THE latest validation of Richard Hooker’s importance as a writer of prose comes with the decision to include Hooker in the 2010 MLA publication Teaching Early Modern Prose. In the chapter devoted to Hooker, Paul Stanwood suggests how Hooker’s prose can and should be taught to undergraduates as he underscores Hooker’s contributions as a thinker, as well as a prose stylist. Hooker is known not only as the writer of what many regard as the major prose work of the sixteenth century—Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie—but even as the person who ‘invented prose in English’.1 Whether one regards this claim as exaggeration, Hooker remains an extraordinary writer for a variety of reasons. The Politie, a unique genre, continues to be read and studied; and scholars of religious thought, literature, history, and rhetoric have especially in the last forty years explored Hooker’s achievement.2 Whether one views Richard Hooker as a philosopher, theologian, ecclesiastic, political theorist, controversialist, logician, or even pastor, his work is lively, cogent, complex—and inviting.
Since Hooker would have thought of his task as a description of the basis of the sixteenth-century Church of England, it is important not to shorten the title to Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie. Such a shortening gives the impression that Hooker is establishing the ‘laws’ of the Elizabethan church. Hooker’s description works best when the reader approaches the text, not in search of church laws, but in search of an understanding of the basis of changeable ‘lawes’ which inform church government, indeed, inform members about living ‘as it were the life of God’ (I.112). I believe that Hooker too would not have countenanced shortening the title since he needs to suggest that the church is not a matter of private construction, even by someone as talented as himself, nor an idiosyncratic construction based on a probable reading of scripture. Rather, the established church reflects God’s creation in all its variety, the insights of rational thought throughout the ages, and the wisdom brought to the state by embracing the history and continuity of Christianity as a local church—the reformed Church of England in this case—is part of that continuity. Hooker, as a public voice, whether official or not, is not legislating a static entity, but identifying how the needs of the Kingdom of God can be realized in a changing world.
One ought not to approach the Politie without knowing the controversialist environment that produced it and how Hooker responded to that environment.3 One also needs a sense of Hooker’s relationship with John Whitgift. From the moment the Elizabethan church settlement went into effect in 1560, there were voices dissatisfied with the arrangement. These voices sought to rid the church of all Church of Rome abuses. The campaign to ‘purify’ Elizabeth’s church further went on for over a decade, and then in 1572 An Admonition to the Parliament appeared. This tract sought parliamentary action to change worship and church government along the lines of John Calvin’s church in Geneva. John Whitgift, then Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, was commissioned by Archbishop Parker to respond, and his Answer against the Admonition produced a ‘reply’ from Thomas Cartwright, England’s leading Presbyterian at the time. As was not unusual, Whitgift answered with his Defence of the Answer (1573), which was composed of twenty-three ‘tractates’ covering what was always, it seemed, an expanding number of topics required by answering the opponent’s new material. The polemic proceeds piecemeal, as Cartwright’s text is broken up into divisions, with passages of Cartwright’s text appearing and being refuted. Predictably, Cartwright responded, with his Second replie (in two parts: 1575 and 1577) using the same form to attack Whitgift. In such an arena it was imperative to have the last word and so be perceived as the victor of a specialized academic disputation, the nuances of which were available only to a small scholarly community. A question to explore is Hooker’s relationship with John Whitgift; whether he is defending Whitgift, who becomes Archbishop in 1583, whether he is moving in different theological directions than his Archbishop, and why he deliberately used materials from Cartwright’s two replies, fifteen years old, in a work which duplicated some of the opponent’s words in new ways. In a sense, Hooker’s Politie, coming twenty years after the Admonition, is a hybrid, as it searches for a new way to do polemics.
The Whitgift–Cartwright exchange was only one of many following the first Admonition. Peter Milward’s Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age: A Survey of Printed Sources (1977) is helpful in seeing how much polemical literature (all now online) was produced during Elizabeth’s reign. This output provides a necessary context for not only what Hooker said, but how he said it. Many of these tracts, as tedious and predictable as they are, are worth exploring to gauge, on the one hand, how different Hooker’s work is, and on the other, how Hooker’s hope for a united, interdependent worshiping community of English citizens intent on living ‘as it were the life of God’ might be reflected in the work of so many others. With this in mind, one of the issues in Hookerian studies is to gauge how much of Hooker’s performance and the performance of others like Whitgift, Bridges, and Cooper, all within the polemical and political environment of the late 1580s and 90s, either excludes or attempts to include all in a worshiping community. Does the discursive strategy, as well as the voice and language of the polemicist, invite in or marginalize?
