Richard Hooker, Reformer And Platonist

RICHARD HOOKER, REFORMER AND PLATONIST This book explores key aspects of Richard Hooker’s philosophical and theological discourse in the context of currents of thought prevalent in the ‘Magisterial Reformation’ of the sixteenth century. Hooker’s treatment of natural law, his dependence upon the philosophical discourse and traditional cosmology of Christian Neoplatonism, and his appeal to the authority of patristic sources, are all closely examined. Challenging the received ‘exceptionalist’ model of much of the twentiethcentury interpretation of Hooker, in particular the concept of his supposed defence of the English Reformation as striking a ‘via media’ between Rome and mainstream Protestant reform, W.J. Torrance Kirby argues that Hooker adheres to principles of magisterial reform while building upon the assumptions of a distinctively Protestant version of Platonism.

To the memory of my father The Honourable William John Cameron Kirby, QC 12 January 1909–27 June 2003

Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist

W.J. TORRANCE KIRBY

© W.J. Torrance Kirby, 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. W.J. Torrance Kirby has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hants GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Kirby, W.J. Torrance Richard Hooker, reformer and Platonist 1.Hooker, Richard, 1553 or 4–1600 2.Church of England 3.Theologians – England – Biography 4.Platonists – England – Biography I. Title 274.2'06'092 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kirby, W.J. Torrance. Richard Hooker, reformer and platonist : a reassessment of his thought / by W.J. Torrance Kirby. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7546-5288-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Hooker, Richard, 1553 or 4-1600. I. Title. BX5199.H813K57 2004 230'.3'092–dc22 2004019229 ISBN 0 7546 5288 2 Typeset by Manton Typesetters, Louth, Lincolnshire, UK. Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.

Contents

Abbreviations Preface

vii ix

1

An Introduction to the Life and Thought of Richard Hooker

1

2

Polemics and Apologetics: the Case for Magisterial Reform

11

3

Grace and Hierarchy: Hooker’s Two Christian Platonisms

29

4

Creation and Government: Mediation of the ‘Aeternall Law’

45

5

Reason and Natural Law: the ‘Duplex Cognitio Dei’

57

6

Christ and the Church: a ‘Chalcedonian’ Ecclesiology

79

7

Common Prayer and Commonwealth: ‘Publique Religion’

97

Select Bibliography Index

113 135

v

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Abbreviations

ACL

Answere

Autograph Notes Cert. CR

Dublin FLE I–VIII Inst. Just.

Keble Lawes LCC LW OS Pride

1 2

A Christian Letter of certaine English Protestantes (1599), volume 4 of The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker. The Answere of Mr Richard Hooker to a Supplication preferred by Mr Walter Travers to the HH Lords of the Privie Counsell, volume 5 of the Folger Library edition. Hooker’s Autograph Notes from Trinity College, Dublin, MS 364, fols 69–84, volumes 3 and 4 of the Folger Library edition. Hooker, A Learned Sermon of the Certaintie and Perpetuitie of Faith in the Elect, vol. 5 of the Folger Library edition. John Calvin, Opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. G. Baum, E. Cunitz and E. Reuss, Brunswick and Berlin, 1863–1900, Corpus Reformatorum edition. Hooker, Dublin Fragments, volume 4 of the Folger Library edition. The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker.1 Books I–VIII, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1559. Richard Hooker, A Learned Discourse of Justification, Workes, and how the foundation of faith is overthrown, volume 5 of the Folger Library edition. John Keble, ed., The Works of … Mr Richard Hooker, 7th edn, revised R.W. Church and F. Paget, Oxford, 1888. Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie.2 Library of Christian Classics. Martin Luther, Commentary on the Gospel of John, Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, vol. 22. John Calvin, Opera Selecta, ed. P. Barth, W. Niesel, D. Scheuner, 5 vols, Munich, 1926–52. Hooker, A Learned Sermon of the Nature of Pride, volume 5 of the Folger Library edition.

References to the Folger Library [Washington, DC] Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker cite volume, page and line numbers. References to the Lawes give book, chapter and section followed by the standard FLE citation. vii

viii

PS RHC SRH ST STC WA WW

Abbreviations

Parker Society editions of the works of the English Reformers, 56 volumes, Cambridge, 1840–1855. Arthur Stephen McGrade, ed., Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, 1997. W. Speed Hill, ed., Studies in Richard Hooker: Essays preliminary to an Edition of his Works, 1972. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province, New York, 1947. A Short-Title Catalogue … 1475–1640, 2nd edition (1976– 1991). Martin Luther, Werke, Kritische Gesammtausgabe, Weimar (1883–). Works of John Whitgift, DD, Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. John Ayre for the Parker Society, Cambridge, 1851.

Preface

The year 2004 marks the 450th anniversary of Richard Hooker’s birth in Exeter, Devon, in April of 1554. The sesqui-quatercentenary affords an apt occasion for reconsideration and reassessment of his remarkable achievement as the foremost apologist of the Elizabethan religious settlement. The chief aim of the present collection of essays is to explore certain key aspects of Hooker’s philosophical and theological discourse within the context of currents of thought prevalent in the so-called ‘magisterial Reformation’ of the sixteenth century. More particularly, their purpose is to extend the proposal first made in my book Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy (1990), and in a subsequent series of articles, which sought to challenge the widely received interpretation of Hooker’s thought according to the paradigm of the so-called Anglican ‘via media’ as essentially anachronistic and therefore fundamentally inaccurate.1 Much of the critical literature published since the mid- to late-nineteenth century has worked from the assumption that Hooker was one of the original progenitors of modern Anglicanism and was therefore seeking to define an explicit, theological middle way between Protestant orthodoxy and Tridentine Catholicism. For example, in his recent introduction to the Preface of the Lawes in the Folger Library Commentary on Hooker’s Works (1993), William Haugaard portrays the Church of England in the late sixteenth century as the ‘crucible for an emerging Anglicanism.’2 In this account Haugaard refers to ‘a recognition among some contemporaries that the English Church represented a kind of Protestant tertium quid among established European Churches, whose character suggested the possibility of rapprochement with Roman Catholic as well as fellow Protestant Churches.’3 As the preeminent defender of the Elizabethan Settlement, Hooker is held up as the proponent of this incipient via media; and thus his theology is represented as bearing the mark of a distinctively ‘Anglican’ approach with respect to both content and method. In a similar vein, Lee Gibbs portrays Hooker’s theology as ‘Thomistic,’ and means thereby that Hooker set out to ‘close the breach opened by the magisterial Reformation and maintained by the disciplinarians between 1

2 3

This thesis has recently been taken up in a very clear and penetrating study of Hooker’s theology by Nigel Atkinson, Richard Hooker and the Authority of Scripture, Tradition and Reason: Reformed Theologian of the Church of England?, to which readers are referred. See W. Speed Hill, gen. ed., The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, vol. 6, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, Books I–VIII, [FLE] 6(1):2. FLE 6(1):6–7. ix

x

Preface

reason and revelation, nature and grace.’4 According to this interpretation, to pursue the Anglican middle way is ipso facto to eschew the doctrinal norms of the magisterial reformers. Is this portrait of Hooker’s putative via media Anglicanism sustainable? There are good grounds for scepticism, chief among them Hooker’s own explicit declarations concerning his apologetic intent. As I have argued elsewhere, Hooker casts the argument of the Lawes as an irenical appeal to the hearts and minds of the disciplinarian Puritan opponents of the Elizabethan Settlement.5 Throughout his discourse Hooker speaks directly to the theological assumptions of those who seek a ‘further reformation’ of the Church of England: ‘Thinke not that ye reade the words of one, who bendeth him selfe as an adversarie against the truth which ye have alreadie embraced; but the words of one, who desireth even to embrace together with you the self same truth … ’6 In order to win conscientious acceptance of the Settlement it was essential to Hooker’s strategy to show the consistency of the English version of reform with continental standards of doctrinal orthodoxy. From the perspective of Hooker’s apologetics, the debate between conformist and disciplinarian critics of the Settlement is in effect a struggle over the interpretation of what exactly constitutes ‘reformed orthodoxy’ in England. The aim of the present study is to explore this struggle in three distinct contexts. First, Hooker’s treatment of the doctrines of creation and natural law raise important questions concerning the authority of reason in theological discourse. The aim is both to examine Hooker’s dependence upon Christian Neoplatonic sources and to compare his thinking directly with other magisterial reformers in order to determine whether appeals to the natural law tradition and related claims on behalf of the natural knowledge of God can be reconciled with mainstream reformed thinking. Second, we will examine Hooker’s dependence upon the philosophical discourse and traditional cosmology of Christian Neoplatonism to inquire whether this necessarily compromises his commitment to reformed doctrine as some have suggested. We will review Hooker’s appeal to the authority of patristic sources – notably the Christological formulations of the four great ecumenical councils of the early Church – within the context of the Elizabethan struggle to define the parameters of a genuinely ‘reformed’ account of the doctrines of salvation and of the Church. Chapters of this book have been previously published as follows: ‘Polemics and Apologetics’ (chapter two) appeared as ‘Richard Hooker as an Apologist of the Magisterial Reformation in England’ in Arthur S. McGrade, ed., Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, 219–33; ‘Grace and Hierarchy’ and ‘Common Prayer and Commonwealth’ (chapters three and seven) were published in a collection of papers delivered by various Hooker scholars at recent 4

5 6

FLE 6(1):124. This is essentially the position of W. David Neelands, ‘Scripture, Reason and “Tradition”,’ in A.S. McGrade, ed., Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, (vol. 165), [RHC], p. 80. See chapter 2 below. Lawes, Pref. 1.3; 1:3.1–6.

Preface

xi

annual meetings of the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference: Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, Studies in Early Modern Religious Reforms, vol. 2. ‘Creation and Government’ (chapter four) was first published as ‘The Neoplatonic Logic of “Procession and Return” in the First Book of Hooker’s Lawes,’ Renaissance and Reformation 22.4 (1998): 49–67; ‘Reason and Natural Law’ (chapter five) as ‘Richard Hooker’s Theory of Natural Law in the Context of Reformation Theology,’ Sixteenth Century Journal 30.3 (1999): 681–703; and ‘Christ and the Church’ (chapter six) appeared in a special quatercentenary collection of essays edited by Gerald Bray in Churchman, vol. 114 (Spring, 2000): 22–39. The introductory account of Hooker’s life and summary of the principal features of his thought was published in Andrew Pyle, gen. ed., The Dictionary of Seventeenth Century British Philosophers. In the pursuit of this inquiry I have incurred many scholarly debts. In particular I would like to thank the members of the happy band of Hookerians who gather every autumn at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference for an annual ‘convivium theologicum’ – Egil Grislis, David Neelands, Paul Stanwood, Lee Gibbs, Rudolph Almasy, John Stafford and Daniel Eppley. Several of the essays included here were presented at these meetings. I owe another debt of gratitude to former colleagues at the Princeton Center of Theological Inquiry where this research first began in earnest. In particular I thank Wallace Alston, William Lazareth and Don Browning for their encouragement. I am indebted also to Avihu Zakai, Niels Gregersen, Victor Nuovo and George Hunsinger, among other members of the Center during my two periods of residence, for their many helpful comments and criticisms on early drafts of chapters four and five. I am very appreciative of the long-standing interest taken in my study of Richard Hooker by Wayne Hankey. I also thank most warmly the staff of the Folger Library in Washington, DC for their valuable assistance during my period of research there. Finally, thanks are due to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their most generous support of my programme of research.

McGill University Montreal, Canada

W.J. Torrance Kirby

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Chapter 1

An Introduction to the Life and Thought of Richard Hooker

Richard Hooker was born at Heavitree near Exeter in April 1554; he died at Bishopsbourne, Kent on 2 November 1600.1 He was educated at Exeter Grammar School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he matriculated in 1569. His tutor was John Rainolds, later president of the college and one of the translators of the Authorized Version. Hooker gained a BA and was admitted a ‘disciple’ of Corpus Christi in 1573. In 1577 he received an MA and was elected a probationary fellow. In 1579 he was made a full fellow and appointed deputy lecturer to Thomas Kingsmill, Regius Professor of Hebrew. He delivered the Hebrew lecture for the remainder of his time at Oxford. Hooker was made a deacon by John Aylmer, Bishop of London, in August 1579 and was later ordained presbyter. He became junior dean of Corpus Christi in 1583. In the autumn of 1584 he earned marked public distinction by delivering a sermon at Paul’s Cross, London. Hooker resigned his fellowship in 1584 and was presented to the living of Drayton Beauchamp in Buckinghamshire by the patron, John Cheney. On 17 March 1585, by Letters Patent from the Crown, Hooker was appointed Master of the Temple Church of the Inns of Court, where he shared the pulpit with the disciplinarian Puritan divine Walter Travers. Before a congregation of the English judges and barristers they engaged in a theological controversy which was to occupy Hooker for the rest of his life. He married Joan Churchman on 13 February 1588. In June 1591 he was appointed subdean of Salisbury Cathedral, prebendary of Netheravon and was presented by Queen Elizabeth to the living of Boscombe. As a member of the Cathedral Chapter he was present at the election of John Coldwell as Bishop of Sarum and is recorded as having presided over the subdean’s court at Salisbury in 1591. The first edition of his great treatise Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie (Lawes) was entered in the Stationer’s Register to the printer and publisher John Windet on 29 January 1593 under the authorization of Archbishop John Whitgift. Initially only the preface and first four books were published. A presentation copy was sent to Lord Burghley on 13 March 1593, the same day on which Sir Edwin Sandys, Hooker’s former pupil at Corpus Christi, spoke in the House of Commons in support of legislation ‘to retain the Queen’s subjects in their due obedience.’2 The

1 2

2004 marked the 450th anniversary of his birth. 35 Eliz. I, ch. 1. 1

2

Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist

Act in question was directed against ‘the wicked and dangerous practices of seditious sectaries,’ a lengthy account of whom figures prominently in the preface to the Lawes.3 There is evidence that Hooker consulted extensively in the formulation of the polemical thrust of his discourse with his former pupils Sandys, son of the Archbishop of York, and George Cranmer, grand-nephew of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury. The fifth book of the Lawes was published in December 1597. In January of 1595 Hooker was presented by the queen to the living of Bishopsbourne in Kent, where he died on 2 November 1600 and was buried in the chancel of the parish church. He left an estate valued at £1092 and consisting mainly of books. A second edition of the first four books edited by Hooker’s friend and literary executor, John Spenser, fellow of Corpus Christi, was issued in 1604. In his preface to the second edition, Spenser refers to the existence of the unpublished ‘three last books, their fathers Posthumi,’ and claims that Hooker lived to see the manuscript perfected. Spenser also edited Hooker’s various tractates and sermons, which were printed by Joseph Barnes, the university printer, in 1612 and 1614. A complete edition of all eight books of the Lawes was not published until after the Restoration. Much of Hooker’s career was spent in theological controversy. As Master of the Temple at the Inns of Court he preached a series of sermons on themes of Reformation soteriology and ecclesiology. Their doctrinal orthodoxy was formally challenged by Walter Travers in A Supplication made to the Privie Counsell.4 In particular, Hooker was reproached by Travers for maintaining that the Church of Rome can be viewed as a branch of ‘the true church of Christ’ and that ‘he dowted not but that thowsands of the fathers which lyved and died in the superstitions of that church, were saved becawse of their ignoranc which excused them.’5 In addition, Hooker’s strong appeal to the authority of reason in religious matters was challenged by Travers as inconsistent with reformed orthodoxy. Hooker’s reply to these objections lays the groundwork of the philosophical and theological system expounded later in the Lawes.6 Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie consists of a lengthy preface and eight books. The first four books address (1) the nature of law in general, (2) the proper uses of the authorities of reason and revelation, (3) the application of the latter to the government of the Church and (4) objections to practices inconsistent with the continental ‘reformed’ example. The final four address the more particular issues of (5) public religious duties, (6) the power of jurisdiction, (7) the authority of bishops and (8) the supreme authority of the Prince in both Church and Commonwealth, and hence their unity in the Christian state. The treatise is framed as a response to Thomas Cartwright, who had been John Whitgift’s formidable adversary in the Admonition Controversy of the 1570s (see Peter Lake, Anglicans and 3 4 5 6

Lawes, Pref. 8; FLE 36.18–51.22. FLE 5: 171–210. FLE 5: 200.12. Books I–IV were published in 1593, book V in 1597 and books VI–VIII posthumously.

The Life and Thought of Richard Hooker

3

Puritans?, 1988). The preface is in fact addressed formally ‘to them that seeke (as they tearme it) the reformation of lawes, and orders ecclesiasticall, in the Church of England,’ that is to disciplinarian Puritans who, like Cartwright and Travers, sought closer conformity to the pattern of the ‘best reformed churches’ on the Continent, especially Calvin’s Geneva. The preface sets the tone of the work and announces Hooker’s main apologetical intent. There is a significant difference between Hooker’s rhetorical approach and that of previous contributions to Elizabethan polemics. He abandons the usual recourse to ridicule and personal abuse which was so characteristic of the vast majority of tracts contributed by both sides of the controversy and speaks irenically to the fundamental theological assumptions with the professed aim of securing conscientious acceptance of the Settlement. To this end he sets out to persuade by an appeal to mutually acceptable theological assumptions and authorities. Hooker’s starting point is to accept unconditionally the disciplinarian premise that the doctrinal tenets and the pastoral aspirations of the Reformation had to be fulfilled in the polity of the Church of England. The rhetorical slant is intended to serve the main apologetic aim of the treatise, namely to justify the Elizabethan Settlement as consistent with the principles of reformed doctrinal orthodoxy. Thus the grand cosmic scheme of laws set out in Book I is intended to place the particulars of the controversy (viz. the precise forms of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, government, ceremonies and the relation of the Church to the civil order) within a foundational context: ‘because the point about which wee strive is the qualitie of our Lawes, our first entrance hereinto cannot better be made, then with consideration of the nature of lawe in generall.’7 His aim is to persuade by tracing the ‘particular decisions’ of the Settlement back to ‘general meditations’ on first principles. Hooker defines law in general as ‘that which doth assigne unto each thing the kinde, that which doth moderate the force and power, that which doth appoint the forme and measure of working … so that no certaine end could ever be attained, unlesse the actions whereby it is attained were regular, that is to say, made suteable for and correspondent unto their end, by some canon, rule or lawe.’8 This definition places him in a scholastic tradition dependent ultimately upon Aristotle. Hooker’s adaptation of this definition, however, goes beyond any simply Aristotelian or Thomistic account. Working from the definition, Hooker asserts that everything works according to law, including God himself: ‘the being of God is a kinde of lawe to his working: for that perfections which God is, geveth perfection to that he doth.’9 There are certain structural similarities between Book I of the Lawes and Thomas Aquinas’s short treatise on law in the second part of the Summa Theologiae (qq. 90–97). The principal resemblance is Hooker’s adoption of Aquinas’s Neoplatonic metaphysical logic. Just as the neo-platonic cosmology accounts for the genesis of the world by means of a downward emanation or

7 8 9

Lawes I.1.3; 1:58.11–13. Lawes I.2.1; 1:58.26–32. Lawes I.2.2; 1:59.5–6.

4

Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist

procession from the principle of original unity, so also Hooker derives a diverse hierarchy of laws from the eternal law as their ‘highest wellspring and fountaine.’ His emphasis upon the divine unity is marked: ‘our God is one, or rather verie Onenesse, and meere unitie, having nothing but it selfe in it selfe, and not consisting (as all things do besides God) of many things.’10 All species of law participate in the undifferentiated unity of the eternal law and are derived from it by way of ‘procession.’ Hooker adheres to the Christian Neoplatonic lex divinitatis whereby the originative principle of law remains simple in itself while proceeding out of itself in its generation of manifold derivative forms of law. He distinguishes between a first and a second eternal law on the ground that God is a law both to himself (in se) in his divine simplicity and to all creatures besides (ad extra). His discussion of the first eternal law is thus closely analogous to a traditional Logos theology. The second eternal law comprises the divine order as ‘kept by all his creatures, according to the severall conditions wherewith he hath indued them.’11 It has a variety of ‘names’ depending on the different orders of creatures subject to the one divine government. The two principal derivative genera of the second eternal law are the natural law and the revealed law of the scriptures, sometimes called the divine law. The entire system of the laws is thus expressed in the classically Neoplatonic twofold motion of procession from (exitus) and return to (reditus) the original unity of the eternal law. The natural law, by a further procession, comprises in turn subordinate species of law which govern irrational natural agents as well as rational; the law governing the rational creatures is distinguished further into the ‘law coelestial,’ which orders the angels, and the ‘law of reason’ (sometimes called the ‘natural law’), which orders humankind. All of these sub-species represent the outward and downward processio of the second eternal law. On the other side, the law of God’s special revelation, the revealed law of the scriptures presupposes the disorder introduced into the cosmos by the Fall, and is provided in order to secure the final restoration or ‘return’ of the creation to its original condition of unity under the eternal law. The distinction between the two summa genera of natural law and divine law which corresponds to the logical structure of procession and return is also reflected in the epistemological distinction of a twofold knowledge of God, namely by the light of supernatural revelation and by the natural light of reason. There are in addition composite species of law, such as human positive law and the law of nations, which are derived by a reflection upon the general principles contained in the natural law. These derivative species of law are a consequence of human sin and, like the divine law, are given as a corrective to the disorder introduced by the Fall (remedium peccati). In all of this the human creature as the imago dei is the focal point of the cosmic operation of procession from and return to the original order established in and by the divine simplicity.

10 Lawes I.2.2; 1:59.20–22. 11 Lawes I.3.1; 1:63.9–10.

The Life and Thought of Richard Hooker

5

The structure of this generic division of law shows that Hooker has clearly read Aquinas very closely indeed. The distinction between the first and second eternal laws is nonetheless a significant departure from the scholastic Thomistic model in an unmistakably Augustinian direction. In a manner characteristic of the theology of the magisterial reformers, the effect of this move is simultaneously to widen and decrease the distance between the creator-lawgiver and the created cosmos. The gathering together of all the derivative species of law within the second eternal law reduces the sense of a mediated hierarchy between creator and creature and emphasizes rather the common participation of the manifold derivative species of law in their one source. At the same time the distinction between the first and second eternal laws upholds the clear distinction between creator and creature. This treatment of the eternal law exhibits the marked Augustinian character of Hooker’s thought and distinguishes his Neoplatonism from the pseudo-Dionysian emphasis of Aquinas. In the second book Hooker addresses the basic hermeneutical question of the definition and the extent of the authority of scripture. The ‘maine pillar’ of the disciplinarian-puritan objections to the constitution established by the Elizabethan Settlement is the claim that ‘scripture ought to be the only rule of all our actions.’ The practical question is whether it is necessary to look to the scriptures directly for the structures of Church government. Hooker argues that the authority of scripture must be interpreted strictly with respect to ‘that end whereto it tendeth.’ He affirms the reformers’ doctrine that the Bible contains a complete account of all things ‘necessary to salvation.’ Tradition and human authority exercised through the Church cannot add anything to God’s written word. On the other hand, the grounds of religion are understood by Hooker both to be revealed in scripture and accessible to the light of natural reason. God the creator of the world speaks through nature, whose voice is his instrument and is manifest to the eye of reason in the glorious works of creation. Whereas tradition is to be eschewed and scripture alone to be followed in the formulation of the rule of faith, tradition, custom and human authority generally are necessary in order to avoid ‘infinite perplexities, scrupulosities, doubts insoluble and extreme despaires’12 in the external ordering of religion. It is not the purpose of the divine law as revealed in the scriptures to provide prescriptions for the political structure of the Church. In the third book Hooker argues that the visible Church is a human ‘politique societie’ subject to human laws and judgements and consequently dependent upon the authority of natural law, reason and custom. In this way matters of ecclesiastical polity are clearly distinguished from matters of faith and salvation. The question is complicated, however, by the ambiguous nature of the Church. Just as the professing Christian is simul justus, simul peccator, as Luther puts it, and lives simultaneously in two realms – in an inward, spiritual realm of the conscience and in an outward, temporal realm of political community – so also the Church is understood to be simultaneously the mystical body of Christ and a visible associa-

12 Lawes II.8.6; 1:190.18–19.

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Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist

tion of believers in the world. In this respect Hooker’s doctrine of the Church is shaped dialectically by his reformed soteriology.13 The fourth book addresses the general principles which underpin the external ceremonies of the Church. Hooker justifies the retention of the customs and traditions inherited from the ancient and medieval Church, which had been rejected by ‘certaine reformed Churches whose example therein we ought to have followed.’ Disciplinarian Puritans objected to the retention by the Church of England of ceremonial practices outwardly conformable with the uses of the Church of Rome. For Hooker it is essential to distinguish between the realms where tradition and scripture are authoritative in combination and where scripture is authoritative alone. The first principles established in book one, which govern the distinction of natural law, human law and divine law, are here applied once again to justify the reformed Church of England’s simultaneous adherence to the rule of faith as defined by the magisterial reformers and to a liberal interpretation of the continuity of ceremonial forms. The fifth book of the Lawes, which is one-third longer than the initial four books combined, offers an account of the particulars of ‘the severall publique duties of Christian religion’ as established by the Act of Uniformity of 1559. Hooker addresses the ‘owtwarde forme’ of religion in architecture, decoration, naming, formal hallowing and dedication of church buildings. He examines the public offices of preaching sermons and reading the scriptures, public prayer and the use of set forms of common prayer, the formality of dress and gesture in divine service, the proper use of music and the recitation of canticles. The theology of particular controversial prayers is examined. In his discussion of the sacraments in book five, chapters 50 through 56, Hooker changes the pace somewhat with an extended discourse on orthodox patristic Christology. The formulation of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 is taken as the dogmatic paradigm for understanding the manner of the Christian believer’s participation in the godhead: Sacramentes are the powerful instrumentes of God to eternall life. For as our naturall life consisteth in the union of the bodie with the soule; so our life supernaturall in the union of the soule with God. And for as much as there is no union of God with man without that meane betwene both which is both, it seemeth requisite that wee first consider how God is in Christ, then how Christ is in us, and how the sacramentes doe serve to make us pertakers of Christ. In other thinges wee may be more briefe, but the waight of these requireth largenes.14

Of particular note is Hooker’s rejection of the Lutheran doctrine of the ubiquity or universal presence of Christ’s human nature and affirmation of the so-called doctrine of the ‘extra-Calvinisticum’ whereby the distinctness of the human and 13 See Hooker’s A Learned Discourse of Justification, Works, and How the Foundation of Faith is Overthrown, FLE 5:105–69. 14 Lawes V.50.3; 2:208.19–209.3.

The Life and Thought of Richard Hooker

7

divine natures in Christ and their respective characteristics is sharply defined. The remainder of book five considers the various rites and offices prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer of 1559. The final chapters are devoted to a consideration of the ‘power of order’ conferred upon the clergy by ordination. The sixth book, first published in 1648, half a century after Hooker’s death, is undoubtedly the most problematic of the three posthumous books. Although the authenticity of authorship is uncontested, the substance of the argument is not easily reconciled with Hooker’s own outline of the treatise in the preface. Extant notes by George Cranmer and Edwin Sandys, based on a lost early draft of book six, first printed by Keble in the edition of 1836, suggest that Hooker initially intended to grapple with the question of lay-eldership. The text of book six as it stands consists mainly of a discussion of the ‘end’ of spiritual jurisdiction, namely penitence, rather than the external institutional ‘means.’ The book has been described as a ‘tract of confession.’ Since Archbishop Ussher’s publication of this text in 1648 it has been customary to include it in spite of its being, in Keble’s words, ‘an entire deviation from its subject.’15 In this tractate Hooker outlines the three parts of the penitence as contrition, confession and satisfaction and concludes with a discussion of absolution, although the latter element is not treated as an essential moment. The editors of the Folger edition acknowledge that this tractate was not intended by Hooker as a substitute for his treatment of the layeldership but that it nonetheless constitutes an important part of the polemic with respect to spiritual jurisdiction. On these grounds, the tractate on penitence continues to appear as the sixth book of the Lawes. The seventh book, the most polished of the three posthumous books, contains a defence of the jurisdiction of bishops, together with a justification of episcopal honours, privileges and temporal benefits. Hooker approaches the question of episcopal government by examining the evidence of the Bible and the authority of the early Church Fathers, historians and the decrees of the early Councils. One important source is the Justinian Corpus juris civilis. A bishop is defined as possessing the powers of order and spiritual jurisdiction possessed by other ministers together with the additional power to ordain new ministers: A Bishop is a Minister of God, unto whom with permanent continuance, there is given not onely power of administring the Word and Sacraments, which power other Presbyters have; but also a further power to ordain Ecclesiastical persons, and a power of Cheifty in Government over Presbyters as well as Lay men, a power to be by way of jurisdiction a Pastor even to Pastors themselves.16

Hooker maintains that the authority of bishops is of human institution. Although their jurisdiction does not originate by direct divine right grounded in the scriptures (iure divino), nevertheless human institutions acquire divine approbation such that ‘the same thing which is of men, may be also justly and truely said to be 15 Keble I: xxxiv. 16 Lawes VII.2.3; 3:152.19–25.

8

Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist

of God, the same thing from heaven which is from earth.’17 The Church as a ‘politique societie’ has in it by nature the power of providing for its own safety and continuance. This power of self-preservation on the part of political bodies consists chiefly in the authority to make laws, for ‘corporations are immortal.’ On this ground Hooker allows that there may be occasions when, by ‘exigence of necessity,’ the ordination of ministers may justly and reasonably occur without the power of a bishop: ‘the whole Church visible being the true original subject of all power, it hath not ordinarily allowed any other then bishops alone to ordain.’18 Hooker goes on to affirm the role of bishops as judges and civil administrators since in a Christian society the civil and ecclesiastical functions may lawfully be united in one and the same person. Here he invokes the Chalcedonian logic of the unity of the divine and human natures which yet continue to be distinct within the undivided person of Christ. In the eighth and final book Hooker presents the main elements of his political theory in a defence of the union of Church and Commonwealth in a Christian state under royal sovereignty. Threads of the argument in all previous books come together in this complex constitutional tapestry. Civil and ecclesiastical power are distinct in ‘nature’ though capable of ‘personal’ union in the Prince. Church and Commonwealth represent distinct properties, qualities or actions which can be united in every subject as well. Hooker rejects the ‘Nestorian’ insistence upon the perpetual necessity of a personal separation: ‘for the truth is that the Church and the Commonwealth are the names which import thinges really different. But those thinges are accidentes and such accidentes as may and should alwayes livingly dwell together in one subject.’19 Hooker argues for a conciliar theory of the origin of sovereign power. As with episcopacy ‘unto Kings by humane right honour by very divine right is due.’ For Hooker, law is supreme rather than the arbitrary will of the Prince: ‘Happier that people, whose lawe is their King in the greatest things then that whose King is himself their lawe.’20 In a remarkable theological discourse in VIII.4, Hooker defends the royal headship of the Church by an appeal to the most subtle distinctions of patristic Christological and Trinitarian orthodoxy. In subsequent chapters he addresses the chief royal powers in the Church, viz. the prerogative to call assemblies, to appoint prelates, to exercise final judgement in ecclesiastical causes and, as the ‘uncommanded commander,’ to be exempt from all forms of judicial punishment by the clergy. Hooker’s generic division of laws rests on a carefully defined tension between natural and revealed theology. His affirmation of the authority of human reason consequent upon the revelation of the divine wisdom to the observer of ‘the glorious workes of Nature’ is a crucial presupposition of his theologico-political system. A significant number of Hooker’s seventeenth-century readers shared this

17 18 19 20

Lawes VII.11.10; 3:210.11–13. Lawes VII.14.11; 3:227.4–6. Lawes VIII.1.5; 3:325.1–4. Lawes VIII.3.3; 3:341.25–342.1 or Keble VIII.2.12.

The Life and Thought of Richard Hooker

9

view and some sought to extend the boundaries of his natural theology a great deal further. His influence ranged over classical ‘Anglo-Calvinists’ James Ussher, Robert Sanderson and Thomas Barlow; Arminians or ‘anti-Calvinists’ William Laud, Jeremy Taylor and Henry Hammond; Cambridge Platonists Benjamin Whichcote, Ralph Cudworth and Nathanael Culverwell; Latitudinarians Edward Stillingfleet, Joseph Glanvill and John Wilkins; and Deists such as John Locke and Charles Blount. As the speculative theological discourse of the seventeenthcentury Church of England unfolds, natural theology assumes increasing influence. Hooker was often cited as an ‘orthodox’ authority by representatives of radical theological rationalism. In virtually every generation since Hooker’s death, theologians have returned to the Lawes as to a mirror of first principles of the doctrine and method of the Church of England. Quite often his readers have found distorted and mutually contradictory images there. It is well known, for example, that James II attributed his conversion to Rome to the reading of Hooker and that John Locke chose the Lawes as his principal authority for the constitutional limitation of royal power in his Two Treatises of Government. Throughout the seventeenth century and later, attempts were frequently made to claim Hooker in support of a wide variety of divergent theological positions. The diversity of these appeals reflects the complex and elusive character of his thought, and possibly also its claim to comprehensiveness.

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Chapter 2

Polemics and Apologetics: the Case for Magisterial Reform

1

Richard Hooker’s theological assumptions have long been the subject of controversy. In his famous pulpit exchange with Walter Travers at the Temple Church in the Inns of Court, and later in A Christian Letter, the first and only published attack on his treatise Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, Hooker was accused of promoting ‘Romishe doctrine’ and ‘scholastique errore.’ His contemporary critics sought to impugn his basic doctrinal assumptions as incompatible with continental standards of ‘reformed orthodoxy,’ especially those exemplified by the theology of Calvin. Since the early nineteenth century, scholars and commentators on Hooker’s thought have commonly allowed the truth of these accusations and have regarded Hooker as a – if not the – chief proponent of the via media hypothesis of Anglicanism. According to this view, Hooker’s underlying assumptions are supposed to reflect a theological middle ground between Rome and continental Protestantism. This interpretation continues to hold sway today and is, perhaps, the one common viewpoint which unites an otherwise fragmented sphere of critical scholarship. The hypothesis of the Anglican via media, a nineteenth-century notion initially proposed by John Henry Newman, has proven to be a hopelessly inadequate and anachronistic hermeneutical instrument for the study of sixteenth-century thought and practice. The hypothesis has created something of an impasse in the critical study of Hooker’s thought. The purpose of my present study is to challenge the validity of the application of this hypothesis to the thought of Hooker and to propose in its place a substantial revision in the interpretation of his basic theological orientation. Hooker’s overriding apologetic aim was to secure conscientious acceptance of the Elizabethan religious settlement by its more moderate critics.2 The invention of an ecclesiological tertium quid somewhere between Geneva and 1

2

This chapter first appeared in a book of essays published to mark the quatercentenary of the first edition of the Lawes. See Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. A.S. McGrade, pp. 219–33. Hooker most likely had in mind those ‘moderate Puritans’ who initially questioned the validity of the institutions and ceremonies established through the Elizabethan religious settlement, but who later conformed to the established order. Among the moderate party of disciplinarian Puritans were such individuals as Laurence Chaderton, William Whitaker, William Perkins and eventually even Thomas Cartwright himself, Hooker’s chief target in the Lawes. See Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church. 11

12

Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist

Rome was entirely outside his purpose, indeed was at odds with his main intention in writing the Lawes.3 The preliminary thesis I wish to demonstrate with respect to his apologetic aim is as follows: Hooker set out to justify the doctrine and institutions of the Elizabethan Church according to received standards of doctrinal orthodoxy laid down by the continental ‘magisterial reformers,’ standards whose authority was readily acknowledged by those whom he sought to persuade. A clear understanding of this apologetic purpose is essential to the task of interpretation. The case for substantial revision of the received interpretation of Hooker’s theological assumptions rests on the proposal that he shares considerable common theological ground with such mainstream continental reformers as Martin Luther, Philipp Melanchthon, Jean (John) Calvin and Heinrich Bullinger – leaders among the so-called magisterial reformers. The central claim to be made is that Hooker himself is a proponent of the essential tenets of this magisterial reform in England. The textual focus of the inquiry will include the Lawes as well as various sermons, tractates and fragments in which Hooker treats the pivotal soteriological questions of sixteenth-century discourse, including A Learned Discourse of Justification, Workes, and How the Foundation of Faith is Overthrowne4 and the Dublin Fragments on Grace and Free Will, the Sacraments, and Predestination.5 The recent completion of the Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker – in particular the fifth volume edited by Laetitia Yeandle with the commentary of Egil Grislis – provides an excellent and indeed unprecedented textual foundation for this part of the undertaking.6 An underlying presupposition of this inquiry is the proposal that the treatise on the Lawes is, as it were, the tree which grows from the roots of Hooker’s theological first principles. The critical ‘hinge’ which connects the various tractates on soteriology with the ecclesiology and political theory of the Lawes is best summarized by the classic Reformation distinction drawn by Luther between the Two Realms and Two Regiments, or the forum conscientiae and forum externum as Calvin puts it. The aim of the inquiry is thus twofold: first, to show that Hooker’s theological assumptions are essentially consistent with the central teaching of the magisterial reformers; and second, to demonstrate how both his distinctive ecclesiology and his political theory are derived from these theological roots shared with other magisterial reformers.

3 For an recent alternative reading of this issue see William Haugaard’s introduction to the preface of the Lawes, FLE 6 (1): 1–7. 4 FLE 5: 105–69. 5 FLE 4: 101–67. 6 See the textual introduction to the Sermons and Fragments in FLE 5: xiii–xxxv.

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The Polemical Context Ever since the publication in 1599 of the anonymous tract entitled A Christian Letter7 there has been controversy over the nature and degree of Richard Hooker’s commitment to the basic Christian doctrines as taught by the leading theologians of the continental Reformation, the so-called magisterial reformers.8 The authors of A Christian Letter declare themselves to be ‘certaine English Protestantes, unfayned favourers of the present state of religion, authorized and professed in England.’ Their manifest purpose in publishing the tract is to impugn the doctrinal and theological assumptions of Hooker’s treatise Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie as incompatible with the fundamental teachings of reformed theology, specifically as these had been formulated and defined in the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England.9 At the outset of A Christian Letter the authors refer the reader to Hooker’s own preface to the Lawes and ‘charge that it seemed unto us that covertlie and underhand you did bende all your skill and force against the present state of our English Church: and by colour of defending the discipline and governement thereof, to make questionable and bring in contempt the doctrine

7

8

9

The complete text of ACL (STC 4707) is included in the Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, (FLE) gen. ed. W. Speed Hill, vol. 4, ed. John Booty, 1–79. In his discussion of the question of authorship, Booty suggests the likelihood of Andrew Willet, fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge. Willet, who is described as a Calvinist in theology and who conformed to the established Church, admirably fits Peter Lake’s category of the ‘moderate Puritan.’ See Booty’s introduction to FLE 4: xvii–xxv. Hooker, however, thinks that the author is ‘plaine and content openly to show <what you are> your self a disciplinarian.’ (FLE 4: 59.16). That is to say, the Reformation as represented by such magistri as Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, Heinrich Bullinger and John Calvin. These representative theologians of the major confessions were allied with their respective ecclesiastical establishments as ordained by princes or republics. They are to be distinguished from the so-called ‘radical’ reformers – separatists, Anabaptists and sectaries discussed by Hooker in his preface to the Lawes, 1:36.18–51.22. The concept of ‘magisterial’ Reformation will be discussed at length below and in chapter 4. The Thirty-Nine Articles constitute the formula accepted by the Church of England in order to define its stance in relation to the doctrinal controversies of the mid-sixteenth century. Otherwise known by the abbreviated title Articles of Religion, they were agreed upon by the convocation of 1563 and subscription by all candidates for ordination was legislated by Parliament in 1571. Their full title is ‘Articles agreed upon by the Archbishops and Bishops of both Provinces and the whole clergy, in the Convocation holden at London in the year 1562, for the avoiding of diversities of opinions, and for the establishing of consent touching true religion.’ For a lively and interesting discussion of the theology of the Articles, see Oliver O’Donovan, On the Thirty-Nine Articles: A Conversation with Tudor Christianity (1986). For an account of the convocation discussion of the Articles, see William P. Haugaard, Elizabeth and the English Reformation: The Struggle for a Stable Settlement of Religion (Cambridge University Press, 1968).

14

Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist

and faith itselfe.’10 The Letter proceeds to demand that Hooker justify his meaning on a series of substantial points of basic doctrine which are addressed, more or less, in the order of the Articles themselves. Those treated include basic Trinitarian dogma and Christology, the authority of scripture, the question of free will, the doctrine of faith and works, the sacraments, as well as the doctrine of the Church. Under each head the Letter begins by quoting the relevant Article, followed by a citation from the Lawes in order to draw attention to some lack of conformity of the latter with the former. According to editor John Booty, the Letter ‘seeks to provide a defense against the erroneous doctrine in which Hooker’s arguments concerning the laws of the Church of England seem rooted.’11 Clearly, these contemporary critics of Hooker regarded the great controversy over the ‘rites, customs, and orders of Ecclesiasticall government,’12 which provided Hooker the occasion for writing his treatise, as much more than a dispute over mere externals; rather, for them, it was ultimately a dispute over theological principles of the highest order.13 The extended Elizabethan debate which began with disagreement in the 1560s over the use of clerical vestments developed into a bitter debate over the constitutional structures of the Church in the Admonition Controversy of the 1570s and 1580s.14 By the 1590s, with the publication of Hooker’s Lawes and the attempted refutation in A Christian Letter, the theological stakes, so to speak, had escalated considerably. Throughout the Letter Hooker is accused, moreover, not only of deviation from the constitutionally established norms of reformed doctrinal orthodoxy but also of the active promotion of ‘Romish doctrine’ and ‘scholastic error.’15 Good Mai[ster] Hoo[ker] helpe us heere, and shewe us howe we may thinke, that you incline not to the errour of poperie touching workes forseene, and that you favour our churches beleefe. And may wee not trulie say, that under the shewe of inveighing against Puritanes, the chiefest pointes of popish blasphemie, are many times and in many places, by divers men not obscurelie broached, both in Sermons and in Writing, to the great griefe of manie faithfull subjectes, who pray for the blessed and peaceable continuance of her most gracious Majestie, and of the estate of the Church of Jesus Christ, as it is nowe

10 11 12 13

FLE 4:7.11, 12, 19, 20. FLE 4: xxviii. Lawes I.1.3; 1:58.1. See the conclusion of ACL, where the authors ask ‘( … is it not a great matter when you seeme to us to make a wide open breach in the church, and to stayne the pure doctrine of faith?) wee seeke that the trueth be not darkened or defaced … ’ (FLE 4:77.28; 78.13–15). 14 On the history of the Admonition Controversy see Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (1988); A.F. Scott Pearson, Church and State: Political Aspects of Sixteenth Century Puritanism (Cambridge University Press, 1928); D.J. McGinn, The Admonition Controversy (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1949). 15 See FLE 4:64.26–71.7.

Polemics and Apologetics

15

established among us? And verelie such a thing offered it selfe unto our eyes in reading your bookes …16

Thus the rhetorical aim of A Christian Letter can be summed up as an attempt to drive a wedge between the theological assumptions of Hooker’s Lawes, on the one side, and the reformed doctrine of the Church of England as the authors of the Letter understood it to be formulated in the Articles of Religion on the other. The general thrust of this polemical estimate of Hooker’s theological orientation is plain. For the authors of A Christian Letter, Hooker’s argument fails the test of orthodoxy when measured against the teaching of the preeminent continental reformers as well as the formularies of reformed doctrine embrace by the Elizabethan Church. The publication of the Letter was by no means the first time that Hooker’s basic doctrinal stance had raised sceptical eyebrows among the proponents of ‘further reformation’ in England. John Booty points out that as early as 1581, in a sermon preached at Paul’s Cross at the behest of Bishop Edwin Sandys, Hooker came to be associated with what appeared to be anti-Calvinist teaching.17 In his sermon Hooker addressed the doctrine of predestination; he drew a distinction between two wills in God – one his ‘general inclynation which is that all men might be saved’ and the second ‘a more private occasioned will which determineth the contrarie.’18 Later, in 1585, after Hooker had been appointed Master of the Temple Church, a full-blown controversy developed between him and Walter Travers, then reader and afternoon preacher at the Temple.19 Travers objected strenuously to another sermon preached by Hooker, on this occasion at the

16 FLE 4:28.14–17; 4:8.24–9.2. 17 See Keble I: 22–3 for Izaak Walton’s account of Hooker’s Paul’s Cross sermon. 18 This formulation is from Hooker’s discussion of the Atonement in Lawes V.49.3. Here Hooker addresses himself to the ‘Prayer that all men may find mercie, and of the will of God that all men might be saved.’ Compare Hooker’s response to the criticism of A Christian Letter on this very distinction in the Dublin Fragments, The Tenth Article Touching Predestination, FLE 4: 143.5–146.18. 19 See W. Speed Hill, ‘The Evolution of Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity,’ SRH, 117–29 and Egil Grislis, ‘Introduction to Commentary on Tractates and Sermons, iv. The Controversy with Travers,’ FLE 5: 641–8. Like Andrew Willet, Travers was educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge. He made the acquaintance of Theodore Beza while visiting Geneva, and published his chief work, a defence of the Presbyterian ecclesiology, under the title Ecclesiasticae Disciplinae et Anglicanae Ecclesiae ab illa Aberrationis plena e verbo Dei et dilucida Explicatio (Heidelberg: M. Schirat, 1574). The treatise shows the influence of Beza in its insistence upon a scripturally based form of government as an essential ‘mark’ of the true visible Church. This book was published simultaneously in an English translation by Thomas Cartwright, whose polemical engagement with Archbishop John Whitgift in the Admonition Controversy provided the immediate occasion for Hooker’s undertaking the composition of the Lawes. S.J. Knox, Walter Travers: Paragon of Elizabethan Puritanism (1962).

