian "republic." He reacted to ecclesiastical lapses from this model by writing with passionate indignation and, in public venues, by pronouncing bold challenges to clerical misbehavior. Writing for a small audience and adhering to an increasingly doubted authority, Colet responds to Dionysius with a sense of tragically changed historical circumstances, and he assumes the role of an admonishing prophet.