Hooker’s biography does suggest that he was cast into this controversialist arena. Born in 1554 and dying in 1600, Hooker knew only the Church of England under Elizabeth, a church perceived as a stable state arrangement having existed a number of years longer— and without serious modification—than the Edwardian or Marian arrangements. At a young age, Hooker became connected to that church through important officials. Bishop Jewel was his patron as he enrolled in Corpus Christi, Oxford and proceeded to a BA and MA at the same time that Whitgift was battling with Cartwright. A talented fellow intellectually, he was appointed deputy to the Professor of Hebrew. But his connections did not stop with Jewel. He was the nephew of John Hooker, a scholar with ties to Peter Martyr Vermigli. Three of Hooker’s pupils had their own connections and would prove indispensable when the Politie was ready to be published in the early 1590s. There was Edwin Sandys, son of the Archbishop of York, George Cranmer, great nephew of Archbishop Cranmer, and future brother-in-law William Churchman, son of John Churchman, prominent in London’s Merchant Taylor’s Company. Sandys and Cranmer were involved with the Politie project that was probably written in the home (and with the financial support) of John Churchman, Hooker’s future father-in-law. Perhaps because of his intellectual talents and his skill in argumentation, Hooker caught the eye of church leaders, was asked to preach at Paul’s Cross in 1581 (possibly on predestination), and, through Archbishop Sandys’s influence, was appointed by Archbishop Whitgift in 1584 Master of the Temple congregation; that is, the congregation’s chief minister and administrator.
But by the 1580s, a new generation of puritans continued relentless in their call for further reformation. They embraced a Presbyterian polity more enthusiastically than before, even organizing along Presbyterian synodic lines. And they seemed to have influence within parliament for a serious challenge to Elizabeth’s recalcitrance over change. It was in the midst of this environment, in the midst of the politics of London, and in that institution where England’s future lawyers were being trained that Hooker was assigned to his battle station. And battle station it was, for as soon as he came to claim his mastership, another leading Presbyterian, Walter Travers, a cousin of Hooker, urged him to accept a nascent Presbyterianism in the Temple congregation. Travers, a friend to Cartwright, was a popular preacher, had hoped to be appointed master, and had earlier written a handbook on Presbyterian polity. In the Politie, Hooker refers to Travers’s De Disciplina Ecclesiastica, translated in 1574 by Cartwright as A Full and Plaine Declaration of Ecclesiastical Discipline out of the word of God and of the declining of the Church of England from the same. The first of many conflicts happened immediately when Travers asked Hooker to wait until he was ‘called’ by the congregation. Hooker knew that in the Church of England pastors were not called, but rather, appointed. Such confrontation with Travers would inform the Politie, which would reflect the contrast between an episcopal hierarchy and the authority of the congregation, the link between church and state which Hooker celebrates, and the potentially personal dimension of Hooker’s work.
The relationship between Hooker, the superior, and Travers was intense and personal, with Travers seizing opportunities to expose his cousin’s theological errors, attacking what he preached, and sending out ‘angry informations … daylie’ (V.228). The situation became so difficult that Whitgift removed Travers in 1586; Travers appealed to the Privy Council, condemning the unsound matter in Hooker’s preaching on predestination, grace, justification, and the Church of Rome. Hooker responded to Whitgift with The answere of Master Richard Hooker to a supplication preferred by Master Walter Travers. Hooker’s complaint against Travers had to do with his behaviour, public behaviour which challenged a superior, the public accusation by an inferior that Hooker caused disturbance.
Although Travers’s work is not cited much in the Politie, this confrontation, as well as Travers’s disregard for ‘the established order of the churche’ (V.248) and his attack on a superior, had to affect Hooker’s approach to writing. That approach considered whether serious thought could occur in the midst of anger and whether surmises were all that were needed to find the truth. And it took into account the danger to church and state when ‘all men mighte think what the liste and speak openly what they thinke’ (V.247). Hooker understood the need to find time and opportunity to compose his thoughts about fundamental theological issues, all the time worrying deeply about destructive behaviour in the heat of debate that resulted in getting people riled up and encouraged the private few to believe they could prevail. Surely, Hooker must have felt the need for a new type of writing which, as it entered the public sphere, had to be less focused on the personal and the petty, and would not duplicate ‘some unquiet kinde of proceedinges’ (V 229).