16

Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist

Temple Church, in which the latter argued ‘that God was merciful to thowsandes of our fathers which lived in popish superstition for that they synned ignorantlye.’20 At issue was whether Hooker’s teaching on grace and predestination was consistent with received Calvinist orthodoxy. The dispute came to be very widely discussed, something of a cause célèbre.21 It resulted eventually in a Supplication made to the Privy Council by Master Walter Travers.22 In 1586 Hooker responded in writing with The Answere of Master Richard Hooker to a Supplication preferred by Master Walter Travers to the Honourable Lords of the Privie Counsell, although this response was in fact addressed to Archbishop Whitgift rather than to the Queen’s Privy Council.23 As in the case of A Christian Letter, Travers accused Hooker of deviation from the rigorous standards of reformed doctrinal orthodoxy by virtue of his [Hooker’s] admission that the Church of Rome, despite its failings, was to be considered nevertheless ‘within the covenant.’24 It is perhaps worth noting that a copy of Hooker’s Answer is bound with A Christian Letter, together with a transcription of Hooker’s autograph notes on his own copy of the Letter.25 The doctrinal dispute between Hooker and Travers in the mid-1580s highlights the issue raised by A Christian Letter: how are Hooker’s theological assumptions to be understood and judged in the light of continental standards of reformed orthodoxy? Both in his Answer to Travers’s Supplication and in his marginal comments on A Christian Letter, Hooker takes great pains to insist upon the orthodoxy of his teaching. Modern critical scholarship has been rather hastily inclined to assume that the standards of reformed orthodoxy are, in fact, what disciplinarian firebrands such as Walter Travers and Thomas Cartwright say they are. In his tractate A Learned Discourse of Justification, Workes, and how the Foundation of Faith is Overthrowne,26 Hooker addresses his doctrinal disagreement with Travers with systematic precision. Here again the essential question is the right interpretation of certain basic teachings with respect to the reformed theology of grace. In a manuscript summary of the tractate, under John Whitgift’s autograph annotation ‘Notes of Master Hooker’s Sermon’, there appears a succinct list of the chief points to be handled:

20 The sermon itself has not survived. This is taken from a contemporary summary taken down by Laurence Tomson, MP, secretary to Sir Francis Walsingham, Privy Councillor and Principal Secretary to Queen Elizabeth. See FLE 5: 273.9. For an introduction to the Hooker–Travers controversy, which includes contemporary MSS reports, see Supplement I in FLE 5: 261–92; the contemporary accounts by Tomson et al. begin at p. 271. 21 William P. Haugaard, The Controversy and its Dissemination, FLE 5: 264–9. 22 The Supplication was first published in 1612 by Oxford University Press (STC 13708); textual introduction, 5: 171–86; text 189–224. 23 Also published by OUP in 1612 (STC 13706); introduction 5:211–24; text 227–57. 24 FLE 5:266. 25 Hooker’s copy of ACL belongs to the library of his alma mater, Corpus Christi College, Oxford (MS 215b). 26 FLE 5:105–69.

Polemics and Apologetics

17

1 What is ment by the foundation [of faith]. 2 What it is to deny the foundation directly. 3 Whether the elect may be so deceased [sic] that they may come to this to deny the foundation directlye. 4 Whether the Galathians did directly deny it. 5 Whether the Church of rome by joyninge workes with Christ in the matter of salvation doe directly denye it.27 These points illustrate that the substance of the controversy between Hooker and Travers turns on the interpretation of some of the most crucial distinctions of reformed soteriology. Travers sought to impugn Hooker’s orthodoxy and found himself deprived of his licence to preach in the Temple Church as a consequence of the controversy. In his extended and detailed reply to Travers in A Learned Discourse, Hooker reveals something of his determination to arrive at some ‘definitive sentence’ of the truth of the matter through trial.28 Hooker’s irenical sentiment in this connection is frequent in the Lawes, and it is especially well put in the preface: Thinke not that ye reade the words of one, who bendeth him selfe as an adversarie against the truth which ye have alreadie embraced; but the words of one, who desireth even to embrace together with you the selfe same truth, if it be the truth, and for that cause (for no other God he knoweth) hath undertaken the burthensome labour of this painefull kinde of conference.29

For Hooker, the determination of what actually constitutes reformed orthodoxy is the main issue which underpins every aspect of the controversy addressed in the Lawes. His career as a theologian of the Church of England was an almost continuous struggle with the question ‘what is it to be reformed?’ In this sense it is easy to see the discourse on ecclesiastical government in the Lawes as a continuation of the question raised in the exchange with Travers. Certainly the authors of A Christian Letter saw the matter in this light. The problem of the interpretation of Hooker’s orientation towards the basic doctrines of reformed theology continues to provide a focal point for scholarly discussion of his achievement. Since the mid-nineteenth century, many theologians, scholars and ecclesiastical historians have sought to give an explanation of this conflict over these doctrinal issues by treating Hooker as a representative, in some cases even the founder, of the via media tradition of Anglicanism. Thus, in relation to some of the charges made in A Christian Letter, H.C. Porter, for example, argues in his essay ‘Hooker, the Tudor Constitution, and the Via Media’ that ‘they [Hooker’s critics] were right. Hooker’s conception of the Deity was 27 FLE 5: 274.7–13. 28 On the need for a definitive resolution of the contentions, see LEP Pref. 5 & 6; 27.10–34.14. 29 Pref. I. 3; 3:1–6.

18

Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist

overtly uncalvinist.’30 According to Porter, Hooker’s critics – Travers, Cartwright or Willet – perceived correctly that ‘the whole of Hooker’s work … was a celebration of “our natural faculty of reason”,’ and therefore he had deviated from the rigorous standard of reformed orthodoxy. In upholding the authority of reason and natural law, Hooker had abandoned the reformers’ insistence upon the principle sola scriptura, and in fact embraced the Thomist dictum ‘grace comes not to destroy nature but to fulfill it, to perfect it … man’s “light of natural understanding” is by it “perfected”.’31 Numerous modern scholars and commentators on Hooker’s thought are in fairly substantial agreement with the general view of Hooker’s theology expressed in A Christian Letter. It has long been commonplace to regard Hooker’s doctrinal intent as tending towards some ‘middle way’ between Rome and the Protestant reformers. Most recently, in his introduction to the preface of the Lawes, William Haugaard discusses the Church in the reign of Elizabeth as the ‘crucible for an emerging Anglicanism.’32 In this account there is reference to ‘a recognition among some contemporaries that the English church represented a kind of Protestant tertium quid among established European churches, whose character suggested the possibility of rapprochement with Roman Catholic as well as with fellow Protestant churches.’33 As the preeminent defender of the Elizabethan Settlement, Hooker is held up as the theologian of this incipient middle way. In such emphasis upon the peculiarity of the ‘Anglican’ theological stance, attention to Hooker’s adherence to the theological assumptions of the mainstream of reformed orthodoxy has been significantly downplayed. Peter Lake, for example, has stressed the apparent departure of the Elizabethan establishment divines, including Hooker, from the accepted measures of reformed doctrinal orthodoxy. Disciplinarian Calvinists are, on this view, much more in tune with continental Protestantism.34 This via media is usually represented as definitive of the peculiar character of the Church of England and as the mark of a distinctively ‘Anglican’ theology.35 It has been argued that the doctrinal implications of this so-called middle way were precisely what the authors of A Christian

30 31 32 33 34 35

SRH, 103. Lawes I.14.5; 1:129.6. See SRH, 103–107. FLE 6:2. FLE 6:5–6. Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church; see especially pp. 1–15. There are several recent studies of Anglicanism, all of which include discussions of the hypothesis of the via media. For a particularly astute and ecumenically oriented view, see Alister E. McGrath, The Renewal of Anglicanism (London: SPCK, 1993). See also the following: Stephen W. Sykes, The Integrity of Anglicanism (New York: Seabury, 1978); John Booty, ‘Richard Hooker,’ in William J. Wolf, John E. Booty, Owen C. Thomas, eds, The Spirit of Anglicanism: Hooker, Maurice, Temple (1981) and Anglican Spirituality (1982). See also John M. Krumm, ‘Continental Protestantism and Elizabethan Anglicanism (1570–1595),’ in Franklin H. Littell, ed., Reformation Studies: Essays in Honour of Roland H. Bainton (1962), pp. 129–44.

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19

Letter feared and opposed in the writings of Hooker.36 Such a view bears the imprimatur of the last great editor of Hooker’s works, John Keble.37 Such a reading of the Elizabethan theological climate tends to perpetuate the anachronism of an Anglican via media, with Hooker as its chief apologist, and leads to an inevitable distortion of the doctrinal assumptions which underpin the argument of the Lawes. According to Cardinal Newman’s classic formulation of the hypothesis of an Anglican via media, ‘a number of distinct doctrines are included in the notion of Protestantism: and as to all these, our Church [that is, the Church of England] has taken the via media between it and Popery.’38 Much of the literature on Hooker since the mid-nineteenth century, both hagiographical and critical, proceeds on the assumption that Hooker, as an Anglican, is a proponent of some such doctrinal middle way which sets his theology fundamentally apart from the doctrinal assumptions of the magisterial reformers.39 The resilience of the application of this anachronistic label to Hooker is truly a marvel. More recently, scholars of the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church have noted the anachronism of applying the concept of ‘Anglicanism’ to this period.40 The assumption of Hooker’s commitment to a peculiarly Anglican via media is theologically imprecise and is ultimately misleading with regard to the central purpose behind the composition of the Lawes. Such anachronism has been largely abandoned in the wider realm of Elizabethan ecclesiastical historiography.41 Is it not time that

36 W. Speed Hill, ‘Doctrine and Polity in Hooker’s Laws,’ (1972), 175. 37 Keble I: xcix. 38 J.H. Newman, The Via Media of the Anglican Church Illustrated in Letters, Lectures and Tracts written between 1830–1841 (London: Longmans, Green, 1885), 41. For an historical and interpretative account of Newman’s hypothesis, see H.D. Weidner’s introduction to his recent edition with notes of J.H. Newman, The Via Media of the Anglican Church (1990), especially chapter 2, xxxiii–xxxvii. 39 See Alfred Barry, ‘Richard Hooker,’ in Masters in English Theology: Being the King’s College Lectures for 1877 (New York: E.P Dutton, 1877), 1–60; Edward Dowden, ‘Richard Hooker,’ in Anglican and Puritan: Studies in Literature (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1900), 69–96; Lionel S. Thornton, Richard Hooker: A Study of His Theology (1924), 28, 33, 74 and 77; F.J. Shirley, Richard Hooker and Contemporary Political Ideas (London: SPCK for the Church Historical Society, 1949, 91; J.S. Marshall, Hooker and the Anglican Tradition: An Historical and Theological Study of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity (1963), 10, 38; John Booty, ‘Hooker and Anglicanism,’ SRH, 207– 11; H.C. Porter, SRH, 77–116; and W.D.J. Cargill Thompson, ‘The Philosopher of the Politic Society: Richard Hooker as a Political Thinker,’ Studies in the Reformation: Luther to Hooker, ed. C.W. Dugmore (1980), 132. 40 Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559– 1625 (1984), ix; see also Collinson The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967), 108; Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590–1640 (1987), viii. 41 For a more detailed discussion of the anachronism of applying the label ‘Anglican’ to Hooker, see my monograph Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy, 33– 41.

20

Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist

this dark varnish was stripped from Hooker’s portrait as well? Such a reading of Hooker’s theology misconstrues Hooker’s own avowed apologetical intent in a fundamental way. Hooker takes great pains in his preface and elsewhere in the Lawes to make clear the nature of his purpose in writing the treatise. The preface itself is addressed directly to ‘them that seeke (as they terme it) the Reformation of lawes, and orders Ecclesiasticall, in the Church of England.’42 From the very outset the whole issue between the Elizabethan establishment and its disciplinarian critics turns upon the precise manner of understanding ‘Reformation’ itself. This issue is clearly manifest in the rhetoric of the Admonition Controversy which stands as the polemical backdrop to the Lawes. For Hooker the fundamental issue underlying every stage of his argument in the Lawes is formulated succinctly in his patron, Archbishop John Whitgift’s question, ‘What is it to be reformed?’ ‘Thinke not,’ Hooker writes later on in his preface, that ye reade the words of one, who bendeth him selfe as an adversarie against the truth which ye have alreadie embraced; but the words of one, who desireth even to embrace together with you the selfe same truth, if it be the truth, and for that cause (for no other God he knoweth) hath undertaken the burthensome labour of this painefull kinde of conference.43

He states, furthermore, that his chief purpose in composing the treatise is to address the consciences of those disgruntled with the Elizabethan Settlement and who seek what they choose to call ‘further reformation’:44 … my whole endeavour is to resolve the conscience, and to shewe as neere as I can what in this controversie the hart is to thinke, if it follow the light of sound and sincere judgement, without clowd of prejudice, or mist of passionate affection.45 The argument of the Lawes is thus cast as an irenical appeal to the hearts and minds of the opponents of the Elizabethan Establishment, especially to those of the moderate disciplinarian party of churchmen. Hooker deliberately abandons recourse to the ridicule and personal abuse which had become so characteristic of ecclesiastical polemics on all sides during the 1570s and 1580s.46 He chooses rather to speak directly to the theological assumptions of the disciplinarians through a close examination of the arguments of Thomas Cartwright, their ac-

42 Lawes, Pref.1.1;1:1.1 [my emphasis]. 43 Lawes, Pref.1.3;1:3.1–6 [my emphasis]. 44 See John Field and Thomas Wilcox, An Admonition to the Parliament [or ‘A View of Popish Abuses Yet Remaining in the English Church’] (Hemel Hempstead?: J. Stroud?, 1572), printed in Puritan Manifestoes: A Study of the Origin of the Puritan Revolt, ed. W.H. Frere and C.E. Douglas (London: The Church History Society, vol. 72, 1907), 19; (repr. London: SPCK, 1954; New York: Burt Franklin, 1972). 45 Lawes, Pref.7.1; 1:34.20–23. 46 For the contrary view see Cargill Thompson, ‘The Philosopher of the Politic Society,’ 140.

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knowledged champion.47 Throughout the argument of the Lawes, Hooker’s express purpose is to secure conscientious obedience to the ‘lawes, rites, customes, and orders’ of the Church of England by means of an appeal to doctrine and theological assumptions agreed upon by both parties to the dispute on the grounds that ‘no lawe of God, nor reason of man hath bene alleaged of force sufficient to prove they do ill, who to the uttermost of their power withstand the alteration thereof.’48 Only through an appeal to a common set of first principles is there any hope that the two parties to the dispute could even approach the possibility of embracing together ‘the selfe same truth.’49 In short, it is the apologetical intent of the Lawes to demonstrate beyond doubt that the entire edifice of the Elizabethan Settlement is grounded upon the mutually acknowledged principles of reformed doctrinal orthodoxy. Without such a demonstration, the irenical appeal will inevitably collapse and the entire argument of the Lawes, on Hooker’s own account of his purpose, must be regarded as a failure. It is precisely Hooker’s irenical purpose which has been so radically misconstrued both by the authors of A Christian Letter and subsequently, although perhaps somewhat ironically, by so many later commentators who have read into Hooker’s thought an Anglicanism which had yet to be invented, to borrow a phrase of Professor Collinson.50 With respect to the latter, it does not appear possible to reconcile Hooker’s avowed apologetic aim with a deliberate attempt to define a middle way that bears any resemblance whatsoever to Newman’s definition. Perhaps it will be objected here that Hooker relied upon the authority and arguments of pagan philosophers, the early Church Fathers and such ‘schoolmen’ as Thomas Aquinas in the formulation of his theological position. Certainly the authors of A Christian Letter were concerned on this point.51 Yet Hooker is unmistakably allied with his fellow magisterial reformers on the Continent in holding the Fathers, particularly Augustine, in the highest regard, especially with respect to the fundamental tenets of Trinitarian and Christological doctrine. His appeals to the ‘Schoolemen’ and ‘Philosophie’ are also consistent with the practice of the magisterial reformers themselves. In his marginal comments on

47 Rudolph Almasy argues that the Lawes should be read as a polemically inspired response to Thomas Cartwright’s The Second Replie of Thomas Cartwright: agaynst M. doctor Whitgifte … Agaynste the Admonition (1575), which in turn is a response to Archbishop Whitgift’s The Defense of the Answere to the Admonition (1574); see R. Almasy, ‘The Purpose of Richard Hooker’s Polemic,’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 39, (1978), 251–70. 48 Lawes Pref.1.2; 1:2.18–21; see also I.1.3; 1:57.32–58.19. 49 Cargill Thompson rejected Hooker’s irenicism and regarded the moderate tone of the Lawes as merely ‘a conscious literary device’ employed towards a purely partisan polemical end. See ‘The Philospher of the Politic Society,’ 140, 141. For Olivier Loyer, on the other hand, ‘L’irenisme est réel chez Hooker’: L’Anglicanisme de Richard Hooker, vol. 2 (1979), 678. 50 Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants, ix. 51 ACL, 4:64.25–71.7.

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Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist

A Christian Letter, Hooker invokes ‘Calvins judgment of philosophie’ in a letter to Martin Bucer:52 As truth is most precious, so all men confess it to be so. And yet, since God alone is the source of all good, you must not doubt, that whatever truth you anywhere meet with, proceeds from Him, unless you would be doubly ungrateful to Him; it is in this way you have received the word descended from heaven. For it is sinful to treat God’s gifts with contempt; and to ascribe to man what is peculiarly God’s is a still greater impiety. Philosophy is, consequently, the noble gift of God, and those learned men who have striven hard after it in all ages have been incited thereto by God himself, that they might enlighten the world in the knowledge of the truth.

Hooker and Calvin both repudiate the vilification of reason and philosophy on the part of the radical, biblicizing reformers. As Hooker notes in the margin of A Christian Letter, ‘Anabaptists, Familists, Libertines, Arrians and other like extreme reformers of popery [are] grown up by that very meanes hatefull to the whole world.’53 Hooker adheres firmly to the right use of ‘the law of nature in handling matters of religion’54 and in this he follows the lead of the magisterial reformers.55 In Hooker’s view, appeals to the authority of philosophers and schoolmen must be entirely consistent with reformed orthodoxy. Such appeals are necessarily restricted according to the matter in hand. It is generally accepted that Hooker’s generic division of the various laws in Book I owes a good deal to scholastic models. Yet, when Hooker quotes Aquinas in A Learned Discourse, for example, it is with a view to refuting the scholastic conception of grace as a quality or habitus which is contrary to the received doctrine of imputed righteousness as formulated by the magisterial reformers. Hooker quotes the doctrine of Aquinas in the Summa Theologica as representative of ‘the Romish doctrine’ which he himself opposes. Aquinas regards ‘gratia justificans’ as a ‘qualitas quaedam supernaturalis’56 which is the root and principle of good works. Hooker objects to the Thomist soteriology, as formulated in the decrees of the Council of Trent, on the grounds that it confuses the active and passive modes of grace: This grace [that is, justification] they will have to be applied by infusion; to thende, that as the bodye is warme by the heate which is in the bodye, so the soule mighte be rightuous by the inherente grace, which grace they make capable of increase: as the body maie be more and more warme, so the soule more and more justefied, accordinge

52 This passage of the letter is quoted by John Booty in his commentary on ACL, 4:65.11–12. Calvin, Epistolae (Geneva: Pierre Santandreanus, 1575), transl. 179, 180; CR, 48:530; Letters of John Calvin, ed. Jules Bonnet, trans. David Constable and M.R. Gilchrist, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: T. Constable, 1855–58), vol. 2, 198–9. 53 ACL, 4:67.7–9. 54 ACL, 4:13. 14–15. 55 Compare Calvin, Inst., 2.2.22,24; 4.20.16. 56 A Learned Discourse of Justification, 5:110.13.

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as grace shalbe augmented, the augmentacion whereof is merited by good workes, as good workes are made meritorious by it, wherefore the firste receipte of grace is in theire divinitye the first justification, the increase thereof the second justification.57

Against this Tridentine view that justifying righteousness is infused as a habit of the soul, Hooker upholds the standard view of the magisterial reformers. For him, total depravity of man’s natural will deprives the soul of the capacity to receive the righteousness of justification as a habitus. Thus for Hooker ‘the rightuousnes wherein we muste be found if we wilbe justefied, is not our owne, therefore we cannott be justefied by any inherente qualitie. Christe hath merited rightuousnes for asmany as are found in hym.’58 Hooker’s formulation of the doctrine of Justification is essentially that of Article IX of the Articles of Religion. There is no discernible difference between this account and Calvin’s distillation of the reformed view in his chapter on justification in the Institutes of the Christian Religion.59

The Question of Reformed Ecclesiology The critical question remains whether Hooker actually succeeds in realizing his stated apologetical intent in the discourse of the Lawes. A preliminary sketch of what might be involved in such a demonstration in the case of the particular issue of the doctrine of the Church will serve to illustrate the point at issue. ‘We are accused,’ Hooker writes in Book I, ‘as men that will not have Christ Jesus to rule over them, but have wilfully cast his statutes behind their backs, hating to be reformed, and made subject to the scepter of his discipline.’60 Hooker reiterates the argument of his patron, Archbishop John Whitgift, to the effect that Thomas Cartwright and those sympathetic to the presbyterian Disciplina were mistaken in their view that ecclesiastical polity was a matter prescribed by the authority of Holy Scripture. At issue here is the extent to which the revealed word of scripture may determine the structures of Church government; the positions taken on this question become a test of reformed orthodoxy. For the disciplinarians, the lack of a scripturally prescribed form of Church polity is considered grounds for ‘further reformation.’ For Whitgift, Hooker and the other defenders of the Elizabethan Settlement, a full reformation had already been accomplished. This ecclesiological dispute serves as a useful paradigm for the larger question raised in A Christian Letter with respect to what actually constitutes adherence to the reformed orthodoxy, and what it is to be ‘fully reformed.’ 57 Just. 5:110.24–111.6. 58 Just. 5:112.22–25. 59 Inst. 3.11.1–23. Compare Hooker’s and Calvin’s virtually identical treatment of the distinction between the principal modes of grace in Just. 5:109.6–114.4 and Inst. 3.16.1. 60 Lawes I.3.1; 1:58.2–5.

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Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist

Hooker never questions the premise of the disciplinarians, that the polity of the Church of England must be consistent with the doctrinal principles and pastoral aspirations of the Reformation. Rather he seeks to show that the Reformation principle of sola scriptura, namely the doctrine that scripture contains all things necessary to salvation, is mistakenly applied to the determination of the external, visible government of the Church, for such matters cannot by nature belong to the realm of ‘things necessary to salvation.’ For Hooker the scriptural Disciplina was ‘only by error and misconceipte named the ordinance of Jesus Christ’61 and was emphatically not a measure of true reformation, nor was its lack any cause for Cartwright’s ‘further reformation.’ On the contrary, the ecclesiological justification offered by the disciplinarians on behalf of their proposed polity was, in Hooker’s estimation, inconsistent with the most fundamental principles of reformed orthodoxy itself. In his defence of the ecclesiology of the Elizabethan Settlement, Hooker stands firmly in the tradition of such magisterial reformers as Calvin, who held that scriptural authority cannot be the same in foro externo as it is in foro conscientiae.62 In holding to this distinction as Whitgift had done before him,63 Hooker adheres to the doctrine enunciated by Calvin over against the more radical ecclesiology of Martin Bucer, for whom a scripturally prescribed Disciplina constitutes one of the essential ‘marks’ of the true visible Church. Bucer’s ecclesiology provided inspiration to the radical reformers on the Continent and was even promoted in Geneva after Calvin’s death by Theodore Beza.64 In this matter of the notae ecclesiae, Beza departs from the classical teaching of the magisterial reformers. Among others profoundly influenced by the more radical ecclesiology were the Heidelberg Calvinists (Zacharias Ursinus, Kaspar Olevianus and Girolamo Zanchi), John Knox, and Hooker’s two great adversaries, Walter Travers and Thomas Cartwright.65 Helmut Kressner has demonstrated that John Whitgift assumed the role of defender of the magisterial reformers’ ecclesiology in the Admonition Controversy of the 1570s while Cartwright adopted the radical teaching of Bucer.66 Hooker follows Whitgift’s lead and aligns himself with Calvin’s position against the radical ecclesiology of the disciplinarians. Thus Whitgift’s exchange with Cartwright in the Admonition Controversy and Hooker’s own further contribution to the debate can quite plausibly be viewed as a continuation in England of the continental debate

61 Lawes Pref.1.2; 1:2.22. 62 Calvin, Inst. 3.19.15 and 4.10.3–6. 63 The Works of John Whitgift, D.D., Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. J. Ayre, PS (Cambridge, 1851), [WW] vol. I: 6. 64 P.D.L. Avis, The Church in the Theology of the Reformers (1981), 79. See also W. Nijenhuis, Ecclesia Reformata: Studies in the Reformation (Leiden, 1972), 130–8. 65 For a discussion of the differences between the magisterial and radical reformers on the question of the notae ecclesiae, see my discussion of the question in Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy, 80–6. 66 Helmut Kressner, Schweizer Ursprünge des Anglikanischen Staatskirchentums (Gutersloh, 1953), chap. 4.

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between the proponents of magisterial and radical reformation. In taking up the ecclesiological thread of the Admonition Controversy in Book III of the Lawes, Hooker presents a classic statement of the magisterial reformers’ response to the radical reformers’ doctrine of the Church, the latter represented by the English disciplinarian Puritans under the leadership of Cartwright. The ultimate issue for both parties is the formulation of a doctrine of the Church consistent with the basic precepts of Reformation doctrine rightly understood. The heatedness of the debate stems from the disagreement over the manner in which commonly agreed first principles are to be applied in the realm of practical and political concerns. The question of the notae ecclesiae is of crucial significance in this theological debate in so far as these marks are understood to be the meeting point of the mystical and external aspects of the Church. According to the Articles of Religion, ‘the visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in which the pure word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly administered according to Christ’s ordinance … ’67 As such, these two marks, Word and Sacraments, link the doctrine of the Church to the even more fundamental theological principle of the ‘two realms’ of active and passive righteousness and thus of the critical, underlying doctrine of grace and salvation. Further, the marks issue provides what might be regarded as an acid test for distinguishing the magisterial reformers from the radicals. François Wendel considers Bucer as the source of the view that ‘ecclesiastical organisations are not subject to human arbitrament; that they are of Divine right because they are dictated by the Holy Spirit.’68 Calvin, on the other hand, while incorporating the scripturally based ‘fourfold ministry’ of pastors, doctors, elders and deacons into the Genevan Ordonnances Ecclésiastiques, nevertheless rejects altogether the view that any form of government could be a mark and therefore belong to the esse or essential being of the visible Church.69 Church government for Calvin properly belongs in the forum externum. Thus to insist upon any particular form of ecclesiastical polity as scripturally prescribed and as necessary to salvation, which it must be if it is a ‘mark’ of the true, visible Church, violates the fundamental tenet of Reformation theology respecting Christian liberty. 70 Calvin castigates both the papal and the radical Bucerian ecclesiologies in one breath when he states that his intention is to impugn ‘constitutions enacted for the purpose of binding the conscience inwardly before God, and imposing religious duties, as if they enjoined things necessary to salvation.’71 For Calvin, the fourfold ministry of Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians72 is to be adopted by Geneva for the sake of the bene esse, the well-being of the Church.73 67 Article XIX. 68 François Wendel, Calvin: The Origins and Development of his Religious Thought (1963), 142. 69 See Wendel, Calvin, 301–303. 70 Inst. 3.10.1 ff. 71 Inst. 4.10.2. 72 Eph. 4:11. 73 Inst. 4.10.5.

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Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist

On identical ecclesiological grounds Hooker upholds the institution of episcopacy for England. Neither Hooker nor Calvin was willing to allow that either form of government could be taken as divinely prescribed nor that such forms in any way constituted ‘marks’ of the true Church. It is more than a little ironic that supporters of iure divino episcopacy and the disciplinarian Puritans actually hold more in common with the ecclesiological first principles of one another than they do with either Hooker or Calvin.74 The disciplinarian appeal to the Reformation principle of sola scriptura in the external realm of polity entails also, for Hooker, a confusion of the received, orthodox distinction of the realms of discourse. ‘The absolute perfection of scripture is seene by relation unto that end whereto it tendeth.’75 ‘Unto the word of God being in respect of that end for which God ordained it, perfect, exact, and absolute in it selfe, we do not add reason as a supplement of any maime or defect therin but as a necessary instrument, without which we could not reape by the scriptures perfection, that fruite and benefit which it yeeldeth.’76 Sola Scriptura, as a soteriological principle, does not, indeed cannot, abrogate the authority of reason in the external realm. This distinction concerning the extent of the authority of scripture is typical of the magisterial reformers. In the Institutes Calvin distinguishes ‘matters of policy and economy’ from the ‘knowledge of God and his will’; in regard to the constitution of the former the ‘light of reason’ holds principal sway while the corruption of the intellect is with respect to man’s supernatural end.77 For Hooker, the disciplinarians’ insistence upon a ‘further reformation’ of the Church of England through the establishment of a scripturally prescribed polity is grounded upon a theological ‘misconceipte.’78 The error threatens to undermine the doctrine of salvation itself on account of its implied confusion of the so-called ‘two realms’ of reformed soteriology. For Luther the confusion of das geistliche Reich and das weltliche Reich was the work of the Devil and was tantamount to overthrowing the doctrine of Justification by Faith, the very keystone of orthodox reformed theology: This is our divinity, whereby we teach how to put a difference between these two kinds of righteousness, active and passive: to the end that manners and faith, works and grace, policy and religion should not be confounded, or taken the one for the other. Both are necessary, but both must be kept within their bounds … we imagine as it were two worlds, the one heavenly and the other earthly. In these we place these two kinds of righteousness, being separate the one far from the other.79 74 For a more extended discussion of these ecclesiological issues see the third chapter of my Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy, 59–91. 75 Lawes II.8.5; 1:189.10, 11. 76 Lawes III.8.10; 1:227.2–6. 77 Inst. 2.2.13. 78 Lawes Pref. 1.2; 1:2.22. 79 Luther summarizes his position in his Commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, ed. Philip S. Watson (Cambridge, 1953), 24, 25; Martin Luther, Werke, Kritische Gesammtausgabe (1883), 40 (1), p. 45.

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As we have observed already, Calvin sees a confusion of the two realms, and thus of the two kinds of righteousness, as a mortal threat to Christian liberty itself, which is founded upon this very distinction. Hooker too falls into step with these magisterial reformers in resisting ‘the mixture of those thinges by speech which by nature are divided,’80 for this very doctrine of the two kinds of righteousness is the foundation of his divinity. In a virtual paraphrase of Luther, Hooker affirms in A Learned Discourse that ‘there are two kindes of christian rightuousnes the one without us which we have by imputacion, the other in us which consisteth of faith hope charitie and other christian virtues … God gyveth us both the one Justice and the other, the one by accepting us for rightuous in Christe, the other by workinge christian rightuousnes in us.’81 As in the argument of John Whitgift82 before him, Hooker takes this crucial distinction from the soteriology of the magisterial Reformation and erects upon it the ecclesiology of the Lawes. The right distinction of the ‘two kindes of rightuousnes’ provides the doctrinal basis for Hooker’s insistence upon the need for a clear and precise distinction between ‘matters of fayth and salvation’ and ‘matters of discipline.’ The reluctance of the disciplinarian Puritans to allow such a clear distinction83 is precisely the theological ‘misconceipte’ which, in Hooker’s view, separates their cause from that of the magisterial reformers. In Book III, Hooker restates the apologetical intention of the Lawes: To take away therefore that error which confusion breedeth, distinction is requisite. Rightly to distinguish is by conceipt of minde to sever thinges different in nature, and to discerne wherein they differ … I somewhat marvayle thay they [the disciplinarians] should think it absurde to oppose Church-government, a plaine matter of action unto matters of fayth, whom know that themselves devide the Gospell into Doctrine and Discipline.84

In upholding such a clear distinction between matters of faith and matters of action, Hooker is making an unmistakable appeal to the magisterial reformers’ critical distinction between the two realms of active and passive righteousness. We can see in this single issue the working out of Hooker’s irenical purpose, which is nothing less than the demonstration that the established order of the Elizabethan Church is already fully reformed, that it is not in need of any ‘further reformation,’ and that the platform for its reform along disciplinarian lines would, in fact, be a departure from the basic principles of reformed orthodoxy as understood by such magisterial reformers as Calvin and Luther, and would lead in the heterodox direction of the ecclesiology of the radical Reformation.

80 81 82 83

Lawes III.3.1; 1:209.24–25. Just.5:129.2–5, 7–10. WW I:6; vol. II:83, 84. See, for example, Thomas Cartwright, The Second Replie against Master Whitgiftes Second Answer (1575), pp. 409, 410, 414. 84 Lawes III.3.1,2; 1:209.25–28 and 210.10–13.

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Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist

What then are we to say of the middle way and the appropriateness of its application to the thought of Richard Hooker? If Hooker is to be regarded as a traveller on a via media, it would seem that there is at least some need to redefine the extremes. It no longer appears plausible to assume, along with the authors of A Christian Letter, that Hooker’s disciplinarian critics represent the mainstream of Protestant orthodoxy and that Hooker is somehow steering a middle course between their position and popery. Such a view fails to give due credit to Hooker’s apologetical intent or to the consequent subtlety of his theological position. The modern critical acceptance of Hooker’s adherence to an Anglican via media is grounded upon an anachronism and inevitably results in a failure to give due acknowledgement to the common theological assumptions shared by him with the leading representatives of reformed orthodoxy both in England and on the Continent. On the contrary, our brief consideration of the ecclesiology of the Lawes suggests that it may be more plausible to include Hooker among the ranks of the magisterial reformers, and thus alongside Calvin, Luther and, of course, Hooker’s own patron, John Whitgift. All of these theologians of the magisterial Reformation seek to tread a middle way between the Scylla of Rome and the Charybdis of a radical biblicizing Protestantism. Like Odysseus, they too suffered the loss of a number of their fellows in that difficult passage. A great deal of work remains to be done in stripping away the distortion of Hooker’s thought through the lens of an Anglicanism not yet invented. Such distortion, initiated in large part by Hooker’s romantic hagiographers, continues to exert a remarkably resilient influence on the critical reading of Hooker to this day.

Chapter 3

Grace and Hierarchy: Hooker’s Two Christian Platonisms

In his commentary on the first book of the Lawes, Lee Gibbs relates the story from Izaak Walton’s Life of Mr Richard Hooker of how Dr Hadrian Saravia, who supposedly ‘knew the very secrets of [Hooker’s] soul,’ visited the judicious divine a day before his death on 2 November 1600.1 After Saravia had administered the Holy Communion to Hooker and to some friends who were present with him, ‘the doctor thought he saw a reverend gaiety and joy in [Hooker’s] face.’ On his return the following day – that is, on the day of Hooker’s death, the precise quatercentenary of which we observe here today2 – Saravia found Hooker ‘deep in contemplation, and not inclinable to discourse; which gave the doctor occasion to inquire his present thoughts: to which [Hooker] replied, “That he was meditating the number and nature of the Angels, and their blessed obedience and order, without which, peace could not be in heaven; and oh that it might be so on earth!”’3 While Walton’s hagiographical tendency should incline us to a certain degree of scepticism, this report nevertheless has some ring of plausibility. In his discourse ‘on lawes and their several kinds in generall’ in the first book of the Ecclesiasticall Politie published seven years earlier in 1593, Hooker refers to the angels as ‘intellectual creatures’ constituted in diverse ranks by the eternal law of God, as it were ‘an Army, one in order and degree above another.’4 Moreover the ‘law coelestial’ which governs the angelic beings provides a paradigm for order among mortals: ‘Neither are the Angels themselves, so farre severed from us in their kind and manner of working, but that, betweene the law of their heavenly operations and the actions of men in this our state of mortalitie, such correspondence there is, as maketh it expedient to know in some sort the one, for the others more perfect direction.’5 The obedience of the angels, with 1 2 3

4 5

Lee W. Gibbs, ‘Commentary on Book One,’ The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, gen. ed. W. Speed Hill, vol. 6, part 1 (1993), 490. This chapter was read as a paper on 2 November 2000 at the Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference held in Denver, Colorado. Izaak Walton, The Lives of Dr John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr Richard Hooker, Mr George Herbert [et al] (Oxford University Press, 1665), 149. See Keble 1:85. For a recent account of Hooker’s friendship with Saravia see Philip B. Secor, Richard Hooker: Prophet of Anglicanism (1999), 291–8. Lawes I.4.2; 1:71.10, 11. Lawes I.16.4; 1:137.13–18. 29

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some rather notable exceptions, is more perfect and therefore, according to Hooker, they provide ‘a paterne and a spurre’ to the weaker human nature. Even with respect to the ceremonies of the liturgy we are told that ‘some regard is to be had of Angels, who best like us, when wee are most like unto them in all partes of decent demeanor.’6 This concept is summarized beautifully in the collect appointed for the feast of Saint Michael and All Angels: ‘O Everlasting God, who hast ordered and constituted the services of Angels and men in a wonderful order: Mercifully grant that, as thy holy Angels alway do thee service in heaven, so by thy appointment they may succour and defend us on earth …’7 In his references to angelic hierarchy – and they occur with some frequency throughout the argument of the Lawes – Hooker demonstrates a thorough familiarity with the Neoplatonic ontology summed up in the so-called ‘lex divinitatis’ famously formulated by the sixth-century Christian Neoplatonic theologian PseudoDionysius the Areopagite in his treatises on the celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchies.8 According to Pseudo-Dionysius ‘it is the all-holy ordinance of the divinity (lex divinitatis) that secondary things should be lifted up to the most divine ray through the mediation of the primary things,’9 that is to say that mortals be raised to communion with the One through the ministration of the angelic mediators in heaven and the symbolic and sacramental orders of the Church in earth. Hooker himself summarizes the Pseudo-Dionysian concept of hierarchical mediation in Book VIII of the Lawes: Order is a graduall disposition. The whole world consisting of partes so manie so different is by this only thing upheld, he which framed them hath sett them in order. Yea the very deitie it self both keepeth and requireth for ever this to be kept as a law, that wheresoever there is a coagmentation of many, the lowest be knitt to the highest by

6 Lawes I.16.4; 1:137.28–30. 7 The collect appointed in the Book of Common Prayer to be read on 29 September. 8 See The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem (1987). On the hierarchical concept of the lex divinitatis see W.J. Hankey, ‘Augustinian Immediacy and Dionysian Mediation in John Colet, Edmund Spenser, Richard Hooker and the Cardinal de Bérulle,’ Augustinus in der Neuzeit: Colloque de las Herzog August Bibliothek de Wolfenbüttel 14–17 Octobre 1996, ed. Dominique Courcelles (1998), 125–60. I acknowledge with pleasure and thanks the contribution made by Dr Hankey to the writing of this paper. Most of Hooker’s direct references to Pseudo-Dionysius are in his Autograph Notes to the Lawes and in his responses to the attack on the treatise mounted in A Christian Letter of certaine English Protestantes (1599). For Autograph Notes, see FLE vol. 3:493, 494 and vol. 4. John Booty notes in his commentary on Book V of the Lawes that one of his marginal references to PseudoDionysius in Greek ‘is from the paraphrase made by George Pachymeres (1242–1310), Greek priest and politician, of De coelesti hierarchia by Dionysius the Areopagite.’ FLE 6:722. 9 Pseudo-Dionysius, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, 5.4, 504C, in Complete Works, 236. See also Celestial Hierarchy, 1.3, 124 A, Complete Works, 146: ‘order and rank here below are a sign of the harmonious ordering toward the divine realm.’

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that which being interjacent may cause each to cleave unto other and so all to continue one.10

In the manuscript of his Autograph Notes drafted in preparation for the final book of the Lawes, Hooker refers explicitly to the Pseudo-Dionysius as the source of his thoughts on the question of order and hierarchy: If you take away order, of necessity confusion follows, whence arises division and from division destruction … Therefore, the Apostle has said that all things should be done with order … This order consists in distinction of degree, so that one differs from his fellow in power and the lesser obeys the greater, otherwise society cannot hold together. And so it is a divine law [lex divinitatis], says Blessed Dionysius, for the lowest things to be led back to the highest by those that are intermediate.11

Thus the lex divinitatis constitutes a principle of cosmic mediation of the divine power and governance through a series of hierarchically ordered steps and degrees.12 In the Lawes Hooker embraces the view that the Church, its orders, sacraments and ceremonies, are to be modelled upon the exemplar of a cosmic order epitomized by the hierarchy of the angels. In his general defence of the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer in the fourth book of the Lawes, Hooker paraphrases the Pseudo-Dionysius once again as follows: ‘The sensible things which Religion hath hallowed, are resemblances framed according to things spiritually understood, whereunto they serve as a hand to lead and a way to direct.’13 The angelic ‘comeliness’ of the external orders, rites and ceremonies of the Church thus serves to mediate between the worshipper and the divine object of worship, between the human soul descended into the flux of the phenomenal world and the simple, wholly transcendent One.14

10 Lawes VIII.2.1; 3:331.19–332.1. 11 Autograph Notes (Supplement II), 3:494. 12 For Aquinas’s formulation of the lex divinitatis see Summa Theologiae IIa IIae q.172 art.2: ‘As the Apostle says (Rom. 13.1), Things that are of God are well-ordered. Now the Divine ordering (lex divinitatis) according to Dionysius (Eccl. Hier. V), is such that the lowest things are directed by middle things. Now angels hold a middle position between God and men, in that they have a greater share in the perfection of the Divine goodness than men have. Wherefore the divine enlightenments and revelations are conveyed from God to men by the angels.’ 13 In Lawes IV.1.3; 1:275.21–24. Hooker refers to a discussion by Dionysius of the baptismal rite in Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 2.3.2, in Complete Works, 205: ‘Sacred symbols are actually the perceptible tokens of the conceptual things. They show the way to them and lead to them, and the conceptual things are the source and the understanding underlying the perceptible manifestations of hierarchy.’ 14 Lawes V.25.2; 2:114.13–17. ‘The house of prayer is a Court beautified with the presence of celestial powers; that there we stand, we pray, we sound forth hymns unto God having his Angels intermingled as our associates; and that with reference hereunto the Apostle doth require so great care to be had of decency for the Angels’ sake … ’

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Throughout the Lawes Hooker advocates a Christian polity whose very essence is liturgical, whose clergy are themselves likened to the angels ‘in order and degree’ and whose government is understood to mirror, however imperfectly, the ideal order of the celestial hierarchy.15 In the eighth and final book of the Lawes Hooker appeals directly to the lex divinitatis in order to justify the office and authority of the Godly Prince himself as that of a ‘supreme Hierarch,’ the single, ‘uncommanded commander’ from whom the descending orders of both civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction proceed and in whom these orders are perfected.16 In this metaphor of the sovereign as the unmoved mover of the constitution, Hooker invokes the cosmology of Aristotle, for whom the heavens are ordered in a concentric pattern where each is moved by an individual angelic intelligence and all cohere in an orderly system on account of their dependence upon an original, divine, self-moving cause.17 Hooker’s affirmation of this hierarchical ontology derived from Neoplatonic tradition is not without complication. The ontology of a mediated hierarchy in fact constitutes just one of two quite distinct Christian Platonisms present and active in his thought. In marked contrast with the Pseudo-Dionysian vision of a cosmically mediated hierarchy emanating by degrees from a primal hypostasis of divine unity, Hooker’s various Tractates and Sermons and the Dublin Fragments on the nature and freedom of the will, grace and the sacraments, and predestination, all manifest a thoroughly Christocentric, Augustinian theological perspective characteristic of other sixteenth-century magisterial reformers. With respect to Hooker’s soteriology and theological anthropology, several scholars have taken considerable pains to show that Hooker stands squarely in the theological tradition of the magisterial reform15 See Lawes V.78; 2:435.20, ‘Of degrees whereby the power of Order is distinguished.’ See also Lawes VII.5.2; 3:160. VII.11.3, 6; 3:205, 207. VII.24.15; 3:299.24: ‘Bishops which will be esteemed as they ought, must frame themselves to that very pattern from whence those Asian Bishops unto whom St. John writeth were denominated, even so far forth as this our frailty will permit; shine they must as Angels of God in the midst of perverse men.’ 16 Lawes VIII.2.1; 3:331.19–332.1. In Hooker’s autograph manuscript draft of this passage, he cites the Christian Neoplatonist Pseudo-Dionysius as his source for this observation. See Autograph Notes 3:494.10–12: ‘Lex itaque divinitatis est infima per media ad suprema reduci, inquit B. Dionysius.’ [And so it is a divine law, says St Dionysius, for the lowest things to be led back to the highest by those that are intermediate.] The translation of ‘divinitatis’ in the FLE Commentary, given here in square brackets, is potentially misleading. Divinitas is to be taken substantively and not as an adjective. Lex divinitatis is more properly ‘the law of the divine power’ and refers to the operation of the eternal law in and through the process of exitus et reditus. 17 See Aristotle, Metaphysics XII.8 (1073a13–1074b14) and Physics VIII.5 & 6 (256a3– 260a19). For a full discussion of the constitutional metaphor of Aristotle’s unmoved mover see Stephen L. Collins, From Divine Cosmos to Sovereign State: an Intellectual History of Consciousness and the Idea of Order in Renaissance England (1989).

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ers.18 According to this interpretation, Hooker’s soteriological discourse is based on an account of the soul’s relation to the divine governance which would appear, at least on the surface, to be profoundly at odds with the logic of hierarchical mediation as propounded by the Pseudo-Dionysius. In A Learned Discourse, in the Sermon on Pride, in the theological tractates in the Dublin Fragments on Grace and Predestination, and in a mode of argument closely resembling the approaches of Luther, Calvin and other magisterial reformers, Hooker invokes the doctrine of forensic justification (sola gratia) by faith alone (sola fides) through the sole mediation of Christ (solus Christus) as the foundation of his own reformed soteriology.19 Implicit in the forensic theory of justification is the affirmation of the essentially inward ‘immediacy’ of the soul’s relation to the divine judge according to a Christocentric doctrine of ‘imputed’ or ‘alien’ righteousness. In his classically ‘reformed’ formulation of the doctrine of justification by faith alone, Hooker embraces a thoroughly Augustinian ontology, psychology and theological anthropology. In the Dublin Fragments, in the essay draft titled On the tenth article touchinge Predestination, Hooker refers to the Pelagian controversy and praises Augustine as ‘the glorie of those times’ and ‘without any equall in the Church of Christ from that day to this.’20 According to this Augustinian view nothing intervenes as mediator between the human soul and God himself save ‘Christ alone,’ who unites hypostatically in himself both human and divine natures and thus accomplishes all that is required to bridge the distance between the infinitely just divine judge and the infinitely unjust fallen human soul.21 For Augustine, humanity is understood as constituted in the divine likeness (imago dei) and, as such, stands in its contemplative vision of the divine exemplar without the interposition of intermediaries.22 Christ alone (solus Christus) 18 See, for example, Nigel Atkinson, Richard Hooker and the Authority of Scripture, ix– xxii. See also the second chapter of W.J. Torrance Kirby, Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy, 30–58. 19 This emphasis is revealed, for example, in the title of his famous soteriological sermon first published posthumously in 1611 in an edition by Henry Jackson. For Just. see FLE 5:105–69. 20 Dublin 36, 4:149.9; 150.10. The emphasis is Hooker’s. 21 See, for example, Augustine, De civitate Dei, X.2 and XI.26. Augustine is highly critical of Porphyry’s doctrine of theurgy, chiefly on account of its claim that mediation between the soul and the divine is accomplished through the power of demonic mediators who stand between human souls and the divine, but who are themselves neither fully human nor truly divine. For Augustine such an account of ‘mediation’ leads to the confusion of creature with creator in the act of worship (latreia). 22 Augustine, De civitate Dei IX.15: ‘In redeeming us from our mortality and misery, He does not lead us to the immortal and blessed angels so that, by participating in them, we may ourselves also become immortal and blessed. Rather, He leads us to that Trinity by participating in whom the angels themselves are blessed. Therefore, when He chose to take the form of a servant, lower than the angels, so that He might be our Mediator, He remained above the angels in the form of God, being Himself both the Way of life on earth and life itself in Heaven.’

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as God and man stands at once both lower than the angels in his human nature and remains above them in the form of God. Thus in the argument of the City of God, for example, Augustine denies the need for hierarchical angelic mediation as the means to participation of the life of the Trinity on logical grounds: ‘Good angels, then cannot be mediators between miserable mortals and blessed immortals, because they too are both blessed and immortal.’23 For Augustine a true mediator by logical necessity must be ‘of both natures,’ both blessed and mortal. This Christologically centred account of mediation between the soul and God has been termed the principle of ‘Augustinian immediacy’ by way of contrast with the alternative ontology implied by the mediating function of the Dionysian hierarchies. From the perspective of Augustinian immediacy, faith in Christ establishes a direct connection between the rational soul as created in the divine image (imago dei) and the Trinity itself as divine exemplar. By way of contrast, it is instructive to note that Pseudo-Dionysius views Christ as the summit of the mediating hierarchy.24 Augustine is highly critical of Porphyry’s account of the human nature as so far ‘descended’ into the flux of becoming and without immediate access to intellection of the divine that it must invoke the ‘theurgic arts’ in order to effect mediation by degrees.25 Augustine expresses admiration for the contrary opinion of Plotinus that the intellectual soul ‘has no nature superior to it except God, Who made the world, and by Whom the soul itself was made.’26 The Plotinian intellectual soul is illuminated directly by the divine sun, and thus is understood to be independent of the agency of angelic mediators. In many respects the logic of Porphyry’s pagan account of the mediating hierarchy of daemonic powers bears a close resemblance to the Pseudo-Dionysian theology. Let us examine more closely the Augustinian elements in Hooker’s own soteriology.27 Hooker’s anthropological starting point is the conviction of man’s total corruption and sinfulness as the consequence of the Fall. An infinite gulf divides an utterly depraved, fallen humanity from their perfectly just divine creator and governor. The problem of salvation, therefore, is the problem of ontological mediation between man and God across this infinite gulf. Hooker’s account of this gulf in terms of the soul’s total depravity is unmistakably reformed:

23 De civitate Dei, IX.15. 24 See Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 5.1.5 505B, Complete Works, 236 and Celestial Hierarchy 4.4 181B, 158, where Dionysius notes ‘that the mystery of Jesus’s love for humanity was first revealed to the angels and that the gift of this knowledge was granted by the angels to us.’ 25 See De civitate Dei IX and X. For a comparative analysis of the logics of mediation proposed by these two Christian Platonisms, see Hankey ‘Augustinian Immediacy and Dionysian Mediation,’ 125–31. 26 De civitate Dei, X.2. 27 For a full discussion of Hooker’s soteriology see Egil Grislis’s commentary on A Learned Discourse in FLE, vol. 5. See also the second chapter on Hooker’s theological first principles in my monograph study of Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy, 45–58.

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Sinne hath twoe measures whereby the greatnes therof is judged. The object, God against whome: and the subject, that creature in whome sinne is. By the one measure all sinne is infinit, because he is Infinite whome sinne offendeth: for which cause there is one eternall punishment due in justice unto all sinners … He leaveth us not as Adam in the hands of our own wills att once indued with abilitie to stand of our owne accord … because that abilitie is altogether lost.28

Hooker’s conviction of the soul’s complete unworthiness is consistent with the Augustinian view as received by the sixteenth-century reformers. Viewed logically, again following Augustine, mediation across this gulf which separates the infinitely just judge from the infinitely depraved rational creature cannot be accomplished by finite steps and degrees. The soul’s happiness and fulfilment attained through mystical union with the divine are also understood to be infinite: ‘No good is infinite but only God: therefore he is our felicitie and blisse.’29 Salvation is thus nothing less than the bridging of the gulf between man’s infinite wickedness and God’s infinite goodness: ‘Then are we happie therefore when fully we injoy God, as an object wherein the powers of our soules are satisfied even with everlasting delight: so that although we be men, yet by being unto God united we live as it were the life of God.’30 How then is union of the fallen rational soul with God accomplished? By what precise means does the soul come to ‘participation of divine nature,’ as Hooker puts it?31 What constitutes the bridge and how is this mediation accomplished? Hooker’s treatment of this problem of soteriological mediation is radically Christocentric, and in this respect he is a close follower of the Christological approach of Augustine adopted by the magisterial reformers. The soul’s participation of the divine nature, according to Calvin, was objectively achieved in and through Christ’s assumption of human nature in the Incarnation.32 Redemptive mediation between man and God is possible solely by the God-man Christ.33 The Augustinian emphasis here is unmistakable. For both Hooker and Calvin the soul’s participation of the divine nature is attained ‘by Christe alone.’34 In A Learned Discourse, Hooker argues eloquently for the 28 29 30 31

‘The Tenth Article touching predestination,’ Dublin 31, 4:140.8–141.9 [my emphasis]. Lawes I.11.2; 1:112.11–12. Lawes I.11.2; 1:112.17–20. Lawes V.56.7; 2:238.18. See Booty’s discussion of ‘The Concept of Participation’ in FLE 6(1):197–9. 32 At Inst. II.12.1, Calvin speaks of the ‘insitio in Christum’ as the indispensable condition for the reception of the grace that Christ’s redemption has gained on our behalf. See Wendel, Calvin, 234–42. 33 Wendel, Calvin, 215–32; see Calvin, Inst. II.12.1. Hooker, like Calvin, placed considerable emphasis on traditional Christological doctrine as defined by the four ecumenical councils of the ancient Church. Both divines also drew upon the patristic formulations of orthodox Christology in order to clarify various questions of ecclesiology and political theory in addition to those of soteriology. 34 Just. 31, 5:151.9–153.15 and Calvin, Inst. III.1.1: ‘As long as we are apart from

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reformed doctrine of salvation by Christ alone.35 In that sermon, he is intent on a demonstration of ‘how the foundation of faith is overthrowne’36 by the requirement of virtuous works to the attainment of justifying righteousness: ‘Salvation only by Christe [solus Christus] is the true foundacion whereupon indeed Christianitye standeth.’37 This union of the soul with Christ is described as a ‘mysticall conjunction’: Wee are therefore in God through Christ eternallie accordinge to that intent and purpose whereby wee were chosen to be made his in this present world before the world it selfe was made … Wee are in Christ because he knoweth and loveth us even as partes of him selfe. No man actuallie is in him but they in whome he actuallie is. For he which hath not the Sonne of God, hath not life.38

Our union with Christ, according to Hooker, is the wholly indispensable condition for our salvation. This immediate and ‘actuall incorporation’ (insitio in Christum) is the first principle of this Augustinian soteriology.39 What is particularly remarkable about Hooker’s relation to the ancient soteriological debate between Augustine and Porphyry, and subsequently between proponents of Augustine (that is, the magisterial reformers) and supporters of the Neoplatonic ontology of Porphyry’s Christian inheritor Pseudo-Dionysius (the theologians of Trent), is the way in which Hooker’s thought draws from both sides of the grand controversy over mediation. Hooker’s soteriological writings bear all the distinctive marks of the Augustinian emphasis on Christocentric immediacy while the hierarchical ontology of the Pseudo-Dionysian lex divinitatis preponderates in his cosmology, ecclesiology and political theology. Our preliminary proposal, therefore, is that there exists a tension of sorts within Hooker’s thought between two principal traditions of Christian Platonism, the Pseudo-Dionysian and the Augustinian. Next it should be observed that the tension between these two distinct, and indeed conflicting, traditions of Platonic thought appears to lie close to the heart of certain difficulties of interpretation which have exercised modern critical scholarship. There is the question of Hooker’s relation to the motif of Anglicanism. While some scholars have held up Hooker as the pioneer and model of the via media,40 others have questioned this

35 36 37 38 39 40

Christ and separated from him, all that he has done and suffered for the salvation of the human race is useless and of no importance.’ For Just. see FLE 5:105–69. The discourse is a set of sermons on Habakkuk 1.4. Just. 1, 5:105.1. Just. 29, 5:149.20–22. Lawes V.56.7; 2:238.18–239.8. Lawes V.56.7; 2:238.30. For Hooker ‘mysticall conjunction’ is a ‘real participation’ of Christ and a ‘real adoption into the fellowship of his Saintes in this present world.’ See, for example, William P. Haugaard’s introduction to Hooker’s Preface to the Lawes, where he describes Elizabeth’s reign as a ‘Crucible for an Emerging Anglicanism,’ FLE 6(1): 2–22. See also Lee Gibbs, ‘Richard Hooker: Prophet of Anglicanism or English Magisterial Reformer?’ (2002); see also Gibbs’s introduction to Book I, FLE 6(1):118–

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interpretation as tending to anachronism.41 In any event, one important question suggested by the proposal of the two Platonisms concerns the extent to which Hooker’s thought can be viewed as an attempt to accommodate these apparently conflicting ontologies. Some interpreters have emphasized Hooker’s dependence on a Thomist theological stance against the protestant reformers. Others have stressed his adherence to the principles of magisterial reformed orthodoxy. Do such readings take into account the full significance for Hooker of both strands of Christian Platonism he espoused? Do certain interpretations emphasize the logic of hierarchical mediation at the expense of Hooker’s Christocentric claims? Do others perhaps fall into the converse position of seeing in Hooker only that Augustinianism compatible with reformed orthodoxy? To some extent I have come to view my own earlier attempts to interpret Hooker’s thought as tending somewhat in the direction of an Augustinian bias. Are the conflicts between these assorted interpretations perhaps open to some constructive revision on the basis of a new reading of Hooker in light of his demonstrable commitment to both Augustinian and Dionysian theological perspectives? Perhaps the continuing debate over the logical cohesiveness of Hooker’s thought might be illuminated by further reflection on the place of these two Christian Platonisms?42 These are just a few of the questions of critical interpretation which present themselves in light of the initial proposal. Without attempting to negotiate the swarm of hermeneutical difficulties presented by such questions, I would like to recapitulate the distinctive characteristics of the Augustinian and Pseudo-Dionysian elements in Hooker’s thought in order to broach a concluding proposal with regard to the intersection of the two Platonisms in his thought. This tension between the two Platonisms reflects two distinct modes of discourse employed respectively in the soteriological matter of the Tractates and Sermons on the one side, and in the political theology of the Lawes on the other. While Hooker’s adherence to the principle of Christocentric ‘immediacy’ constitutes the mainstay of his reformed soteriology argued in A Learned Discourse, when we turn to the first book of the Lawes it appears, at least on the surface, that we have left this Augustinian metaphysic behind. Rather than an Augustinian binary polarity or ‘disjunctive’ view of the relation between the orders of grace and nature, it appears that we have here a Thomist affirmation of the consonance between nature and grace, or a ‘conjunctive’ view exemplified by Hooker’s articulation of the complementary authorities of reason and scripture.43 Certainly the 19; John Booty, ‘Hooker and Anglicanism,’ in SRH, 207–39; and H.C. Porter, ‘Hooker, the Tudor Constitution, and the Via Media,’ also in SRH, 77–116. 41 Nigel Atkinson, Richard Hooker on Reason. See also Chapter 2 above. 42 There is a large body of criticism spread over the past half century devoted to the question of the logical coherence of Hooker’s thought. See, for example, A.S. McGrade, ‘The Coherence of Hooker’s Polity: The Books on Power’ (1963): 163–82 and W.D.J. Cargill Thompson, ‘The Philosopher of the “Politic Society,” SRH, 3ff. 43 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia. q.1 art.8. W. David Neelands sees Hooker’s position as lacking in sympathy with the thought of reformers such as Calvin, whose

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structure of the argument in Book I of the Lawes approximates the questions on law in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae; this structure is ultimately derived from the theology of Pseudo-Dionysius.44 Here, and indeed throughout this lengthy treatise, both the structure and the content of Hooker’s discourse rest upon a sustained appeal to the Neoplatonic ontology of hierarchical mediation as formulated in the lex divinitatis by Pseudo-Dionysius. In Book VIII of the Lawes45 Hooker offers a succinct recapitulation of this principle of mediation: ‘the very deitie itself both keepeth and requireth for ever this to be kept as a law, that wheresoever there is a coagmentation of many, the lowest be knitt to the highest by that which being interjacent may cause each to cleave unto other and so all to continue one.’46 Here we have in nuce a distinctly un-Augustinian account of the mediation of divine governance. The order described here is not centred spiritually, inwardly and exclusively on immediate union with the person of Christ but is rather cosmically situated, such that lower beings are linked contiguously to higher beings through the external mediation of beings which intervene between them. God ‘does not cooperate with nature.’ Neelands goes on to show that ‘for Hooker, as for Thomas, grace not only perfects nature, it presupposes nature, and scripture presupposes reason … Reason and scripture are related precisely as nature and grace, not co-equal, but consonant, both having validity and neither being in conflict with the other.’ See ‘Scripture, Reason and “Tradition”,’ RHC, 80, 85 and 88. See also Lee Gibbs’s recent introduction to the first book of the Lawes, where he observes that Hooker is closer to a Thomistic ‘conjunctive view’ of the relation between grace and nature, scripture and reason than he is to ‘the more disjunctive perspective of his Calvinist antagonists.’ FLE 6(1):97–103. 44 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia IIae qq.90–97. See Lee Gibbs’s remarks on the Thomist structure of Hooker’s theology of law in the first book: Commentary on Book I, FLE 6(1):92. See also Neelands’s discussion of ‘Scripture and reason: a Thomistic clue to their relationship’ in ‘Hooker on Scripture, Reason and “Tradition”,’ 76–89. Neelands points to Hooker’s citation of Pseudo-Dionysius, On the Divine Names 4.33: ‘to destroy nature is not part of Providence.’ See ‘Grace and Free Will,’ Dublin 13, FLE 4:113.112–13. 45 Lawes VIII.2.1; 3:331.19–332.1. See note 16 above. Compare Pseudo-Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy, in The Complete Works of Pseudo-Dionysius, 156–9, 166–9 and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, 233–43. This formulation of the lex divinitatis is Boniface VIII’s in the bull Unam Sanctam (1302), incorporated into Extravagantes Communes, 1.8.1 ‘De Maioritate et Obedientia’: ‘Nam secundum beatum Dionysium, Lex divinitatis est, Infima per media in suprema reduci.’ See the Corpus Iuris Canonici, ed. P. Lancelotus (Paris, 1587), 853; Friedberg, 2:1245. See FLE 6(2):1081. See also David Luscombe, ‘The Lex Divinitatis in the Bull Unam Sanctam of Pope Boniface VIII,’ in C.N.L. Brooke et al, Church and Government in the Middle Ages (1985), 205–21. 46 Hankey notes that ‘Hooker is not reading Dionysius directly, but either some traditional source common to him and Pope Boniface, or he has slightly modified the text of Unam Sanctam [1302] known to him from the canon law.’ See Hankey, ‘Augustinian Immediacy,’ 152.

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A further purpose, then, must be to explore Hooker’s respective appeals to these two distinct traditions of Christian Platonism and to ask whether – and if so how – he is able to reconcile within his thought such disparate accounts of the human soul’s relation to the divine governance. Is the ontology of divine power mediated by a hierarchical system of laws, by hierarchically ordered polity, sacraments and symbols, as elaborated in the Lawes, consistent with the soteriological claim in A Learned Discourse on behalf of the Christocentric immediacy of the communication of justifying righteousness, as construed by orthodox reformed soteriology? Or, alternatively, is Hooker caught in a fundamental logical inconsistency from which he cannot escape? With this question we confront once again the perennial issue of the coherence of Hooker’s thought, a theme which runs through much of the scholarly discussion of the past half-century and more. This question calls for a full exploration of the tension within the thought of this great Protestant scholastic between two very distinct conceptions of the gubernatio Dei, based upon two thoroughly distinct models of the communication of the divine rule to humanity, the one founded upon a principle of Christocentric immediacy and the other on a principle of cosmic, hierarchical mediation – two distinct metaphysical visions which represent two principal traditions of patristic Christian Neoplatonism, those of Aurelius Augustine and the Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. I would like to explore just one particular aspect of this pivotal hermeneutical difficulty: namely Hooker’s view of law as an ‘emanation’ from the One. The starting point of the generic division law in book one of the Lawes is consistent with the mystical theology of Pseudo-Dionysius. The exposition begins properly with God himself, that is, with God understood as ‘the One.’ Hooker states most emphatically that ‘God is one, or rather verie Onenesse, and meere unitie, having nothing but it selfe in it selfe, and not consisting (as all things do besides God) of many things.’47 In the Pseudo-Dionysian cosmology, which follows the model established by Iamblichus and Proclus, the One is the highest principle, the supreme source of all that is, of all essences and existences, of intellect and of intelligibility, and also of all order in the world.48 Given the political orienta-

47 Lawes I.2.2; 1:59.20–22. This emphasis upon God’s simplicity of being is central to Neoplatonic thought. The ‘One’ of Plotinus transcends thought and all determinacy, and is the àÚ¯‹ from which and to which all multiplicity proceeds. See Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen McKenna (1992), III.8, 273–87; V.4, 460–64; VI.9, 698– 709. On the importance of the doctrine of the One in the thought of Plotinus, see Elmer O’Brien, ed., The Essential Plotinus: Representative Treatises from the Enneads, 2nd edn (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), 17–21. For an example of the Christian appropriation of this doctrine, see also Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, in The Complete Works, 977B 1–981B 8, 127–30. 48 See Stephen Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena: an Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-Dionysian Tradition, Studien zur Problemgeschichte der Antiken und Mittelalterlichen Philosophie VIII (Leiden and New York: E.J. Brill, 1978). E.R. Dodds noted that it was Iamblichus who ‘introduced the “law of mean

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tion of his theology, Hooker’s emphasis naturally falls on the interpretation of the One as the source of cosmic order. Thus he proceeds to identify the eternal law with God himself, whose very being is a law to his own divine operation.49 He aims in the discourse of Book I to show ‘in what maner as every good and perfect gift, so this very gift of good and perfect lawes is derived from the father of lightes.’50 Just as Neoplatonic cosmology accounts for the genesis of the world by means of a downward procession or emanation from the One, so also Hooker derives a diverse hierarchy of laws from the one eternal law. He adheres closely to the logic of procession whereby the divinely original principle of law remains simple in itself while, proceeding out of itself, it generates manifold derivative forms, and thus is the source of both unity and continuity in the entire system of laws.51 The unity of the system of laws is expressed through a twofold motion. First there is a downward procession of generation in which the multiple forms of law come to be out of the One. This is balanced by an upward ‘return’ whereby all derivative forms are gathered up into the original divine unity. Hooker’s two derivative summa genera, namely the natural law and the revealed law of scripture, represent these two principal directions of the cosmic procession. In the circular process of emanation and return (processio et reditus), Hooker places his argument in a theological tradition which harks back to the early centuries of the Christian era. Even before this pattern of emanation and return was taken up by

terms” to the Platonists which allowed him to bridge the gap between the intransigent unity of the One and the dividedness of the many.’ See Proclus, The Elements of Theology, ed. E.R. Dodds (1963), xxi–xxii. For a discussion of ‘Iamblichan-Procline’ mediation and the Lex Divinitatis, see Hankey, ‘Augustinian Immediacy,’ 128, 129. 49 Lawes I.2.2; 1:59.5: ‘The being of God is a kinde of lawe to his working: for that perfection which God is, geveth perfection to that he doth.’ The Trinitarian structure of Hooker’s thought is already discernible in this preliminary observation concerning the eternal law. 50 Lawes I.16.1; 1:135.11–13. Compare Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy, 1 120B 3–6, Luibheid and Rorem, 145: ‘Inspired by the father, each procession of the Light spreads itself generouly toward us, and, in its power to unity, it stirs us by lifting us up. It returns us back to the oneness and deifying simplicity of the father who gathers us in.’ 51 For further examples of Hooker’s employment of the Neoplatonic language and logic of procession, see Lawes I.3.2; 1:65.4. See also I.3.4; 1:67.29 and 1:68.6–8; I.5.2; 1:73.5–8. At the latter he states: ‘Againe sith there can bee no goodnesse desired which proceedeth not from God himselfe, as from the supreme cause of all things; and every effect doth after a sort conteine, at least wise resemble the cause from which it proceedeth: all things in the worlde are saide in some sort to seeke the highest, and to covet more or lesse the participation of God himselfe.’ The Neoplatonic logic of procession is aptly summarized by Proclus as follows: ‘every effect remains in its cause, proceeds from it, and returns to it.’ See The Elements of Theology, 38 and Diogenes Allan, Philosophy for Understanding Theology (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1985), 75.

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Christian theologians, Plotinus argued that the One is the terminus of all striving in the world because it is the originative first principle.52 Similarly for Hooker the creation of the world is an ‘outward procession’ or exitus from the divine unity. The natural law is God’s means of preserving the order of the world once created; it is effectively the eternal law as kept by all creatures. The complete action of return, on the other hand, is accomplished through the redemptive operation of divine self-revelation in the written word of the scriptures. This divine law is God’s chosen means of restoring a fallen creation to unity with himself. Metaphysically considered, the purpose of the discourse has two principal objects in view: first to demonstrate the derivation of the many from the One, and second to show also the reintegration of the many back into the One. The procession and return of the manifold forms of law comprised by these summa genera is accomplished according to the lex divinitatis, the law of mediated hierarchy.53 By this law of procession, the derivative forms of law in all their complexity remain within the primal form of the eternal law, and it continues to be in them without the loss of its own original simplicity. It is the simultaneous procession of the many from the One and the remaining of the many within the

52 Plotinus, The Enneads, III.8.7: ‘It is certain, also, that as the Firsts exist in vision all other things must be straining towards the same condition; the starting-point (àÚ¯‹) is, universally, the goal (Ù¤ÏÔ˜).’ Cf. Enneads V.4.1 on the One as origin and VI.9.3 on the One as end. For an instance of the Christian appropriation of this exitus-reditus theology, see Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford University Press, 1991), XIII.iv.5. See also Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy 1 120B 1– 120A 2, The Complete Works, 145: ‘Inspired by the father, each procession of the Light spreads itself generously toward us, and in its power to unify, it stirs us by liftin us up. It returns us back to the oneness and deifying simplicity of the Father who gathers us in. For, as the sacred Word says, “from him and to him are all things” (Rom. 11:36).’ Compare Lawes I.2.6; 1:62.14–20. See Paul Rorem’s note 4, PseudoDionysius, Complete Works, 145. 53 For a discussion of the scholastic appeal to the Dionysian lex divinitatis, see W.J. Hankey ‘“Dionysius dixit” … ’, (1992), 119–50. The lex divinitatis is the law of the ‘great chain of being.’ Hooker mentions the metaphor of the ‘chain’ at I.11.1; 1:111.14 in the context of an Aristotelian teleological defence of the unity of all motion and desire in a ‘finall cause.’ Although he does not actually use the term lex divinitatis, Arthur O. Lovejoy defines the law of the chain in his classic study The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea, The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University, 1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), 59: ‘the conception of the universe as … composed of an immense, or—by the strict but seldom rigorously applied logic of the principle of continuity—of an infinite, number of links ranging in hierarchical order from the meagerest kind of existents, which barely escape non-existence, through “every possible” grade up to the ens perfectissimum—or, in a somewhat more orthodox version, to the highest possible kind of creature, between which and the Absolute Being the disparity was assumed to be infinite—everyone of them differing from that immediately above and that immediately below it by the “least possible” degree of difference.’

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One which constitutes the continuity of the cosmic order.54 The ‘order of procession’ culminating in the creation of man, who is the very image of God, is also broken by him in the Fall.55 Owing to man’s wilful rejection of the order of creation, the natural law by itself is no longer sufficient to secure the unity of the cosmos under God.56 While fallen humanity continues to possess a natural desire to be happy,57 and thus to be reunited with the eternal source of order, on account of original sin man is ‘inwardly obstinate, rebellious and averse from all obedience unto the sacred lawes of his nature … in regard of his depraved mind little better then a wild beast.’58 Thus observance of the natural law is no longer effectual in preserving the original, divinely constituted order. Nonetheless ‘it is an axiome of nature that naturall desire cannot utterly be frustrate,’ says Hooker, citing Aristotle.59 While nature requires a ‘more divine perfection,’ the means whereby this perfection is attained must be supernatural.60 A complete restoration of the order is provided directly by God himself in the divine act of redemption ‘in himselfe prepared before all worldes.’ The redemption is a reditus or ‘return’ to God of all creation by ‘a way mysticall and supernaturall.’61 The divine law revealed in scripture is God’s chosen means of completing a circular mediation of his own ‘externall working,’ the purpose of which is ‘the exercise of his most glorious and most abundant vertue: Which abundance doth shew it selfe in varietie, and for that cause this varietie is oftentimes in scripture exprest by the name of riches. The Lord hath made all things for his owne sake.’62 The works of both creation and redemption are linked to God’s own Trinitarian self-reflection. All things proceed from and return to God by the divine Word. The utterance of the Word brings the world into being.63 The divine work of redemption ‘God in himselfe prepared before all worldes.’64 God is thus an end to himself in the process of both exitus and reditus. The seemingly endless and immeasurable diversity of life in its many forms is stabilized and contained by an order which is nothing less than the divine self-

54 Compare Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy, CH 1 120A 1: ‘Even though in various ways every divine enlightenment proceeds, out of goodness, toward those provided for, it not only remains simple in itself but also unifies those it enlightens.’ 55 Lawes I.7.2; 1:77.20. 56 Lawes I.11.5, 6; 1:118.11–18. 57 Lawes I.11.4; 1:114.8–10. 58 Lawes I.10.1; 1:96.26–29. 59 Lawes I.11.4; 1:114.15. Hooker cites the Proemium of Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. See Thomas Aquinas, Metaphysicorum Aristotelis expositio in duodecim libros (Turin: Marietti, 1950), 6. That nature does nothing in vain is a central doctrine of Aristotle’s Physics. See also Commentary, FLE 6(1):513. 60 See Lawes I.11.4–6; 1:114.8–119.23. 61 Lawes I.11.6; 1:118.15, 22. 62 Lawes I.2.4; 1:61.6–10. 63 Lawes I.3.2; 1:64.19. 64 Lawes I.11.6; 1:118.23.

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identity. Through the working of creation and redemption, the order of all things both originates and culminates in the one eternal law, hence the circular structure of this mediating process. Looked at another way, the natural law and the divine law are the two most essential moments in the self-mediating operation of the one eternal law. In this process of going out from and returning to God, who is ‘the Eternal himselfe,’ nothing created can be said to fall outside the original order established in the one eternal law.

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Chapter 4

Creation and Government: Mediation of the ‘Aeternall Law’

In the first book of his treatise Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, Richard Hooker constructs a complex generic division of the various forms of law. His approach to the definition of law is remarkable for its simultaneous appropriation of a systematic Neoplatonic structure of argument and an appeal to orthodox Protestant assumptions with respect to the relation of the orders of nature and grace.1 At the outset of book one, Hooker offers a brief sketch of his argument, in which he provides a useful starting point for understanding the Neoplatonic structure of his system of laws. He begins with an allusion to the polemical occasion of the treatise in the ecclesiological controversies which arose in England as a consequence of the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559: Because the point about which wee strive is the qualitie of our Lawes, our first entrance hereinto cannot better be made, then with consideration of the nature of lawe in generall, and of that lawe which giveth life unto all the rest, which are commendable just and good, namely the lawe whereby the Eternall himselfe doth worke. Proceeding from hence to the lawe first of nature, then of scripture, we shall have the easier accesse unto those things which come after to be debated, concerning the particular cause and question which wee have in hand.2

By this account, the idea of law is fundamentally threefold. First there is the law ‘which God hath eternallie purposed himself in all his works to observe.’3 This eternal law is the ‘highest welspring and fountaine’ of all other kinds of law. While there is a great variety of derivative forms of law, they are contained, as it were, within two principal kinds: the law of nature and the revealed law of scripture. The latter is often referred to by Hooker as the divine law, which is not

1

2 3

W. David Neelands argues that while Hooker recognizes Calvin’s threefold use of the law, the former’s organization of the system of laws owes little to Calvin, and thus Hooker’s ‘treatment of law was a clear departure from these Reformation themes, although it did not oppose them.’ See Neelands’s essay ‘Scripture, Reason and “Tradition”,’ RHC, p. 77. For an important discussion of related questions see W.J. Hankey, ‘Augustinian Immediacy,’ 125–60. I am much indebted to Dr Hankey for his contribution to my thinking on this question. Lawes I.1.3; 1:58.11–19. Lawes I.3.1; 1:63.7. 45

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to be confused with eternal law. These three summa genera – eternal law, natural law and divine law – together constitute a comprehensive division of the ‘kinds’ of law. On account of the subordination of the two derivative summa genera to the one eternal law, there is a sense in which law, viewed from the standpoint of its divine originative principle, is simply one. This apparent ambiguity of the simultaneous unity and multiplicity of law lies at the very heart of Hooker’s Neoplatonic vision of the procession of the dialectical division of the manifold forms of law out of the one eternal law.4

The Eternal Law: Creation and Government If we will give judgement of the Lawes under which wee live, first let that law eternall be alwayes before our eyes, as being of principall force and moment to breede in religious mindes a dutifull estimation of all Lawes, the use and benefite whereof we see; because there can be no doubt but that Lawes apparently good, are (as it were) thinges copied out of the very tables of that high everlasting law, even as the booke of that law hath sayd concerning it selfe, By me Kinges raigne, and by me Princes decree justice.5

The eternal law can be viewed from two principal standpoints according to the distinction between the internal and the external operations of God. The internal operations are themselves distinguishable into natural and necessary operations of the divine life, on the one hand, and God’s voluntary works, on the other. The ‘necessary’ internal operations have to do with the life of the Godhead as a Trinity of three persons in one eternal, divine substance. These workings are so intimately tied to the divine essence as to be above the power of the divine will. The ‘voluntary’ internal operations, on the other hand, have to do with ‘that law eternall which God himself hath made to himselfe, and therby worketh all things wherof he is the cause and author.’6 In a sense the latter looks towards the divine works which are ad extra (that is, which fall outside the simple divine life), though these works are viewed as contained within the will of their author. The eternal law as it governs the creation can also be viewed externally as the divine purpose ‘set downe as expedient to be kept by all his creatures according to the severall conditions wherwith he hath indued them.’7 In the latter case, the operation of God ad extra is viewed from the standpoint of the creatures rather than the creator. On the basis of these two standpoints Hooker distinguishes a first and a second eternal law.

4 On the concept of the procession of the forms of law see, for example, I.3.4; 1:68.6– 8: ‘ … the naturall generation and processe of all things receyveth order of proceeding from the setled stabilitie of divine understanding.’ 5 Lawes I.16.2; 1:136.4–11. 6 Lawes I.2.5; 1:61.28–62.2. 7 Lawes I.3.1; 1:63.9.

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In the autograph manuscript of his Notes toward a Fragment on Predestination, Hooker observes that God’s external operation is twofold: creation and government.8 Government naturally presupposes creation. The second eternal law is all about the government of God and in this sense corresponds more closely than the first eternal law to the teleological definition of eternal law in question 93 of Aquinas’s Summa.9 The chief difference between the first and second forms of the eternal law is therefore to be discerned in the relations which obtain among the worker, the law of the work and the actual work done. In the case of the first eternal law, or ‘creatio,’ they remain coequal since God establishes the order of his own voluntary working. In the second eternal law, or ‘gubernatio,’ there is a necessary hierarchical subordination of the creaturely work to the creator lawgiver who both makes and is, as the divine source (àÚ¯‹), the law of making.10 Hooker’s remarks on the first eternal law are thus more properly reminiscent of the doctrine of God and Logos theology in the prima pars of the Summa Theologiae of Aquinas.11 With this important theological distinction clarified, Hooker embarks upon a more specific division of the various kinds of law with a general, teleological definition of law itself as his point of departure:

8

Richard Hooker, Notes toward a Fragment on Predestination, Trinity College, Dublin, MS 364, f. 80v, FLE 4: 86.11–17, also printed in Supplement II, FLE 3: 527.12–18: ‘Operatio Dei ad extra est duplex: Creatio. Gubernatio. Gubernatio praesupponit creationem. Non enim gubernatur quod non est.’ 9 Thomas Aquinas, The Treatise on Law [Summa Theologiae, IaIIae, QQ. 90–97], ed. R.J. Henle (1993), pp. 204, 205: ‘Sed contra est quod Augustinus dicit (De Lib. Arb. i,6) quod lex aeterna est summa ratio, cui semper obtemperandum est.’ [Augustine says that the eternal law is the supreme exemplar to which we must always conform.] Corpus: ‘Sicut ratio divinae sapientiae, inquantum per eam cuncta sunt creata, rationem habet artis, vel exemplaris, vel ideae, ita ratio divinae sapientiae moventis omnia ad debitum finem obtinet rationem legis. Et secundum hoc lex aeterna nihil aliud est quam ratio divinae sapientiae, secundum quod est directiva omnium actuum et motionum.’ [Just as the model in the Divine wisdom through which all things were created has the nature of an art or exemplar or idea, so the plan in the Divine wisdom which moves everything to its proper end has the nature of a law. And, accordingly, the eternal law is nothing other than the idea in Divine wisdom inasmuch as it directs all acts and movements.] 10 See Gibbs, ‘Introduction to Book I,’ FLE 6 (I), p. 99. 11 See W.J. Hankey, God In Himself: Aquinas’ Doctrine of God as Expounded in the Summas Theologiae (Oxford: OUP, 1987). For an excellent account of Aquinas’s employment of the exitus et reditus logic, see pp. 22–35. Hankey maintains against M.-D. Chenu that Christ alone is the via of return in Aquinas’s argument. For Chenu, there are two returns in the Thomist theology, a natural one in the secunda pars, and one through gracious history: ‘The transition of IIa to the IIIa Pars is a passage from the order of the necessary to the order of the historical, from an account of structures to the actual story of God’s gifts.’ M.-D. Chenu, Toward Understanding St. Thomas, trans. A.-M. Landry and D. Hughes (Montreal/Paris: Library of Living Catholic Thought, 1964), p. 315.

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Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist All things that are have some operation not violent or casual. Neither doth any thing ever begin to exercise the same without some foreconceaved ende for which it worketh … That which doth assigne unto each thing the kinde, that which doth moderate the force and power, that which doth appoint the forme and measure of working, the same we tearme a Lawe.12

In this account, law is represented as absolutely fundamental to everything that is, since everything in nature is governed one way or another by law.13 The eternal law governs both the internal operations of the divine life and also the external divine works of creation and redemption of the world. God in himself is subject to law in the sense that ‘the beinge of God is a kind of law to his working: for that perfection which God is, geveth perfection to that he doth.’14 That is to say, the divine operations are subject to the internal necessity of the divine nature. As an ‘intellectual worker’ God governs himself, is indeed a law to himself.15 In him law and activity are one and the same, for God is ‘verie Onenesse.’Yet in the unity of his substance God is understood to be both the ‘worker’ and the ‘lawe’ whereby his works are wrought. In the case of all other forms, these ‘moments’ are ontologically separate. In God himself, the mediation of the moments is dependent upon a Trinitarian understanding of the divine nature.16 There are three elements to be considered in the divine operation: the worker himself, the pattern of the work and the actual act of working. According to Hooker’s orthodox Trinitarian logic, these three continue to be undivided in the unity of the divine substance, for God, by the necessity of his own nature, can have nothing in himself but himself. In the language of the Athanasian creed, all three moments ‘are coeternal together and coequal.’17 Hooker maintains that the internal operations of the Godhead as a 12 Lawes I.2.1; 1:58.22–29. This negative definition of law as an ‘operation not violent or casual’ is a restatement of Aristotle’s dictum that everything in nature acts for the sake of an end. For Hooker that end or Ù¤ÏÔ˜ is nothing but law. See Aristotle’s refutation of the view that chance and spontaneity are ‘causes’ in Physics, 198a5–13 and 198b10, as well as his explanation that ‘Nature belongs to the class of causes which act for the sake of something,’ beginning at 199a3–8. For further discussion of this definition see McGrade’s introduction to Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Preface, Book I, Book VIII (1989), xx–xxii. 13 Lawes I.2.2; 1:58.33. 14 Lawes I.2.2; 1:59.5–6. 15 Lawes I.2.3; 1:60.8. 16 According to the Articles of Religion, article I, ‘Of Faith in the Holy Trinity’, ‘there is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there be three persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.’ The reference to the two divine names ‘Maker’ and ‘Preserver’ alludes to the duplex operatio dei ad extra, namely creation and governance. See Hooker, Notes toward a Fragment on Predestination, FLE 4: 86.11. 17 See ‘The Creed of St. Athanasius, commonly so called,’ in The Book of Common Prayer (1662), v. 26.

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Trinity of distinct persons within the unity of one divine substance are the supreme expression of law. At this highest level there is no externality of ruler, rule and ruling. On this account the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit are the most perfect operations expressive of the first eternal law. It is essential to Trinitarian orthodoxy that these operations are involuntary, for they belong by internal necessity to the triune nature of the Godhead. Although Hooker is reluctant to wade more deeply into these internal operations of the Godhead – on this subject ‘our safest eloquence is silence’ – nonetheless he is clearly intent on establishing the source of law at the highest possible ontological level. For Hooker also the pagan philosophers were able to attain to a knowledge of the nature of God and of his law.18 Hooker cites the example of Plato’s demiurge who brings the visible world into being according to a plan or pattern (paradeigma) which is its own thought.19 In this philosopher’s account of creation, the visible world is a ‘moving image of eternity.’ The divine worker is manifested through his work. Mercurius (Hermes) Trismegistus, who was thought in the sixteenth century to be an ancient Egyptian teacher of universal philosophy, maintained that the world was made not with hands, but by reason (Logos).20 Cicero too defines law as ‘something eternal which rules the whole universe by its wisdom in command and prohibition.’21 In each of Hooker’s references to pagan authors the same principle is revealed: order or law is a divine, and therefore self-mediating rational principle. ‘Neither have they otherwise spoken of their cause, then as an Agent, which knowing what and why it worketh, observeth in working a most exact order or lawe.’22 Thus at the very highest level of both pagan and Christian theology, law is manifest as an eternal, self-originating, self-mediating principle in which there is a distinction of the agent, the principle or rule of action, and the action or operation itself. Quite remarkably, Hooker seems to suggest in this 18 Lawes I.2.3; 1:59.33–60.14: ‘the wise and learned among the verie Heathens themselves, have all acknowledged some first cause, whereupon originallie the being of all things dependeth. Neither have they otherwise spoken of that cause, then as an Agent, which knowing what and why it worketh, observeth in working a most exact order or lawe … all confesse in the working of that first cause, that counsell is used, reason followed, a way observed, that is to say, constant order and law is kept, wherof it selfe must needs be author unto itselfe.’ 19 See the Timaeus, 37d, trans. Benjamin Jowett, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 1167: ‘The nature of the ideal being was everlasting, but to bestow this attribute in its fullness upon a creature was impossible. Wherefore [the demiourgos] resolved to have a moving image of eternity, and when he set in order the heaven, he made this image eternal but moving according to number, while eternity itself rests in unity, and this image we call time … Time and the heaven came into being at the same instant.’ 20 On Hooker’s use of the Hermetica see Wayne Schumaker, The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: A Study in Intellectual Patterns (1972) 238–9. 21 De Legibus, 2.6. See Loeb Classical Library edition, trans. C.W. Keyes (Harvard University Press, 1975), 379–81. 22 Lawes I.2.5; 1:59.33–60.1.