Travers’s accusations no doubt troubled Hooker, who was portrayed as sinister and conspiratorial, tongue and pen not interested in peace. And Travers openly complained about Hooker’s manner of teaching. But it may have been Travers’s insistence that his cousin was not theologically knowledgeable that got Hooker’s goat. For we see in The answere and in the Politie that Hooker, as he was to become a representative of his church and state, took pains to portray himself as a man of peace and intelligence capable of the intellectual work required to settle the debate once and for all. And in his intellectual superiority, Hooker complains about the ‘other’: don’t proclaim unless the issues are completely understood; understanding only comes from long and thorough study, from careful thinking and considered articulation; ‘many talke of the truth, which never sounded the depth from whence it springeth’ (I.56)—meaning the Presbyterian opponents like cousin Travers.
Truth in the Politie comes from the ‘certainty of evidence’ contrasted with faith’s ‘certainty of adherence’, concepts Hooker explores in his Learned Sermon of the Nature of Pride. These concepts helped Hooker articulate the difference between matters of faith and matters of polity. For the Presbyterians, of course, faith included embracing a divinely designed New Testament church structure. The Church of England rejected such an article. As Hooker states, ‘what was used in the Apostles time, the scripture fullie declareth not’ (I.23). Polity is not a matter of ‘certainty of adherence’, an adherence that embraces God’s promise of salvation and offer of grace. Rather, polity has to do with the ‘evidence’ which one assembles through learning and an understanding of the past. When one searches for the certainty of evidence to support, for example, the historical development of polity in a local church like England’s, one needs an aggressive intellect which will find the evidence and then present the explanation. But the human mind easily confuses things. The objective controversialist needs right understanding, particularly for ‘controversies of disputation’, which Hooker admits he is pursuing. One must be led logically by a good teacher, led to understand the ‘evidence’ that the teacher, Richard Hooker in this case, marshals. Convinced that he possessed understanding and intellect, Hooker would have been insulted when Travers said publicly that his cousin was a poor scholar. The source of right understanding—and Hooker is always critical of his opponents on this measure—is the maturity of one’s judgement. Only an informed mind could understand the social, ecclesiastical, and political world which Hooker would say the Politie explains so lucidly. Travers and his like simply didn’t know enough to criticize Hooker and the church, and they failed to remain silent in their ignorance.
Hooker would also have been disturbed that Travers misrepresented his appeal to reason in understanding theological concepts. As the Politie makes plain, especially in its first book, human reason is necessary in forging the ‘certainty of evidence’ for specific ecclesiastical polity. But the English Presbyterians had a problem with reason, and the scepticism about reason, as well as human judgement, can be traced to Cartwright’s exchange with Whitgift. For Hooker, as the Holy Spirit leads one to truth through scripture, so the Spirit can also lead through reason, that is, through ‘sounde divyne reason’(V.255). The Politie does celebrate reason and Hooker is known for elevating the power of reason. But we have to recall that it is reason used in ‘controversies of disputation’—in that search for the ‘certainty of evidence’—that determines the consensus upon which truth is built, rather than private judgement and slight surmises which, for Hooker, characterize the Presbyterian case. In The answere and in the Politie, Hooker’s embrace of reason, a reason informed by grace and understood as a divine gift to the human and the corporate, is ‘the moste sure and sauff waie whereby to resolve thinges doubted of in matters apperteyninge to faith and christian religion’ (V. 255).4
In approaching the Politie, one has to be careful not to assume that Hooker’s authorities are in competition. Grace and nature go together, as do reason and scripture. As many have noted, Hooker had a gift for syncretism. Scripture’s purpose is to reveal the means to salvation. Reason’s value is in discovering and articulating what is and ought to be in the ‘state of men in this world’. To be in this world, even ‘to live as it were the life of God’, is to be in a political and social environment which depends on human intellect to understand the operations of law and to discover what is appropriate for one’s particular time ‘in this world’, especially by focusing attention on first principles, which is the work of Book I.5 Matters like orderly governance and the adiaphora of worship are devised by reason, relying on consensus, goodwill, legislation, and the voices from the past: ‘the generall and perpetuall voyce of men is as the sentence of God him selfe’ (I.83). Hooker carves out a site of human effort appropriate and necessary for Christ’s earthly church. Tracing how Hooker uses this site, often in remarkable ways, can be a fascinating exercise. And it can also reveal Hooker’s differences with both his Presbyterian, as well as his conformist, brethren.