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passage that a Logos theology can be discerned in the pagan understanding of law as the divine first principle and perhaps also, by implication, an adumbration of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Homer, Plato, the Stoics and no less an authority than thrice-great Hermes are all enlisted in support of the proposition implicit in these expressions of Logos theology, namely that God is law.23 From the standpoint of the natural knowledge of God, the conclusion reached is much the same: the life of God is the very substance of law. Hooker identifies the light of reason with the divine Logos of the Prologue to John’s Gospel. Here the ‘word’ of God in scripture is twinned with the ‘word’ of rational human discourse in and through their common source, the eternal divine ‘Word.’24 God the ‘light of light’ is the author of both the light of reason and the revealed light of the scriptures.25 God, the author of nature, speaks through nature whose voice is his instrument.26 Knowledge of the eternal law as a divine principle of self-imposed order is, as we have seen, variously accessible by supernatural revelation, philosophical reflection or through the poetical inspiration of the Muses, which may lie somewhere between the other two. Looked at more systematically, Hooker presents the knowl23 Lawes I.2.3; 1:60.4–11: ‘Thus much is signified by that which Homer mentioneth, ¢Èfi˜ ‰’ âÙÂÏ›ÙÔ ‚Ô˘Ï‹ (Jupiter’s Counsell was accomplished). Thus much acknowledged by Mercurius Trismegistus ÙeÓ ¿ÓÙ· ÎfiÛÌÔÓ âÔ›ËÛÈÓ ï ‰ËÌÈÔ˘ÚÁe˜ Ôé ¯ÂÚÛdÓ àÏÏa ÏfiÁˇˆ (The creator made the whole world not with hands, but by Reason). Thus much confest by Anaxagoras and Plato, terming the maker of the world an Intellectual worker. Finallie the Stoikes, although imagining the first cause of all things to be fire, held neverthelesse that the same fire having arte, did ï‰ˇá ‚·‰›˙ÂÈÓ âd ÁÂÓ¤ÛÂÈ ÎfiÛÌÔ˘ (Proceed by a certaine and a set Waie in the making of the world).’ All translations are Hooker’s own. In the FLE Commentary on Book I, it is observed that Hooker derives his references to Anaxagoras, Plato and the Stoics from the fifth-century Stobaeus’s Eclogues. See P.G. Stanwood, ‘Stobaeus and Classical Borrowing in the Renaissance,’ 141–6. 24 Lawes III.9.3; 1:238.25: ‘The light of naturall understanding wit and reason is from God, he it is which thereby doth illuminate every man entering into the world. If there proceede from us any thing afterwardes corrrupt and naught, the mother thereof is our owne darknes, neither doth it proceede from any such cause whereof God is the author. He is the author of all that we thinke or doe by vertue of that light, which himselfe hath given (John 1:5).’ 25 Lawes III.8.9; 1:226.11–14. See Lawes V.56.2; 2:235.25–27: ‘The Sonne [is] in the father as light in that light out of which it floweth without separation; the father [is] in the Sonne as light in that light which it causeth and leaveth not.’ 26 Lawes I.8.3; 1:84.4 and see also I.3.4; 1:67.16–20, 68.18: ‘Those things which nature is said to do, are by divine arte performed, using nature as an instrument: nor is there any such arte or knowledge divine in nature her selfe working, but in the guide of natures worke.’ Compare Calvin, Comm. on Hab. 2:6, CO 43.540.1; Commentaries on the Twelve Minor Prophets, trans. John Owen, vol. 4 (Grand Rapids, MI.: Eerdmans, 1950), pp. 92–3: ‘Since some principles of equity and justice remain in the hearts of men, the consent of all nations is, as it were, the voice of nature or the testimony of that equity which is engraven on the hearts of men, and which they can never obliterate. This also is the dictate of nature … ’ [my italics].

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edge of the eternal law according to the duplex cognitio dei. It is important to qualify the degree of knowledge. For Hooker the substance of the eternal law is altogether beyond our grasp. At this highest level of the inquiry into the essence of law, theology must be apophatic, for dangerous it were for the feeble braine of man to wade farre into the doings of the most High, whome although to knowe be life, and joy to make mention of his name: yet our soundest knowledge is to know that we know him not as in deed he is, neither can know him … his glory is inexplicable, his greatnes above our capacitie to reach.27

Unlike the book of nature or the book of scripture, the first eternal law is likened to a book which ‘we are neither able nor worthie to open and looke into.’28 Nevertheless, Hooker maintains that we are able to know the universality, the eternity and the immutability of this law. Scripture reveals that God’s hidden counsel is a ‘thing unchangeable.’29 God himself is law, both to himself and to all other things besides. The first eternal law comprises both the inward and the outward actions of God. As we have already observed, even in his external working God continues to be an end to himself, for the end of this external labour is nothing other than ‘the exercise of his most glorious and most abundant vertue.’30 In the outward exercise of his power or ‘vertue’, God works voluntarily, though now under a self-imposed law. This law is manifest in every voluntary act of the creator. Thus, underlying the great act of creation there is a self-mediated action of the lawgiver who wills to act according to a rational purpose.31 As distinct from the purely internal operations discussed above, there is necessarily a separation of the worker and the work in the outward acts of God. In the outward acts there is a disproportion between the law of operation and the operation itself; the former is infinite while the latter is finite.32 Thus an externality of law and the operation ruled by it comes about in ‘everie acte proceeding externally from God.’ The worker and the rule of operation continue to be coequal. Reason and will are perfectly united in the outward 27 Lawes I.2.2; 1:59.12–19. 28 Lawes I.2.5; 1:62.10. See also Notes on Predestination, FLE 4: 85.15: ‘Scientia divina est liber in quo scripta sunt omnia etiam nomina, quibus nihil magis contingentur evenit.’ [Divine knowledge is a book in which are written the very names of all men, than which nothing more contingent exists.] 29 Heb. 6:17. 30 ‘Vertue’ has the connotation here of power and strength. 31 Some interpreters of Hooker have argued that his theology is realist as opposed to voluntarist. Yet here it is clear that the divine will is an integral element alongside the divine reason in the doctrine of eternal law. See Gibbs, ‘Introduction to Book I,’ FLE 6(I), pp. 97, 103. See also Peter Munz, The Place of Hooker in the History of Thought (1952), p. 140 ff. and W.J. Torrance Kirby, Richard Hooker’s Doctrine, pp. 13–15. 32 Lawes I.2.5; 1:61.15–18: ‘Undoubtedly a proper and certaine reason there is of every finite worke of God, in as much as there is a law imposed upon it; which if there were not, it sould be infinite even as the worker himselfe is.’

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expression of the eternal law.33 The eternal law, however, imposes no limitation on the freedom of the divine will. The law whereby the world is created and governed is voluntarily self-imposed; the first eternal law is ‘that order which God before all ages hath set down with himselfe, for himselfe to do all things by.’34 Hooker states that this Logos theology is not the customary account given of the eternal law.35 The more usual definition of eternal law is, for example, the one formulated by Augustine in De Libero Arbitrio and cited by Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae: ‘The Eternal Law is the supreme exemplar [summa ratio] to which we must always conform.’36 Aquinas comments on this definition by observing that the divine plan which directs every creature to its appointed end has the nature of a law just as the model or pattern in the divine wisdom through which all things were created has the nature of an exemplar. ‘Accordingly, the Eternal Law is nothing other than the idea in Divine wisdom inasmuch as it directs all acts and movements.’37 The emphasis here is upon the teleological ordering of the creation to its proper end: gubernatio. Augustine may well have obtained his definition from Cicero’s treatise on law, where he too defines law as ‘the highest reason implanted in nature (ratio summa insita in natura).’38

The Second Eternal Law The great variety of laws which make up the grand scheme of Hooker’s generic division are all gathered together under the governance of the second eternal law which ‘receyveth according unto the different kinds of things which are subject unto it different and sundry kinds of names.’39 The second eternal law comprises 33 See Gibbs, ‘Introduction to Book I,’ FLE 6(I), 97. 34 Lawes I.2.6; 1:63.2. 35 Lawes I.3.1; 1:63.6–17: ‘I am not ignorant that by law eternall the learned for the most part do understand the order, not which God hath eternallie purposed himselfe in all his works to observe, but rather that which with himselfe he hath set downe as expedient to be kept by all his creatures, according to the severall conditions wherewith he hath indued them. They who thus are accustomed to speake apply the name of Lawe unto that only rule of working which superior authority imposeth, whereas we somewhat more enlarging the sense thereof, terme any kind of rule or canon whereby actions are framed a law. Now that law which as it is laid up in the bosome of God, they call aeternall, receyveth according unto the different kinds of things which are subject unto it differenct and sundry kinds of names.’ 36 De Lib. Arb., I.6, cited by Thomas Aquinas, The Treatise on Law [Summa Theologiae], p. 204. ‘Lex aeterna est summa ratio, cui semper obtemperandum est.’ 37 Ibid., p. 205. 38 De Legibus, 1.4. Loeb Classical Library edition, trans. C.W. Keyes (Harvard University Press, 1975), 317. 39 Lawes I.3.1; 1:63.16. Compare Aquinas, Treatise on Law, q. 93, art. 1, p. 200: ‘But things that are diverse in themselves are considered as one according to their ordina-

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the law of irrational natural agents, angelic law, the law of reason, human positive law, the law of nations, as well as the revealed law of scripture. All of these forms of law are distinct expressions of the one and undivided ‘gubernatio Dei.’ In the Notes toward a fragment on Predestination, Hooker goes on to distinguish between various species of this gubernatio: Government is that work of God whereby he sustains created things and disposes all things to the end which he naturally chooses, that is the greatest good which, given the law of creation, can be elicited. For, given the law of creation that creation be violated through those things which follow from creation. So God does nothing by his government which offends against that which he has framed and ratified by the very act of creation. The government of God is: general over all; special over rational creatures. There are two forms of government: that which would have been, had free creation not lost its way; that which is now when it has lost its way.40

This passage reveals the theological principle underlying the generic division of laws. On one side are laws governing the order of unfallen creation. Among these Hooker includes the law of nature in so far as it governs irrational and nonvoluntary natural agents. This again is a significant departure from the usual, more restricted sense of natural law as an ‘intellectual habit’ of the soul, that is to say the summa ratio as it is present and known to rational creatures.41 The ‘law coelestial’ is natural law as observed by unfallen rational creatures, namely the angels. The ‘law of reason’ is natural law for rational human creatures. tion to something common. There, the Eternal Law is one, that is the exemplar of this ordination.’ 40 John Booty’s translation of Hooker’s Latin notes in FLE 4: 86.28–87.12: ‘Gubernatio est ea Dei operatio qua res creatas sustentat disponitque omnia in finem ab ipso naturaliter expetitum id est maximum bonum quod posita creationis lege potest elici. Etenim posita creationis lex <est regula omnium> per ea quae secuta sunt creationem violare non decuit. Nihil itaque operatur Deuos [sic] gubernando contra id quod creando fixum ratumque habuit. Gubernatio Dei: Generale super omnia; Speciale super creaturas rationales. Gubernationis duplex modus: Qui fuisset si creatura libera non exorbitasset; Qui nunc est cum exorbitarit.’ 41 See, for example, Aquinas’s discussion of the definition of natural law in The Treatise on Law, q. 94, art. 1, pp. 235–41; also, Cicero, De Legibus, 1.4, Loeb, 317: ‘ … lex est ratio summa insita in natura, quae jubet ea, quae facienda sunt, prohibetque contraria. Eadem ratio cum est hominis mente confirmata et confecta, lex est. [Law is the highest reason, implanted in Nature, which commands what ought to be done and forbids the opposite. This reason, when firmly fixed and fully developed in the human mind, is Law.]’ Quoted in Commentary, FLE 6 (I), 477. Finally, Gratian, Decretum, Part I, Distinct. 1., in A.L. Richter and A. Friedberg, Corpus juris canonici, vol. I (Leipzig: B. Taushnitz, 1879), 2; reproduced (Graz: Akademische Druk-u. Verlagsanstalt, 1955, 1959): ‘Natural law is that which is contained in the Law and the Gospel whereby everyone is commanded to do to another that which he would have done to himself.’ Hooker cites Gratian’s definition at Lawes I.12.1; 1:119.30– 120.1.

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In order to be properly understood, the natural law must be considered in relation to both its originative source, the eternal law, and its twin, as it were, the revealed law of scripture. Scripture attests to the common source of these summa genera of law in God himself: ‘Doth not the Apostle term the law of nature even as the Evangelist doth the law of Scripture, dikaioma tou theou, “Gods own righteous ordinance?”’42 These two primary derivative forms of law together account for both the ‘outward procession’ of the entire created order from and its final redemptive return by a ‘way mystical and supernaturall’ to the original divine unity.43 The eternal law is thus both the starting point (àÚ¯‹) and the goal (Ù¤ÏÔ˜) of all order. Natural law and divine law represent for Hooker the two motions of cosmic procession and return and in this way the two summa genera constitute a comprehensive division of the idea of law.44 The natural law is God’s means of preserving the order of the world once created; it is effectively the eternal law as kept by all creatures. Had Adam continued in his unfallen state, the natural law would have sufficed to bring him to ‘the reward of blisse.’ In the divine law of scripture God reveals his chosen means of restoring fallen creation to unity with himself.45 This revealed way of redemption is also an expression of the one eternal law and is described by Hooker as prepared by God in himself before all worlds.46 We shall seek to demonstrate that Hooker’s conservative Neoplatonic presentation of this twofold division of the eternal law manifests in content the essentially Lutheran structure of the two realms of creation and redemption.47 By the unaided illumination of natural reason, it is possible to distinguish true from false, good from evil, and consequently a certain degree of knowledge of the 42 Rom. 1:32 and Luke 1:6. See Lawes VII.11.10; 3:211.12. Earlier in the same passage Hooker’s purpose is to justify the discourse of reason in determining the polity of the Church. See further VII.11.10; 1:210.27–211.6. 43 Cf. Lawes I.16.1; 1:135.11–13 and III.11.3; 1:248.23–26. 44 For further examples of Hooker’s employment of the Neoplatonic language and logic of procession, see Lawes I.3.2; 1:65.4, I.3.4; 1:67.29 and 1:68.6–8, I.5.2; 1:73.5–8. At the latter he states: ‘Againe sith there can bee no goodnesse desired which proceedeth not from God himselfe, as from the supreme cause of all things; and every effect doth after a sort conteine, at least wise resemble the cause from which it proceedeth: all things in the worlde are saide in some sort to seeke the highest, and to covet more or lesse the participation of God himselfe.’ The Neoplatonic logic of procession is aptly summarized by Proclus as follows: ‘every effect remains in its cause, proceeds from it, and returns to it.’ The Elements of Theology, p. 38. 45 Lawes I.11.5,6; 1:115.25–119.23. 46 Lawes I.11.6; 1:118.23. 47 On the significance for Christian ethics of Luther’s distinction between the realms of creation and redemption, see William H. Lazareth, ‘Luther’s “Two Kingdom” Ethic Reconsidered,’ Christian Social Ethics in a Changing World, ed. John C. Bennett (New York: Association Press, 1966); reprinted in Marburg Revisited: A reexamination of Lutheran and Reformed Traditions, eds Paul C. Empie and James I. McCord (Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 1966), pp. 165–76. The latter edition is cited here.

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divine will itself is attainable without the help of supernatural revelation. This natural knowledge of God consequently leads to a natural practical wisdom. To know theologically what human nature is and where it stands in the larger order of creation is the starting point for reflection upon the principles of human action.48 In this context Hooker is able to compare the virtue of voluntary obedience to the natural law on the part of rational creatures with the external beauty of the hierarchically ordered cosmos.49 Building upon this argument with respect to the natural knowledge of God, he proceeds to show that one and the same moral law is taught by Plato, Aristotle, Moses and Christ with respect to our natural duty towards both God and our fellow man.50 The second great commandment in Christ’s summary of the law, for example, is grounded in the law of non-contradiction, a law of the rational faculty. Throughout this discussion of the axioms of virtuous action, Hooker presupposes that ‘the mindes even of naturall men, have atteyned to know, not onely that there is a God, but also what power, force, wisedom, and other properties God hath, and how all things depende on him.’51 Given that rational, free creation has lost its ‘way’ (that is, the way of return to the one) on account of the Fall, it is necessary to the preservation of the created order that there be a special revelation from God in the divine law of the scriptures, both through the law and the Prophets and through the Gospel of Christ. Finally, there is need of positive ‘humane law’ or ‘such Lawes of government as serve to direct even nature depraved to a right end.’52 The latter can be further divided into categories of civil, ecclesiastical and international law, of which the latter contains within it the laws of arms and embassage. Special law, for example, governing the authority of general councils of the Church, can be regarded as a hybrid species of ecclesiastical law and the law of nations.53 The subdivision can certainly go a great deal further. The chief point to observe is that the structure of the division is theologically determined by three main distinctions. First, there is the twofold character of God’s external operation as ‘Maker and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible.’54 God’s work as creator is distinct from his work as governor, hence the distinction of the first and second eternal laws. Second, there is a distinction between God’s general government over all creatures and a special government over rational creatures. Out of the latter arises the distinction between the main species of natural law. Finally, the mode of the special divine government over rational creatures is itself twofold on account of the Fall. The natural law is both a law of reason and the pattern for 48 49 50 51

Lawes I.8.6; 1:86.25–29. Lawes I.8.9; 1:89.31–90.11. Lawes I.8.7,8; 1:87.9–89.2. Lawes I.8.7; 1:87.14–17. See Neelands, ‘Scripture, Reason and “Tradition”,’ RHC, pp. 76, 77. 52 Lawes I.10.1; 1:96.33. 53 See Lawes I.10.14; 1:109.2–110.16 where Hooker refers to the ‘Lawes of spirituall commerce betweene Christian nations.’ 54 Article I, ‘Of faith in the Holy Trinity,’ in the Articles of Religion.

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positive human law. Human law serves as a remedy for sin.55 Both positive human law and the divine law presuppose the corruption of human nature, so that they are posterior to the laws which suppose a free creation which has not lost its way. It is therefore structurally appropriate that Hooker’s discussion of the divine law (chapter 11) immediately follows upon the treatment of positive human law (chapter 10). With the various forms of human law the descent from the perfection of the eternal law is complete.

55 Lawes I.10.13; 1:108.3–7: ‘ … those Lawes of reason which (man retayning his original integritie) had bene sufficient to direct each particular person in all his affaires and duties, are not sufficient but require the accesse of other Lawes, now that man and his ofspring are growne thus corrupt and sinfull.’

Chapter 5

Reason and Natural Law: the ‘Duplex Cognitio Dei’

1

Richard Hooker’s theory of natural law has long been the subject of controversy. In his pulpit exchange with Walter Travers in the Temple Church at the Inns of Court,2 and later in A Christian Letter,3 Hooker was accused of promoting ‘the darkenesse of schoole learning’ in his attempt to maintain intellectual continuity with the natural law tradition.4 His contemporary critics sought to impugn his theory as incompatible with such standards of sixteenth-century Protestant orthodoxy as Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion and the confessions of ‘the best reformed churches’ on the Continent.5 Since the mid-nineteenth century, 1 2

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This paper was read at the annual meeting of the Society of Christian Ethics held in Cincinnati in January 1997. See Egil Grislis, ‘Introduction to Commentary on Tractates and Sermons: §iv. The Controversy with Travers,’ FLE, vol. 5, pp. 641–8. All references to Hooker’s text in this edition cite volume, page and line numbers. Travers’s chief work is a defence of a scripturally based form of Church polity published under the title Ecclesiasticae Disciplinae et Anglicanae Ecclesiae ab illa Aberrationis plena e verbo Dei et dilucida Explicatio and translated by Thomas Cartwright as A Full and plaine declaration of ecclesiasticall discipline owt off the word off God and off the declininge off the churche of England from the same; both (Heidelberg: M. Schirat, 1574) [STC 24184]. [Anonymous] A Christian Letter of certaine English Protestantes [ACL; STC 13721], was the only attack on the Lawes published in Hooker’s lifetime. The complete text, together with Hooker’s marginal annotations, is reprinted in FLE vol. 4, ed. John Booty (1982), pp. 1–79. FLE 4:23.10–24.8; 4:65.1 See the introduction to ACL, FLE 4:7.24–9.14: ‘Shew unto us and all English Protestantes, your owne true meaning, and how your wordes in divers thinges doe agree with the doctrine established among us. And that not onelie for avoyding of offence given to many godlie and religious Christians: but also that Atheistes, Papistes, and other hereticques, be not incouraged by your so harde and so harsh stile (beating as it were, as we verilie thinke, against the verie heart of all true christian doctrine, professed by her Majestie and the whole state of this Realme) to despise and set light by, her sacred Majestie, the reverend Fathers of our Church and the whole cause of our religion … And for the better ease herein, and our more readie satisfaction, we have compared your positions and assertions in your long discourses, unto the articles of religion sett forth Anno Domini 1562. and confirmed by Parliament the 13. of her Majesties most blessed and joyfull reigne … ’ On the 57

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commentators on Hooker’s thought have commonly allowed the truth of these accusations, largely owing to their consistency with the prevailing hypothesis of the so-called Anglican via media.6 As we have shown, this interpretation of Hooker’s thought rests on the assumption that the doctrine of the Church of England occupies a theological middle ground between Roman Catholicism and continental Protestantism.7 Hooker has been pointed to frequently as one of the originators and chief proponents of this Anglican way of theological compromise. In general, the interpretation of the doctrine and institutions of the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church in recent historiography has tended to dismiss the via media hypothesis as inappropriate and anachronistic.8 This widely accepted revision has

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theology of the Articles, see Oliver O’Donovan, On the Thirty-Nine Articles. For an account of the convocation debate on their formulation, see William P. Haugaard, Elizabeth and the English Reformation: The Struggle for a Stable Settlement of Religion (Cambridge University Press, 1968). Puritan Manifestoes, eds W.H. Frere and C.E. Douglas (London, 1907), pp. 6, 19, 27, 28, 32 and 34. See Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (1995), ch. 9. The term ‘orthodoxy’ is not employed in this essay in its more common historiographical sense as a category referring to the arid scholastic systematization of Lutheran or reformed doctrine in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is rather intended to denote the authoritative teaching of various representative theologians of the Protestant mainstream, the socalled magisterial reformers, over against the radical doctrines of the Anabaptists, antinomians and libertines. See Olivier Fatio, ‘Orthodoxy,’ trans. Robert Shillenn, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation [OER] gen. ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand (Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 180–3. This view has been expressed by W. Speed Hill, ‘Doctrine and Polity in Hooker’s Laws,’ English Literary Renaissance, 2 (1972), p. 175 and by H.C. Porter, ‘Hooker, the Tudor Constitution, and the Via Media,’ p. 103. In general, the interpretation of Hooker on the hypothesis of the Anglican via media is characteristic of the recent Introductions to the Lawes in the new Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, vol. 6 (1), (1993). See, for example, Lee W. Gibbs on Book I, iv, Hooker and his Contemporaries, pp. 122–4. According to Gibbs, Hooker is a neoThomist who ‘closed the breach opened by the magisterial Reformation and maintained by the disciplinarians between reason and revelation, nature and grace.’ See also Egil Grislis, Hooker’s Theological Heritage, FLE 5:630–34, 640: ‘Hooker was imbued with the spirit of Erasmus.’ Robert K. Faulkner sees Hooker as the author of a counter-Reformation in England; see Richard Hooker and the Politics of a Christian England (1981), p. 51. See chapter 2 above. The classic formulation of this hypothesis is John Henry Newman’s. For an historical interpretation see H.D. Weidner’s introduction to his recent edition with notes of J.H. Newman, The via media of the Anglican Church (1990), pp. xxxiii–xxxvii. For a recent application of this hypothesis to the interpretation of Hooker’s theology see Aidan Nichols, The Panther and the Hind: A Theological History of Anglicanism (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993), pp. 37–52. According to Patrick Collinson, the weight of scholarly opinion has begun to shift perceptibly away from ‘the damaging mistake of writing the history of that Church

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yet to secure a foothold in contemporary Hooker scholarship. Indeed the via media hypothesis continues to hold widespread authority as a hermeneutical paradigm in the most recent studies of his theology.9 Thus a premise of our present inquiry is that the continued use of this paradigm presents an impediment to the critical interpretation of Hooker’s thought. It is within this context of interpretation that the question needs to be asked once again: where does Hooker’s appeal to the authority of natural law in matters of religion place him with respect to the continental reformers? Does such an appeal distance his thinking from the norms of Protestant orthodoxy? Or, alternatively, can the tradition of natural law theory be reconciled with the central teachings of the magisterial Reformation? The initial premise of our approach to these questions involves the abandoning of the anachronistic hypothesis of the Anglican via media. An alternative interpretation is offered here and is based on the proposal that Hooker shares considerable theological ground in his account of natural law with four leading representatives of the continental magisterial Reformation: Martin Luther, Philipp Melanchthon, John Calvin and Heinrich Bullinger.10 Central to our proposed revision to the received reading is the contention that far from initiating a theological compromise between Rome and continental Protestantism, Hooker is really a proponent of the principles of magisterial reform in England. This revised interpretation of Hooker’s basic theological orientation is built upon a careful reading of the main apologetic purpose of his treatise Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie.11 Briefly stated, Hooker frames his discourse as

9

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11

in the anachronistically dichotomous terms of an Anglicanism not yet conceived and an alien Puritanism not yet clearly disowned.’ The Religion of Protestants, p. ix. See also Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, p. viii and O. O’Donovan, On the ThirtyNine Articles, pp. 13–14. See William Haugaard’s introduction to Hooker’s preface to the Lawes in the new commentary FLE 6 (1) Elizabeth’s Reign: Crucible for an Emerging Anglicanism, pp. 2–22. A recent and very important exception to this interpretation is proposed by Nigel Atkinson in Richard Hooker and the Authority of Scripture, Tradition and Reason. Atkinson directly challenges the traditional consensus of Hooker as a representative of via media Anglicanism. There is, of course, no single theological current which can be called ‘the magisterial Reformation.’ In the course of the sixteenth century a variety of distinct confessions emerged. Four main branches of Protestant reform are normally recognized: Lutheran, Genevan, Zurich and Radical Reform. The first three branches are commonly classified as the ‘magisterial’ Reformation over against the fourth. The preface to the Lawes makes clear Hooker’s concern that the promoters of the disciplina have adopted certain features of the radical Protestant agenda. This continental backdrop of confessionalization is of crucial significance to the interpretation of Hooker’s thought. For a clear discussion of these distinctions see Konrad Repgen, ‘Reform,’ in the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, gen. ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand (Oxford University Press, 1996), vol. 3, pp. 392–5. This interpretation of Hooker’s apologetics has been set forth already in W.J. Torrance Kirby, Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy, pp. 19–23; see also

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an irenical appeal to the hearts and minds of the ‘moderate Puritan’ critics of the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559.12 Hooker addresses his discourse directly to disciplinarian but non-separating Puritans who seek reformation of the ecclesiastical law of England.13 He endeavours to persuade his audience by an appeal to standards of doctrinal orthodoxy, acknowleged by them as authoritative, that a complete reformation has in fact already been achieved. By a concerted appeal to ‘theological reason’14 he hopes to secure conscientious acceptance of the Settlement by such disciplinarian Puritan critics as Walter Travers or Thomas Cartwright. In the course of the Admonition Controversy of the 1570s, Travers and Cartwright articulated their support for a scripturally prescribed form of ecclesiastical polity or Disciplina, and are the representative authorities for the Disciplina cited by Hooker in the Lawes.15 The comparative stability enjoyed by the Jacobean Church and Cartwright’s own eventual conformity to the established Church in the late 1590s provide some evidence of success in this irenical purpose. Hooker’s overriding apologetic aim as set out in the preface to the Lawes is, at any rate, inconsistent with an attempt to construct an ecclesiological tertium quid somewhere between Geneva and Rome. In order to persuade his audience that a complete reformation of the Church had been achieved in and through the doctrine and institutions of the Elizabethan Settlement, one of Hooker’s chief tasks is to justify the authority of natural law in handling matters of religion. The only possibility of success in this apologetic aim is to offer a demonstration proceeding from the ground of theological assumptions shared by those whom he intends to persuade.16 Thus it should come as no great surprise when, in his account of natural law, he relies upon arguments and authorities employed by Calvin, Luther and other magisterial reformers.

12

13 14

15 16

Torrance Kirby, ‘Richard Hooker as an Apologist of the Magisterial Reformation in England,’ in Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community [RHC], pp. 219–33. See also Nigel Atkinson, Richard Hooker and the Authority of Scripture, Tradition and Reason, pp. ix–xxii. This category is adopted from the important study by Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church; see especially pp. 1–15. On Hooker’s irenicism see Lawes Pref. 9.3.4; 1:52.12–53.15. Lawes I.1.3; 1: 57.33–58.19. Master Hooker’s Answer to the Supplication that Master Travers made to the Counsell, FLE 5:255.4–15. Luther distinguishes between ‘theological reason’ and mere ‘human reason’ in his Disputationen (1535–45), WA 39,1.180; LW 34.144. On the Admonition Controversy of the 1570s, see Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? See Pref. 1.3; 1:3.1–6: ‘Thinke not that ye reade the words of one, who bendeth him selfe as an adversarie against the truth which ye have alreadie embraced; but the words of one, who desireth even to embrace together with you the selfe same truth, if it be the truth, and for that cause (for no other God he knoweth) hath undertaken the burthensome labour of this painefull kinde of conference.’ Cf. Hooker’s marginal note on ACL in FLE 4:68.12–16.

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Interpretations of the Role of Natural Law in Hooker’s Theology John McNeill argued, perhaps too sanguinely, that there is ‘no real discontinuity between the teaching of the reformers and that of their predecessors with respect to natural law.’17 It must nevertheless be acknowledged that there is a genuine dialectical difficulty in reconciling the authority of the natural law with the core assumptions of Reformation soteriology and scriptural hermeneutics. As we have already noted, Hooker’s advocating of natural law to defend the constitution of the Elizabethan Church met with strong opposition from some of his contemporaries. To the anonymous authors of A Christian Letter he appeared to overthrow the very foundation of the doctrine of the reformed Church of England by setting a qualification on the perfect sufficiency of scriptural authority.18 In his debate with Archbishop John Whitgift earlier in the 1570s, Cartwright had argued that the dictum sola scriptura constituted a universal rule of human action and that whatever is not done in accord with God’s revealed written word is sinful.19 In the Lawes Hooker responds to Cartwright’s four scriptural proofs of this position with an invocation of wisdom theology: Whatsoever either men on earth, or the Angels of heaven do know, it is as a drop of that unemptiable fountaine of wisdom, which wisdom hath diversly imparted her treasures unto the world. As her waies are of sundry kinds, so her maner of teaching is not meerely one and the same. Some things she openeth by the sacred bookes of Scripture; some things by the glorious works of nature: with some things she inspireth them from above by spirituall influence, in some thinges she leadeth and trayneth them onely by worldly experience and practise. We may not so in any one speciall kind admire her that we disgrace her in any other, but let all her wayes be according unto their place and degree adored.20

The authors of A Christian Letter interpret Hooker’s theology openly to challenge foundational teaching on the perfect sufficiency of the scripture (sola scriptura).

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‘Natural Law in the Teaching of the Reformers,’ Journal of Religion 26 (1946), p. 168. Lawes I.14.5; 1:129.10–14: ‘It sufficeth therefore that nature and scripture doe serve in such full sort, that they both joyntly and not severallye eyther of them be so complete, that unto everlasting felicitie wee neede not the knowledge of any thing more then these two [and] may easily furnish our mindes with on all sides … ’ Compare II.8.3; 1:188.4–7: ‘the unsufficiencie of the light of nature is by the light of scripture so fully and so perfectly herein supplied, that further light then this hath added there doth not neede unto that ende.’ Thomas Cartwright, A Replye to an Answere made of M. doctor Whitgifte … Agaynste the Admonition (1574), pp. 26–7, cited in Lawes II.1.3; 1:146.1, II.2.1; 1:148.7, II.3.1; 1:150.19 and II.4.1; 1:151.18. Lawes II.1.4; 1:147.23–148.6. The Wisdom of Solomon 11:4. Compare Calvin, Inst. 1.1.1: ‘Those blessings which unceasingly distill to us from heaven, are like streams conducting us to the fountain.’

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His appeal to diversity of access to the divine wisdom is construed as an affirmation that the ‘light of nature’ teaches a knowledge necessary to salvation and that scripture, therefore, is merely a supplement to the natural knowledge of God.21 The compatibility of natural law theory with such primary doctrines as justification by faith (sola fides) and salvation by Christ alone (solus Christus) is also called into question.22 Hooker’s appeal to natural law tradition, the light of reason, the authority of philosophy in general and Aristotle in particular23 is thought to pose such a serious breach with the Articles of Religion that, as A Christian Letter puts it, ‘almost all the principall pointes of our English creed [are] greatlie shaken and contradicted.’24 In short, against Hooker’s protestations to the contrary, the authors of A Christian Letter regard the appeal to the authority of reason and natural law in theological discourse as simply irreconcilable with ‘all true christian doctrine.’ Present-day scholarly evaluations of Hooker’s thought are more inclined to agree with the assessment of these sixteenth-century critics than with Hooker’s own avowed apologetic intent. William Speed Hill, for example, maintains that Hooker’s defence of natural law leads away from Protestant orthodoxy in the direction of the Anglican via media and that it was precisely ‘the doctrinal implications of this position – specifically its apparent proximity to Rome – that the authors of A Christian Letter feared and opposed.’25 With respect to the

21 22 23

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25

See ACL §3. The Holye Scripture contayneth all thinges necessarie to salvation. FLE 4:11.1–14.9. See especially 4:11.22. FLE 4:14.4–7 and also ACL §6. Of fayth and workes. FLE 4:19.17–23.9. Hooker refers to Aristotle as ‘the Arch-Philosopher’ and ‘the mirror of humaine wisdom.’ Lawes I.4.1; 1:70.20 and I.10.4; 1:99.28. For Luther Aristotle is synonymous with reason and philosophy and is often referred to as the ‘light of nature.’ WA 7.738.31; 7.739.23; 2.395.19 and 2.363.4. See B.A. Gerrish, Grace and Reason: A Study in the Theology of Luther (1962), pp. 32–42. ACL §20. Schoolemen, Philosophie, and Poperie. FLE 4:65.16–68.19: ‘yet in all your discourse, for the most parte, Aristotle the patriarch of Philosophers (with divers other human writers) and the ingenuous [sic] schoolemen, almost in all pointes have some finger; Reason is highlie sett up against holie scripture, and reading against preaching; the church of Rome favourablie admitted to bee of the house of God; Calvin with the reformed churches full of faults; and most of all they which indevoured to be most removed from conformitie with the church of Rome; Almost all the principall pointes of our English creed, greatlie shaken and contradicted … Shall wee doe you wronge to suspect you as a privie and subtill enemie to the whole state of the Englishe Church, and that you would have men to deeme her Majestie to have done ill in abolishing the Romish religion, and banishing the Popes authoritie; and that you would bee glad to see the backesliding of all reformed churches to bee made conformable to that wicked synagogue of Rome … and that you esteeme … the bookes of holy scripture to bee at the least of no greater moment then Aristotle and the Schoolemen: Or else doe you meane to bring in a confusion of all thinges, to reconcile heaven and earth, and to make all religions equall: Will you bring us to Atheisme, or to Poperie?’ Hill, ‘Doctrine and Polity,’ SRC, p. 175.

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specific charges made in A Christian Letter concerning Hooker’s appeal to the authority of natural law, H.C. Porter argues that they were entirely justified. According to Porter, Hooker’s critics perceived correctly that ‘the whole of Hooker’s work … was a celebration of our natural faculty of reason,’ and that therefore he had indeed deviated from the path of Protestant orthodoxy.26 By upholding the authority of reason and natural law Hooker had abandoned the magisterial reformers’ insistence upon the principle sola scriptura, and had in fact embraced the Thomist dictum ‘grace comes not to destroy nature but to fulfill it, to perfect it.’27 In his recent introduction to the first book of the Lawes, Lee Gibbs adopts much the same view when he observes that Hooker is closer to a Thomistic ‘conjunctive view’ of the relation between grace and nature, scripture and reason than he is to ‘the more disjunctive perspective of his Calvinist antagonists.’28 Gibbs points out that Hooker’s emphasis on the rationality of law depends on a teleological perspective derived from Aristotle and Aquinas while the magisterial reformers adhere to a nominalist, voluntarist emphasis on the essence of law as command rather than reason.29 By this account a rationalist, realist account of law like Hooker’s is by definition incompatible with the assumptions of reformation theology. According to Gibbs, Hooker’s more optimistic view of human nature enabled him to close the breach between reason and revelation, nature and grace which had been opened by the magisterial reformers and maintained by the more radical disciplinarian Puritans.30 In this fashion, Hooker’s theological position is identified as essentially neo-Thomist.31 To regard natural law as a revelation of the divine nature is, on this view, to depart from the established bounds of Protestant orthodoxy into the territory of scholastic divinity or, as the authors of A Christian Letter put it, ‘the darknesse of schoole learning.’32 Hooker’s contemporary critics and present-day scholarship are agreed at least on this point: the 26 27 28 29

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H.C. Porter, ‘Hooker, the Tudor Constitution, and the Via Media,’ p. 103. Lawes I.14.5; 1:129.6. See Porter, pp. 103–7. See also Neelands, ‘Hooker on Scripture, Reason and “Tradition”,’ pp. 76–82. FLE 6(1):97. Gibbs maintains that the controversy turns on ‘the difference between two natural law traditions. Hooker stands predominantly within the medieval rationalist and realist tradition represented by Aquinas, while the magisterial Protestant Reformers and their disciplinarian progeny stand squarely in the camp of the medieval voluntarists and nominalists.’ Lee Gibbs, Introduction to Book I, FLE 6 (1):103. Otto von Gierke lays out this distinction between the two natural law traditions in Political Theories of the Middle Ages, trans. F.W. Maitland (Cambridge University Press, 1922), pp. 172–3; see also Francis Oakley, ‘Medieval Theories of Natural Law: William of Ockham and the Significance of the Voluntarist Tradition,’ Natural Law Forum 6 (1961), pp. 65–83. FLE 6 (1):124. ‘For Hooker, as for Aquinas, law is grounded on reason (aliquid rationis).’ FLE 6(1):97. Gibbs emphasizes Hooker’s dependence on Aquinas throughout his introduction. FLE 4:65.1.

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theology of disciplinarian Puritanism, with its rejection of natural-law theory, is more consistent than the theology of Hooker with the teaching of the magisterial reformers. In what remains of this discussion we shall argue that such a portayal of the role of natural law in Hooker’s theology is questionable; we shall seek to demonstrate, moreover, that his embrace of the natural law tradition is in fact consistent with a well-established pattern in the practical theology of the magisterial reformers.33

Natural Law in the Theology of the Magisterial Reformers Martin Luther According to Martin Luther there is a paradox in the scriptures with respect to the knowledge of God.34 On the one hand, Paul testifies to the Romans that man is able to know God by nature.35 On the other hand, John’s Gospel plainly affirms that God can only be known as revealed in Christ: ‘if the Son, whom the Father embraces in His divinity, had not come to reveal God to us, no one would ever know him.’36 Luther goes on to ask how these apparently contrary claims can be reconciled and notes with remarkable prescience that someday this question is going to cause trouble! The reconciliation rests on a distinction between two kinds of knowledge of God, one through the law and the other through the Gospel. Reason knows God through what Luther calls a cognitio legalis, a legal knowing, while the saving knowledge of the Gospel is by definition inaccessible to reason. This twofold knowledge of God according to the distinction between the law and the Gospel in turn provides the basis for the crucial distinction of ethical doctrine, namely the twofold use of the law. For Luther the law and the Gospel are two distinct species of word or preaching (tzweyerley wort oder predigt). Indeed the ability properly to distinguish between the two is the essential task of theology (summa totius Christianae doctrinae).37 The individual Christian lives simultaneously in the two orders of creation and redemption; the one is

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For a significant critique of this prevailing consensus, see Nigel Atkinson, Richard Hooker and the Authority of Scripture, Tradition and Reason, pp. 1–33. In the following summary of Luther’s teaching concerning the knowledge of God and the twofold use of the law I am indebted to the following sources: Karl-Heinz zur Mühlen, ‘Law: Theological Understanding of Law,’ Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, vol. 2, pp. 404–8; William H. Lazareth, ‘Luther’s “Two Kingdom” Ethic Reconsidered’ and B.A. Gerrish, Grace and Reason: A Study in the Theology of Luther. See also Atkinson, Richard Hooker and the Authority of Scripture, pp. 18–22. Rom. 1:19, 20. LW, vol. 22, p. 150. See Luther’s introduction to his Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, WA 40 (1).37–51.

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natural, temporal and earthly while the other is spiritual, eternal and heavenly. There is distinction between the two realms but not disjunctive separation. In the former man lives externally in relation to the world, while in the latter life is internally directed towards God. Corresponding to the two kingdoms are two distinct modes of discourse and two corresponding uses of the law. In temporal matters (coram hominibus) the rational man is self-sufficient; in this realm the law rules externally and is directed principally by the natural light of reason. This is the usus politicus of law which is naturally accessible to all rational creatures. Here in the forum politicum the authority of Aristotle is altogether worthy of praise.38 In spiritual matters which have to do with the soul’s immediate, internal relation to God (coram Deo), on the other hand, reason is blind and man is incapable of acceptable ethical action. In matters of salvation the power of reason is simply ‘death and darkness.’39 In this realm of discourse and action the law functions to show up all human ethical striving as null, and drives the conscience to rely solely upon the divine grace. This so-called usus theologicus seu spiritualis of the law can be discerned only through the revealed light of the Gospel. So far as the Gospel is concerned, that is to say in the forum theologicum, all Aristotle is to theology as darkness is to light.40 According to Luther, God rules through the Gospel as redeemer and through the law as creator. A twist enters into this dialectical construct when the political or external use of the law is shown to be necessary for those under the dispensation of the Gospel.41 Within this structure of divine governance, the Christian is viewed as both justified and sinful (simul justus et peccator) and therefore simultaneously no longer under the law and yet still in need of the law’s correction. Thus, according to the usus theologicus, natural law demonstrates the futility of any human effort to live justly; at the same time, according to the usus civilis, the law demands full obedience. Thus the law imposes no soteriological necessity upon the believer justified by faith but does establish an ethical measure for the good works which proceed from the ‘indicative’ of divine grace.42 It is only with

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‘Aristoteles est optimus in morali philosophia; in naturali nihil valet.’ Tischreden 1.226.10. WA 39 (1). 180; LW 34.144. See Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, trans. Robert C. Schultz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), pp. 64–71. ‘Totus Aristoteles ad Theologiam est tenebra ad lucem,’ from ‘Ad subscriptas conclusiones respondebit M. Franciscus Guntherus Northusensis, pro Biblia, Praesidente R.P.D. Martino Luthero Augustiniano S. Theologiae Wittembergae Decano, loco et tempore statuendis. M.D.XVII,’ Conclusion 50, in M. Luther, Opera Omnia (Wittenberg: Iohannem Lufft, 1558), vol. I:56b; quoted in ACL, FLE 4:65.13–14. See William H. Lazareth, ‘Luther’s “Two Kingdom” Ethic Reconsidered,’ pp. 173– 6. See Luther’s explanation of the necessity of regeneration and the subduing of the flesh in this life, Kirchenpostille (1537), Epistle for the Nineteenth Sunday After Trinity, WA 45. 161–4.

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the emergence of the tertius usus legis that a divine legal ‘imperative’ is asserted in Philipp Melanchthon’s theology of law and in later Lutheran formulations.43 For Luther, the Decalogue and the golden rule of the New Testament are both expressions of the natural law commanded in the scriptures.44 Thus the legal authority of nature and scripture coincide. The law inscribed on human hearts by the law of nature, but obscured by sin, is reestablished by revealed command. Hooker’s account of natural law appeals to Luther’s distinction of the twofold use of the law, although his formulation of doctrine is potentially misleading on a terminological level: The lawe of reason doth somewhat direct men how to honour God as their Creator, but how to glorifie God in such sort as is required, to the end he may be an everlasting Saviour, this we are taught by divine law, which law both ascertayneth the truth and supplyeth unto us the want of that other law. So that in morall actions, divine lawe helpeth exceedingly the law of reason to guide mans life, but in supernaturall it alone guideth.45

It is important to observe here that Hooker’s ‘divine law’ is a category which embraces both the Gospel and the moral law revealed in scripture. Owing to the primacy of the Gospel-law antinomy in his theology, Luther never applies the terminology of ‘law’ to the teaching of the Gospel. The antinomy is affirmed by Hooker, but within the broader categorical distinction between revealed law and natural law. Thus in ‘supernaturall actions’ the revealed word alone is a guide. In the mystical realm of salvation, reason is incapacitated, and for Hooker ‘without belief all other things are as nothing.’46 Within the order of creation, on the other hand, natural law rules. As a result of man’s fallen condition, the law of nature

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On Melanchthon, see p. 67 below. I am grateful to Dr Niels Gregerson for drawing my attention to the doctrine of the tertius usus legis in the Formula of Concord of 1577, the Solid Declaration, Article VI. ‘The Third Function of the Law’ in The Book of Concord: The Confession sof the evangelical Lutheran Church, trans. and ed. Theodore G. Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959), pp. 563–8. See especially p. 565: ‘But in this life Christians are not renewed perfectly and completely. For although their sins are covered up through the perfect obedience of Christ, so that they are not reckoned to believers for damnation, and although the Holy Spirit has begun the mortification of the Old Adam and their renewal in the spirit of their minds, nevertheless the Old Adam still clings to their nature and to all its internal and external powers … Hence, because of the desires of the flesh the truly believing, elect, and reborn children of God require in this life not only the daily teaching and admonition, warning and threatening of the law, but frequently the punishment of the law as well, to egg them on so that they follow the Spirit of God.’ Robert Kolb, Confessing the Faith: Reformers Define the Church, 1530–1580 (1991). See Commentary on Galatians 5:14, WA 45(2).66,67; LW 27.53; Commentary on the Gospel of John, LW 22.150. Lawes I.16.5; 1:139.3–10. Lawes I.11.5,6; 1:118.11–30.

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requires some kind of coercive ‘public regiment.’47 By means of this political use of law in the external realm, it is possible, says Hooker, to furnish ourselves with ‘a life fit for the dignitie of man.’48 On this level, namely the order of creation, the discourse has every appearance of humanism. At the same time, however, the need for such external regiment is taken as evidence of God’s remedy for human depravity (remedium peccati). The external order of political law and the revelation of a supernatural way of salvation both arise out of disruption of the natural order. In a manner similar to the Christian individual, the Church also falls within the distinction of the two orders of creation and redemption. As the mystical body of Christ, the Church is altogether above natural knowing. Yet in so far as the Church falls within the external, political realm it too is subject to the directives of positive human law and thus ultimately to the authority of the Christian prince as the ‘uncommanded commander’ in the external, political realm.49 Throughout his discussion of the authority of natural law in the government of the visible Church, Hooker depends upon the dialectical paradigm established by Luther in the doctrine of the two kingdoms. Philipp Melanchthon Melanchthon observes in his Loci Communes that the law of nature is a ‘divine light’ implanted in human intellect and agreeable in content with the law of Moses.50 Reason would be incapable of marvelling at the glorious works of the creator if it lacked what Melanchthon calls a preconception or ‘proleptic’ knowledge of God.51 Indeed the divine image shines in man as the knowledge of God; this similitude to the divine mind shows itself in a capacity for moral discrimina47 48 49 50

51

Lawes I.10.4; 1:100.11. Lawes I.10.1; 1:96.10. See chapter 4 of this volume for a discussion of Hooker’s doctrine of the Church in the context of patristic Christological discourse. ‘De lege naturae,’ Loci Communes Theologici, p. 139: ‘Lumen divinum in mentibus non exstinguendum est … ergo vera definitio legis naturae: legem naturae esse notitiam legis divinae naturae hominis insitam; ideo enim dicitur homo ad imaginem Dei conditus esse, quia in eo lucebat imago, hoc est, notitia Dei, et similitudo quaedam mentis divinae, id est discrimen honestorum et turpium … ’ For an interpretation of Melanchthon’s view of natural law and its possible influence on Calvin, see Clemens Bauer, ‘Melanchthons naturrechtslehre,’ Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 42 (1951): 64–100. Philipp Melanchthon, Römerbrief-Kommentar 1532, ed. Rolf Schäfer, in Melanchthons Werke in Auswahl (Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1965), pp. 71–2: ‘Quamquam enim, ut postea dicit, mens ratiocinatur aliquid de Deo ex consideratione mirabilium eius operum in universa natura rerum, tamen hunc syllogismum ratio non haberet, nisi etiam Deus notitiam kai prolepsin indidisset mentibus nostris.’ Cf. Loci Communes, p. 138: ‘Philosophi hoc lumen vocant notitiam principiorum, vocant ÎÔ›Ó·˜ âÓÓÔ›·˜ ηd ÚÔÏ‹„ÂȘ; ac vulgaris divisio nota est, alia esse principia speculabilia … ’

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tion which is, of course, dependent upon a knowledge of the natural law.52 Thus the natural knowledge of God and practical wisdom are bound tightly together. Melanchthon extends Luther’s doctrine of law to include a tertius usus whereby the law, natural or revealed, serves as a permanent instruction for holiness to those justified by faith.53 Hooker adheres to this third use of the law in his insistence upon the necessity of the ethical regeneration of sanctifying righteousness while, at the same time, he continues to uphold the original distinction between the usus civilis and the usus theologicus.54 It has been suggested that Melanchthon stresses the pedagogical function of the law in the ethical realm owing to the humanistic bent of his thought.55 It is important to recognize that Melanchthon’s humanism, like Hooker’s, is erected on the foundation of the distinction between the two orders or kingdoms. In the context of the tertius usus legis, the study of Aristotle’s Ethics becomes an explicitly Christian undertaking; there is a communication of idioms (comunicatio idiomatum), as it were, between the realms of Gospel and law. The third use of the law emphasizes the performance of good works as the fruit of faith and thus allows for a restoration or baptism, as it were, of pagan moral science. Hooker’s frequent appeals to the authority of pagan practical wisdom, whether it be to Aristotle, Sophocles, Cicero or to later Christian Neoplatonic sources, can be better understood in the light of Melanchthon’s tertius usus legis. There is no need whatever for Hooker to abandon the theological ground of the magisterial reformers in order to reconcile the practice of Christian virtue with natural law. Lee Gibbs has observed that Hooker follows Aquinas in defining law as ‘something pertaining to practical reason.’56 It can be said equally fairly that Melanchthon and Luther follow Aquinas in their account of practical reason according to the doctrine of the usus civilis. Heinrich Bullinger Heinrich Bullinger, the reformed leader of Zurich, interprets natural law chiefly in terms of the conscience. In his exegesis of Romans 2:15 in the Decades,57 Bullinger 52

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Similarly for Hooker human rationality and volition are the highest expression of the divine likeness in creation: ‘man being made according to the likenes of his maker resembleth him also in the maner of working; so that whatsoever we worke as men, the same we doe wittingly worke and freely … ’ Lawes I.7.2; 1:77.20–23. Loci Communes, p. 127: ‘Although God now dwells in these [believers] and gives them light, and causes them to be conformed to him, nevertheless, all such happens through God’s word, and the law in this life is necessary, that saints may know and have a testimony of the works which please God. Since all men in this mortal life carry in themselves much weakness and sin, daily penance before God ought to increase, and we ought even more to lament our false security and impurity.’ See my discussion of Hooker’s soteriology in chapter 4. Karl-Heinz zur Mühlen, OER, p. 406. FLE 6(1):495. These collected sermons were formally authorized by Archbishop Whitgift for the theological study of the clergy of England in 1586, not long after Hooker’s appoint-

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maintains that God has placed the law of nature in the mind in order to instruct it and direct it in its judgement between good and evil. This law also imprints general principles of religion and justice on the soul in such a fashion that they can be said to be born with us, and are therefore naturally in us. Like Luther and Melanchthon, Bullinger insists on the virtual identity of content and purpose of the natural law and the moral law revealed in scripture.58 The fault of the Gentiles lies not so much in ignorance of God’s purposes but rather in a perverse turning away from the knowledge they possess. Thus the will rather than the intellect is at the root of their failure to observe the law.59 For Bullinger the disobedience of the Gentiles to the law ‘engraven in our minds’ is expressed typically in the worship of the ‘graven image.’ By virtue of its failure to recognize the true imago dei in the rational soul, idolatry is a violation of the natural law as well as the revealed law of scripture. Hooker regards idolatry in much the same way. As does Bullinger, he sees it as exemplary of ‘the like kind of generall blindnes [which] hath prevailed against the manifest laws of reason.’ Prevalence of ‘the grosser kind of heathenish idolatrie’ is evidence of the inherent weakness of human reason and the consequent need for perpetual divine aid.60 John Calvin and the Duplex Cognitio Dei In the 1559 edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin formulates a classic summary of the twofold knowledge of God: It is one thing to perceive that God our Maker supports us by his power, rules us by his providence, fosters us by his goodness, and visits us with all kinds of blessings, and another thing to embrace the grace of reconciliation offered to us in Christ. Since, then, the Lord first appears, as well in the creation of the world as in the general doctrine of

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ment to the Mastership of the Temple. See W.P.M. Kennedy, Elizabethan Episcopal Administration (London: Alcuin Club, 1924), vol. 2, pp. 45–6. Heinrich Bullinger, The Decades, 1.2:194,195: ‘The law of nature is an instruction of the conscience, and, as it were, a certain direction placed by God himself in the minds and hearts of men, to teach them what they have to do and what to echew. And the conscience, verily, is the knowledge, judgement, and reason of a man … and this reason proceedeth from God … Wherefore the law of nature [is so called] because God hath imprinted or engraven in our minds some knowledge, and certain general rinciples of religion, justice, and goodness, which, because they be grafted in us and born together with us, do therefore seem to be naturally in us … We understand that the law of nature, not the written law, but that which is graffed in man, hath the same office that the written law hath.’ See Edward A. Dowey, ‘Heinrich Bullinger’s Theology: Thematic, Comprehensive, Schematic,’ in Calvin Studies V, ed. John Leith (Davidson, NC: Davidson College, 1990), pp. 41–60 and John T. McNeill, ‘Natural Law in the Teaching of the Reformers,’ pp. 178, 179. See David C. Steinmetz, ‘Calvin and the Natural Knowledge of God,’ in Calvin in Context (1995), pp. 26–8. Lawes I.8.11; 1:91.25–93.16.

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This distinction of the duplex cognitio dei proves to be most significant in the systematic ordering of Calvin’s theology and is highly influential in later reformed doctrine as well.62 In another well-known passage in the Institutes, he observes that the knowledge of God is naturally implanted in the human mind.63 It is interesting to note that, unlike most discussions of this question by the magisterial reformers, Calvin does not appeal here to the Epistle to the Romans. He refers rather to two passages where Cicero argues that knowledge of the divine is engraved on the minds of men.64 Employing language similar to Cicero’s, although to a different purpose, Paul argues at the outset of his Epistle to the Romans that God reveals himself to the Gentiles through the works of creation (Rom. 1:20) and that his law is inscribed upon their hearts (scriptum in cordibus suis).65 In his commentary on this passage, Calvin interprets the created world as a mirror (speculum) of the invisible deity and man himself as the principal image 61

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John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Inst.) 1.2.1. For most of this century there has been considerable controversy over the right interpretation of Calvin’s natural theology; whether Calvin had a natural theology at all has even been doubted. For a succinct account of this controversy and a summary of the extensive body of critical literature, see William Klempa, ‘Calvin and Natural Law,’ Calvin Studies IV, ed. John H. Leith and W. Stacy Johnson (Davidson, NC: Davidson College, 1988), pp. 1–23. See Edward A. Dowey, The Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology (1954, 1994). For an interesting discussion of the history of this motif in reformed theology, see Richard A. Muller, ‘“Duplex cognitio dei” in the Theology of Early Reformed Orthodoxy,’ Sixteenth Century Journal X, 2 (1979): 51–61. Inst. 1.3.1: ‘That there exists in the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of Deity, we hold to be beyond dispute, since God himself, to prevent any man from pretending ignorance, has endued all men with some idea of his Godhead, the memory of which he constantly renews and occasionally enlarges, that all to a man, being aware that there is a God, and that he is their maker, may be condemned by their own conscience when they neither worship him nor consecrate their lives to his service … But, as a heathen [Cicero] tells us, there is no nation so barbarous, no race so brutish, as not to be imbued with the conviction that there is a God.’ Compare Lawes V.1.3; 2:20.4–9 for the concept of the ‘semen religionis.’ Inst. 1.3.1. The two passages cited from Cicero’s De Natura Deorum are as follows: ‘Intelligi necesse est deos, quoniam insitas eorum vel potius innatas cognitiones habemus. … Quae hobis natura informationem deorum ipsorum dedit, eadem insculpsit in mentibus ut eos aeternos et beatos haberemus’ (I.17). The second reference is from Bk. II.4: ‘Itaque inter omnes omnium gentium summa constat; omnibus enim innatum est, et in animo quasi insculptum esse deos’ [my italics]. Calvin also cites the ‘Christian Cicero’ Lactantius, Divinarum Institutionum, liber III.10, Opera (Antwerp: Christopher Plantin, 1570). Compare Hooker, Lawes I.8.3; 1:84.7–16 and III.9.3; 1: 238.25–239.4.

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in which the divine majesty shines forth.66 Calvin asserts furthermore that human reason is naturally able to discern eternal power and divinity through a contemplation of the splendour of the natural order with the rational creature as its principal glory.67 The proper image of the divine glory is displayed in the rational human soul. Calvin quotes Ovid’s Metamorphoses: While the mute creation downward bend Their sight, and to their earthly mother tend, Man looks aloft, and with erected eyes, Beholds his own hereditary skies.68

In yet another passage in the second book of the Institutes, Calvin weighs the power of human reason with respect to actual knowledge of the kingdom of God. He concludes that pagan spiritual discernment is limited and ‘men otherwise most ingenious are blinder than moles.’69 While they can have no knowledge of God’s paternal favour, and hence of salvation, nevertheless they are able to attain to a certain limited knowledge of God. To know God as Father requires the revelation of the divine law, whereas the divine existence, eternity and power are accessible to the unaided power of human reason. There is a natural knowledge of God as maker of all things but not as redeemer.70 Thus the Christian is simultaneously subject to the conditions of blindness and sight. There are also two ethical concepts of nature at work here. On the one side, human nature is endowed with a sense of natural justice and equity which is not completely obliterated by sin, although it is severely impaired.71 As a consequence of the usus civilis legis fallen

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See Calvin, Commentaries on the Epistle to the Romans, trans. and ed. John Owen, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1948), pp. 67 ff. See especially the comment on Rom. 1:20: ‘God is in himself invisible; but as his majesty shines forth in his works and in his creatures everywhere, men ought in these to acknowledge him, for they clearly set forth their Maker: and for this reason the Apostle in his Epistle to the Hebrews says, that this world is a mirror, or representation of invisible things. He [Paul] does not mention all the particulars which may be thought to belong to God; but he states, that we can arrive at the knowledge of his eternal power and divinity; for he who is the framer of all things, must necessarily be without beginning and from himself … ’ On Calvin’s appeal to nature and natural law see John I. Hesselink, Jr, Calvin’s Concept of Law, Princeton Theological Monograph Series, vol. 30 (Allison Park, PA, 1992), pp. 56–67 and Susan E. Schreiner, Theatre of His Glory: Nature and the Natural Order in the Thought of John Calvin, Studies in Historical Theology 3 (1991), pp. 73–95. Inst. 1.15.2. The translation is John Dryden’s. Inst. 2.2.19. Inst. 2.2.18. See also 2.2.22: ‘If the Gentiles have the righteousness of the law naturally engraven on their minds, we certainly cannot say that they are altogether blind as to the rule of life.’ Inst. 2.2.13.

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man is able to discern the natural law and is thereby able to construct an ethicalpolitical order even though this external observance of the law can accomplish nothing whatever in the economy of salvation.72 On the other side, from the viewpoint of the usus theologicus, man as fallen is utterly blind to the knowledge of God’s kingdom and his fatherly grace. The mysteries of redemption can be apprehended solely by the illumination of divine grace.73 Calvin’s account of the twofold knowledge of God adheres closely to Luther’s distinction between the orders of creation and redemption. In his exposition of the moral law, Calvin maintains that the revealed law of the Decalogue is naturally inscribed on every heart74 such that the law of scripture and the natural law are united in content.75 Calvin goes even further than Melanchthon in upholding the third use of the law. For Calvin it is the principal use and is most closely connected with law’s proper end.76 The Pauline abrogation of the law by no means abolishes law simply; rather the law loses its power of constraining the conscience.77 In the regeneration of the will, the law becomes a teacher and commander. This restoration or ‘baptism’ of law in the third use has significant consequences for the role of natural law. Thus growth in ethical virtue, or sanctification as it is called, is achieved in large part through the study of the moral law revealed by both nature and scripture.78 Hooker and the Authority of Magisterial Reform In A Learned Sermon on the Nature of Pride,79 Hooker defines law in general as follows: … an exact rule wherby humane actions are measured.80 The rule to measure and judge them by is the law of god … Under the name of law we must comprehend not only that

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Edward Dowey, The Knowledge of God, p. 63. Inst. 2.2.20. Inst. 2.8.1. Inst. 4.20.14,15. Inst. 2.7.12. Inst. 2.7.14: ‘Christ came not to destroy the law but to fulfill it, that until heaven and earth pass away, not one jot or tittle shall remain unfulfilled.’ See Harro Höpfl, The Christian Polity of John Calvin (Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 179–84 and John Leith, ‘Creation and Redemption: Law and Gospel in the Theology of John Calvin,’ (1966), pp. 150, 151. The Sermon on Pride is one of seven tractates by Hooker first published postumously in 1612. It has recently been reedited and published in FLE, volume 5, ed. Laetitia Yeandle with commentary by Egil Grislis (1990), pp. 309–61. For a textual introduction see FLE 5: 299–308. Compare with the definition of law in general at Lawes I.2.1; 1:58.26–29: ‘That which doth assigne unto each thing the kinde, that which doth moderate the force and power, that which doth appoint the forme and measure of working, the same we tearme a Lawe.’ See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia Iae, q. 90, art. 1, reply 1 in The

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which god hath written in tables and leaves but that which nature hath ingraven in the hartes of men. Els how should those heathen which never had bookes but heaven and earth to look upon be convicted of perversnes? But the Gentils which had not the law in books had saith the apostle theffect of the law written in their hartes. Rom. 2.81

The passage quoted from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans is the crucial scriptural text cited by Hooker in support of the authority of natural law.82 This is hardly surprising, since Romans 2:15 is the locus classicus for virtually all discussion of natural law throughout the history of Christian thought.83 It is important here to note the derivation of the natural law. In this definition Hooker represents the idea of law as fundamentally threefold. First, there is the law of God as simply given. Elsewhere Hooker identifies this undifferentiated principle of law as the rule ‘which God hath eternallie purposed himself in all his works to observe.’84 This ‘eternal law,’ as he calls it, is the ‘highest welspring and fountaine’ out of which all other kinds of law proceed.85 Strictly interpreted, the eternal law itself is ‘laid up in the bosom of God’ altogether above human understanding and our safest eloquence concerning it is silence.86 With marked apophatic emphasis, Hooker

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Treatise on Law, p. 119: ‘lex sit regula quaedam et mensura, dicitur dupliciter esse in aliquo. Uno modo sicut in mensurante et regulante; et quia hoc est proprium rationis idea per hunc modum lex est in ratione sola. Alio modo sicut in regulato et mensurato; et sic lex est in omnibus quae inclinantur in aliquid ex aliqua lege … ’ The same formulation of law as ‘measure’ is adopted by Heinrich Bullinger, Decades, 1.2:209. FLE 5:312. Rom. 2:14,15: ‘For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the means while accusing or else excusing one another.’ Hooker refers to this passage frequently. See Lawes I.8.3; 1:84.7–16, I.16.5; 1:138.27–139.8, II.8.6; 1:190.11–16, III.2.1; 1:207.14–21, III.7.2; 1:217.30– 218.3 where he refers to the ‘edicts of nature,’ III.9.3; 1:238.31–239.4 and V.1.3; 2:20.4–9 for the concept of the ‘semen religionis.’ On this see J. Bohatec, Calvin und das Recht (Feudinger: Buchdruckerei u. Verlagsanstalt, 1934), p. 5. Lawes I.3.1; 1:163.7. That is, the ‘fountaine of wisdom,’ Lawes II.1.4; 1:147.24 and ‘the author fountain and cause of our justice’ in A Learned Sermon on the Nature of Pride, FLE 5:341.3– 9. Lawes I.3.1; 1:63.15 and I.2.5; 1:62.10. Hooker adopts the approach of Neoplatonic apophatic theology in his insistence upon the unknowability of the divine simplicity: ‘Dangerous it were for the feeble braine of man to wade farre into the doings of the most High, whome although to knowe be life, and joy to make mention of his name: yet our soundest knowledge is to know that we know him not as in deed he is, neither can know him: and our safest eloquence concerning him is our silence, when we confesse without confession that his glory is inexplicable, his greatnes above our capacitie and reach.’ Lawes I.2.2; 1:59.12–19.

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avers that ‘we confesse without confession that his glory is inexplicable.’87 At the same time, however, there is a cataphatic need to draw attention to the fact that the eternal law ‘reads itself’ to the world. Thus there is the paradox of keeping this invisible, unknowable law ‘alwayes before our eyes.’88 The eternal law, though unknowable in itself, is the highest source of all other kinds of law and is made known to us under two primary aspects: on the one hand, it is revealed by God’s word written in the scriptures and, on the other, it is manifest in creation and known by the law inscribed on human hearts by nature. These two primary modes or summa genera whereby the one eternal law is made accessible to human understanding are termed respectively by Hooker the divine law and the law of nature.89 Although we are ‘neither able nor worthy to open and looke into’ the book of the eternal law, the books of scripture and nature reveal its contents in a manner adapted to our finite capacity.90 Hooker is certainly not alone among Reformation theologians in holding that the knowledge of God, and thus also of the eternal law, is attainable by means of both scripture and reason. It is furthermore a commonplace of the exegesis of the reformers that the twofold obligation to honour God and deal justly with one’s neighbour is taught by both natural and divine law. The interplay between the natural and the revealed knowledge of God gives shape to the magisterial reformers’ complex, dialectical approach to the authority of natural law; and the theory of natural law in turn constitutes a critical link between theology and politics in their thought as well. Hooker’s account of the twofold manifestation of the eternal law through the summa genera of natural law and divine law, the duplex gubernatio dei,91 gives practical expression as it were to Calvin’s epistemological motif of the duplex cognitio dei. Just as for Calvin the Lord reveals himself both through the creation of the world and by the revelation of the redeeming grace of Christ, so also Hooker’s eternal law manifests itself in the realm of creation as natural law and in the realm of redemption as divine law. While the eternal law in itself ‘cannot be compassed with that wit and those senses which are our owne,’ it is nevertheless manifest in the ‘glorious workes of nature.’92 In Hooker’s claim that the pagan philosophers were able to attain to a knowledge of the nature of God and of his law, there is a distinct echo of Calvin’s natural theology:

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Lawes I.2.2;1:59.17. Lawes I.16.2; 1:136.4–15. See Lawes I.1.3; 1:58.11–19. See I.8.3; 1:84.9 and I.8. passim for the identification of natural law with the law or light of reason. Compare III.11.8; 1:253.15–20. See Lawes I.2.5; 1:62.10; I.2.2; 1:59.12–20; and V.56.5; 2:237.18–25. ‘Now amongst the Heathens which had noe bookes whereby to know God besides the volumes of heaven and earth … ’ Grace and Free Will, §12, FLE 4:111.21–23. Hooker employs this expression in his treatment of the divine operations ad extra in Notes toward a Fragment on Predestination, Trinity College Dublin, MS 364, folio 80, printed in FLE 4: 83–97; see especially pp. 86, 87. Lawes I.11.5; 1:116.21.

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the wise and learned among the verie Heathens themselves, have all acknowledged some first cause, whereupon originallie the being of all things dependeth. Neither have they otherwise spoken of that cause, then as an Agent, which knowing what and why it worketh, observeth in working a most exact order or lawe … all confesse in the working of that first cause, that counsell is used, reason followed, a way observed, that is to say, constant order and law is kept, wherof it selfe must needs be author unto itselfe.93

For Hooker, as for Luther, Melanchthon, Bullinger and Calvin, the foundation of a theological reflection on ethics is the twofold knowledge of God. Knowledge of the creator is not to be confused with knowledge of the redeemer, yet a complete account of Christian virtue demands both species of knowing. Hooker’s credentials as a reformer stand forth when he maintains that only through the supernatural revelation of the scriptures is it possible to hope for a participation of the divine nature. Scripture alone can reveal the supernatural way of salvation: The light of nature is never able to finde out any way of obtayning the reward of blisse, but by performing exactly the duties and workes of righteousnes. From salvation therefore and life all flesh being excluded this way, behold how the wisedome of God hath revealed a way mysticall and supernaturall … concerning that faith hope and charitie without which there can be no salvation; was there ever any mention made saving only in that lawe which God him selfe hath from heaven revealed?94

Only by divine grace can the soul attain to a saving knowledge whereby it might participate in the divine nature and ‘live as it were the life of God.’95 Owing to man’s wilful rejection of the order of creation, the natural law by itself is insufficient to secure the unity of the cosmos under God. With a marked Augustinian emphasis, Hooker notes that fallen humanity continues to possess a natural desire to be happy,96 and thus to be reunited with the eternal source of order; yet, on account of original sin, man is ‘inwardly obstinate, rebellious and averse from all obedience unto the sacred Lawes of his nature … in regard of his depraved mind little better then a wild beast.’97 Thus observance of the natural law is no longer effectual in preserving the divinely constituted order of creation. According to Aristotle ‘it is an axiome of nature that naturall desire cannot utterly be frustrate.’98 Reason cannot escape the predicament of desiring a participation of the

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Lawes I.2.3; 1:59.33–60.14. See page 49 above. Lawes I.11.5,6; 1:118.11–15,119.12–15. Lawes I.11.2; 1:112.20. Lawes I.11.4; 1:114.8–10. Lawes I.10.1; 1:96.26–29. Lawes I.11.4; 1:114.15. Hooker cites the Proemium of Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. See Thomas Aquinas, Metaphysicorum Aristotelis expositio in duodecim libros (Turin: Marietti, 1950), p. 6. That nature does nothing in vain is a central doctrine of Aristotle’s Physics. See De Caelo, 271a34. See Comm., FLE 6 (I), 513.

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divine nature while, at the same time, being constitutionally incapable of finding its way to the consummation of its own deepest longing.99 While nature demands a ‘more divine perfection,’100 the means whereby this perfection is attained cannot themselves be natural. Thus the redemption or mystical ‘return’ to God of all creation can only be by supernatural means. Throughout his discourse on the duplex gubernatio dei Hooker adheres strictly to the magisterial reformers’ dialectical exposition of the two realms of creation and redemption and their respective uses of the law. In Hooker’s view, strife within the Elizabethan Church over constitutional forms ultimately stems from disagreement over the interpretation of the proper relation between the two summa genera of law, especially with respect to the precise delineation of their proper spheres of authority. Epistemologically the struggle turns on the precise manner of interpreting the proper functions of natural and revealed theology. Hooker sees the debate over the ecclesiastical constitution in terms logically linked to the duplex cognitio dei, and thus to one of the crucial distinctions of reformed theology. In this approach to the question of law he follows a pattern of discourse already well established by other magisterial reformers. In A Learned Sermon on the Nature of Pride he acknowledges the difficulty of making the distinction between the ‘waie of nature’ and the ‘waie of grace.’101 For Hooker, this is the great question of sixteenthcentury theological discourse: ‘the want of exact distinguishing between these two waies [viz. of nature and grace] and observing what they have common what peculiar hath bene the cause of the greatest part of that confusion whereof christianity at this daie laboureth.’102 The question whether Hooker’s theology exemplifies a conjunctive rather than a disjunctive view of the relation between grace and nature is a great deal more complicated than twentieth-century criticism has frequently allowed. As with the thought of the Reformation theologians we have considered, Hooker’s position is dialectically complex. In his theology, as in theirs, there is simultaneously disjunction and conjunction in the relation between the two kingdoms, the two kinds of discourse and the two ways of righteousness. The knowledge of God as creator must be kept distinct from the knowledge of God as redeemer; yet these two forms, although distinct, are by no means separable, and thus they cannot be denoted as simply ‘disjunctive.’ By analogy, the natural law and the revealed law of scripture are distinct modes or aspects of the eternal law, yet they are nonetheless inseparable in origin. Both are expressions of the one eternal law. The orders of nature and grace are very clearly distinguished by the magisterial reformers, Hooker included. Yet these 99

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The classic discussion of this predicament is Augustine’s Confessions. See the account of the ‘natural weight’ of the soul in Conf. XIII.ix.10, 11 (Oxford University Press, 1991). See Neelands, ‘Scripture, Reason and “Tradition”,’ RHC, pp. 83–85. Pride, 5:313.7. Pride, 5:313.19–23. For further discussion by Hooker of the relation of nature and grace, see the Dublin Fragment on Grace and Free Will, FLE 4: 101–13.

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distinct orders or realms of law are understood to be united in the simplicity of their common divine source as well as in our knowledge of them. For all of the magisterial reformers whose theology we have considered, knowledge of God is granted through a contemplation of both the splendour of creation and the written word of the scriptures. For Hooker, just as for Luther, Calvin and the others, there is necessarily a conjunction of the orders of grace and nature, both in their divine author and in the souls of rational creatures. To uphold the doctrine of sola scriptura is not to denigrate the authority of the light of reason. Hooker can be taken as speaking for the principles of these reformers collectively when he states: Injurious we are unto God, the Author and giver of humane capacity, judgement and wit, when because of some things wherein he precisely forbiddeth men to use their own inventions, we take occasion to disauthorize and disgrace the works which he doth produce by the hand, either of nature or of grace in them. We offer contumely, even unto him, when we scornfully reject what we list without any other exception then this, the brain of man hath devised it.103

In the marginal notes penned on his own copy of A Christian Letter104 and in the incomplete theological tractates which comprise the beginning of a formal response,105 we see clearly that the most pressing theological question Hooker faced was the need to justify continuity with the natural law tradition within the limits of Protestant orthodoxy. In one of his comments scrawled on his copy of A Christian Letter, Hooker invokes ‘Calvins judgment of philosophie’ in a letter to Martin Bucer: As truth is most precious, so all men confess it to be so. And yet, since God alone is the source of all good, you must not doubt, that whatever truth you anywhere meet with, proceeds from Him, unless you would be doubly ungrateful to Him; it is in this way you have received the word descended from heaven. For it is sinful to treat God’s gifts with contempt; and to ascribe to man what is peculiarly God’s is a still greater impiety. Philosophy is, consequently, the noble gift of God, and those learned men who have

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Lawes VII.11.10; 1:210.27–211.6. Compare Calvin, Inst. 2.2.15, where he argues that to despise the admirable light of truth displayed in the profane authors is to insult their divine creator and giver. See John Booty’s introduction to ‘Hooker’s Marginal Notes,’ FLE 4: xxviii–xxxiii. The autograph notes on ACL are transcribed from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, MS 215b. Hooker spent the short remainder of his life writing a response to the criticisms contained in ACL. He did not live to see his answer published. The Dublin Fragments on Grace and Free Will, Grace and the Sacraments, and The tenth Article touching on Predestination (FLE 4:81–167) constitute a portion of his intended though unfinished reply to ACL. See especially FLE 4:103.9–24, 104.2–9, 105.18– 106.4. The copy texts for the Dublin Fragments, Trinity College, Dublin, MSS 121 and 364, folio 80, were first published in Keble II: 537–97.

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Hooker’s appeal to Calvin is intended as a vindication of continuity with the tradition of natural law theory by an authority acceptable to his disciplinarian Puritan critics. In this he seeks to identify his own theology with the magisterial reformers’ repudiation of the biblical literalism and exclusivism of the radical Reformation. Consistently with his wider apologetic aim, Hooker demonstrates to the disciplinarian opponents of the Elizabethan Settlement that vilification of the practical reason upon which the ecclesiastical constitution rests is in fact at odds with Protestant orthodoxy as interpreted by these magisterial reformers. Here I have argued that, together with Luther, Melanchthon, Bullinger and Calvin, Hooker maintains an orthodox, dialectical balance between the claims of natural law and the doctrine of sola scriptura, each within its proper sphere. Indeed the law of nature is to be upheld as an indispensable instrument in theological discourse for reasons which Hooker demonstrates on the basis of a reformed interpretation of the scriptures.

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Calvin, Letters, ed. Jules Bonnet and trans. David Constable, 2 volumes (Edinburgh: Thomas Constable, 1855–57), 2:198,199; Epistolarum et responsorum (Lausanne: Excudebat Franciscus le Preux, 1576), pp. 179, 180; CR, 48:530. The attribution to Calvin is not entirely certain. This passage from the letter is quoted by John Booty in his commentary on ACL, FLE 4:65.11–12. Compare Lawes VII.11.10; 1:210.27–211.6.

Chapter 6

Christ and the Church: a ‘Chalcedonian’ Ecclesiology

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For as much as there is no union of God with man without that meane betweene both which is both, it seemeth requisite [to] consider how God is in Christ, then how Christ is in us.2

In the dedicatory preface to the fifth book of his treatise Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, Richard Hooker remarks that ‘the waightiest conflicts the Church hath had were those which touched the head, the person of our Saviour Christ, and the next of importance those questions which are at this daie [that is, the period of the Reformation and its aftermath] betweene us and the Church of Rome about the actions of the body of the church of God … ’3 The great actions of the Church disputed in the sixteenth century have to do principally with the manner and the means of human participation in God’s own life.4 The communication of God’s grace to humanity was opened up to rigorous scrutiny in Luther’s formulation of the doctrine of justification by faith alone. The doctrine of the Church was radically recast as a logical consequence of the rethinking of the doctrine of salvation.5 Furthermore, the soteriology and the ecclesiology of the Reformation are intimately linked to that ‘weightier conflict’ touching the manner of the union of God and man in one Christ. Indeed Chalcedonian Christological orthodoxy provides a governing paradigm for Hooker along with other magisterial reformers in their approach to the doctrines of salvation and the Church. 1

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This essay was delivered as a paper at the seventeenth Atlantic Theological Conference in Fredericton, New Brunswick in June 1997 and later published in a quatercentenary collection edited by Gerald Bray as ‘The Paradigm of Chalcedonian Christology in Richard Hooker’s Discourse on Grace and the Church,’ Churchman, vol. 114 (Spring, 2000): 22–39. Lawes V.50.3; 2:228.22–209.1. Lawes V. Dedication §3; 2:2.15–19. Hooker is of course referring in the first instance to the Christological controversies of the third and fourth centuries. He discusses at considerable length ‘the maner how God and man are united in one Christ’ in Lawes V.51.1.1–56.13; 2:209.8–244.25. For a clear account of Hooker’s polemic directed towards the Tridentine soteriology, see Egil Grislis, ‘Introduction to Commentary: Tractates and Sermons,’ FLE 5:634–41. That is to say, the principal theological question of the Reformation in Hooker’s estimation is properly soteriological. See P.D.L. Avis, The Church in the Theology of the Reformers, pp. 13–24. 79

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Hooker in particular is highly conscious of the importance of this link between Christology on the one hand and the doctrines of salvation and the Church on the other. As he points out in his introduction to a discussion of the sacraments, it is first necessary to consider how God is in Christ in order to consider how Christ is in us.6 According to his thoroughly Aristotelian formulation, For as to take away the first efficient of our being were to annihilate utterly our persons, so we cannot remove the last final cause of our working … something there must be desired for it selfe simplie and for no other … Nothing may be infinitely desired but that good which in deed is infinite, and no good is infinite but God: therefore he [is] our felicitie and blisse. If then we be blessed, it is by force of participation and conjunction with him … Then are we happy therefore when fully we injoy God, as an object wherein the powers of our soules are satisfied even with everlasting delight: so that although we be men, yet by being unto God united we live as it were the life of God.7

For Hooker, indeed as for the other magisterial reformers – Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon, Bullinger – the question of the manner and means of this complete union of souls with God is rooted ultimately in the interpretation of the cardinal doctrine ‘that God is in Christ by the personal incarnation of the Sonne who is very God.’8

Christology and the Doctrine of Salvation The logic of reformed soteriology appears, at least initially, paradoxical. How can the grace of justification leave man still in the condition of a sinner? How can there be a perfect and immediate imputation of Christ’s righteousness while, at the same time, the soul must acquire the virtues by degrees in an incremental progress towards sanctification? How do these two kinds of righteousness of the reformed theology of grace, namely justification and sanctification, remain wholly distinct and yet continue in unity both in their source, that is to say in Christ, and in the souls of Christian believers?9 For 6 ‘And for as much as there is no union of God with man without that meane betwene both which is both, it seemeth requisite that wee first consider how God is in Christ, then how christ is in us … ’ Lawes V.50.3; 2:208.22–209.1. 7 Lawes I.11.1; 1:111.23 … 112.20. For Aristotle, ‘to partake in the eternal and divine is the goal towards which all things strive.’ (De Anima, 2.4; 415b), qu. Booty, FLE 6: Comm. 2:234.33. 8 Lawes V.51.1; 2:209.4. 9 For a learned and useful general account of this pivotal doctrine of the Reformation see Alister E. McGrath’s magisterial study Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, vol. 2 ‘From 1500 to the present day’ (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 1–134. For discussion of Hooker’s soteriology, see Egil Grislis, ‘Introduction to Commentary,’ §5 Hooker’s Theology, FLE 5: 649–55. See also Philip Edgcumbe

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Hooker, this is no paradox, but rather the very consequence of the manner in which the human nature of Christ is joined to his divinity. The doctrine of the hypostatic union is represented by him as the objective means of salvation. As he observes: ‘There is cause sufficient why divine nature should assume human nature, that so God might be in Christ reconcilinge to him self the world.’10 For Hooker, the precise theological definition of the perfect union between the two natures is authoritatively defined by the orthodox Christology summarized at the Council of Chalcedon in 451.11 The so-called Chalcedonian definition had significant implications for the subsequent interpretation of the union between Christ and fallen humanity as defined by reformed soteriology. Hooker’s account of patristic Christological orthodoxy is succinct and concise; it is worth citing this summary at length: To gather therefore into one summe all that hetherto hath bene spoken touchinge this pointe, there are but fower thinges which concurre to make compleate the whole state of our Lord Jesus Christ, his deitie, his manhood, the conjunction of both, and the distinction of the one from the other beinge joyned in one. Fower principall heresies there are which have in those thinges withstood the truth, Arians by bendinge them selves against the deitie of Christ; Apollinarians by maiminge and misinterpretinge that which belongeth to his humane nature; Nestorians by rentinge Christ asunder and devidinge him into two persons; the followers of Eutiches by confoundinge in his person those natures which they should distinguish. Against these there have bene fower most famous ancient generall Councels, the Councel of Nice to define against the Arians, against Apollinarians the Councell of Constantinople, the Councel of Ephesus against Nestorians, against Eutichians the Chalcedon Councell. In fower words àÏË©á˜, ÙÂϤˆ˜, à‰È·ÈÚ¤Ùˆ˜, àÛ˘Á¯‡Ùˆ˜, truly, perfectly, indivisibly, distinctly; the first applyed to his beinge God, and the seconde to his beinge man, the third to his beinge of both one, and the fowrth to his still continuinge in that one both, wee may fullie by way of abridgment comprise whatsoever antiquitie hath at large handled either in declaration of Christian beliefe or in refutation of the foresaid heresies. Within the compasse of which fower heades I may trulie affirme, that all heresies, which touch but the person of Jesus Christ, whether they have risen in these later days, or in any age heretofore, may be with great facilitie brought to confine

Hughes, Faith and Works: Cranmer and Hooker on Justification (1982) and C. FitzSimons Allison, The Rise of Moralism: The Proclamation of the Gospel from Hooker to Baxter (1966). 10 Lawes V.51.3; 2:211.1. 11 See Lawes V.54.10; 2:226.22–227.18. On Hooker’s extensive use of patristic sources in the Lawes, see William P. Haugaard, ‘Introduction to Books II, III & IV,’ FLE 6(1):143–8 and John Booty, ‘Introduction to Book V,’ FLE 6(1):206. See also John K. Luoma, ‘Who Owns the Fathers? Hooker and Cartwright on the Authority of the Primitive Church,’ Sixteenth-Century Journal, 8 (1977): pp. 45–59 and Haugaard, ‘Renaissance Patristic Scholarship and Theology in Sixteenth-Century England,’ Sixteenth-Century Journal, 10 (1979): pp. 37–60. On Hooker’s adherence to the doctrine of the four great general councils of the early Church, see J.S. Marshall, Hooker and the Anglican Tradition, ch. 14.

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Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist them selves. Wee conclude therefore that to save the world it was of necessitie the Sonne of God should be thus incarnate, and that god should so be in Christ as hath bene declared.12

Following this summary of the Christological controversies of the early Church, Hooker devotes a substantial chapter to an explanation of the continuing integrity of both the human and divine natures such ‘that by the union of the one with the other nature in Christ there groweth neither gaine nor losse of essential properties in either.’13 Christ’s assumption of manhood does not transmute or abolish in any way the characteristics peculiar and essential to human nature. The union of the natures subsists in the category of ‘personhood’: The sequell of which conjunction of natures in the person of Christ is no abolishment of naturall properties apperteininge to either substance, no transition or transmigration thereof out of one substance into an other, finallie no such mutuall infusion as reallie causeth the same natuall operations or properties to be made common unto both substances, but whatsoever is naturall to deitie the same remayneth in Christ uncommunicated unto his manhood, and whatsoever naturall to manhood his deitie thereof is uncapable.14

Thus also in Christ’s soteriological union with fallen humanity, there is no abolition of the ‘naturall properties’ which constitute that nature.15 This doctrine is invoked by Hooker in his notes in the margin of A Christian Letter against the accusation that he upheld the doctrine of free will.16 The issue concerns the relation between divine grace and human free will. Hooker had argued in the first book of the Lawes that ‘there is in the will of man naturallie that freedome, whereby it is apt to take or refuse anie particular object, whatsoever being presented unto it.’17 In the margin of A Christian Letter Hooker penned a quick response: There are certaine woordes as Nature, Reason, Will and such like which whersoever you find named you suspect them presently as bugs wordes, because what they mean you doe not in deed as you ought apprehend. You have heard that mans Nature is

12 13 14 15

Lawes V.54.10; 2.226.22–227.15. Lawes V.53.1; 2:216.19–21. Lawes V.53.1; 2:216.22–29. Lawes V.56.9; 2:241.9–18. Compare A Learned Sermon on the Nature of Pride, FLE 5:326.25–327.6, where Hooker appeals to the doctrine of the ‘extra-Calvinisticum’ in order to uphold the distinction of natures maintained in the soul’s participation in Christ. ‘For are not wee and Christ personallie distinguished? Are we not locallie devided and severed each from other?’ On the ‘mutual participation which is betweene Christe and the Church of Christ in this present worlde,’ see John Booty, The Spirit of Anglicanism (1979), pp. 17–29. 16 FLE 4:17.16–19.16. 17 Lawes I.7.6; 1:79.27–29.