We are not sure why Hooker began a comprehensive response to the Presbyterian challenge. That response, fundamentally political, is cast as a forensic proposition. Here are the opening words of Hooker’s preface:
Surely the present forme of Church government which the lawes of this land have established, is such, as no lawe of God, nor reason of man hath hitherto bene alleaged of force sufficient to prove they do ill, who to the uttermost of their power withstand the alteration thereof. Contrariwise, The other which in stead of it we are required to accept, is only by error and misconcepit named the ordinance of Jesus Christ, no one proofe as yet brought forth whereby it may cleerely appeare to be so in very deede. (I. 2)
There is a great deal in these opening sentences: a ‘present forme’ changeable in the future, judged acceptable because it does no ‘ill’ and much good; a ‘present forme’ established by law, consistent with the law of God and the reason of man. Hooker’s opponents ‘withstand’ or resist the law of the land. They offer English citizens a polity built not on law and reason, but rather, on erroneous thinking. Although these opening sentences suggest the forensic nature of a public disputation, the form Hooker invents is a far different public utterance than typical polemic. For Hooker is not only defensive in answering the Presbyterians but, more importantly, constructive in explaining the achievement which is the Elizabethan church.6 Polemical disputation, as waged by Whitgift, Bridges, Cooper, and others, was a form of prose investigation that had become static, unable to develop further as discourse. Thus, to be more than defensive and damning, Hooker dared to try a more philosophical form. Such an attempt was needed when we note how the Politie served the needs of the state as prose debate entered the public sphere to imagine a worshipping community. Traditional polemic proved a confining school exercise. Something other had to be invented to give the definitive sentence on the controversy. And so, Hooker’s prose strategy searches for new ways to invite in citizen-worshippers as they embrace a more universal and extensive representation of the Church of England.
For that representation, Hooker sensed what needed to be covered and how. The preface announces that there will be eight essays or ‘bookes of discourse’ (I.34). The first will ‘declare therein what lawe is, how different kinds of lawes there are, and what force they are of according unto each kind’ (I.35). ‘If men had beene willing to learne how many lawes their actions in this life are subject unto, and what the true force of ech law is, all these controversies might have dyed the very day they were first brought forth’ (I.139). Book II ‘sifts’ the ‘chiefest principle’ in the debate that ‘scripture ought to be the only rule of all our actions’. Book III follows by refuting the notion that scripture describes an ecclesiastical structure ‘the lawes whereof admit not any kinde of alteration’. The fourth book counters the accusation that since the Church of England retains popish rites, such ceremonies must be excised.
Many agree that Hooker made a brilliant decision to begin Book I with the notion that the Church of England was founded on law, and that different kinds of law inform every aspect of political, social, and ecclesiastical experience. Professor McGrade praises Hooker’s notion of law as the ‘single master idea in his work’.7 Professor Kirby labels it ‘a radical, foundational proposal’.8 The great variety of law—eternal, celestial, natural, rational, human, and positive—invites awe and humility, as each citizen participates in a world defined by law: ‘That little thereof which we darkly apprehend, we admire, the rest with religious ignorance we humbly and meekly adore’ (I.62). Although there is disagreement in the scholarly community over Hooker’s precise meanings, sources, and modifications, the concept of law did provide him with a frame to emphasize order and harmony, concepts popular throughout the century, and the wisdom of the hierarchy and the public, as well as intellectual differentiation among citizens. It also enabled him to appropriate a variety of authorities which determine the affairs of humankind, to indicate how scripture and its interpretation (surely the crux of the debate) was only one authority, and how law, whether permanent or positive, defined church, state, and citizenship. Hooker says that Book I, ‘concerning lawes, and their severall kindes in generall’, has laid a new foundation on which to build ‘hereunto that which commeth in the next place’ (I.110). But this new foundation also directs the reading, Hooker controlling, unlike Whitgift, the disputational materials, seizing control of the discourse, and constructing himself as above the controversy, vastly more rational, knowledgeable, and tolerant than his church’s adversaries.
Four books remain in the Politie ‘and are bestowed about the specialities of that cause which lyeth in controversie’ (I.35). Book V defends the Elizabethan church’s ‘publique duties’ and its ministry. Books VI and VII concern ecclesiastical jurisdiction—the power of the lay eldership and the power of the bishop. The final book argues for the ecclesiastical dominion of ‘the Prince or Soveraigne commaunder over the whole bodie politique’ (I.36).
There is much that is not known about why Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie came into existence. Hooker could have undertaken the project to satisfy his own intellectual curiosity and defend the church he admired. Perhaps he wrote to put Walter Travers and his fellow troublemakers in their place. Or perhaps there was something more official, more public, behind the project. He does say he is writing ‘for mens information’ (I.1). And Hooker does seem to be responding to the unanswered Second replie and so completing Whigift’s defence, surely with Whitgift’s knowledge, and perhaps, approval.
We do know that Hooker remained at his post in the Temple until 1591. During these years the nonconformists continued to agitate for substantial changes, indeed, for the overthrow of the episcopal system. The attack was enhanced by the appearance of the Marprelate tracts, seven of them between 1588 and 1589, precisely when Hooker would have started on his project. Perhaps because of these tracts, Hooker determined not to engage in ridicule, sarcasm, and ad hominem. In Hooker’s mind, Marprelate did not promote harmony and peace, as he viciously satirized the bishops; indeed, he angered and divided. Hooker sensed the need for another type of prose, one that would promote rational thinking, humility, and peace. His prose needed to be energetic, assertive, and inclusive, displayed with confidence and authority, reflecting how the church and state needed to be represented.9 But one of the tracts especially may have encouraged him to start writing. Oh Read over D. John Bridges: The Epistle to the Terrible Priests for the Convocation House speaks of polity. Marprelate writes to Dean Bridges: ‘I would advise you, learn this of me: that the Church government is a substantial point of religion, and therefore of the substance of the building … his Grace [Whitgift] shall one day answer me this point’.10 It wasn’t Whitgift who answered; it was Richard Hooker.
Might he have been answering on behalf of his Archbishop? During these years, Whitgift did pursue an aggressive campaign to silence opposition, assigning projects to Richard Bancroft, Bishop of London, and to Thomas Cooper, Bishop of Winchester. But was the Politie another such project? There is no evidence that Whitgift officially commissioned Hooker to write an apologia for the Church of England. However, the Archbishop surely would have known what Hooker and his friends were working on, and it does appear, regardless of the differences between Whitgift and Hooker, that Whitgift helped with the project. He may have seen Hooker’s future book as one more weapon in his arsenal to attack and silence. Perhaps he felt that a work such as Hooker’s could speak to all of Christendom about the Church of England as legitimate, reformed, even apostolic, as Jewel’s Apology had done thirty years earlier. We know that from 1591 to 1595 Hooker was working on his writing in London, supported by absentee livings which Whitgift probably arranged, residing at the Churchman house with influential friends like Edwin Sandys, Member of Parliament.
Hooker shared his writings with Sandys and George Cranmer, another well-connected former student. Books I–IV, plus an enlarged preface, were in print by 1593, allegedly in time to be used by Sandys in parliament against all nonconformists. It is the preface which announces ‘The matter conteyned in these eyght bookes’ (I.34). The entry for the Stationers’s Register also indicates eight books, although only four appeared in 1593. And Hooker’s ‘advertisement to the Reader’ at the end of Book IV explains: ‘I have for some causes … thought it at this time more fit to let goe these first foure bookes by themselves, then to stay both them and the rest, till the whole might together be published’ (I.345). To many, this statement indicates that all eight books were finished or nearly finished, each following an identical pattern of composition. It would not be until 1597, however, when Book V, the defence of the Book of Common Prayer, would appear, and it would be lengthier than the first four books combined.
We cannot be sure what was happening. There is evidence that his lay collaborators had some influence over the project. We assume it was their doing that Hooker added chapters 8 and 9 to his preface. These additions directly blame the Presbyterians for the separatists. The long chapter 8 stresses political dangers: the world will be ‘cleane turned upside downe’ (I.42), Hooker warns, should the discipline be ‘received’. Citizens need ‘to feare the manifold dangerous events likely to ensue upon this intended reformation, if it did take place’ (I.36). For many, Hooker seems uncharacteristically alarmist in this chapter, although throughout the Politie he frequently cites the dangers of this kind of change to the good order of state and church.