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corrupt his reason blind his will perverse. Whereupon under coulor of condemning corrupt nature you condemn nature and so in the rest [my italics].18

His response to this issue is developed in the Dublin Fragment on ‘Grace and Free Will.’19 Hooker asks ‘must the will cease to be itselfe because the grace of God helpeth it?’20 Just as Christ’s assumption of human nature does not destroy the essential properties belonging to that nature, so also grace, when communicated to fallen humanity, does not destroy the ‘naturall powers’ of the human soul. On the contrary, they are regenerated by this communication of grace. Thus, according to Hooker, Freedom of operation wee have by nature, butt the abilitie of vertuous operation by grace, because through sinne our nature hath taken that disease and weaknes, whereby of itselfe it inclineth only unto evil. The naturall powers and faculties therefore of mans minde are through our native corruption soe weakened and of themselves so averse from God, that without the influence of his special grace, they bring forth nothing in his sight acceptable, noe nott the blossoms or least budds that tende to the fruit of eternal life.21

The union between fallen humanity and Christ is consequently not a transmigration out of its own nature into the divine substance.22 According to the Chalcedonian Christological paradigm, the human is regenerated and sanctified by the grace of union. The reformation doctrine of the two kinds of righteousness is firmly grounded in this Christological model. By the grace of justification, the soul is ‘in Christ,’ and shares in his divine perfection; by the grace of sanctification, Christ works ‘in the soul’ and thus the human is brought by degrees to perfection in the life of virtue. Yet the soul and Christ must never be confused with one another in this account of soteriological union.23 Hooker’s brief rule concerning the ques-

18 FLE 4:17.22–29. Above this remark Hooker refers to ‘Dionys. p.338,’ a reference to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’s On the Divine Names, where evil is defined as the ‘deficiency of good.’ See note in FLE 4:193. According to Dionysius, ‘nothing in the world is utterly destitute of Good, then the Divine Providence is in all things, and nothing that exists can be without It.’ 19 FLE 4:101–13. See Egil Grislis, ‘The Role of Consensus in Richard Hooker’s Method of Theological Inquiry’ (1965), pp. 74–5. 20 FLE 4:101.6. 21 FLE 4:103.10–17. 22 As John Booty argues, ‘by “participation” Hooker does not mean fusion, absorption, or deification (©¤ˆÛȘ), nor does he refer to a casual relationship or kinship (Û˘ÓÁÂÓ›·).’ Rather it is a ‘“mysticall communion” (FLE 2:340.11) that involves the deification of human nature, not turning human nature into deity, but making our nature the Deity’s “owne inseparable habitation”.’ See the ‘Introduction to Book V,’ FLE 6(1): 198–9. 23 See Lawes V.56.9; 2:241.11–13 and 5.56.10; 2:242.17–26: ‘And because the divine substance of Christ is equallie in all, his human substance equallie distant from all, it

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tions about the union of natures in Christ thus provides a useful insight into the logic of his doctrine of grace: ‘of both natures there is a cooperation often, an association alwayes, but never any mutual participation whereby the properties of the one are infused into the other.’24 The doctrine of salvation poses a problem of mediation fundamentally analogous to that addressed by the Chalcedonian definition. The anthropological starting point for the reformers was the conviction of man’s total corruption and sinfulness, which was the consequence of the Fall. An infinite gulf was seen to divide an utterly depraved, fallen humanity from their infinitely righteous and perfect creator. The problem of salvation was understood to depend upon the problem of the ontological mediation between man and God across this gulf. Hooker’s account of this gulf in terms of the soul’s total depravity is unmistakably reformed: And sinne hath twoe measures whereby the greatnes therof is judged. The object, God against whome: and the subject, that creature in whome sinne is. By the one measure all sinne is infinit, because he is Infinite whome sinne offendeth: for which cause there is one eternall punishment due in justice unto all sinners … He leaveth us not as Adam in the hands of our own wills att once indued with abilitie to stand of our owne accord … because that abilitie is altogether lost [my italics].25

Hooker’s conviction of the soul’s complete unworthiness is wholly consistent with the usual reformed view. The problem of mediation is crucial. Conversely, the soul’s fulfilment, happiness and perfection is also, according to Hooker, infinite: ‘No good is infinite but only God: therefore he is our felicitie and blisse.’26 Salvation is nothing less than the bridging of the gulf between man’s infinite wickedness and God’s infinite goodness: ‘Then are we happie therefore when fully we injoy God, as an object wherein the powers of our soules are satisfied even with everlasting delight: so that although we be men, yet by being unto God united we live as it were the life of God.’27 How is this complete union of man with God accomplished? How do men come to ‘the participation of divine nature?’28 What constitutes the bridge and

24 25 26 27 28

appeareth that the participation of Christ wherein there are manie degrees and differences must needes consist in such effectes as beinge derived from both natures of Christ reallie into us are made our own, and wee by havinge them in us are trulie saide to have him from whome they come, Christ also more or lesse to inhabit and imparte him selfe as the graces are fewer or moe, greater or smaller, which reallie flowe into us from Christ.’ Lawes V.53.3; 2:218.20–219.3. Dublin Fragments, ‘The Tenth Article touching predestination,’ §31, FLE 4:140.8– 141.9. Lawes I.11.2; 1:112.11–12. Lawes I.11.2; 1:112.17–20. Lawes V.56.7; 2:238.18. See John Booty’s discussion of ‘The Concept of Participation’ in FLE 6(1):197–9.

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how is this mediation accomplished? Hooker’s treatment of this problem of soteriological mediation is radically Christocentric, and in this respect he is a close follower of the theological approach adopted by Calvin. The soul’s participation of the divine nature, according to Calvin, was objectively achieved in and through Christ’s assumption of human nature in the Incarnation.29 The mediation between man and God was possible solely by the God-man Christ.30 For Hooker and Calvin both, the soul’s participation in the divine nature was attained ‘by Christe alone.’31 In A Learned Discourse of Justification, Hooker argues forcibly for the doctrine of salvation by Christ alone.32 In that sermon, he is intent on a demonstration of ‘how the foundation of faith is overthrowne’33 by the requirement of virtuous works to the attainment of justifying righteousness: ‘Salvation only by Christe [solus Christus] is the true foundacion whereupon indeed Christianitye standeth.’34 This union of the soul with Christ is described as a ‘mysticall conjunction’: Wee are therefore in God through Christ eternallie accordinge to that intent and purpose whereby wee were chosen to be made his in this present world before the world it selfe was made … Wee are in Christ because he knoweth and loveth us even as partes of him selfe. No man actuallie is in him but they in whome he actuallie is. For he which hath not the Sonne of God hath not life.35

Our union with Christ, according to Hooker, is the wholly indispensable condition for our salvation. This immediate and ‘actuall incorporation’ (insitio in Christum) is the foundational principle of orthodox reformed soteriology.36 As Hooker observed in his tractate on ‘Grace and Free Will’ in the Dublin Fragments, ‘In Grace there is nothing of soe great difficultie as to define after what manner and measure it worketh.’37 The union may be viewed in two ways:

29 Inst. 2.12.1. Calvin speaks of the ‘insitio in Christum’ as the indispensable condition for the reception of the grace that Christ’s redemption has gained on our behalf. See Wendel, Calvin: The Origins and Development of his Religious Thought, pp. 234–42. 30 Wendel, Calvin, pp. 215–32; Inst. 2.12.1. Hooker, like Calvin, placed considerable emphasis on traditional Christological doctrine as defined by the four ecumenical councils of the ancient Church. Both divines also drew upon the patristic formulations of orthodox Christology in order to clarify various questions of ecclesiology and political theory in addition to those of soteriology. 31 Just. §31; 5:151.9–153.15 and Calvin, Inst. 3.1.1: ‘As long as we are apart from Christ and separated from him, all that he has done and suffered for the salvation of the human race is useless and of no importance.’ 32 Just., FLE 5:105–69. The discourse is a set of sermons on Habakkuk 1.4. 33 Just. §1; 5:105.1. 34 Just. §29; 5:149.20–22. 35 Lawes V.56.7; 2:238.18 … 239.8. 36 Lawes V.56.7; 2:238.30. For Hooker this ‘mysticall conjunction’ is a ‘real participation’ of Christ and a ‘real adoption into the fellowship of his Saintes in this present world.’ 37 FLE 4:111.32–33.

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‘Participation is that mutuall inward hold which Christ hath of us and wee of him, in such sort that ech possesseth other by waie of speciall interest propertie and inherent copulation.’38 The union of fallen humanity with Christ is viewed dialectically by Hooker in accord with the Chalcedonian Christological paradigm. On the one hand, there is union with Christ by virtue of God’s eternal decree. The soul is ‘in God through Christ eternallie accordinge to that intent and purpose whereby we were chosen to be made his in this present world before the world it selfe was made.’39 On the other hand, ‘our beinge in Christ by eternall foreknowledge saveth us not without our actuall and reall adoption into the fellowship of his Sainctes in this present world.’40 Hooker has here distinguished a twofold participation of grace. First, humanity is united to God through Christ beyond time: God therefore lovinge eternallie his Sonne, he must needes eternallie in him have loved and preferred before all others them which are spirituallie sithence descended and spronge out of him. These were in God as in theire Savior and not as in theire creator onlie. It was the purpose of his savinge goodnes, his savinge wisdome and his savinge power which inclined it selfe towardes them.41

Yet, ‘no man actuallie is in him but they in whome he actuallie is.’42 Christ dwells in us in order that we might dwell in him. Thus Hooker emphasizes the simultaneous union both in heaven beyond the limits of time (coram Deo) as well as here and now (coram hominibus). Thus, this initial analysis of the ‘mutuall participation’ between Christ and humanity reveals a tension between the realms of time and eternity which is characteristic of reformed soteriology. This tension of realms is built up further in Hooker’s analysis of the so-called ordo salutis, the order of salvation. The communication of grace to men is marked by important distinctions. Salvation is achieved in and through the unity of Christ’s person, yet this unity is ‘participated’ by the soul in clearly distinct modes: But we saie our salvation is by Christ alone therefore howsoever or whatsoever we add unto Christe in the matter of salvation we overthrowe Christe. Our case were very hard if this argumente so universally ment as it is proposed were sound and good. We ourselves do not teache Christe alone excluding our owne faith unto justeficacion, Christe alone excluding our owne workes unto sanctification, Christe alone excluding the one or the other as unnecessary unto salvation.43

38 Lawes V.56.1; 2:234.29–31. 39 Lawes V.56.7; 2:238.19–21; compare Calvin, Inst. 3.25.5: ‘Of those whom God has chosen as his children it is not said that he elected them in themselves, but in his Christ … ’ For a discussion of the Christocentric character of Calvin’s view of predestination, see Wendel, Calvin, p. 275. 40 Lawes V.56.7; 2:238.27–29. 41 Lawes V.56.6; 2:238.3–9. 42 Lawes V.56.7; 2:239.6–7. 43 Just. §31; 5:151.9–16.

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The problem of soteriology for Hooker, as indeed for Reformation theology generally, was how salvation can be wrought by Christ alone and yet not result in paralysing souls into total inaction. In his approach to this problem Hooker adheres closely to Calvin’s formulation of the distinct modes of grace.44 Hooker and Calvin, both following Luther’s lead, make a sharp distinction between the righteousness of justification and that of sanctification. Thus, according to Hooker, ‘there are two kindes of Christian rightuousness the one without us which we have by imputacion, the other in us which consisteth of faith hope charitie and other christian virtues … God gyveth us both the one Justice and the other, the one by accepting us for rightuous in Christe, the other by workinge christian rightuousnes in us.’45 These two modes of participation in Christ derive from one and the same source. Both are means whereby Christ alone works the salvation of humanity. The two modes of righteousness are distinct, yet always bound together. According to Calvin, ‘justifying Grace is not separate from regeneration although these are distinct things.’46 In Hooker’s formulation ‘wee participate Christ partelie by imputation, as when those thinges which he did and suffered for us are imputed unto us for righteousness; partlie by habituall and reall infusion, as when grace is inwardlie bestowed while we are on earth … ’47 ‘But we saie our salvation is by Christ alone therefore howsoever or whatsoever we add unto Christe in the matter of salvation we overthrowe Christe.’48 These two modes of grace – that is, imputed or justifying grace and infused or sanctifying grace – must not be mixed or confused lest the ‘foundation of faith be overthrown.’49 As with the distinction and unity of two natures of Christ as defined by the Chalcedonian paradigm, the affirmation of a ‘righteousness of works’ does not contradict the doctrine of justification by faith alone. The two modes of righteousness are unified in their source yet remain clearly distinct in their operation. Justifying righteousness is the logically prior mode of grace. Calvin defined it as the ‘principle of the whole doctrine of salvation and the foundation of all religion.’50 It is a perfect righteousness, perfect because it is the righteousness of Christ himself. It is, however, extraneous or alien to the soul, and by no means can it be regarded as a spiritual quality or habit. Aquinas regarded gratia justificans as a qualitas quaedam supernaturalis which operates as the root and principle of good works.51 Hooker distinguishes his interpretation from the Thomist soteriology

44 Compare Just. §6; 112.26–113.4 and Inst. 3.16.1. 45 Just. §21; 5:129.2–10. Hooker’s argument here is closely reminiscent of Luther’s account in Two Kinds of Righteousness (1520). 46 Inst. 4.11.11. 47 Lawes V.56.11; 2:243.4–7. 48 Just. §31; 5:151.9–11. 49 Just. §22; 5:131.9ff. 50 Sermon on Luke 1:5–10, in Opera omnia quae supersunt in Corpus Reformatorum (Brunswick, 1863–1900), vol. 46, 23, quoted by Wendel, Calvin, 256. 51 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Ia IIae, q. 110, quoted by Hooker in FLE 5:110.13. See also q. 113 ‘de justificatione.’ In his commentary on this passage Egil

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as enshrined in the decrees of the Council of Trent, on the grounds that the latter tends to a confusion of the two principal modes of grace: This grace [that is, justification] they will have to be applied by infusion; to the end that as the bodye is warm by the heate which is in the bodye, so the soule mighte be rightuous by the inherente grace, which grace they make capable of increase: as the body maie be more and more warme, so the soule more and more justefied, accordinge as grace shalbe augmented, the augmentacion whereof is merited by good workes, as good workes are made meritorious by it, wherfore the firste receipte of grace is in theire divinitye the firste justification, the increase thereof the seconde justification.52

Over against the view that the righteousness of justification is itself ‘infused’ as a habit of the soul, and therefore is both inherent in the soul and dynamic in its operation, Hooker upholds the standard interpretation of the reformers. On account of man’s total depravity, there is no capability whatever on the part of the soul to receive the righteousness of justification as a quality or habitus: ‘The righteousness wherein we must be found, if we will be justified, is not our own; therefore we cannot be justified by any inherent quality. Christ hath merited righteousness for as many as are found in him. In him God findeth us, if we be faithful; for by faith we are incorporated into him.’53 For Hooker, as for Calvin, Luther and the magisterial reformers generally, the principal controversy between the Church of Rome and its Protestant critics hangs upon this soteriological application of the Chalcedonian definition. For the reformers, the righteousness whereby the soul is justified ‘before God’ (coram Deo) is perfect, alien and wholly passive. It is ‘perfect’ because it is the righteousness of Christ himself: ‘Such we are in the sight of God the Father, as is the very Son of God himself.’54 The righteousness of justification is altogether incapable of increase or decrease. It is alien since it does not inhere in the sinful soul, but is imputed to it as though it were perfectly righteous. It is passive in so far as men participate in it entirely by faith. At one point Hooker refers to justification as ‘the external justice of Christ Grislis points out the close similarity between Hooker’s and Philipp Melanchthon’s formulations of the doctrine in question. See FLE 5:716, n. 110.13 ‘devyne spiritual qualitie.’ Melanchthon and Bucer, ed. Wilhelm Pauck, Library of Christian Classics 19 (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969), pp. 86–7. 52 Just. §5; 5:110.24–111.6. 53 Just. §6; 5:112.22–26. Hooker continues: ‘Then although in ourselves we be altogether synfull and unrightuous, yett even the man which him self is ympious, full of inequity, full of synne, him beinge found in Christe through faith, and having his synne in hatred through repentaunce, hym god beholdeth with a gratious eye, putteth awaie his syn by not ymputing it, taketh quite awaie the ponishemente due therunto by pardoneinge it, and accepteth him in Jesus Christe as perfectly rightuous as if he had fullfilled all that is comaunded hym in the lawe, shall I saie more perfectly rightuous then if him self had fulfilled the whole lawe?’ FLE 5:112.26–113.4. 54 Just. §6; 5:113.6–8.

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Jesus’ distinguished from the ‘habitual justice’ of sanctification.55 The ‘external’ character of the prior mode of grace is of crucial significance. In the imputed righteousness of Christ, the soul finds its unity and stability altogether outside itself, ‘in heaven’ with Christ.56 This is the so-called realm of faith which, for reformed soteriology, must be kept wholly distinct from the secondary or consequent realm of virtuous activity. To confuse the two realms or the two modes of grace is to overthrow the foundation of faith, just as confusion of the divine and human natures in the person of Christ undermines Christological orthodoxy.57 Sanctifying righteousness, on the other hand, is defined according to the accepted formula of reformed doctrine as ‘inherent, but not perfecte.’58 In an explicit appeal to the categories of Chalcedon, Hooker distinguishes the second mode of righteousness ‘as a thinge in nature different from the rightuousnes of justification.’59 It is by its nature imperfect, habitual and infused as against the perfect, alien and imputed character of the first mode. The grace of sanctification, or regeneration as it is sometimes called, is ‘Christ in us’ as against the mode of ‘ourselves in Christ.’60 This second mode of grace is inherent in that it is a gift of virtues, that is, habits of the soul which contribute to a progressive, incremental regeneration of the will: ‘the effects thereof are such actions as the Apostle doth call the fruits, the works, the operations of the Spirit.’61 Thus while the Christian is totally justified by the imputation to him of Christ’s perfect righteousness, at the same time he remains a sinner throughout his life – simul justus et peccator in Luther’s famous tag. The sinner, having been justified by faith, is nevertheless engaged in a dynamic process of becoming righteous. For Hooker the difficulty in the teaching of the Church of Rome as formulated at the Council of Trent was therefore ‘not that she requireth workes at their handes that wilbe saved: but that she attributeth unto works a power of satisfying God for sin and a virtue to merite both grace here and in heaven glorye.’62 According to the Chalcedonian paradigm, the soul’s complete participation in the divine nature must by no means be confused with the continuing integrity of its own finite human nature. In this way the logic of soteriological union with Christ reflects the Christological paradigm. Here we have the central structural feature of reformed soteriology. On the one hand, the Christian individual is totally righteous, and on the other is

55 56 57 58 59 60

Just. §3; 5:129.26. Just. §6; 5:109.8–9; 112.22–113.15. Just. §25; 5:135.20–136.22. Just. §3; 5:109.11. Just. §6; 5:113.18–19. Lawes V.56.11; 2:243.4–9: ‘Thus we participate Christ partelie by imputation, as when those thinges which he did and suffered for us are imputed unto us for righteousnes; partlie by habituall and reall infusion, as when grace is inwardlie bestowed while wee are on earth and afterwardes more fullie both our soules and bodies made like unto his in glorie.’ 61 Just. §6; 5:113.27–114.4. 62 Just. §32; 5:153.16–19.

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simultaneously becoming righteous by degrees.63 The soul exists simultaneously in two completely distinct worlds. No longer can justification be viewed as a progressive, incremental ascent from the imperfect realm of nature to the perfect realm of grace. The soul is rather present in both realms at once. By faith the believer is already in the eschatological realm of perfect righteousness, yet continues to exist in a ‘temporal’ realm of dynamic righteousness. The Christian, by virtue of his simultaneous participation in these two modes of grace, participates in the two realms of incorruption and corruption, perfect justice and imperfect justice, imputed and infused grace. Following Chalcedonian logic, nothing can be more important than keeping these two modes distinct from each other, especially on account of their close association in the Christian person: ‘The want of exact distinguishing between these two waies and observing what they have in common what peculiar hath bene the cause of the greatest part of that confusion whereof Christianity at this daie laboureth.’64 The two modes of passive and active righteousness are thus sharply distinguished, and yet continue unified and inseparable. They are united in that ‘Christe without any other associate finished all the partes of our redemption, and purchased salvation himself alone.’65 These ‘partes’ of redemption are distinct in the manner of their conveyance: ‘in the world to be called justefyed, sanctefied, after we have lefte the world to be receyved into glory. Christe in every of theis hath somewhat which he worketh alone.’66 Thus the logic of Hooker’s soteriology follows the long-established dialectical pattern of Chalcedonian Christology. As is the case with Calvin, the doctrine of the so-called hypostatic union (that is, the union of the divine and human natures in the person of Christ) provides a useful hermeneutical instrument for the clarification of the complexities of reformed soteriology.67

Christology and the Doctrine of the Church The logic of the Chalcedonian definition which governs the distinction and relation between the two realms, along with their respective modes of power, the so-called ‘two regiments,’ is extended even further by the reformers in their treatment of questions in the sphere of ecclesiology and political order.68 There was nothing particularly novel or original in this close association of the doctrine 63 64 65 66 67

Lawes V.56.13; 2:244.11–25. A Learned Sermon on the Nature of Pride, FLE 5:313.19–23. Just. §31; 5:152.16–18. Just. §31; 5:152.20–23. See Wendel on Calvin’s employment of Christological arguments in his refutation of the mystical speculations of Andreas Osiander: Calvin, 235ff. 68 For an extended treatment of the concept of the ‘two regiments’ in the thought of both Luther and Hooker, see James Cargill Thompson, Studies in the Reformation: Luther to Hooker.

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of power with the basic principles of the doctrine of grace and through soteriology back to Christology. On the contrary, the close link between Christology and ecclesiology was a commonplace of Reformation thought.69 It has been said that the section of the Lawes dealing with Christology ‘is like a central tower’ around which the whole argument of the treatise is constructed.70 It is instructive to examine Hooker’s doctrine of the Church through the categories of Chalcedonian Christology.71 The Church is, in its most fundamental nature, the body of Christ, who is its divine head. The body, like the head, has two natures – one divine, the other human. While the Church is twofold, it is not two Churches, just as Christ, who is both divine and human, is neither two Christs, nor two persons. According to the definitions of the four great ecumenical councils of the early Church, Christ is truly God, perfectly human, indivisibly one individual person, and finally, his two natures remain altogether distinct within his indivisible person.72 As we have seen, the great Christological heresies of the early Church involved denial of one or other of these principles. Thus the Arians denied Christ’s deity; the Apollinarians denied his full humanity; the Nestorians asserted that Christ was two persons; and the Eutychians confused the two natures in their affirmation of the unity of his person.73 Following the lead of the magisterial reformers, Hooker upholds the Chalcedonian condemnation of these Christological

69 See P.D.L. Avis, The Doctrine of the Church, 1, 36–44; F. Edward Cranz provides a clear and detailed exposition of the derivation of Luther’s ecclesiology and political theory from his doctrine of justification in An Essay on the Development of Luther’s Thought on Justice, Law, and Society (1959), 13ff. I am indebted particularly to Cranz’s research for my understanding of the basic logic of Luther’s position. 70 Lionel Thornton, Richard Hooker: A Study of his Theology, 54. The centrality of Chalcedonian orthodoxy in Hooker’s thought has been remarked on by George W. Morrel in his article ‘Richard Hooker, Theologian of the English Reformation,’ Christianity Today 10 (September 1966): 8–10. 71 It was, of course, commonplace to supply the analogy of Christology to the interpretation of the sacraments. For instance, see Calvin’s well-known criticism of the Lutheran sacramental teaching as a tendency towards Eutychianism, viz. a failure to distinguish between Christ’s human and divine natures, ‘and insisting only on the unity of person, he converted God into man and man into God. What madness, then, is it to confound heaven with earth, sooner than not withdraw the body of Christ from its heavenly sanctuary.’ Inst. 4.17.30. Luther employs a Christological paradigm to explain the relation of Faith and Law in his Commentary on Galatians (1531), WA XL,1,427,1: ‘Ut si dico de Christo homine, tamen duae naturae distinctae: … Dico: humanitas non est divinitas et tamen homo est Deus. Sic lex non est fides. In concreto et composito kommen sie zusammen.’ For a discussion of Luther’s use of the Christological paradigm, see F.E. Cranz, 63, 93; for Calvin’s Christocentrism see Wendel, passim, esp. 3ff. See also E.D. Willis, Calvin’s Catholic Christology (1966), 18–74. Compare Hooker, Lawes V.67.10; 2:337.14–338.5. 72 Lawes V.54.10; 2:226.22–227.18. 73 See p. 81 above for Hooker’s summary of Chalcedonian doctrine. See also Lawes V.42.13; 2:177.10–178.3.

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heresies.74 He extends the Chalcedonian paradigm to his understanding of the relation between the ‘mysticall’ and ‘politique’ bodies of the Church. The Church, like Christ its head, is an invisible, supernatural, divine community. As the mystical communion of saints, the totality of the elect ‘foreknown and chosen before all worlds,’ it is altogether hidden. Like God and Christ, the Church mystical is an object of faith.75 Its essential divinity consists in being known only to God. In this divine aspect, the Church is subject solely to the operation of supernatural law and is apprehensible to the eye of faith alone.76 On the other hand, the Church, like Christ, has become incarnate. In this other aspect, the Church is a visible, human and political association. The external body of believers, like Christ the Son of man, is not hidden, but manifest. As distinct from Christ’s body as God sees it, the Church is defined as it appears to us. The Church in this external aspect is not ordered by the rule of the Gospel, but rather by positive human laws deduced from the law of nature. Just as God chooses to reveal himself in human form, so also the Church is manifest as a human institution. Hooker formulates this concept succinctly: ‘Grace hath use of nature.’77 There are thus two natures ascribed to the Church analogous to the two natures of Christ. Discourse concerning the Church, just as in the doctrine of Christology, must observe certain rules as to the manner of the relation between the ‘mysticall’ and ‘politique’ bodies, that is to say, how they are connected and how distinguished. Just as in the discourse concerning the manner of the relation between the divine and human natures in the person of Christ there was considerable room for confusion and disagreement, so also in the doctrine of the Church. As Hooker observes at the outset of his Christological inquiry, ‘there is no union of God with man without that meane betwene both which is both.’78 Similarly in relation to the doctrine of the Church, there is no participation by men in the divine nature without membership in Christ, and hence participation in his body the Church. This body may be viewed in two fashions: first, as it is in Christ and known in God (that is, mystically); and second, as it is discerned externally in the world and known to men (namely, institutionally). The complexity of Hooker’s ecclesiology unfolds when the nature of the connections between these two aspects of the Church is discussed. In its logical complexity the problem of ecclesiology mirrors Hooker’s Christological discourse. First, we must examine the character of the union between the two natures of the Church in order to see clearly how an association which is on the one hand 74 Compare Calvin, Institutes 2.14.1–8. See B.C. Milner, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Church (1970). 75 Calvin, Inst. 4.1.4. 76 Lawes III.1.2; 1:194.27–32: ‘That Church of Christ which we properly terme his body mysticall, can be but one, neither can that one bee sensiblie discerned by any man, in as much as the partes thereof are some in heaven alreadie with Christ, and the rest that are on earth (albeit their naturall persons bee visible) we doe not discerne under this propertie, whereby they are truly and infallibly of that body.’ 77 Lawes III.8.6; 1:223.29. 78 Lawes V.50.3; 2:208.23–24.

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invisible, supernatural, mystical, in short divine, and on the other hand visible, natural, secular or human can be simultaneously, and thus indivisibly, one Church. Second, we must consider the manner in which these distinctions are preserved within a primary unity. Just as Christ is a single, undivided person while being both God and man, so also his body the Church is fundamentally one Church existing in two realms: ‘Our being in Christ by eternall foreknowledge saveth us not without our actuall and reall adoption into the fellowship of his sainctes in this present world.’79 In this Hooker merely follows the standard formulations of reformed ecclesiological orthodoxy. Christians must have recourse to visible means of grace, as the scripture reveals.80 Thus when it is Calvin’s intention to speak of the visible Church, ‘let us learn if only from her title of mother,’ he says, ‘how much the knowledge of this same is useful, and indeed necessary … outside the bosom of the Church we can hope for no remission of sins nor any salvation.’81 Hooker’s discussion of the visible means of grace rests upon the ‘necessitie of Sacraments unto the participation of Christ.’82 Thus membership in the ‘mysticall bodie’ of the Church is tied by personal union to participation in the external, visible institution of the Church. In parallel fashion, the Godhead is revealed to man through the mediation of Christ’s assumption of the human nature. There is thus, by analogy, an ecclesiological ‘communication of idioms’ between the mystical and institutional Churches, just as in Christology between the human and divine natures:83 A kinde of mutuall commutation there is whereby those concrete names God and Man when wee speake of Christ doe take interchangablie one an others roome, so that for truth of speech it skilleth not whether wee saie that the Sonne of God hath created the world and the Sonne of man by his death hath saved it, or els that the Sonne of man did create and the Sonne of God die to save the world. Howbeit as oft as wee attribute to God what the manhood of Christ claymeth, or to man what his deitie hath right unto, wee understand by the name of God and the name of man neither the one nor the other nature, but the whole person of Christ in whome both natures are.84

In the Christological controversies of the early Church, Hooker observes that stress upon the union of the two natures led in time to their confusion or conflation: ‘So Eutyches of sound beliefe as touchinge theire true personall copulation became unsound by denyinge the difference which still continueth betwene the one and the other nature.’85 It was thus paramount to orthodox Christology to 79 80 81 82 83

Lawes V.56.7; 2:238.27–29. Lawes V.56.7. Calvin, Inst. 4.1.4. Lawes V.57.1; 2:244.26. See Lawes V.53.4; 2:219.3–220.1 for Hooker’s exposition of the ‘mutuall commutation’ of the divine and human natures. He relies upon John of Damascus, De Fide Orthodoxa, 3.4; PG 94:1000. See FLE 6: Comm. 2:219.k. 84 Lawes V.53.4; 2:219.8–18, my emphasis. 85 Lawes V.52.4; 2:215.31–216.1.

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‘keepe warilie a middle corse shunninge both the distraction of persons wherein Nestorius went awrie, and also this later confusion of natures which deceived Eutyches.’86 By analogy in the doctrine of the Church, the mystical and external aspects of the Church’s life must be kept distinct so that ‘there is no abolishment of naturall properties apperteininge to either substance, no transition or transmigration thereof out of one substance into an other, finallie no such mutuall infusion as reallie causeth the same naturall operations or properties to be made common unto both substances … ’87 While membership in the mystical body is attainable only through the visible means, it is essential to the preservation of fundamental doctrinal orthodoxy that there be no confusion or mixture of the sign with the signified, of the finite with the infinite, of the human with the divine. The natural operations and properties which belong to the mystical or spiritual nature of the Church must not be infused into the life of the external, political community of the Church. Finally, there is a communion of idioms between the two natures of the Church whereby the human positive laws governing the external polity have the force of divine ordinance: So that Lawes humane must be made according to the generall Lawes of nature, and without contradiction unto any positive law in scripture. Otherwise they are ill made. Unto Lawes thus made and received by a whole Church, they which live within the bosome of that Church, must not thinke it a matter indifferent either to yeeld or not to yeeld obedience … It doth not stand with the duty which we owe to our heavenly father, that to ordinances of our mother the Church we should shew ourselves disobedient. Let us not say we keepe the commandements of the one, when we breake the law of the other: For unlesse we observe both, we obey neither.88

Thus for Hooker there is an explicitly divine basis for the human, positive laws and external institutions of the Church. These laws are by nature wholly distinct from the divine, revealed law, but are nonetheless divine in a mediated fashion according to the Chalcedonian paradigm: ‘Yea that which is more, the Lawes thus made God himselfe doth in such sort authorize, that to despise them is to despise in them him.’89 The proper distinction of the two aspects of the Church is not such as to enforce a complete and unbridgeable separation of the external-human authority from the mystical-divine authority. Rather, by the ‘grace of union,’ the 86 Lawes V.52.4; see also Calvin, Inst. 4.17.30; 2.14.2. In Calvin’s Catholic Christology, E.D. Willis argues that Calvin was intentionally unoriginal in his Christology, p. 63, and that his aim was to be faithful above all to the orthodoxy of the Christological definition of the Council of Chalcedon, p. 66. See also Joseph N. Tylenda, ‘Calvin’s Understanding of the Communication of Properties,’ in Richard C. Gamble, ed., An Elaboration of the Theology of Calvin, vol. 8 (New York: Garland, 1992), pp. 148– 59. 87 Lawes V.53.1; 2:216.23–27. 88 Lawes III.9.2,3; 1:237.27–238.7. 89 Lawes III.9.3; 1:238.11–13. See also 1:239.11–12.

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distinction is preserved while, at the same time, divine authority is mediated through human means. As in the case of Hooker’s Christology, as regards the union of the two natures in Christ, ‘of both natures there is a cooperation often, an association alwayes, but never any mutuall participation whereby the properties of the one are infused into the other.’90 That is to say, Christ is both God and man without the confusion of Godhead with humanity. Thus also, the Church is a ‘mysticall’ and ‘politique’ body without the confusion of the former with the latter. The authority exercised by Christ in the ‘body mysticall’ is unmediated; the authority he exerts over the ‘body politique’ is mediated by external and visible representatives. Out of these considerations perhaps we can begin to see how Hooker’s strict adherence to Chalcedonian Christological orthodoxy shapes in a fundamental way their treatment of both the doctrine of salvation and the doctrine of the Church.

90 Lawes V.53.3; 2:218.30–219.3.

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Chapter 7

Common Prayer and Commonwealth: ‘Publique Religion’

There is nothing in all man’s life … so needful to be spoken of, and daily to be called upon, as hearty, zealous, and devout prayer; the necessity whereof is so great, that without it nothing may be well obtained at God’s hand. For, as the Apostle James saith, Every good and perfect gift cometh from above, and proceedeth from the Father of lights: who is also said to be rich and liberal towards all them that call upon him; not because he either will not or cannot give without asking, but because he hath appointed prayer as an ordinary means between him and us.1

Thus begins the Elizabethan homily ‘Concerning Prayer,’ most probably composed by Richard Hooker’s patron, John Jewel, Bishop of Sarum. Prayer is defined by Jewel as ‘an ordinary means’ between God and us. The homily counsels that ‘in all our necessities we must flee unto God, direct our prayers unto him, call upon his holy name, desire help at his hands, and at none other’s.’ According to Augustine, prayer is a ‘lifting up of the mind to God’; for Isidore of Seville it is more ‘an affection of the heart’ than ‘a labour of the lips’. Prayer

1

This is the opening sentence of ‘An Homily or Sermon Concerning Prayer,’ Certaine sermons or Homilies appointed to be read in churches, In the time of the late Queene Elizabeth of famous memory (London: John Bill, 1623); reprinted Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1968 [STC, 13675]. The homilies are authorized sermons originally issued for use in the Church of England during the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth I. They were intended to provide the Church with a new model of simplified topical preaching as well as a theological formulation of the central teachings of the Reformation. Thomas Cranmer first broached the idea of a book of homilies in 1539, but the book was not authorized by convocation until 1542. Within a year the 12 homilies of the first book were collected and edited by Cranmer, who wrote at least five of them. Owing to Henry VIII’s refusal to authorize them, the first book of homilies was not published until the reign of Edward VI in 1547. The homilies were revoked under Queen Mary but reinstated by Elizabeth. In 1562–63, the Second Book of Homilies was published, though it did not contain the full complement of 21 homilies until the edition of 1571. Hooker’s patron, Bishop John Jewel of Salisbury, wrote all but two of these. The latter constitute a more practical and devotional divinity than the first book. The two books were issued in a single volume in 1623. The homily ‘Concerning Prayer’ appears in the Elizabethan Second Book of Homilies. The critical edition of the homilies of 1547 edited by R.B. Bond (University of Toronto Press, 1987). See Bond’s introduction, pp. 3–45. 97

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consists first and foremost in the inward groan of longing and only secondarily in the outward manifestation of this longing in speech.2 And to what end is prayer the ‘ordinary means’? There is an endless multitude of necessities for which prayer can be made. As Hooker himself observes in the first book of the Lawes, we labour to eate, and we eate to live, and we live to do good, and the good we do is as seed sowne with reference unto a future harvest: But we must come at length to some pause. For if every thing were to bee desired for some other without any stint, there could be no certaine end proposed unto our actions, we should go on we know not whether, yea, whatsoever we do were in vaine, or rather nothing at all were possible to be done.3

The goal of calling upon God in prayer is ultimately concerned with the overcoming of the separation between the divinity and the worshipper. As Augustine so famously put the matter, ‘the heart is restless until in rests in Thee, O Lord.’4 For Hooker, the end of prayer is nothing less than theosis, the attainment of eternal rest through union with the divine. The highest object of human longing thus lies altogether outside itself; the attainment of this object of longing is the fundamental goal of prayer. Only God himself, who is desired simply in and for himself, without reference to any other good, can constitute the proper goal of human longing. Here Hooker appeals, somewhat unexpectedly, to the eudaemonistic teachings of Greek ethics. Happiness, as Aristotle maintains, consists in the enjoyment of that which is desired for its own sake and not for the sake of anything external. What is sought as a ‘means’ is necessarily referred to an ‘end’ beyond itself. What is instrumental and useful must always be referred to ‘that for the sake of which,’ namely what is to be enjoyed. Perfect happiness can only be realized in a perfect object of longing which is itself a final goal, and not conceivable as instrumental to something beyond itself. Thus the ultimate end of prayer, therefore, is traditionally understood to be the attainment of such ultimate happiness, that is through union with God, through enjoyment of him in a complete knowledge by means of a perfect love.5 Hooker summarizes this most appositely when he says that ‘then are we happie therefore when fully we enjoy God, as an object wherein the powers of our soules are satisfied even with everlasting delight: so that although we be men, yet by being unto God united we live as it were the life of God.’6 The fifth book of Richard Hooker’s great treatise Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie furnishes a remarkable theological exploration of the nature of prayer in general and of the principles of common prayer in particular. It is chiefly with reference to his thoughts that I wish to explore the question which pervades the

2 3 4 5 6

The homily ‘Concerning Prayer,’ part 2. Lawes I.11.1; 1:111.14–21. Confessions, I.1. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia IIae q.3, art.4. Lawes I.11.2; 1:112.18–20.

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entirety of Hooker’s discourse in Book V, viz. ‘What is Common Prayer?’ For Hooker, who lived from 1554 till 1600, the Book of Common Prayer was a near contemporary in age. The first Edwardine prayer book was established as the public liturgy of the Church of England just five years before Hooker himself was born, that is on 21 January 1549 with the passage by Parliament under King Edward VI of ‘An Act for Uniformity of Service and Administration of the Sacraments throughout the Realm.’7 The first Edwardine Book of Common Prayer was replaced three years later in April 1552 with a revised book which, with relatively minor revisions in 1559 and 1662, became the standard of common prayer down to our own time.8 In Hooker’s time – in this respect, at least, not unlike our own – the Book of Common Prayer was under vigorous attack. Radical disciplinarian Puritans execrated the Elizabethan prayer book as riven with superstitious prayers and ceremonies, ‘an unperfecte booke, culled and picked out of that popishe dunghil, the Masse booke.’9 Hooker’s concern in the Lawes is to respond to these critics by means of a full apology of ‘the publique duties of the Christian religion.’10 It is such a full apology that Book V of the Lawes addresses virtually every portion of the prayer book.11 He considers the premises of the Act of Uniformity itself in the opening chapters. This is followed by examination of the substance of the various prefaces; the lectionary and calendar; the office rubrics concerning the place and ornaments of worship, and the forms of matins and evensong themselves; the Litany; the collects, Epistles and Gospels; the two principal sacraments, baptism and the Eucharist, with confirmation inserted very logically between the two; the services for visitation and communion of the sick, matrimony, churching and finally the ordinal. While it may appear initially that Hooker is ploughing his way through an exhaustively detailed list of topics here, underneath the polemic there is an important connective theological argument concerning the nature of prayer in general and common prayer in particular. It is more the latter that I wish to investigate. In defining prayer in general, Hooker employs a vivid image which provides a clue to the interpretation of this grand exploration of the liturgy. In his definition of prayer he observes that Betwene the throne of God in heaven and his Church upon earth here militant if it be so that Angels have theire continuall intercorse, where should we finde the same more verified then in these two ghostlie exercises, the one ‘Doctrine,’ and other ‘Prayer’? For what is thassemblie of the Church to learne, but the receivinge of Angels descended from above? What to pray, but the sendinge of Angels upward? His heavenly inspirations and our holie desires are as so many Angels of entercorse and comerce betwene

7 8 9

Edward VI, c. 1; Statutes of the Realm, iv. 37–9. 5 & 6 Edward VI, c. 1; Statutes of the Realm, iv. 130–131. An Admonition to the Parliament, reprinted in Puritan Manifestoes, ed. W.H. Frere (London: SPCK, 1972), 21. 10 Lawes V.1.1; 2:16. 11 See John Booty‘s introduction to Book V in FLE 6(2):185, 186.

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God and us. As teachinge bringeth us to know that God is our supreme truth; so prayer testifieth that we acknowledg him our soveraigne good.12

The liturgy is thus understood by Hooker dialectically as a dynamic, double motion of procession and return, of messages sent from above to us and from us sent heavenward. Edmund Spenser expressed this conceit most fittingly in his Hymnes of Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beauty. In the first poem he recounts the ascent of the soul in praise: Love, lift me up upon thy golden wings, From this base world unto thy heavens hight, Where I may see those admirable things, Which there thou workest by thy soveraine might, Farre above feeble reach of earthly sight, That I thereof an heavenly Hymne may sing Unto the god of Love, high heavens king.13

Conversely in An Hymne of Heavenly Beauty, the poet, having made the ascent in love, offers to instruct, himself an angelic herald or preacher of the things above: Rapt with the rage of mine own ravisht thought, Through contemplation of those goodly sights, And glorious images in heaven wrought, Whose wondrous beauty breathing sweet delights, Do kindle love in high conceipted sprights: I faine to tell the things that I behold, But feele my wits to faile, and tongue to fold.14

Similarly, the weaving together of instruction with praise and supplication in the offices of morning and evening prayer constitutes our participation, at least at one level, in this double motion. In light of this metaphor, Hooker’s definition of ‘publique teaching or preaching’ is intentionally broad in scope. Catechism and the public reading of the scriptures constitute together with the preaching of sermons the operation of heavenly messages ‘sent from above.’15 ‘Thinges are preacht not in that they are taught but in that they are publisht.’16 For with us the readinge of scripture in the Church is a parte of our Church litourgie, a speciall portion of the service which we doe to God, and not an exercise to spend the

12 Lawes V.23.1; 2:110.7–16. 13 S.K. Heninger, Jr, Selections from the Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1970), 256. 14 Heninger, Works of Edmund Spenser, 264. 15 Lawes V.18–21; 2:65–87. 16 Lawes V.18.3; 2:67.9.

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time, when one doth waite for an others comminge, till thassemblie of them that shall afterwardes worship him be complete … Sermons are not the onlie preaching which doth save soules … our usuall publique reading of the worde of God for the peoples instruction is preaching. The worde of God outwardlie administred (his spirit inwardlie concurringe therewith) converteth, edifieth, and saveth soules.17

Hooker’s treatment of the dialectical ascent and descent of the ‘commerce betwene God and us’ constitutes a bridge between a series of four chapters on divine instruction and the chapters on common prayer and the liturgy of the offices. It is important to note that prayer is referred to by Hooker equivocally. He speaks of prayer in the more restricted sense of one of the two angelic motions, as in prayers are those caulves of mens lippes; those most gracious and sweet odors; those rich presentes and guiftes which beinge carryed up into heaven doe best testifie our dutifull affection, and are for the purchasinge of all favour at the handes of God the most undoubted means we can use.18

When he turns to consider the form of common prayer, however, prayer may be taken more broadly as representing the liturgy as comprising both motions of this ‘angellic entercorse.’

‘Publique Religion’ Prayer, for Hooker, is an action shared by the Church triumphant and the Church militant; it is moreover ‘a worke common unto men with angels, what should we thinke but that so much of our lives is coelestiall and divine as we spend in the exercise of prayer?’19 In one sense, the commonness of ‘Common Prayer’ is the participation in an action which transcends the ordinary distinction between the earthly-temporal and the celestial-eternal realms. As members of ‘that visible mysticall bodie which is his Church,’20 the worshipper has as it were a foot in both the natural and the supernatural orders of being. While this sense of community is certainly important, and we will return to consider its underlying theological significance in a moment, the ordinary sense of the commonness of common prayer has to do with the public character of religious duty. It is important to recall that for the sixteenth-century liturgical formularies, religion is assumed almost without question to be a public political matter. Church attendance was enforced by statute and royal injunction.21 For Hooker, religion is the foremost care of the Commonwealth. In the last book of the

17 18 19 20 21

Lawes V.19.5; V.21.4, 5. Lawes V.23.1; 2:110.27–31. Lawes V.23.1; 2:111.16–18. Lawes V.24.1; 2:111.26. See 1 Elizabeth I, cap. 2; Royal Injunctions (1559), No. 33.

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Lawes, Hooker prefaces his discussion of the royal supremacy with the claim that … even as the soule is the worthier part of man, so humane societies are much more to care for that which tendeth properly unto the soules estate then for such temporall thinges as this life doth stand in need of. Other proof there needes none to shewe that as by all men the kingdome of God is first to be sought for: So in all commonwealths things spirituall ought above temporall to be provided for. And of things spirituall the chiefest is Religion.22

The opening salvo of Hooker’s defence of the Book of Common Prayer is a straightforward apology for the Act of Uniformity and in it the case is made for the essentially public character of religion: Wee agree that pure and unstayned religion ought to be the highest of all cares apperteyninge to publique regiment: as well in regarde of that aide and protection, which they, who faithfullie serve God, confesse they receave at his mercifull handes; as also for the force which religion hath, to qualifie all sortes of men, and to make them in publique affaires the more serviceable, governors the apter to rule with conscience, inferiors for conscience sake the willinger to obaye. It is no peculiar conceipt, but a matter of sounde consequence, that all duties are by so much the better performed, by how much the men are more religious from whose habilities the same proceed. For if the coorse of politique affaires cannot in any good sorte goe forward without fitt instrumentes, and that which fitteth them be their virtues, lett politie acknowledge itself indebted to religion, godlines beinge the cheifest top and welspringe of all true virtues, even as God is of all good thinges. So natural is the union of Religion with Justice, that wee may boldlie denie there is either where both are not … wee have reason to thinke that all true vertues are to honour true religion as theire parent, and all well ordered commonwealtes to love her as theire cheifest staye.23

Thus, the case for the prescriptive, uniform liturgy of common prayer to be observed throughout the realm rests upon the premise that true religion is indispensable to the well-being of the Commonwealth. As Hooker puts it much later in his discussion of the ordinal in the concluding chapters of Book V,24 ‘happinesse not eternal onlie but also temporall’ depends upon the ‘publique ministrie of holie thinges.’25 Since religion is taken as the source of the moral virtues, temporal peace and prosperity, what Hooker terms ‘the secular happines’ depends upon the practice of common prayer such that ‘the Priest is a pillar of that commonwelth wherein he faithfullie serveth God.’26 This identification of the minister of religion as ‘pillar of the Commonwealth’ is dialectically mirrored by Hooker in his

22 23 24 25 26

Lawes VIII.1.4; 3:321.10–17. Lawes V.1.2; 2:16.25–17.13 and V.1.5; 2:22.22–25. Chaps 76–81; 2:413–98. Lawes V.76.1; 2:413.24. Lawes V.76.1; 2:414.15.