Regardless of additions, the preface does shape the reader’s attitude towards John Calvin, his Geneva, and his polity, towards the English Presbyterians, the ‘learneder sort’, and the not so learned. Hooker urges his opponents ‘to call your deedes past to a newe reckoning, to reexamine the cause yee have taken in hand and to trie it even point by point … to search the truth … [to] sift unpartiallie youre owne hearts’ (I.51). After Hooker’s explanation, they should be able to accept the Church of England with clear consciences, and so cease causing trouble. The preface does identify earnest Presbyterians as one of the principal audiences Hooker had in mind. At the same time, there is always the ‘other’ who is politically dangerous. Some readers are merely intellectually unsound, dealing as they do with ‘meere probabilities’ (I.33). Note too the well-meaning, obedient English citizens who could be troubled by puritan accusations and seduced into the ‘snares of glosinge speech’ (II.30). Faced with a variety of readers, Hooker constructs himself as tolerant and sympathetic, and above all intellectually sound, promising that important ‘certainty of evidence’ to those who would listen. On the one hand, he has developed a ‘briefe’ for his church, presented before the Presbyterians, but also before potential Presbyterian sympathizers and conformists alike, even before the whole world. Hooker offers the ‘intier bodie’ of the case so all can ‘find ech particular controversies resting place, and the coherence it hath with those things, either on which it dependeth, or which depend on it’ (I.36). But the preface goes one step further, as Richard Hooker portrays himself as the universal judicial voice who has tried all things and presents his ‘finall resolute persuasion’ (I.2). The judge finds in favour of the ‘present forme of Church government’, with a judicial proclamation which, for Tudor England, expected silence. His is ‘the sentence of judiciall and finall decision’ discussed in chapter 6 as the only force to end contentions. Whether or not Hooker started with these constructions in the earlier books before adding a preface, it is a different reading experience to start immediately with Book I and ignore the preface, at least for a while. Indeed, because of that influential preface, one should ask how can the Politie be read?
Knowledge of the publishing history should help us in this reading. Apparently, Hooker had difficulties in finding a publisher. That his Archbishop does not appear to have helped launch the enterprise could suggest a lack of enthusiasm. As many have remarked, there is an independence of thought in Hooker’s work.11 Edwin Sandys agreed to finance the printing so that the first books, at least, would be out in time for the 1593 parliament. Since it took Hooker four more years to complete the comprehensive Book V and since Sandys and Cranmer did comment on a draft of Book VI, it is assumed lay collaborators had some influence in encouraging Hooker to revise and expand the remaining books. Hooker supposedly was to follow exhortations to emphasize the political dangers of innovation, to show how attacks on the church were attacks on the state, to condemn the innovation of the lay eldership, to attend to the particulars of the controversy, and to satisfy both the learned and the simple. To my mind, these are not exhortations Hooker would have particularly needed, exhortations which would have led to significant and lengthy revisions. Speculation abounds on the success of the collaborators in influencing Hooker to change what he had originally conceived or initially written. Perhaps the length of Book V is their doing. It appeared as a separate volume in 1597, probably because the last three books, for whatever reasons, were not ready or too massive to publish along with Book V. At the end of Book V, Hooker asks readers to ‘have patience with me for a small time, and by the helpe of Almightie God I will pay the whole’. ‘For a small time’ suggests that Books VI, VII, and VIII were on their way to being finished. But they did not appear in ‘a small time’.
John E. Booty, in his Introduction to Book V in the Folger Edition, speculates which chapters would have been in a first version of Book V and then how revision would have enlarged the composition. Whether Booty’s speculations are correct, the alleged additions to Book V would have still reflected Hooker’s announced interest in the particulars of the controversy and in responding to passages from opponents. Things are not really different—just more, in my opinion. And the ‘more’ has made Book V a complete, enthusiastic defence and celebration of the worship and ministry within the established church. Characteristically Elizabethan, Hooker treats many of the details as adiaphora, acceptable because a church has the power to enact its own ceremonies. As Hooker remarks in the opening of Book V, ‘Lawes touchinge matter of order are changeable, by the power of the Church: articles concerninge doctrine not so’ (II.38), and worship is not doctrine. Yet, God still approves because the church’s judgement is based on ‘stronge and invincible remonstrances of sound reason’ (II.47). For Hooker, the Book of Common Prayer manifests the value of corporate worship in which all citizens participate and so are absorbed into the public experience of worship, an experience centred on prayer and priest, reading and preaching, the scriptures rightly understood, the sacraments rightly administered. Such public worship, characterized by individual and corporate thanksgiving, helps English citizens ‘to live as it were the life of God’. The goal, as Professor McGrade writes, is an ‘intelligently guided, socially effective communal piety’.12 As Hooker suggests then that worship folds the private into the corporate, the individual citizen into the worshipping community, his work goes beyond mere defence to indicate how the established church was in the world serving the needs of both the individual and Elizabethan society. The interdependent worshipping communion fulfils that divine law which unites ‘all into one bodie, a lawe which bindeth them each to serve unto others good, and all to preferre the good of the whole before whatsoever their owne particular’ (I.69). This is, indeed, to do the will of God.
But the issue of ‘more’ in the Politie, as a result of revision, needs to be dealt with in confronting Book VI, which answers ‘whether all Congregations or Parishes ought to have laie Elders invested with power of Jurisdiction in Spirituall causes’ (III.1). The original Book VI can be reconstructed from the notes Sandys and Cranmer made.13 This reconstruction indicates that Hooker’s strategy was not significantly different from that used in the books published in 1593: an opening, a review, and enlargement of the topics of the debate (more than likely covered by Whitgift), and then Hooker’s new contribution which would bring closure. For Book VI, that contribution would have been a review of Old Testament civil and judicial arrangements as the alleged basis for the eldership. Unfortunately, however, the text which exists is not a complete Book VI. We find two chapters that might have been original, but then a piece of writing, atypical of Hooker’s strategy in the other parts of the Politie, which by some has been labelled a ‘tract on penance’, with Catholic writers the principal opponents. These ‘chapters’, 3 through 6, have been printed in the Folger Edition as part of Book VI, based on the argument that Hooker thought it wise, perhaps influenced by his friends, to revise the four unpublished last books. Not only did Book V expand significantly, but Book VI would have expanded too as Hooker reviewed spiritual jurisdiction and English ecclesiastical law in order to provide context for the eldership debate.14
Whatever was happening in Hooker’s life, now assigned a living at Bishopsbourne in 1595, none of the last books appeared before his death in 1600. Books VI and VIII appeared in 1648, and Book VII in 1662.15 Was the delay the result of revision and expansion? Or were the last three books finished in the early 1590s, but for some reason withheld, perhaps for financial reasons? Were there possible printer concerns since the earlier books had not sold well? Were new pastoral responsibilities or ill health interfering? Or was Hooker growing weary of a project that now seemed superfluous since the Presbyterians had quieted by the mid-1590s. Was Archbishop Whitgift dissatisfied with a project less Calvinistic for his taste? And was the ecclesiastical climate changing in ways that affected Hooker, for example, on the issue of the jure divino basis of episcopacy, which Hooker did not seem ready to embrace? Were there atrophy and disinterest as the nation waited for a new, younger monarch? As the country neared a time of change, were the anxieties reflected in the last books overwhelming to Hooker, books covering what Hooker felt were the weightiest matters? It may be the case that Hooker’s alarm about civil unrest, about lay power, about bitter disrespect for bishops, and about the responsibilities of the monarch was his way of dealing with the anxieties of the 1590s, anxieties he could not quite resolve in his discourse. Finally, perhaps Hooker was less suited to investigating the particulars of the debate, preferring instead the more general, philosophical problems he tackled so well in the earlier books. We simply don’t know.
What we do know is that a great deal of political activity was happening in the late 1580s and 90s, and Hooker’s work should be related to what was happening and who else was writing. We have been alerted to this need particularly through the work of Torrance Kirby and Peter Lake, as well as others, who are determining Hooker’s relationship to Calvin and Whitgift and other predecessors, to the notion of a magisterial reformation, and to the Anglicanism of the seventeenth century. Firmly grounded in a reformist orientation, as Professor Kirby argued, Hooker may still have been advancing beyond Calvinism, becoming innovative as he followed where his thoughts led. Through these textual negotiations Hooker is not only practising a new prose strategy, but developing his own identity as someone other than a typical polemicist. He is also developing or constructing the identity of a religious establishment that later came to be called ‘Anglican’. Professor Lake, for example, stresses how Hooker created ‘a distinctive and novel vision of what English protestant religion was or rather ought to be’.16 That is, as Hooker engaged the controversy at a particular time in Elizabeth’s reign and through a new type of discourse, he did not simply repeat the conformist answers, but rather, began to look afresh at scripturalism and authority, human potential and religious understanding, and worship and polity.17
There are several ways, then, of reading the Politie. Anyone who peruses the contents of any book will see Hooker engaged in a controversy which can be traced back several years to the Admonition. Second, there surely is the influence of the personal, revealed especially in the language reserved for his ‘opposites’. So often Hooker’s text—as constructive or irenic as some want to see it—characterizes the Presbyterian opponents as either plagued by misjudgement or by psychological disorder. They follow ‘the law of private reason, where the law of publique should take place’ (I.140). In an age ‘full of tongue and weake of braine’, many ‘preferreth rest in ignorance before wearisome labour to knowe’ (I.81). But not all, for as he adjusted to the polemical arena, Hooker played with the notion of multiple readers with different skills. But there were only a few like Hooker who thrived on ‘wearisome labour’, for he had ‘more sharpnes of witt, more intricate circuitions of discorse, more industrie and depth of judgment then common habilitie doth yeeld’ (II.43). In differentiating among readers, Hooker is very much directing the reading and the reader of the treatise. Of course, Hooker’s work has to be read in relationship to the ecclesiastical and political atmosphere of the late 1580s and early 90s, especially in the wake of the Marprelate tracts. Finally, the Politie should not be seen as the product of a retiring intellectual writing in the privacy of his study. Rather, readers need to be alert to traces of corporate authorship in a work that has a polemically constructed ideology. And closely related to this sense of corporate authorship is the question of revision. But to look for revision is first to understand the architecture of the Politie and its individual books.