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description of the publique administration of justice as ‘Godes own worke, and [the judges] his agentes in this busines, the sentence of right Godes own verdict, and themselves his preistes to deliver it.’27 In this inverse complementarity of the civil and ministerial offices there is a hint of the double angelic motion. The conclusion is clear: the practice of common prayer serves the Commonwealth and the Commonwealth serves the practice of common prayer. The Church and the Commonwealth are mutually dependent. In this age of ‘cafeteria religion’ in which we live, it is perhaps difficult for us to make this immediate and direct a connection between the religious and the political realms.28 Religion is so obviously a private, subjectively voluntary matter from a post-Enlightenment point of view. From the standpoint of common prayer, however, at least as it was understood by its framers and defenders in the sixteenth century, communion with God cannot even be conceived as separable from communion with one’s neighbours. One has only to reflect on the significance of the placement of the royal collect immediately following the rehearsal of the Ten Commandments in the order of the administration of the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion to grasp this. In the sequence of its petitions the Great Litany displays the ‘wonderful order’ of the Elizabethan constitution. Perhaps nothing conveys more vividly Cranmer’s sense of the linkage between communion with God and communion with one’s neighbour than the rubrics preceding the Holy Communion.29 The presupposition of the liturgy is that communion with Christ is inseparable from the communion of saints. Hooker expresses this concept in more exalted theological terms in his discourse in chapter 56 on ‘The union or mutuall participation which betweene Christ and the Church of Christ in this present worlde.’30 They which belonge to the mysticall bodie of our Saviour Christ and be in number as the starres of heaven, devided successivelie by reason of their mortall condition into manie generations, are notwithstanding coupled everie one to Christ their head and all unto everie particular person amongst them selves [my emphasis], in as much as

27 Lawes V.1.2; 2:17.18–20. 28 For an account of the subjective character of contemporary religiosity, see Ingolf Dalferth, ‘Theology in the Age of Cafeteria Religion,’ Theology Today, 57.1 (April 2000), 5–23 (trans. Margaret Kirby). 29 From rubrics prefaced to ‘the Supper of the Lord’ in the Book of Common Prayer (1549): ‘So many as intende to bee partakers of the holy Communion, shall sygnifie their names to the Curate, over night: or els in the morning, afore the beginning of Matins, or immediatly after. And if any of those be an open and notorious evill liver, so that the congregacion by hym is offended, or have doen any wrong to his neighbours by worde or dede: The Curate shall call hym. And advertise hum, in any wise not to presume to the lordes table, untill he have openly declared hymselfe to have truly repented, and amended his former naughtie life: that the congregacion maie thereby be satisfied, whiche afore were offended: and that he have recompensed the parties, whom he hath dooen wrong unto, or at the least bee in full Purpose so to doo, as sone as he conveniently maie.’ 30 Lawes V.56.1; 2:234.26.

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the same spirit, which annointed the blessed soule of our saviour Christ, doth so formalize unite and actuate his whole race, as if both he and they were so manie limmes compacted into one bodie, by beinge quickned all with one and the same soule.31

John Booty has noted with great discernment that the fifth book of Hooker’s Lawes ‘is a circle whose circumference is the commonwealth and whose center is the concept of participation.’32 What is this concept of ‘participation’ and how does it serve to illumine our understanding of common prayer? Following his sequence of chapters on the offices and the Litany,33 Hooker launches into a remarkable discourse on the principles of Catholic Christology34 as a preparation for his subsequent discussion of the sacraments.35 It is here, in the exposition of the concept of participation that angelic intercourse reaches, as it were, consummation and fulfilment. To become ‘trulie partakers of the divine nature’36 constitutes for Hooker the highest goal of prayer: ‘Participation is that mutuall inward hold which Christ hath of us and wee of him, in such sort that each possesseth other by waie of speciall interest propertie and inherent copulation.’ Actual participation takes us beyond the saving ‘commerce’ of angels ascending and descending prayer and preaching to that more perfect fellowship (teleia koinonia) of ‘actual incorporation’ into Christ’s body. It is thus through the sacramental life of the Church that common prayer reaches its culmination.37 Prayer and instruction are for Hooker offices or duties which, properly understood, serve as the ‘elements partes or principles’ of the sacraments.38 As we have already noted, the act of prayer is a ‘continuall intercourse’ between heaven and earth. This dynamic mediation shown forth in the prayer and preaching is described by Francis Paget as ‘the act correlative to God’s disclosure of his truth,’ that is to say, the practice of common prayer in its double motion provides an analogue if you will of God’s own self-revelation in Christ the true mediator, both God and man, who in his very person unites heaven and earth.39 John Booty has noted that Hooker’s understanding of participation can be traced, at least in part, to his exegesis of 1 Corinthians 10:16, which reads as follows: ‘The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in

31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Lawes V.56.11; 2:243.14–23. FLE 6(1):193. Lawes V.23–49; 2:110–207. Lawes V.50–56; 2:207–44. Lawes V.57–68; 2:244–359. Lawes V.56.7; 2:240.11. On the concept of ‘participation’ in Hooker’s thought, see Francis Paget’s Introduction to the Fifth Book of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity (Oxford University Press, 1899), 147ff. See also Olivier Loyer, L’Anglicanisme de Richard Hooker, 1:371–9 and John Booty, FLE 6(1):197–9. 38 Lawes V.50.1; 2:207.11. 39 Paget, Introduction to the Fifth Book, 138.

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the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ?’40 The Greek word for ‘sharing’ in the Koine Greek text of the New Testament is ‘koinonia,’ variously translated as community, fellowship, association or society. Hooker follows the Geneva Bible in translating the term ‘communion.’41 It is through ‘communion’ of the body that Christ himself is ‘participated.’ The bread and cup are his bodie and blood because they are causes instrumentall upon the receipt whereof the participation of his boodie and bloode ensueth. For that which produceth any certaine effect is not vainely nor improperlie said to be that verie effect whereunto it tendeth. Everie cause is in the effect which groweth from it. Our soules and boodies quickned to eternall life are effectes the cause whereof is the person of Christ, his bodie and his bloode are the true wellspringe out of which this life floweth … The fruit of the Eucharist is the participation of the bodie and blood of Christ.42

40 Compare Article XXVIII ‘Of the Lord’s Supper’: ‘The Supper of the Lord is not only a sign of the love that Christians ought to have among themselves, one to another, but rather it is a sacrament of our redemption by Christ’s death: insomuch that to such as rightly, worthily, and with faith receive the same, the bread which we break is a partaking of the body of Christ, and likewise the cup of blessing is a partaking of the blood of Christ. Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of bread and wine) in the Supper of the Lord, cannot be proved by Holy Writ, but is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions. The body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner. And the mean whereby the body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is faith. The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was not by Christ’s ordinance reserved, carried about, lifted up, or worshipped.’ 41 FLE 6(1):198. During the Marian exile (1553–58), hundreds of Protestant divines were driven across the Channel to the Continent, including Miles Coverdale, John Foxe, John Knox, Thomas Sampson and William Whittingham, who settled in Geneva. With the protection of the Genevan civil authorities and the support of John Calvin, the Church of Geneva determined to produce an English Bible without the approval of either England or Rome. The translators produced a revised New Testament in English in 1557 that was essentially a revision of Tyndale’s corrected edition of 1534. Much of the work was done by Whittingham. The Genevan New Testament was barely off the press when work began on a revision of the entire Bible, a process that took more than two years. In 1560 a complete revised Bible was published and dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I. The Geneva Bible was finally printed in England in 1575 after the death of Archbishop Matthew Parker, editor of the authorized Bishop’s Bible. The Geneva Bible became the most widely read in private use. Between 1560 and 1644 at least 144 editions appeared. It was popularly known as the ‘Breeches Bible’ from its rendering of Genesis 3:7. 42 Lawes V.67.5; 2:334.17–25 and 2:335.15.

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It is important to note here that for Hooker our participation is not just our sharing of a common nature with Christ, that is to say that we are connected to him merely by virtue of our being human. The reality of participation extends beyond that. The key is the reciprocal ‘indwelling’ between Christ and the soul in koinonia. Hooker refers to the Second Epistle of Peter: ‘He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in [that is, participates] me, and I in him.’43 The argument concerning the community the soul has with God in Christ is carefully taken forward in three principal stages. To understand how the soul comes to ‘live the life of God’ through a full participation of the divine nature – and thus to understand the final goal of common prayer itself – it is necessary, says Hooker, to consider first ‘how God is in Christ, then how Christ is in us, and [finally] how the sacramentes doe serve to makes us pertakers of Christ.’44 This series of propositions is certainly a tall order, but here at least is an attempt at a summary account. First, the question of how God is in Christ leads us to consider the common life of the Holy Trinity and the mystery of God’s incarnation. In an echo of the rehearsal of the Decalogue, Hooker begins with God’s indivisible unity: The Lord our God is but one God. In which indivisible unity notwithstandinge wee adore the father as beinge altogether of him selfe, wee glorifie that consubstantiall worde which is the Sonne, wee blesse and magnifie that coessentiall Spirit eternallie proceedinge from both which is the holie Ghost. Seeing therefore the father is of none, the Sonne is of the Father, and the Spirite is of both, they are by these their severall properties reallie distinguishable from each other.45

Precisely here in the distinction of the divine persons the principle of common life has its fount and origin. Each person has his own subsistence and all share in the one divine substance. While the second person is properly said to become man, because the eternal Logos and the Godhead are ‘one subject,’ it is the whole nature of God, the divine substance which takes human nature upon itself. To deny this would be to ‘make the Sonne of God incarnate not to be verie God.’ The ‘cause sufficient’ for this assumption of the human nature by the divine is, as Paul puts it, ‘that so God might be in Christ reconcilinge to him selfe the world.’46 This union of God and man in Christ is the key to everything Hooker has to say about prayer and the common life. In a magnificent potted history of the four great ecumenical councils of the Church he goes on to elaborate the various misinterpretations which ‘heresie hath made of the maner how God and man are united in one Christ’ and to conclude with an affirmation of orthodox Catholic Christology:

43 44 45 46

2 Peter 1:4. Lawes V.50.3; 2:208.24–209.2. Lawes V.51.1; 2:209.8–15. II Corinth. 5:19, quoted in Lawes V.51.3; 2:210.25–211.1: ‘ … there is cause sufficient why divine nature should assume humane, that so God might be in Christ

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In fower words àÏË©á˜, ÙÂϤˆ˜, à‰È·ÈÚ¤Ùˆ˜, àÛ˘Á¯‡Ùˆ˜, truly, perfectly, indivisibly, distinctly; the first applyed to his beinge God, and the seconde to his beinge man, the third to his beinge of both one, and the fowrth to his still continuinge in that one both, wee may fullie by way of abridgment comprise whatsoever antiquitie hath at large handled either in declaration of Christian beliefe or in refutation of the foresaid heresies.47

On the ground of Chalcedonian Christological orthodoxy, Hooker proceeds next to consider the second step in his argument, namely how Christ is present ‘in us.’ We have moved from the supreme koinonia of the persons of the Trinity and the koinonia of the divine and human natures in Christ to a consideration of koinonia which is between Christ and the Church ‘in this present worlde.’48 The participation of the divine nature which is the supreme goal of prayer is mediated by the ‘mutuall inward hold which Christ hath of us and wee of him’ – which may be recognized in the Prayer of Humble Access in the petition that ‘we may dwell in him and he in us.’ The prior ‘communities’ of Trinity and Incarnation provide the ground of access or ‘participation.’ Hooker presents this access in terms of a doctrine of causality: ‘everie originall cause imparteth it selfe unto those thinges which come of it, and whatsoever taketh beinge from anie other the same is after a sorte in that which giveth it beinge.’49 The original source of being ‘dwells’ in that which is derivative of it and, conversely, that which is derivative ‘dwells’ in its original source.50 That community which is the mutual indwelling of Christ and his Church, therefore, has its archetype, reconcilinge to him selfe the world.’ 47 Lawes V.54.10; 2:226.22–227.15. For a discussion of Hooker’s Christology see chapter 6 above. 48 Lawes V.56.1; 2:234. 49 Lawes V.56.1; 2:235.1–3. See also Lawes I.5.1, 2; 1:72–73 and Pride III, 5:341.3–9, as follows: ‘Besides god him selfe being the supreme cause which giveth being unto all things that are and every effect so resembling the cause whereof it cometh that such as the one is the other cannot choose but be also, it followeth that either men are not made righteous by him, or if they be then surely god him selfe is much more that which he maketh us, just if a [He] be the authour fountain and cause of our justice.’ 50 Lawes V.56.5; 2:236.26–31, 237.15–25: ‘All thinges are therefore pertakers of God, they are his ofspringe, his influence is in them, and the personall wisdome of God is for that verie cause said to excell in nimbleness or agilitie, to pearce into all intellectual pure and subtile spirites, to goe through all, and to reach unto everie thinge which is … all thinges which God in theire times and seasons hath brought forth were eternallie and before all times in God as a worke unbegunne is in the artificer which afterward bringeth it unto effect. Therefore whatsoever wee doe behold now in this present world, it was inwrapped within the bowells of divine mercie, written in the booke of eternall wisdom, and held in the handes of omnipotent power, the first foundations of the world being as yet unlaide. So that all thinges which God hath made are in that respect the ofspringe of God, they are in him as effects in their highest cause, he likewise actuallies is in them, thassistance and influence of his deitie is their life.’

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its highest and most perfect reality, in the community of the three divine persons of the Blessed Trinity: It followeth hereupon that the Sonne of God beinge light of light, must needes be also light in light. The persons of the Godhead, by reason of the unitie of their substance, doe as necessarelie remaine one within an other as they are of necessitie to be distinguished one from an other, because two are the issue of one, and one the ofspringe of the other two, onlie of three one not growinge out of any other.51

Moreover, to this community of the Trinitarian life must be added the next degree of community in the order of procession, namely that of the two natures in the person of the Son: His incarnation causeth him also as man to be now in the father and the father to be in him. For in that he is man he receiveth life from the father as from the fountaine of that everliving deitie which in the person of the worde hath combined it selfe with manhood and doth thereunto imparte such life as to no other creature besides him is communicated.52

Hooker’s use of the language of ‘communication’ should be observed. In the traditional Christological formulas, the association (koinonia) of the two natures in one subject entails a ‘communication of idioms’ (communicatio idiomatum) whereby the divine and human natures may be spoken of interchangably. Such is the power of this communication, such is the dynamic motion resulting from the hypostatic union, that we may speak of the creation of the world by the Son of man and the salvation of the world through the death of the Son of God. These speeches reveal much more than a mere play on words. Hooker maintains that Christ does some things as God because his deitie alone is the well-springe from which they flowe; some thinges as man, because they issue from his meere humane nature; some thinges jointlie as both God and man, because both natures concurre as principles thereunto … of both natures there is a cooperation often, an association alwayes, but never any mutuall participation whereby the properties of the one are infused into the other.53

Thus, through the agency of Christ, the manhood he assumed is taken up into the communion of the three divine persons in the one, undivided Godhead. This ‘mutuall indwelling’ is analogous to, but necessarily distinct from, the manner in which the creation dwells in the creator. Just as all created things dwell in God ‘as effectes in theire highest cause’ and God likewise dwells in them as the first principle of their life, so also there is a mutual indwelling of cause and effect in the distinctive work of God’s salvific re-creation: 51 Lawes V.56.2; 2:235.3–9. 52 Lawes V.56.4; 2:236.7–13. 53 Lawes V.53.3; 2:218.20–23.

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God therefore lovinge eternallie his Sonne, he must needes eternallie in him have loved and preferred before all others them which are spirituallie sithence descended and sproonge out of him. These were in God as in their Saviour and not as in their creator onlie. It was the purpose of his savinge goodnes, his savinge wisdome and his savinge power which inclined it self towardes them. They which thus were in God eternallie by their intended admission to life, have by vocation or adoption God actuallie now in them, as the artificer is in the worke which his hand doth presentlie frame. Life as all other guiftes and benefites groweth originallie from the father and commeth not to us but by the Sonne, nor by the Sonne to anie of us in particular but through the Spirit.54

Here we can see the crucial importance of both the community of the three divine persons and the community of the two natures in Christ for that community which is the life of the Church. In this perspective we can see that the doctrine of the Church is to be interpreted as an outgrowth and consequence of both Trinitarian and Christological doctrine. Our ‘participation of the divine nature,’ as the Second Epistle of Peter has it, is interpreted by Hooker as a twofold dwelling in God. On the one hand, the Church ‘participates’ the community of the Godhead by virtue of our union with Christ in God’s predestining purpose. ‘Wee are therefore in God through Christ eternallie accordinge to that intent and purpose whereby wee were chosen to be made his in this present world before the world it selfe was made, wee are in God through the knowledge which is had of us and the love which is borne towards us from everlastinge.’55 On the other hand, there is no salvation outside the Church militant – nulla salus extra ecclesiam! But in God wee actuallie are no longer then onlie from the time of our actuall adoption into the bodie of his true Church, into the fellowship of his children. For his Church he knoweth and loveth, so that they which are in the Church are thereby known to be in him. Our beinge in Christ by eternall foreknowledge saveth us not without our actuall and reall adoption into the fellowship of his Sainctes in this present world. For in him we are by our actuall incorporation in that societie which hath him for their head and doth make together with him one bodie (he and they in that respect havinge one name) for which cause by vertue of this mysticall conjunction wee are of him and in him even as though our verie flesh and bones should be made continuate with his. Wee are in Christ because he knoweth and loveth us even as partes of himself. No man actuallie is in him but they in whome he actuallie is. For he which hath not the sonne of God hath not life.56

This passage helps to explain Hooker’s earlier, somewhat paradoxical, reference to the Church as a ‘visible mystical body’ in his discussion of Publique Prayer back in chapter 24. The Church, consistent with the archetype of the Incarnation itself, is both in heaven and in earth, mystical yet visible. Once again we recog-

54 Lawes V.56.6, 7; 2:238.3–15. 55 Lawes V.56.7; 2:238.18–23. 56 Lawes V.56.7; 2:238.23–239.8.

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nize the pattern of ‘properties communicated’ (communicatio idiomatum) as in the image of the ‘angelic commerce’ with which we began in relation to the dynamic double notion of doctrine and prayer in the liturgy of the offices. The Church assembles in order to learn by receiving heavenly inspiration as by angels descending from above and also to pray by offering up holy desires as by angels ascending in return. Yet for Hooker it is above all the sacraments which ‘serve to make men partakers of Christ.’57 The sacraments are the divinely appointed and necessary means of our participation of God in Christ. As Article XXV puts it, ‘Sacraments ordained of Christ be not only badges or tokens of Christian men’s profession, but rather they be certain witnesses and effectual signs of grace, and God’s good word towards us, by the which he doth work invisibly in us, and doth not only quicken, but also strengthen and confirm our faith in him.’ Hooker, following the doctrine of the Articles of Religion, rejects the Zwinglian option as Christologically untenable. Just as he rejects the claim of participation in Christ simply by sharing a common human nature with him as ‘too cold an interpretation’ of the mystery of co-inherence with him, so here he also insists that we must become real partakers of his body. For wee take not baptisme nor the Eucharist for bare resemblances or memorialls of thinges absent, neither for naked signes and testimonies assuringe us of grace received before, but (as they are in deed and in veritie) for meanes effectuall whereby God when wee take the sacramentes delivereth into our handes that grace available unto eternall life, which grace the sacraments represent or signifie.58

Through the instrumentality of the sacraments, God accommodates himself to our mortal condition. In them the ascending motion of the angels of our ‘holie desires’ and the descending motion of the angels of ‘heavenly inspirations’ are united; through these sacramental means, as instruments whereby we receive grace, there is effected the real incorporation of believers into the body of Christ. It is crucial to this teaching that, unlike doctrine and prayer in the public religious act, sacraments are delivered into our hands as individuals: ‘That savinge grace which Christ originallie is or hath for the good of his whole Church, by sacramentes he severallie deriveth into everie member thereof.’59 The former is an important sense in which Hooker views doctrine and prayer as elements or parts which come to completion and fulfilment in the sacraments. In the sacraments the heavenly gifts are made actual in the lives of concrete individuals, and through these ‘morall instruments’ these individuals are conformed to the common life of the ‘visible mystical bodie.’ Through the sacraments there is achieved that ‘actual incorporation’ into the community which has Christ as its head and which is actually one body with him whereby ‘wee are of him and in him even as though 57 Lawes V.57.1; 2:244.28. 58 Lawes V.57.5; 2:247.16–21. 59 Lawes V.57.5: 2:247.

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our verie flesh and bones should be made continuate with his.’60 Furthermore, the actual range or extent of this participation is of crucial significance. Communion in Christ’s body extends to the totality of our humanity, just as in his Incarnation Christ is teleos anthropos, completely and perfectly man. From Christ’s body ‘our verie bodies’ through the mystical communion receive the ‘vitall efficacie’ which belongs to him owing to his Resurrection: Our corruptible bodies could never live the life they shall live, were it not that heere they are joyned with his bodie which is incorruptible, and that his is in oures as a cause of immortalitie, a cause by removinge through the death and merit of his owne flesh that which hindered the life of oures. Christ is therefore both as God and as man that true vine whereof wee both spirituallie and corporallie are branches.61

To return once again to our beginning, what does all this high doctrine have to do with the ‘publique duties of Christian religion’ and, more specifically, with the justification for the practice of public or common prayer? For Hooker and his sixteenth-century brethren, there is nothing in our lives more needful to be spoken of and called upon than prayer. Through prayer our communion with the source and end of our being is established. That prayer should be a ‘publique act,’ and thus common prayer is for Hooker a consequence of the very being of God himself. If we are to ‘live the life of God,’ which is the ultimate concern of all our prayer, we find that we are called to live communally. The life of God as Trinity is a mystical koinonia of divine persons. As Hooker observes in the sixth book on penitence, ‘What is love towards God, butt a desire of union with God? And shall wee imagine a sinner converting himselfe to God, in whome there is noe desire of union with God presupposed?’62 This desire of union draws us ineluctably into a life of communion, of koinonia. In our religious duty of service towards God there is most certainly an internal and private moment through which we live as ‘spiritual branches’ of the one true vine. Our prayers may be uttered in secret, yet this secrecy can by no means do away with the mediating layers of community we have hitherto discussed. Although we may distinguish our private religious duty as individuals before God from our public act of worship, the sixteenth-century reformers would not have us separate the two for fear that we fall into grievous doctrinal error. Christ’s assumption of our human nature is complete and perfect – he is teleos anthropos. Since we participate Christ as both God and man, we must show forth this mystical mutuality ‘corporallie’ as well as ‘spirituallie.’63 On this principle as a premiss, Hooker understands the totality of human life and experience as belonging to communion of Christ’s body. It is on the solid ground of Chalcedonian Christology that he is able to claim that the external visible Church and the Commonwealth together constitute a single community: 60 61 62 63

Lawes V.56.7; 2:239.4–5. Lawes V.56.9; 2:241.5–11. Lawes VI.3.3; 3:9.21–22. Lawes V.56.9; 2:241.11.

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The Church and the Commonwealth are names which import thinges really different. But those thinges are accidentes and such accidents as may and should alwayes lovingly dwell together in one subject … A Commonwealth we name it simplie in regard of some regiment or policie under which men live, a church for the truth of that religion which they professe … The Commonwealth and the Church therefore being such names, they doe not only betoken those accidentes of civill governement and Christian religion which we have mentioned, but also together with them such multitudes as are the subjectes of those accidentes … Are not Saincts and Citizens one and the same people? Are they not one and the same societie? … within this Realme of England … from the state of Pagans we differ in that with us one societie is both the Church and Commonwealth which with them it was not, as also from the state of those nations which subject themselves to the Bishop of Rome in that our church hath dependencie upon the cheife in our Commonwealth which it hath not under him. In a word our estate is according to the patterne of Godes own ancient elect people, which people was not parte of them the Commonwealth and part of them the Church of God, but the self same people whole and entier, were both under on chief Governour, on whose supreme authoritie they did depend.64

Hooker’s claim that there is no necessary, perpetual and personal separation between Church and Commonwealth is no doubt difficult for us to fathom, living as we do in the evening glow of the Enlightenment sun which was just showing the rosy fingers of dawn in Hooker’s own lifetime. Nonetheless, this important political aspect of his theology, however uncomfortable and unattractive it may seem to us, serves but to reinforce the claim he makes concerning the power and efficacy of common prayer. In reflection upon this conception of the union of Church and Commonwealth, of the religious and the secular in the life of a single ‘politique societie’, we can begin to discern the remarkably full extent of Hooker’s claim on behalf of common prayer. Through the practice of common prayer there is, as it were, a communication of idioms (communicatio idiomatum) between Christ’s ‘visible mysticall bodie,’ viz. the Church, on the one side, and the Commonwealth on the other. Properties are communicated from the one ‘accident’ of Christian religion to the other accident of civil government through the ‘personal’ identity of Christian ‘subjectes.’ The community at prayer is hypostatically one and the same community engaged in the many and various duties and tasks of civil community. In short, common prayer is nothing less than the public religious act of the concrete Christian ‘politique societie’ (koinonia politike). Through common prayer the whole of life lived in the Commonwealth is lifted up before the throne of the heavenly king. From the profoundly Christian perspective delineated by Hooker in Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, there is no form of human community that can fall outside the embrace of the community of God’s own Trinitarian life. The union of God with man in the person of Jesus Christ who is that ‘meane betwene both which is both’ is the ground upon which Christians are called to a participation of the divine life.

64 Lawes VIII.1.5–7; 3:325.1–4, 16–18, 25–326.1, 327.13–15, 27–330.8.

Select Bibliography

Bibliographies and Reference Grislis, Egil and W. Speed Hill, compilers. Richard Hooker: A Selected Bibliography. Bibliographia Tripotamopolitana, 4. Pittsburgh: The Clifford E. Barbour Library, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, 1971. ——, compilers. ‘Richard Hooker: An Annotated Bibliography.’ In Studies in Richard Hooker, ed. Hill, 279–320. ——, compilers. ‘Richard Hooker: A Selected Bibliography, 1971–1993.’ In Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. A.S. McGrade, 385–405. Grislis, Egil and John K. Stafford, compilers. ‘Richard Hooker: A Selected Bibliography.’ In W.J. Torrance Kirby, ed., Richard Hooker and the English Reformation. London and Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003. Hill, W. Speed. Richard Hooker: A Descriptive Bibliography of the Early Editions 1593–1724. Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1970. Lawry, Jon. ‘A Working Bibliography of Studies of Richard Hooker that Bear upon Literary Criticism.’ English Renaissance Prose [Newsletter] 4.1 (Fall 1990): 33–8. Stanwood, P.G. ‘Richard Hooker, 1554–1600.’ In New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, 1:1949–58. Cambridge University Press, 1973.

Printed Works of Hooker Bayne, Ronald. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: The Fifth Book. The English Theological Library. London: Macmillan, 1902. Hill, W. Speed, gen. ed. The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker. Vols 1–5, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; vols 6 and 7, Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1977–98. Vol. 1. Georges Edelen, ed. Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie: Preface, Books I–IV, 1977. Vol. 2. W. Speed Hill, ed. Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie: Book V, 1977. Vol. 3. P.G. Stanwood, ed. Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie: Books VI, VII, VIII, 1981. Vol. 4. John E. Booty, ed. Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie: Attack and Response, 1982. 113

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Vol. 5. Laetitia Yeandle, ed. Tractates and Sermons, 1990. Vol. 6. W. Speed Hill, gen. ed. Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, Books I– VIII, 1993. Vol. 7. W. Speed Hill, gen. ed., with the assistance of Thane Doss. Index of Names and Works, 1998. Hooker, Richard. Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie. Eyght Bookes. London: John Windet, n.d. Editio Princeps of Preface and Books I–IV; entered to Windet 29 January 1593. Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie. The fift Booke. London: John Windet, 1597. Printer’s copy (Bodleian MS Add. C. 165), with corrections in Hooker’s hand. The Answere of Mr. Richard Hooker to a Supplication Preferred by Mr. Walter Travers to the HH. Lords of the Privie Counsell. Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1612. A Learned and Comfortable Sermon of the certaintie and perpetuitie of faith in the Elect; especially of the Prophet Habakkuks faith. Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1612. A Learned Discourse of Justification, Workes, and How the Foundation of Faith is Overthrowne. Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1612; 2nd edn, 1613. A Learned Sermon on the Nature of Pride. Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1612. Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie; The Sixth and Eighth Books … now published according to the most Authentique Copies. London: Richard Bishop, 1648; reissued, 1651. First edition of Books VI and VIII, the latter incomplete (omits chapters vii and ix). The Works of Mr. Richard Hooker … in Eight Books of Ecclesiastical Polity. Now Compleated, as with the Sixth and Eighth, so with the Seventh … out of his own Manuscripts, never before Published. London: J. Best, for Andrew Crook, 1662. Houk, R.A., ed. Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity: Book VIII. 1931; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1973. Hughes, Philip Edgcumbe, ed. Faith and Works: Cranmer and Hooker on Justification. Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow, 1982. Modernized repr. Of Justification, 61–109. Keble, John, ed. The Works of … Mr. Richard Hooker: with an Account of His Life and Death by Isaak Walton. 7th edition, rev. R.W. Church and F. Paget. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888; repr. Anglistica and Americana, vol. 181. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag. 1977; Ellicott City: Via Media, 1994. McGrade, A.S., ed. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Preface, Book I, Book VIII. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge University Press, 1989. McGrade, A.S. and Brian Vickers, eds. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: An Abridged Edition. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1975.

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Other Primary Sources [Anon.] A Christian Letter of certaine English Protestants unfayned favourers of the present state of religion, authorized and professed in England: unto that Reverend and Learned man Mr. R. Hoo[ker] requiring resolution in certayne matters of doctrine (which seeme to overthrowe the foundation of Christian Religion, and of the Church among us) expreslie contayned in his five bookes of Ecclesiasticall Policie. Middleburg, Netherlands: R. Schilders, 1599; facsimile, New York, 1969 (No. 202, The English Experience). Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae [Treatise on Law], IaIIae, QQ. 90–97. Ed. R.J. Henle. London: Notre Dame Press, 1993. Bullinger, Heinrich. The Decades. Ed. T. Harding. London, 1577. Reprinted for the Parker Society, Cambridge, 1849–51. Calvin, Jean. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. Henry Beveridge. 2 vols. London and Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1979. Cartwright, Thomas. A Replye to an Answere Made of M. Doctor Whitgift … Agaynste the Admonition. s.l., 1574. Reprinted in Whitgift’s Works. Ed. John Ayre. 3 vols. Cambridge: Parker Society, 1851–53. ——. The Second Replie against Master Whitgiftes Second Answer. s.l., 1575. ——. The Reste of the Second Replie. s.l., 1577. Luther, Martin. Werke. Kritische Gesammtausgabe. Weimar, 1883. ——. Commentary on the Gospel of John, Luther’s Works. Ed. Jaroslav Pelikan. St Louis and Philadelphia: Concordia, 1955–86. Melanchthon, Philipp. Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine: Loci Communes Theologici of 1555. Ed. and trans. Clyde L. Manschreck. Erlangen: Carlus Heyder, 1828; New York, 1965. Plotinus. The Enneads. Trans. Stephen McKenna. Burdett, NY: Larson Publications, 1992. Proclus. The Elements of Theology. Ed. E.R. Dodds. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The Complete Works. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem. Classics of Western Spirituality Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987. Travers, Walter. Ecclesiasticae Disciplinae, et Anglicanae Ecclesiae ab illa aberrationis, plena e verbo Dei, et dilucida explicatio. La Rochelle, 1574. ——. A Full and Plaine Declaration of Ecclesiastical Discipline. Heidelberg, 1574. Whitgift, John. The defense of the answere to the Admonition, against the Replie of T.C. London: H. Bynneman for H. Toye, 1574. ——. Works. Ed. John Ayre. 3 vols. Cambridge: Parker Society, 1852.

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Books and Articles on Richard Hooker1 Addison, James T. ‘Early Anglican Thought, 1559–1667.’ Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 22 (1953): 247–69. Allchin, Arthur M. ‘The Theology of Nature in the Eastern Fathers and among Anglican Theologians.’ In Man and Nature, ed. H. Montiefore, 143–54. London: Collins, 1975. ——. Participation in God: A Forgotten Strand in Anglican Tradition. Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow, 1988. Allison, Christopher FitzSimons. The Rise of Moralism: The Proclamation of the Gospel from Hooker to Baxter. London: SPCK, 1966; New York: Seabury, 1966. ——. ‘The Pastoral and Political Implications of Trent on Justification: A Response to the ARCIC Agreed Statement Salvation and the Church.’ St Luke’s Journal of Theology 31 (June 1988): 204–22. Almasy, Rudolph P. ‘The Purpose of Richard Hooker’s Polemic.’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 39 (April–June 1978): 251–70. ——. ‘Richard Hooker’s Address to the Presbyterians.’ Anglican Theological Review 61.4 (1979): 462–74. ——. ‘Richard Hooker’s Address to the Puritans.’ Selected Papers from the West Virginia Shakespeare and Renaissance Association 4 (1979): 117–39. ——. ‘Richard Hooker’s Book VI: A Reconstruction.’ The Huntington Library Quarterly 42.2 (Spring 1979): 117–39. ——. ‘They are and are not Elymas: The 1641 ‘Causes’ Notes as Postscript to Richard Hooker’s Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie.’ In Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. McGrade, 183–201. ——. ‘Language and Exclusion in the First Book of Hooker’s Politie.’ In Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, ed. W.J. Torrance Kirby. Studies in Early Modern Religious Reforms. London and Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003, 227–42. ——. ‘Book VI and the “Tractate on Penance”: do they belong together?’ In Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, ed. Kirby, 263–83. Alsop, James D. and Wesley M. Stevens. ‘William Lombarde and Elizabethan Polity.’ In Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 8, ed. J.A.S. Evans and R.W. Unger, 233–65. New York: AMS, 1986. Archer, Stanley. Richard Hooker. Twayne’s English Author Series, 350. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1983. ——. ‘Hooker on Apostolic Succession: The Two Voices.’ Sixteenth Century Journal 24.1 (1993): 67–74.

1

This section of the bibliography is largely derived from the Select Bibliography compiled by Egil Grislis and John Stafford and published in W.J. Torrance Kirby, ed., Richard Hooker and the English Reformation. London and Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003.

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Armentrout, Donald S., ed. This Sacred History: Anglican Reflections for John Booty. Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1990. Atkinson, Nigel. Richard Hooker and the Authority of Scripture, Tradition, and Reason: Reformed Theologian of the Church of England? Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1997. ——. ‘Hooker’s Theological Method and Modern Anglicanism.’ Churchman 114.1 (Spring 2000): 40–70. Avis, Paul D.L. ‘Richard Hooker and John Calvin.’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 32.1 (January 1981): 19–28. ——. The Church in the Theology of the Reformers. Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1981. ——. Anglicanism and the Christian Church. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1989. Bartholomew, Keith. ‘Biblical and Constitutional Interpretation and the Role of Originalism in Sixteenth- and Twentieth-Century Societies.’ Anglican Theological Review 82.3 (Summer 2000): 537–45. Bartlett, Alan. ‘What has Richard Hooker to Say to Modern Evangelical Anglicanism.’ Anvil 15.3 (1998): 195–206. Barton, John and John Halliburton. ‘Story and Liturgy.’ In Believing in the Church, ed., B. Mitchell, et al., 79–107. London: SPCK, 1981. Bauckham, Richard J. ‘Hooker, Travers and the Church of Rome in the 1580s.’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 29.1 (January 1978): 37–50. ——. ‘Richard Hooker and John Calvin: A Comment.’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 32.1 (January 1981): 29–33. Bennett, Gareth. ‘The Church of England and the Royal Supremacy (1300– 1829).’ One in Christ 22.4 (1986): 304–13. Bennett, Joan S. ‘Hooker, Milton, and the Radicalization of Christian Humanism.’ In Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton’s Great Poems, 6– 32. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Berry, Paul. The Encounter between Seneca and Christianity. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002. Bietenholz, Peter G., ed. Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Bibliographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation. 3 vols. University of Toronto Press, 1987. Booty, John E. ‘The Quest for the Historical Hooker.’ Churchman 80 (Autumn 1966): 158–93. ——. ‘Hooker and Anglicanism.’ In Studies in Richard Hooker, ed. Hill, 207–39. ——. Three Anglican Divines on Prayer: Jewel, Andrewes, and Hooker. Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1978. ——. ‘Contrition in Anglican Spirituality: Hooker, Donne and Herbert.’ In Anglican Spirituality, ed. William J. Wolf, 25–48. Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow, 1982. ——. ‘Richard Hooker.’ In The Spirit of Anglicanism: Hooker, Maurice, Temple, ed. William J. Wolf, John E. Booty and Owen C. Thomas, 1–45. Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow, 1976; Edinburgh: Clark, 1982. ——. ‘The English Reformation: A Lively Faith and Sacramental Confession.’ In

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The Anglican Moral Choice, ed. P. Elmen, 15–32. Wilton, CT: MorehouseBarlow, 1983. ——. ‘Hooker’s Understanding of the Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.’ In The Divine Drama in History and Liturgy: Essays Presented to Horton Davies on His Retirement from Princeton University, ed. John E. Booty, 131–48. Pittsburgh Theological Monographs, n.s. 10. Allison Park, PA: Pickwick, 1984. ——. ‘The Judicious Mr. Hooker and Authority in the Elizabethan Church.’ In Authority in the Anglican Communion: Essays Presented to Bishop John Howe, ed. Stephen W. Sykes, 94–115. Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1987. ——. ‘An Elizabethan Addresses Modern Anglicanism: Richard Hooker and Theological Issues at the End of the Twentieth Century.’ Anglican Theological Review 71 (Winter 1989): 8–24. ——. ‘The Law of Proportion: William Meade and Richard Hooker.’ St Luke’s Journal of Theology 34 (March 1991): 19–31. ——. ‘Hooker and Anglicanism: into the Future.’ Sewanee Theological Review 36.2 (Easter 1993): 215–26. ——. ‘The Spirituality of Participation in Richard Hooker.’ Sewanee Theological Review 38 (Christmas 1994): 9–20. ——. ‘Richard Hooker and the Holy Scriptures.’ SEAD Occasional Paper 3 (May 1995). www.VetusTestamentums.edu/sead/booty.htm. ——. ‘Anglican Identity: What is the Book of Common Prayer?’ Sewanee Theological Review 40 (Easter 1997): 137–45. ——. Reflections on the Theology of Richard Hooker: An Elizabethan Addresses Modern Anglicanism. Sewanee, TN: University of the South Press, 1998. ——. ‘The Core of Elizabethan Religion.’ In Wrestling with God: Literature and Theology in the English Renaissance, ed. Mary Ellen Henley and W. Speed Hill, 45–51. Vancouver: Benwell-Atkins, 2001. ——, ed. A Celebration of Richard Hooker (on the 400th Anniversary of Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity), Sewanee Theological Review 36.2 (Easter 1993): 179–251. Bouwsma, William J. ‘Hooker in the Context of European Cultural History.’ In Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora K. Shuger, 142–58. Cambridge University Press, 1997. ——. ‘Hooker in the Context of European Cultural History.’ In Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. McGrade, 41–57. Bryan, John M.C. ‘The Judicious Mr. Hooker and the Early Christians: The Relationship of Scripture and Reason in the First Century of the Christian Era.’ In This Sacred History, ed. D.S. Armentrout, 144–60. Cargill Thompson, W.D.J. ‘The Source of Hooker’s Knowledge of Marsilius of Padua.’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 25.1 (January 1974): 75–81. ——. ‘The Philosopher of the Politic Society: Richard Hooker as a Political Thinker,’ in Studies in Richard Hooker, ed. Hill, 3–76. Repr. Studies in the Reformation: Luther to Hooker, ed. C.W. Dugmore, 131–91. London: Athlone Press, 1990.

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Carlson, Leland H. ‘Archbishop John Whitgift: His Supporters and Opponents.’ Anglican and Episcopal History 56 (September 1987): 285–301. Chapman, Mark D; Alexandra Riebe, trans. ‘Bischofsamt und Politik: zur Begruendung des Bischofsamtes der anglikanischen Kirche.’ Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 97.4 (2000): 434–62. Christopher, Brian. ‘Richard Hooker and Me.’ Sewanee Theological Review 36 (Easter 1993): 179–80. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. ‘Richard Hooker: c.1554–1600.’ In The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Marginalia, ed. George Whalley, 1131–67. Bollingen Series 75. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. Collins, Stephen L. ‘Richard Hooker: The Innovative Conservative.’ In From Divine Cosmos to Sovereign State: An Intellectual History of Consciousness and the Idea of Order in Renaissance England, 91–103. Oxford University Press, 1989. Collinson, Patrick. The Elizabethan Puritan Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. ——. The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559–1625. The Ford Lectures, 1979. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982; repr. 1984, 1985 and 1988. ——. ‘Hooker and the Elizabethan Establishment.’ In Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. McGrade, 149–81. Compier, Don H. ‘Hooker on the Authority of Scripture in Matters of Morality.’ In Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. McGrade, 251–9. Condren, C. ‘The Creation of Richard Hooker’s Public Authority: Rhetoric, Reputation and Reassessment.’ Journal of Religious History 21 (1997): 35–59. Covel, William. A Just and Temperate Defence of the Five Books of Ecclesiastical Polity Written by Richard Hooker [1603]. Repr. from the Hanbury edn. London: Holdsworth and Ball, 1930. Ed. John A. Taylor. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998. Cragg, G.R. ‘Hooker, Andrewes, and the School of Laud.’ Chap. 4, Freedom and Authority, 97–126. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1975. Crowley, Weldon S. ‘Erastianism in England to 1640.’ Journal of Church and State 32 (Summer 1990): 549–66. Dackson, Wendy. ‘Richard Hooker and American Religious Liberty.’ Journal of Church and State 41 (Winter 1999): 117–34. Davies, E.T. The Political Ideas of Richard Hooker. London: SPCK, 1948; repr. New York: Octagon Books, 1972. ——. Episcopacy and the Royal Supremacy in the Church of England in the XVI Century. Oxford: Blackwell, 1950. Davies, Horton. Worship and Theology in England. Vol. 1: From Cranmer to Hooker, 1534–1603. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970. Davis, Charles Watterson. ‘“For conformities sake”: How Richard Hooker Used

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Fuzzy Logic and Legal Rhetoric against Political Extremes.’ In Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. McGrade, 331–49. Davis, J.C. ‘Backing into Modernity: The Dilemma of Richard Hooker.’ In The Certainty of Doubt: Tributes to Peter Munz, ed. Miles Fairburn and W.H. Oliver. Victoria, New Zealand: Victoria University Press, 1997. Delbanco, Andrew, The Puritan Ordeal. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. d’Entrèves, Alessandro Passerin. Riccardo Hooker: Contributo alla teoria e alla storia del diritto naturale. R. Universita di Torino, Memorie dell’Instituto Giuridico, series 2, No. 22. Turin: Press L’Istituto della R. Universitá, 1932. Douglas, Crerar. Positive Negatives: A Motif in Christian Tradition. New York: Peter Lang, 1992. Dunstan, Gordon R. ‘Corporate Union and the Body Politic: Constitutional Aspects of Union between the Church of England and the Church of Rome.’ In Their Lord and Ours, ed. Mark Santer, 129–48. London: SPCK, 1982. Eccleshall, Robert R. ‘Richard Hooker’s Synthesis and the Problem of Allegiance.’ Journal of the History of Ideas 37.1 (January–March 1976): 111–24. ——. Order and Reason in Politics: Theories of Absolute and Limited Monarchy in Early Modern England. Oxford University Press, 1978. ——. ‘Richard Hooker and the Peculiarities of the English: The Reception of the Ecclesiastical Polity in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.’ History of Political Thought 2.1 (Spring 1981): 63–117. Edelen, Georges. ‘Hooker’s Style.’ In Studies in Richard Hooker, ed. Hill, 241– 77. Ellison, James. ‘Richard Hooker.’ In George Sandys: Travel, Colonialism and Tolerance in the Seventeenth Century, 21–30. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002. Eppley, Daniel. ‘Richard Hooker and Unconditionality of Predestination.’ In Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, ed. Kirby, 43–61. ——. ‘Richard Hooker and Christopher St. German: Biblical Hermeneutics and Princely Power.’ In Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, ed. Kirby, 285–94. Faulkner, Robert K. ‘Reason and Revelation in Hooker’s Ethics.’ American Political Science Review 59 (1965): 680–90. ——. Richard Hooker and the Politics of a Christian England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Ferguson, Arthur B. ‘The Historical Perspective of Richard Hooker: A Renaissance Paradox.’ Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 3.1 (1973): 17–49. Fields, Albert W. ‘Emerson and Hooker: from the Footstool of God.’ Xavier Review 7.1 (1987): 11–20. Flannery, Kathryn Thoms. ‘What Makes this Text Literature?’ Essays: Critical Approaches to Medieval and Renaissance Texts 5 (1989): 111–33. Foord, Martin. ‘Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of Justification.’ Churchman, 114.4 (Winter 2000): 316–29. Forte, Paul E. ‘Richard Hooker’s Theory of Law.’ Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 12.2 (1982): 133–57.

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——. ‘Richard Hooker as Preacher.’ Tractates and Sermons, Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, 5:657–82. Garnett, James M. ‘Notes on Elizabethan Prose.’ PMLA (Modern Language Association of America) 4.1 (1889): 41–61. Gascoigne, J. ‘Church and State Unified: Hooker’s Rationale for the English PostReformation Order.’ Journal of Religious History 21 (1997): 35–59. Gassmann, Günther. ‘Richard Hooker (1554–1600).’ Theologische Realenzyklopaedie 15 (1986): 581–3. Germino, Dante. ‘Eric Voegelin’s Two Portraits of Hooker and their Relation to Modern Crisis.’ In Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. McGrade, 351–67. Gibbs, Lee W. ‘Richard Hooker’s Via Media Doctrine of Justification.’ Harvard Theological Review 74.2 (April 1981): 211–20. ——. ‘Theology, Logic, and Rhetoric in the Temple Controversy between Richard Hooker and Walter Travers.’ Anglican Theological Review, 65.1 (January 1983): 177–88. ——. ‘The Source of the Most Famous Quotation from Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.’ Sixteenth Century Journal 21.1 (1990): 77–86. ——. ‘Richard Hooker’s Via Media Doctrine of Repentance.’ Harvard Theological Review 84.1 (January 1991): 59–74. ——. ‘Richard Hooker.’ In The Middle Way: Voices of Anglicanism, 11–28. Cincinnati, OH: Forward Movement Publications, 1991. ——. ‘Richard Hooker.’ Dictionary of Literary Biography, Sixteenth-Century British Nondramatic Writers, ed. David A. Richardson, 1st ser., 132:192–209. Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1993. ——. ‘Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes on Priestly Absolution.’ In Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. McGrade, 261–74. ——. ‘Richard Hooker’s Via Media Doctrine of Scripture and Tradition.’ Harvard Theological Review 95.2 (April 2002): 227–35. ——. ‘Richard Hooker: Prophet of Anglicanism or English Magisterial Reformer?’ Anglican Theological Review 84.4 (Fall 2002): 943–60. ——. ‘Book VI of Hooker’s Lawes Revisited: the Calvin Connection.’ In Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, ed. Kirby, 243–61. Goldblatt, Mark M. ‘Inherited Flaws: The Logical Consistency of Hooker’s Thomism.’ English Renaissance Prose [Newsletter] 4.1 (Fall 1990): 1–17. Grace, D. ‘Natural Law in Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity,’ Journal of Religious History 21 (1997): 10–22. Greaves, Richard L. Society and Religion in Elizabethan England. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. ——. ‘Concepts of Political Obedience in Late Tudor England.’ Journal of British Studies 22 (1982): 23–34. Gregg, William O. ‘Sacramental Theology in Hooker’s Laws: A Structural Perspective.’ Anglican Theological Review 73 (Spring 1991): 155–76. Grislis, Egil. ‘Richard Hooker’s Method of Theological Inquiry.’ Anglican Theological Review 45 (April 1963): 190–203.

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——. ‘Richard Hooker’s Image of Man.’ Renaissance Papers, ed. S.K. Heninger, Jr et al., 73–84, The Southeastern Renaissance Conference, 1964. ——. ‘The Role of Consensus in Richard Hooker’s Method of Theological Inquiry.’ In The Heritage of Christian Thought: Essays in Honor of Robert Lowry Calhoun, ed. Robert E. Cushman and Egil Grislis, 64–88. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. ——. ‘The Hermeneutical Problem in Richard Hooker.’ In Studies in Richard Hooker, ed. Hill, 159–206. ——. ‘Commentary.’ Tractates and Sermons, The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, 5:619–55, 683–909. ——. ‘The Eucharistic Presence of Christ: Losses and Gains of the Insights of St. Thomas Aquinas in the Age of Reformation.’ Consensus 18.1 (1992): 9–35. ——. ‘The Anglican Spirituality of Richard Hooker.’ Toronto Journal of Theology 12.1 (1996): 35–45. ——. ‘The Assurance of Faith According to Richard Hooker.’ In Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. McGrade, 237–49. ——. ‘The Role of Sin in the Theology of Richard Hooker.’ Anglican Theological Review 84.4 (Fall 2002): 881–96. ——. ‘Providence, Predestination, and Free Will in Richard Hooker’s Theology.’ In Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, ed. Kirby, 79–95. ——. ‘Reflections on Richard Hooker’s Understanding of the Eucharist.’ In Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, ed. Kirby, 207–23. Gustafson, Sarah. ‘A Semiotic Inquiry: Exegesis by More, Tyndale, and Hooker.’ In Semiotics 1989, ed. John Deely, Karen Haworth and Terry Prewitt, 68–76. Lanham, MA: USA Press, 1990. ——. ‘Inquiries Into “True Religion”: Hooker’s and Bacon’s Use of Reason.’ English Renaissance Prose [Newsletter] 4.1 (Fall 1990): 18–32. Guy, John. ‘The Elizabethan Establishment and the Ecclesiastical Polity.’ In The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the last Decade, ed. John Guy, 126– 49. Cambridge University Press, 1995. Hall, Anne Drury. ‘Richard Hooker and the Ceremonial Rhetoric of “Silly Sooth.”’ Prose Studies 11.2 (September 1988): 25–36. ——. Ceremony and Civility in English Renaissance Prose. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. Hall, M.S. and R.W. Hall. ‘Platonism in Hooker.’ Apeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science 17 (1983): 48–56. Harrison, William H. ‘Prudence and Custom: Revisiting Hooker on Authority.’ Anglican Theological Review 84.4 (Fall 2002): 897–913. ——. ‘Powers of Nature and Influences of Grace in Hooker’s Lawes.’ In Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, ed. Kirby, 15–24. ——. ‘Prudential Method in Ecclesiology: Authority in Richard Hooker’s Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie.’ PhD thesis, Boston College, 2000. Haugaard, William P. ‘Renaissance Patristic Scholarship and Theology in Sixteenth-Century England.’ Sixteenth Century Journal 10 (Fall 1979): 37–60.

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——. ‘The Bible in the Anglican Reformation.’ In Anglicanism and the Bible, ed. Frederick Houk Borsch, 11–80. Wilton, CT: Moorehouse-Barlow, 1984. ——. ‘Richard Hooker: Evidences of an Ecumenical Vision from a TwentiethCentury Perspective.’ Journal of Ecumenical Studies 24.3 (Summer 1987): 427–39. ——. ‘Towards an Anglican Doctrine of Ministry. Richard Hooker and the Elizabethan Church.’ Anglican and Episcopal History 56.3 (October 1987): 265–84. ——. ‘The Scriptural Hermeneutics of Richard Hooker. Historical Contextualization and Teleology.’ In This Sacred History, ed. Armentrout, 161–74. ——. ‘Richard Hooker (1554–1600).’ In Historical Handbook of Major Biblical Interpreters, 198–204. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998. ——. ‘Prelude: Hooker after 400 Years.’ Anglican Theological Review 84.4 (Fall 2002): 873–80. Haverland, Mark D. ‘“So Many and So Godly Ages”: The Idea of Tradition in Richard Hooker.’ MA thesis, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, 1981. Master’s Abstracts, 19.4: 352. Heaven, Edwin B. ‘The Transcendence of Order.’ In The Future of Anglican Theology, ed. M. Darrol Bryant, 117–29. Hill, W. Speed. ‘The Doctrinal Background of Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.’ PhD thesis, Harvard University, 1964. Hill, W. Speed, ed. Studies in Richard Hooker: Essays Preliminary to an Edition of His Works. Cleveland, OH: Press of Case Western University, 1972. ——. ‘The Authority of Hooker’s Style.’ Studies in Philology 67 (1970): 328–38. ——. ‘Hooker’s Polity: The Problem of the “Three Last Books.’’’ Huntington Library Quarterly 34 (1971): 317–36. ——. ‘Doctrine and Polity in Hooker’s Laws.’ English Literary Renaissance 2 (1972): 173–93. ——. ‘The Evolution of Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.’ In Studies in Richard Hooker, ed. Hill, 117–58. ——. ‘The Calculus of Error, or Confessions of a General Editor.’ Modern Philology 75.3 (February 1978): 247–60. ——. ‘Editing Richard Hooker: A Retrospective.’ Sewanee Theological Review: A Celebration of Richard Hooker 36.2 (Easter 1993): 185–99. ——. ‘Scripture as Text, Text as Scripture: The Example of Richard Hooker,’ TEXT: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship 9 (1996): 93–110. ——. ‘Commentary on Commentary on Commentary: Three Historicisms Annotating Richard Hooker,’ for Margins of the Text, ed. D.C. Greetham. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. ——. ‘Richard Hooker in the Folger Edition: An Editorial Perspective.’ In Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. McGrade, 3–20. ——. ‘Recent Theoretical Approaches to Editing Renaissance Texts, with Particular Reference to the Folger Library Edition of Hooker’s Works.’ In New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, II: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1992– 1996, ed. W. Speed Hill, 11–21. Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies in conjunction with Renaissance English Text Society, 1998.

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——. ‘Where Are the Bibliographers of Yesteryear?’ In Pilgrimage for Love: Essays in Early Modern Literature in Honor of Josephine A. Roberts, ed. Sigrid King, 115–32. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999. ——. ‘Richard Hooker and the Rhetoric of History.’ Churchman 114.1 (Spring 2000): 7–21. Hillerdal, Gunnar. Reason and Revelation in Richard Hooker. Lund, Sweden: CWK Gleerup, 1962. Hudson, Nicholas. ‘Three Steps to Perfection: Rasselas and the Philosophy of Richard Hooker.’ Eighteenth Century Life 14.3 (November 1990): 29–39. Irish, Charles W. ‘“Participation of God Himselfe”: Law, the mediation of Christ, and sacramental participation in the thought of Richard Hooker.’ In Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, ed. Kirby, 165–84. Johnson, Mary Peterson. ‘An “Anglican Tripod”? Richard Hooker’s Explication of the Roles of Scripture, Reason, and Tradition as Sources of Authority for the Church, Considered in Light of the Admonition Controversy.’ STM thesis, General Seminary, New York, 1986. Kavanagh, Robert V. ‘Reason and Nature in Hooker’s Polity.’ PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1944. Kaye, Bruce N. ‘Richard Hooker and Australian Anglicanism.’ Sewanee Theological Review 36.2 (Easter 1993): 227–45. ——. ‘Authority and the Shaping of Tradition: New Essays on Richard Hooker.’ Journal of Religious History 21 (1997): 3–9. ——, ed. ‘Richard Hooker Issue.’ Journal of Religious History 21 (1997): 11– 109. ——. ‘Authority and Interpretation of Scripture in Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.’ Journal of Religious History 21 (1997): 80–109. ——. ‘What Might Alistair MacIntyre Learn from a Reading of Richard Hooker? Rivalry, Commonality, and Their Projects.’ Sewanee Theological Review 42 (Pentecost 1999): 332–49. Kendall, R.T. Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649. Oxford University Press, 1979. Kirby, W.J. Torrance. ‘Supremum Caput: Richard Hooker’s Theology of Ecclesiastical Dominion.’ Dionysius 12 (Dec. 1988): 69–110. ——. Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy. Studies in the History of Christian Thought, 43. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990. ——. ‘Richard Hooker as an Apologist of the Magisterial Reformation in England.’ In Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 165, ed. A.S. McGrade. (Tucson, Arizona: 1997), 219–33. ——. ‘Richard Hooker.’ In The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd edition, ed. E.A. Livingstone. Oxford University Press, 1997. ——. ‘The Neoplatonic Logic of “Procession and Return” in the First Book of Hooker’s Lawes.’ Renaissance and Reformation, 22.4 (1998): 49–67.

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——. ‘Richard Hooker’s Theory of Natural Law in the Context of Reformation Theology.’ The Sixteenth Century Journal 30.3 (Fall 1999): 681–703. ——. The Theology of Richard Hooker in the Context of the Magisterial Reformation. Studies in Reformed Theology and History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Theological Seminary, 2000. ——. ‘The Paradigm of Chalcedonian Christology in Richard Hooker’s Discourse on Grace and the Church.’ Churchman 114.1 (Spring 2000): 22–39. ——. ‘Richard Hooker.’ In The Dictionary of Seventeenth Century British Philosophers, Andrew Pyle, gen. ed. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2000. Repr. in The Thoemmes Encyclopedia of the History of Ideas. www.thoemmes.com/encyclopedia/hooker.htm, 2001. ——. ‘John Rainolds.’ In The Dictionary of Seventeenth Century British Philosophers, Andrew Pyle, gen. ed. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2000. ——. ‘“The Charge of Religion belongeth unto Princes”: Peter Martyr Vermigli on the Unity of Civil and Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction.’ Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 94 (2003). ——, ed. Richard Hooker and the English Reformation. London and Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003. ——. ‘Grace and Hierarchy: Richard Hooker’s Two Platonisms.’ In Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, ed. Kirby, 25–40. ——. ‘Angels descending and ascending: Richard Hooker’s discourse on the “double motion” of Common Prayer.’ In Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, ed. Kirby, 111–30. Kirk, Terrel T. ‘The Meaning and Application of Reason in Richard Hooker.’ St Luke’s Journal of Theology 4.1 (1961): 22–35. Klein, Joan Larsen. ‘Review of the Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, Books I–V.’ Journal of English and German Philology 85.1 (January 1986): 110–18. Knox, S.J. Walter Travers: Paragon of Elizabethan Puritanism. London: Methuen, 1962. Lake, Peter. Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church. Cambridge University Press, 1982. ——. ‘Presbyterianism, the Idea of a National Church, and the Argument from Divine Right.’ In Protestantism and the National Church in Sixteenth Century England, ed. Peter Lake and Mary Dowling, 193–224. London: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1987. ——. Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker. London and Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988. ——. ‘Business as Usual? The Immediate Reception of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity.’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 52.3 (July 2001): 456–86. Lejosne, Roger. ‘Locke, Hooker, et la foi raisonnable, ou, Du bon usage des citations.’ In Vivante tradition, sources et racines: Évolution de quelques formes et forces en litérature et civilization anglaise, 88–96. Paris: Centre d’Histoire des Idées dans les Iles Britanniques, 1982.

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Locke, Kenneth A. ‘Equal Ministries: Richard Hooker and Non-episcopal Ordinations.’ Anvil 14.3 (1997): 172–82. Loyer, Olivier. ‘Hooker et la doctrine eucharistique de l’église anglicane,’ Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Theologiques 58.2 (April 1974): 213–41. ——. ‘Contrat Social et Consentement chez Richard Hooker.’ Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques 59.3 (July 1875): 369–98. ——. L’Anglicanisme de Richard Hooker. 2 vols. Lille: Atelier des thèses, 1979. Luoma, John K.R. ‘Restitution or Reformation? Cartwright and Hooker on the Elizabethan Church.’ Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 46.1 (1977): 85–106. ——. ‘Who Owns the Fathers? Hooker and Cartwright on the Authority of the Primitive Church.’ Sixteenth Century Journal 8 (1977): 45–60. Mahon, Vincent. ‘The Christian Letter: Some Puritan Objections to Hooker’s Work; and Hooker’s “Undressed” Comments.’ Review of English Studies, n.s. 25 (1974): 305–12. Malone, Michael T. ‘The Doctrine of Predestination in the Thought of William Perkins and Richard Hooker.’ Anglican Theological Review 52 (1970): 103–17. Marot, Hilaire. ‘Aux Origines de la Théologie Anglicane: Écriture et Tradition Chez Richard Hooker.’ Irénikon 33 (1960): 321–43. Marshall, John S. ‘Hooker’s Theory of Church and State.’ Anglican Theological Review 27 (1945): 151–60. ——. Hooker and the Anglican Tradition: an Historical and Theological Study of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity. Sewanee, TN: University of the South Press, 1963. Marshall, W. Gerald. ‘Time in Walton’s Lives.’ Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 32.3 (Summer 1992): 429–42. Martin, Jessica. Walton’s Lives: Conformist Commemorations and the Rise of Biography. Oxford University Press, 2001. Mason, Sheila. ‘An Essentialist Inheritance: from Hooker to Montesquieu.’ Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 242 (1986): 83–124. McAdoo, Henry Robert. The Spirit of Anglicanism: A Survey of Anglican Theological Method in the Seventeenth Century. London: A&C Black, 1965; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965. ——. ‘The Influence of the Seventeenth Century on Contemporary Anglican Understanding of the Purpose and Functioning of Authority in the Church.’ In Christian Authority, ed. G. Evans, 251–7. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. ——. ‘Richard Hooker.’ In The English Religious Tradition and the Genius of Anglicanism, ed. Geoffrey Rowell. Wantage: IKON Productions, 1992; Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1992. McAdoo, H.R. and Kenneth W. Stevenson. The Mystery of the Eucharist in the Anglican Tradition. Norwich, CT: The Canterbury Press, 1995. McCoy, Richard C. Alterations of State: Sacred Kingship in the English Reformation. New York, NY: Columbia Univ. Press, 2002. McGrade, Arthur S., ed. Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community. Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies (vol. 165), 1997.

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——. ‘Public Religion: A Study of Hooker’s Polity in View of Current Problems.’ PhD thesis, Yale Univ., 1961. ——. ‘The Coherence of Hooker’s Polity: The Books on Power.’ Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963): 163–82. ——. ‘The Public and the Religious in Hooker’s Polity.’ Church History 37 (1968): 404–22. ——. ‘Hooker’s Polity and the Establishment of the English Church.’ Introduction 1 in Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: An Abridged Edition, ed. McGrade and Vickers, 11–40, 1975. ——. ‘Repentance and Spiritual Power: Book VI of Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 29.2 (April 1978): 163–76. ——. ‘Constitutionalism Late Medieval and Early Modern – Lex Facit Regem: Hooker’s Use of Bracton.’ In Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Bononiensis: Proceedings of the Fourth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, Bologna 26 August to 1 September 1979, ed. R.J. Schoeck, 116–23. Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, vol. 37. Binghamton, NY: MRTS, 1985. ——. ‘Richard Hooker on the Lawful Ministry of Bishops and Kings.’ In The Ministry: Clerical and Lay: Papers Read at the 1989 Summer Meeting and the 1989 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. W.J. Sheils and Diana Wood, 177–84. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. ——. ‘Richard Hooker: An Apologist for All Seasons.’ St Mark’s Review [Canberra, Australia] 141 (Autumn 1990): 12–19, 37. ——. ‘Foreword.’ In Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. McGrade, xxi–xxii. McGrath, Patrick. ‘Elizabethan Catholicism: A Reconsideration.’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35 (July 1984): 414–28. McKinley, David J. ‘John Owen’s View of Illumination: An Alternative to the Fuller–Erickson Dialogue.’ Bibliotheca Sacra 154 (1997): 93–104. Milward, Peter. Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age: A Survey of Printed Sources. Ilkley: The Scolar Press; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977. Monahan, Arthur P. ‘Richard Hooker: Counter-Reformation Political Thinker.’ In Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. McGrade, 203–17. Moore, T. ‘Recycling Aristotle: The Sovereignty Theory of Richard Hooker.’ History of Political Thought 14.3 (Fall 1993): 345–60. Møller, Jens. ‘The Beginnings of Puritan Covenant Theology.’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 14 (1963): 46–67. Munz, Peter. The Place of Hooker in the History of Thought. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952; repr. New York: Greenwood Press, 1970. Neelands, W. David. ‘The Theology of Grace of Richard Hooker.’ ThD thesis Trinity College and the University of Toronto, 1988. ——. ‘Hooker on Scripture, Reason, and “Tradition”’. In Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. McGrade, 75–94.

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——. ‘Richard Hooker and the Debates about Predestination 1580–1600.’ Toronto Journal of Theology 7.1 (2002): 187–202; repr. in Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, ed. Kirby, 43–61. ——. ‘Richard Hooker on the Identity of the Visible and Invisible Church.’ In Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, ed. Kirby, 99–110. Nicolosi, Gary Gabriel. ‘The Sources and Process of Authoritative DecisionMaking in Richard Hooker’s Thought.’ MDiv thesis, Trinity College, Toronto, 1983. Niemeyer, Gerhart. ‘Reason and Faith: The Fallacious Antithesis.’ In Essays on Christianity and Political Philosophy, ed. G. Carey and J. Schall, 11–29. Lanham, MD: University Press of America/The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1984. Nijenhuis, Willem. Adrianus Saravia (c. 1532–1613). Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1980. Novarr, David. The Making of Walton’s Lives. Cornell Studies in English, 41. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958. O’Donovan, Joan. ‘Proposals Regarding the Future of Anglican Theology.’ In The Future of Anglican Theology, ed. M. Darrol Bryant. Toronto Studies in Theology 17, 143–50. Toronto: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1984. O’Donovan, Joan Lockwood. Theology of Law and Authority in the English Reformation. Emory University Studies in Law and Religion, 1. Atlanta: Scholars Press for Emory University, 1991. Orr, Robert W. ‘Chillingworth versus Hooker: A Criticism of Natural Law Theory.’ Journal of Religious History 2 (December 1962): 120–32. Orrù, Marco. ‘Anomy and Reason in the English Renaissance.’ Journal of the History of Ideas 47.2 (April–June 1986): 177–96. Owen, Derwyn R.G. Social Thought and Anglican Theology. Archbishop Owen Memorial Lectures. Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1980. ——. ‘Is There an Anglican Theology?’ In The Future of Anglican Theology. Toronto Studies in Theology, vol. 17, 3–13. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Printers, 1984. Parris, John R. ‘Hooker’s Doctrine of the Eucharist.’ Scottish Journal of Theology 16 (June 1963): 151–65. Patterson, Patrick D.M. ‘Hooker’s Apprentice: God, Entelechy, Beauty, and Desire in Book One of Richard Hooker’s Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Polity.’ Anglican Theological Review 84.4 (Fall 2002): 961–88. Patterson, W.B. ‘Hooker on Ecumenical Relations: Conciliarism in the English Reformation.’ In Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. McGrade, 283–303. ——. ‘Richard Hooker’s Theology for Our Time.’ Sewanee Theological Review 43.4 (Michaelmas 2000): 503–11. Perrott, M.E.C. ‘Richard Hooker and the Problem of Authority in the Elizabethan Church.’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 49 (January 1998): 29–60. Pocock, J.G.A., ed. The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800. Cambridge University Press, 1993. Porter, H.C. ‘Hooker, the Tudor Constitution, and the Via Media.’ In Studies in Richard Hooker: Essays Preliminary to an Edition of his Works (SRH), ed. W.

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Speed Hill (Cleveland and London: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1972), 77–116. Rabb, Theodore K. Jacobean Gentleman: Sir Edwin Sandys, 1561–1629. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Rasmussen, Barry G. ‘Richard Hooker’s Trinitarian Hermeneutic of Grace.’ Anglican Theological Review 84.4 (Fall 2002): 929–41. ——. ‘The Priority of God’s Gracious Action in Richard Hooker’s Hermeneutic.’ In Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, ed. Kirby, 3–14. ——. ‘Presence and Absence: Richard Hooker’s Sacramental Hermeneutic.’ In Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, ed. Kirby, 151–64. Reynolds, Stephen. ‘Sacrifice by Resemblance: The Protestant Doctrine of Eucharistic Sacrifice in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart Divinity.’ Toronto Journal of Theology 3 (1987): 79–99. Schmidt, Martin. ‘Die Rechtfertigungslehre bei Richard Hooker.’ In Geist und Geschichte der Reformation, 377–96. Berlin: Walter de Grutyer, 1966. Schoeck, R. J. ‘From Erasmus to Hooker: An Overview.’ In Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. McGrade, 59–73. Schwarz, Robert C. ‘Dignified and Commodious: Richard Hooker’s “Mysticall Copulation” Metaphor.’ Sewanee Theological Review 43 (Christmas 1999): 16– 30. Secor, Philip B. ‘In Search of Richard Hooker: Constructing a New Biography.’ In Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. McGrade, 21–37. ——. Richard Hooker: Prophet of Anglicanism. Toronto: The Anglican Book Centre, 1999; Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1999. Sedgwick, Timothy F. ‘Revisioning Anglican Moral Theology.’ Anglican Theological Review 63 (January 1981): 1–20. ——. ‘The New Shape of Anglican Identity.’ Anglican Theological Review 77 (Spring 1995): 187–97. Shaw, Mark. ‘Richard Hooker and the Politics of Christian England.’ Sixteenth Century Journal 17.3 (Fall 1986): 370–71. Shawcross, John T. ‘Of the Laws of Editorial Polity.’ In TEXT; An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies, 11, eds W. Speed Hill and Edward M. Burns, 331–42. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Shuger, Debora Kuller. Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. ——. ‘Richard Hooker, Lancelot Andrewes, and the Boundaries of Reason.’ In Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture, 17–68. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. ——. ‘“Societie Supernaturall”: The Imagined Community of Hooker’s Lawes.’ In Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. McGrade, 307–29. Sisson, C.J. The Judicious Marriage of Mr. Hooker and the Birth of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Cambridge University Press, 1940. Sommerville, Johann P. ‘Richard Hooker, Hadrian Saravia, and the Advent of the

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Divine Right of Kings.’ History of Political Thought 4.2 (Summer 1983): 229– 45. Sommerville, M.R. ‘Richard Hooker and His Contemporaries on Episcopacy: An Elizabethan Consensus.’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35.2 (April 1984): 177–87. Spinks, Bryan D. Two Faces of Elizabethan Anglican Theology: Sacraments and Salvation in the Thought of William Perkins and Richard Hooker. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, Inc, 1999. Stafford, John K. ‘Scripture and the Generous Hermeneutic of Richard Hooker.’ Anglican Theological Review 84.4 (Fall 2002): 915–28. ——. ‘Sorrow and Solace: Richard Hooker’s Remedy for Grief.’ In Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, ed. Kirby, 131–47. ——. ‘Grace, Sin, and Nature: Richard Hooker’s Theology of Baptism.’ In Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, ed. Kirby, 185–205. Stanwood, P.G. ‘The Richard Hooker Manuscripts.’ Long Room [Trinity College, Dublin] 2 (1975): 7–10. ——. ‘Stobaeus and Classical Borrowing in the Renaissance, with special reference to Richard Hooker and Jeremy Taylor.’ Neophilologus 59 (1975): 141–6. ——. ‘Seventeenth-Century English Literature and Contemporary Criticism.’ Anglican Theological Review 62 (1980): 395–410. ——. ‘Hooker and Spenser.’ In The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A.C. Hamilton et al., 378–9. University of Toronto Press, 1990. ——. ‘Of Prelacy and Polity in Milton and Hooker.’ In Heirs of Fame: Milton and Writers of the English Renaissance, ed. Margo Swiss and David A. Kent, 66– 84. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1995; London: Associated University Press, 1995. ——. ‘Richard Hooker’s Discourse and the Deception of Posterity.’ In English Renaissance Prose: History, Language, and Politics, ed. Neil Rhodes, 75–90. Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997. ——. Izaak Walton: 1592–1683. Twayne English Authors Series, 548. New York: Twayne, 1998. Stanwood, P.G. and Laetitia Yeandle. ‘Richard Hooker’s Use of Thomas More.’ Moreana 35 (1972): 5–16. ——. ‘An Autograph Manuscript by Richard Hooker.’ Manuscripta 18 (1974): 38–42. ——. ‘Three Manuscript Sermon Fragments of Richard Hooker.’ Manuscripta 21 (1977): 183–95. Stevenson, Kenneth. Covenant of Grace Renewed: A Vision of the Eucharist in the Seventeenth Century. London: Dartron, Longman & Todd, 1994. Stevick, Daniel B. ‘Hooker’s Criteria for Liturgy.’ Anglican Theological Review 73 (Spring 1991): 139–54. Stoute, Douglas. ‘An Anglican Understanding of Ministry and Church Polity in the 16th Century.’ Consensus 12.1–2 (Spring 1986): 71–83. Sykes, Stephen W. The Integrity of Anglicanism. Oxford: Mowbrays, 1968.

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——. ‘Richard Hooker and the Ordination of Women to the Priesthood.’ Sewanee Theological Review 36 (Easter 1993): 200–214. —— and John Booty, eds. The Study of Anglicanism. London: SPCK, 1988; Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1988. Targoff, Ramie. ‘Performing Prayer in Hooker’s Lawes: The Efficacy of Set Forms.’ In Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. McGrade, 275–282. Tebeaux, Elizabeth. ‘Donne and Hooker on the Nature of Man: The Diverging “Middle Way”.’ Restoration Quarterly 24.1 (1981): 29–44. Thornton, Lionel S. Richard Hooker: A Study of His Theology. London: SPCK, 1924. Trevor-Roper, Hugh. ‘Richard Hooker and the Church of England.’ In Renaissance Essays, 103–20. University of Chicago Press, 1985; London: Secker and Warburg, 1985; London: Fontana Press, 1986. Tyacke, Nicholas. Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987; repr. 1990. Vickers, Brian. ‘Hooker’s Prose Style.’ Introduction 2 in Richard Hooker: Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: An Abridged Edition, ed. A.S. McGrade and Brian Vickers, 41–59. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1975. ——. ‘Authority and Coercion in Elizabethan Thought.’ Queen’s Quarterly 87.1 (1980): 114–23. ——. ‘Public and Private Rhetoric in Hooker’s Lawes.’ In Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. McGrade, 95–145. Voak, Nigel. Richard Hooker and the Reformed Theology: A Study of Reason, Will, and Grace. Oxford University Press, 2003. Wall, John N. ‘Hooker’s “Faire Speeche”: Rhetorical Strategies in the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie.’ In This Sacred History, ed. Armentrout, 125–43. Wall, John N., Jr. ‘Jeremy Taylor and Richard Hooker’s Contemporary Reputation.’ Seventeenth-Century News 35 (1977): 112–13. Wallace, Dewey D., Jr. Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology, 1525–1695. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. Walton, John. ‘Tradition of the Middle Way: The Anglican Contribution to the American Character.’ Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 44 (1975): 7–32. White, Charles E. ‘Were Hooker and Shepard Closet Arminians?’ Calvin Theological Journal 20 (April 1985): 33–42. White, Peter. Predestination, Policy, and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War. Cambridge University Press, 1992. Williams, J. Stockton, Jr. ‘The Tractarian Deviation on the Episcopacy.’ In Church Divinity 1986: Graduate Theological Foundation, ed. John Morgan, 1–21. Bristol, IN: Wyndham Hall, 1986. Williams, Rowan. ‘Hooker: Philosopher, Anglican, Contemporary.’ In Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. McGrade, 369–83. Wolf, William, J. ‘Anglicanism and Its Spirit.’ In The Spirit of Anglicanism:

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Hooker, Maurice, Temple, ed. William J. Wolf, J.E. Booty and O.C. Thomas, 137–87. Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow, 1981. ——, ed. Anglican Spirituality. Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow, 1982. Woodhouse, Hugh F. ‘The Authenticity of Hooker’s Book VII.’ Church History 22 (March 1953): 3–7. ——. ‘Permanent Features of Hooker’s Polity.’ Anglican Theological Review 42 (April 1960): 164–8. Wright, J. Robert. ‘Richard Hooker and the Doctrine of Cumulative or Sequential Orders.’ Sewanee Theological Review 36 (Easter 1993): 246–51.

Other Books and Articles Brooke, C.N.L. et al., eds. Church and Government in the Middle Ages. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Christianson, P. ‘Reformers and the Church of England under Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts.’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 31 (1980), 463–82. Collinson, Patrick. ‘A Comment concerning the Name Puritan.’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 31 (1980). Coolidge, J.S. The Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible. Oxford University Press, 1970. Courvoisier, J. ‘La dialectique dans l’ecclesiologie de Calvin.’ Revue d’historie de philosophie religieuse, 44 (1964), 348–63. Cranz, F. Edward. An Essay on the Development of Luther’s Thought on Justice, Law and Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959. Davies, R.E. The Problem of Authority in the Continental Reformers: A Study in Luther, Zwingli and Calvin. London: Epworth Press, 1947. d’Entrèves, Alessandro Passerin. The Medieval Contribution to Political Thought: Thomas Aquinas, Marsilius of Padua, Richard Hooker. New York: The Humanities Press, 1959. Dowey, Edward A. The Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1954, repr. 1994. George, Charles H. and Katherine. The Protestant Mind of English Reformation 1570–1640. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. Gerrish, B.A. Grace and Reason: A Study in the Theology of Luther. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Hankey, W.J. ‘“Dionysius dixit,” Lex divinitatis est ultima per media reducere: Aquinas, Hierocracy and “augustinisme politique”,’ in Tommaso d’Aquino: proposte nuove di letture. Festschrift Antonio Tognolo, ed. Ilario Tolomio. Medioevo: Rivista di Storia della Filosofia Medievale, 18. Padua: Editrice Antenore, 1992. ——. ‘Augustinian Immediacy and Dionysian Mediation in John Colet, Edmund Spenser, Richard Hooker and the Cardinal de Bérulle.’ Augustinus in der Neuzeit. Von Petrarca zum 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Dominique De Courcelles. Turnhout: Brepols, 1998.

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Kolb, Robert. Confessing the Faith: Reformers Define the Church 1530–1580. St Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1991. Kressner, Helmut. Schweizer Ursprünge des Anglikanischen Staatskirchentums. Gutersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1953. Krumm, John McGill. ‘Continental Protestantism and Elizabethan Anglicanism (1570–1595),’ in Reformation Studies: Essays in Honour of Roland H. Bainton, ed. Franklin H. Littell, 129–33. Richmond, CT: John Knox Press, 1962. Lazareth, William H. ‘Luther’s “Two Kingdom” Ethic Reconsidered.’ In Christian Social Ethics in a Changing World, ed. John C. Bennett. New York: Association Press, 1966. Leith, John. ‘Creation and Redemption: Law and Gospel in the Theology of John Calvin.’ In Marburg Revisited: A Reexamination of Luther and the Reformed Traditions, ed. Paul C. Empie and James I. McCord, Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 1966. McNeill, John T. ‘Natural Law in the Teaching of the Reformers,’ Journal of Religion 26 (1946). Milner, B.C. Calvin’s Doctrine of the Church. Leiden and New York: E.J. Brill, 1970. Milton, Anthony. Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640. Cambridge University Press, 1995. Newman, J.H. The Via Media of the Anglican Church. Ed. H.D. Weidner. Oxford University Press, 1990. Nijenhuis, W. Ecclesia Reformata: Studies in the Reformation. Leiden and New York: E.J. Brill, 1972. Oakley, Francis. ‘Medieval Theories of Natural Law: William of Ockham and the Significance of the Voluntarist Tradition,’ Natural Law Forum 6 (1961): 65–83. O’Donovan, Oliver. On the Thirty-Nine Articles: A Conversation with Tudor Christianity. Exeter: Paternoster, 1986. Schreiner, Susan E. Theatre of His Glory: Nature and the Natural Order in the Thought of John Calvin. Studies in Historical Theology 3. Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1991. Schumaker, Wayne. The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: A Study in Intellectual Patterns. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Steinmetz, David C. ‘Calvin and the Natural Knowledge of God.’ Calvin in Context. Oxford University Press, 1995. Torrance, T.F. Kingdom and Church: A Study in the Theology of the Reformers. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1956. Wendel, François. Calvin: The Origins and Development of his Religious Thought. Trans. Philip Mairet. London: Collins, 1963. Willis, E.D. Calvin’s Catholic Christology: The Function of the So-called Extra Calvinisticum in Calvin’s Theology. Leiden and New York: E.J. Brill, 1966.

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Index

Admonition Controversy 2, 14, 20, 24, 25, 60 angels Augustine on 34 Hooker on 29–30 ‘Anglicanism’, anachronistic use 19, 28 Apollinarians 91 Aquinas, Thomas 5, 21, 22, 63 Summa Theologiae 3, 38, 47, 52 Arians 91 Aristotle 3, 42, 63, 65 cosmology 32 Ethics 68 on happiness 98 Articles of Religion (Thirty-Nine Articles) 13, 15, 23, 25, 62 Augustine, St 5, 21, 33–4, 36 on angels 34 Hooker on 33 on mediation 34 Platonism 36 works City of God 34 De Libero Arbitrio 52 Aylmer, John, Bishop 1 Barlow, Thomas 9 Barnes, Joseph 2 Beza, Theodore 24 bishop authority 7–8 definition 7 Blount, Charles 9 Book of Common Prayer 7, 31, 99, 102 Booty, John 14, 15, 104 Bucer, Martin 22, 24, 25, 77 Bullinger, Heinrich 12, 59 Decades 68 on natural law 68–9 Burghley, Lord 1

Calvin, John 11, 12, 22, 35, 59, 74–5 on natural law 69–72 and scriptural authority 24 works Institutes of the Christian Religion 23, 26, 57, 69–70, 71 Ordonnances Ecclésiastiques 25 Cartwright, Thomas 2, 3, 16, 21, 23, 24, 25, 60, 61 Chalcedon, Council 6, 81 Chalcedonian paradigm 87, 89, 92, 94 Cheney, John 1 Christ, human/divine nature 6–7, 8, 33, 35, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 107, 108, 109 A Christian Letter 11, 13–15, 16, 17, 18– 19, 21, 22, 23, 28, 57, 61, 62–3, 77, 82–3 Christology 80, 91–5 Calcedonian 6, 81, 90, 91, 111 and doctrine of salvation 80–90 Hooker’s 80–95 Church of Rome, Hooker on 16 Church, The external ceremonies 6 Hooker on 109–10 nature 5–6 as ‘politique societie’ 5, 8, 92, 112 royal powers 8 two natures 92, 94, 95 Cicero 68, 70 on law 49, 52 clergy, ordination 7 Coldwell, John, Bishop 1 Collinson, Patrick 21 communion 105–6 Cranmer, George 2, 7 Cranmer, Thomas 2 creation and government 47 135

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Plato on 49 and redemption 64–5, 76 Cudworth, Ralph 9 Culverwell, Nathanael 9 Decalogue 66, 72, 106 disciplinarians ix, 3, 6, 20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 63, 99 divine law 4, 45, 66 divine unity 4 ecclesiology 12, 23–4, 27, 28 Elizabethan Settlement 3, 5, 11, 18, 20, 23, 24, 45, 60, 78 eternal law 4, 5, 46–52, 73–4 definition 52 first 51 second, distinction 5, 46–7 second 52–6 components 53 see also creation; government Fall, The 4, 34, 42, 55, 84 Gibbs, Lee 63, 68 Glanvill, Joseph 9 God Hooker on 4 knowledge of 4, 64–5, 69–70, 75 as law 3, 50 union of soul with 35–6 government, and creation 47 grace, Hooker on 22–3, 83, 88 Grislis, Egil 12 Hammond, Henry 9 happiness, Aristotle on 98 Haugaard, William 18 heresies 91 Hill, William Speed 62 Hooker, Richard on angels 29–30 on Augustine 33 biography 1–2 Book of Common Prayer, defence 102 Christology 80–95 on Church of Rome 16 on God 4 on grace 22–3, 83, 88

influence 9 on law 3, 8, 45–6, 47–8, 72–3 as magisterial reformer 32–3 marriage 1 ‘middle way’ doctrine 17–19, 21, 28, 36–7, 58–9 on natural law 61–4, 73–4 on prayer 98–101 on predestination 15 ‘Reformation’, understanding of 20 rhetoric 3 on righteousness 87–9 on the sacraments 110–11 on scripture 26 soteriology 32–3, 34–6, 75, 85–7 on The Church 109–10 on The One 39–42 on The Trinity 48–9 Travers, polemics 13–23 works Autograph Notes 31 Dublin Fragments 32, 33, 83, 85 Lawes 1, 79 Christology 91–5 ecclesiology 12, 23–4, 27, 28 hierarchical mediation 30–31 parts 2 purpose 11–12, 21, 27, 59–60 A Learned Discourse of Justification 12, 16, 17, 22, 27, 33, 35, 37, 39, 85 A Learned Sermon on the Nature of Pride 33, 72–3, 76 Notes toward a Fragment on Predestination 47, 53 Tractates and Sermons 32 Iamblichus 39 Incarnation 35, 85 Isidore of Seville 97 James II 9 Jewel, John, Bishop 97 justification 23, 24, 80, 83, 88, 89, 90, 111 by faith 26, 33, 62, 79, 87 forensic 33 Keble, John 7, 19 Kingsmill, Thomas 1

Index Knox, John 24 koinonia 105, 107, 108, 111 Lake, Peter 18 Laud, William 9 law Cicero on 49, 52 God as 3, 50 Hooker on 3, 8, 45–6, 47–8, 72–3 of reason 53 see also divine law; eternal law; natural law lex divinitatis 4 Pseudo-Dionysius 30, 31, 36, 38 see also mediation, hierarchical Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government 9 Logos theology 4, 50, 52 Luther, Martin 5, 12, 26, 59 on natural law 64–7 McNeill, John 61 magisterial reformers x, 13, 27 continental 59 Hooker as 32–3 mediation Augustine on 34 hierarchical 30–31, 32 see also lex divinitatis Melanchthon, Philipp 12, 59, 66 Loci Communes 67 on natural law 67–8 ‘middle way’ doctrine Hooker 17–19, 21, 28, 36–7, 58–9 Newman on 19 natural law 4, 42, 53–6 Bullinger on 68–9 Calvin on 69–72 Hooker on 61–4, 73–4 Luther on 64–7 Melanchthon on 67–8 Neoplatonism 3–4 cosmology 40 Nestorians 91 Newman, John Henry 11 on ‘middle way’ doctrine 19 Olevianus, Kaspar 24

137

One, The Hooker on 39–42 Plotinus on 41 Ovid, Metamorphoses 71 Paget, Francis 104 Paul, St, Epistle to the Romans 70, 73 penitence 7 Peter, St, Second Epistle 109 Plato, on creation 49 Platonism, Christian traditions 36–7, 39 see also Augustine, Platonism; PseudoDionysius Plotinus 34 on The One 41 Porphyry 34, 36 Porter, H.C. 17–18, 63 power, civil/ecclesiastical 8 prayer definitions 97–8, 99–100 Hooker on 98–101 purpose 98, 104 predestination, Hooker on 15 procession order of 42 and return 4, 40, 41, 54 Proclus 39 Pseudo-Dionysius, lex divinitatis 30, 31, 36, 38 reason, natural 54–5 redemption 42, 43, 72 and creation 64–5, 76 religion duties 6 as public matter 101–4 revealed law see divine law righteousnes active/passive 25, 26, 27, 88–9 Hooker on 87–9 sacraments 6 Hooker on 110–11 salvation doctrine x, 25, 26, 36, 79, 80, 95 and Christology 80–90 meaning 35, 84 Sanderson, Robert 9

138

Index

Sandys, Edwin, Bishop 15 Sandys, Edwin, Sir 1, 2, 7 Saravia, Hadrian 29 scripture authority 5, 6, 26, 61 Calvin 24 limitation 24 Hooker on 26 Sophocles 68 soteriology, Hooker’s 32–3, 34–6, 75, 85–7 soul, union with God 35–6, 84–5 Spenser, Edmund, Hymnes of Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beauty 100 Spenser, John 2 Stillingfleet, Edward 9 Taylor, Jeremy 9 theology, natural/revealed, tension 8 Thirty-Nine Articles see Articles of Religion Travers, Walter 1, 3, 15–16, 24, 57, 60 A Supplication made to the Privie Counsell 2, 16

Hooker’s response 16–17 Hooker, polemics 13–23 Trent, Council of 22, 88, 89 Trinity, The 50 Hooker on 48–9 Two Realms, Two Regiments 12 Uniformity, Act 6, 99 Ursinus, Zacharias 24 Ussher, James, Archbishop 7, 9 Walton, Izaak, Life of Mr Richard Hooker 29 Wendel, François 25 Whichcote, Benjamin 9 Whitgift, John, Archbishop 1, 2, 16, 20, 23, 24, 27, 28, 61 Wilkins, John 9 Windet, John 1 Yeandle, Laetitia 12 Zanchi, Girolamo 24