Scholars continue to explore the challenges the Politie offers. Is it a discourse which holds together? Is there coherence in Hooker’s book and thought? Does Book I’s insistence on the primacy of law in fact provide the foundation for subsequent ‘meditations’? Is there agreement on what Hooker understood as natural law or predestination or grace, reason or the sacraments, ecclesiastical jurisdiction or ministry? Exploring such challenges, tracing ideas to intellectual and theological predecessors and determining Hooker’s adjustments and deviations, as well as looking forward to those who used—or exploited Hooker—in the seventeenth century, has been the principal work of contemporary scholars.18 This is especially true since the appearance of the Folger Edition, which has attracted the attention of scholars of religion, history, politics, literature, and rhetoric. Indeed, Hooker’s contributions to European intellectual life have been celebrated in a recent, comprehensive volume in Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition series, the 2008 A Companion to Richard Hooker. Among the volume’s topics, there are chapters on sin, grace, predestination, faith, assurance, reason, hermeneutics, prayer, the sacraments, ministry, and episcopacy. Such work also has elevated Hooker’s reputation within the Reformation as a serious thinker, independent, adventurous, and yet, for many, orthodox. It may not be possible to find consensus on what Hooker really thought about matters that informed the work of theologians during the Reformation. It is not so much that this or that label can be easily applied (generalizations about Hooker now so suspect), but rather, how much and for what reasons he used, say, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, or Calvin, and what he was doing rhetorically within the discourse. These issues will continue to fascinate scholars and perhaps frustrate them, for Hooker may not have set out to write philosophy or theology for the sake of philosophy and theology. For as eloquent and substantial as Hooker can be, his was a practical enterprise with a straightforward goal: to persuade those who were either not conformists or only lukewarm conformists to embrace the established church’s government, mode of worship, and limited scripturalism and to ‘resolve the conscience, and … shewe … what in this controversie the hart is to thinke’ (I.34). If not resolve and accept, at least obey.
In this respect, Hooker would have understood his work as dialectics. But at the same time, he knew his rhetoric. He did seek to move his readers—to move them to admire the sixteenth-century Church of England, as well as to fear the potential for disruption by the Presbyterian system. The play between Hooker’s dialectic and rhetoric should be further explored, especially in Hooker’s multiple constructions of himself, in how he defined the ‘good’ which the Ciceronian orator sought, in how he used praise to elevate the established church, and in how his various readers were to be affected by his prose.19 But even as Hooker plays at being the good orator fighting for order and against disruption, the Politie cannot be called a summa. Even when Hooker began to think more deeply on matters like grace and free will, and the sacraments and predestination, his writings are reactive. Let me explain.
Only one response to Hooker’s Politie appeared in his lifetime, the anonymous A Christian Letter in 1599. The Letter criticized Hooker’s characterization of Calvin and accused him of teachings contrary to the articles of the Church of England. Hooker countered sections of the letter with notes that would have been part of a formal reply (we are back to the importance of having the last word). He also began writing more sustained and thoughtful responses on certain topics raised in the Letter, responses which have come down to us as fragments in a Trinity College, Dublin manuscript. But the Christian Letter also criticizes Hooker’s style of writing, preferring the more typical arrangement of material which John Whitgift used. In Whitgift’s book, so describes the writer, ‘wee finde the question judicially sett downe, his aunswere to the matter in question sensible, his reasons eyther from holy scripture, from Fathers or new writers, without all circumferences and crooked windings, directly applied’ (IV.73). Clearly, there was little appreciation for the new type of prose Hooker was doing. The writer complains of ‘swelling wordes of vanitie, and cunningly framed sentences [which] blind and intangle the simple’, of Hooker’s ‘metaphisicall and crupticall method to bring men into a maze’ (IV.72). To read Richard Hooker is to ‘walke as in a labyrinth, and [be] suddenlie overwhelmed as in the deepe sea’ (IV.73).
What this Presbyterian took for a labyrinth is for Professor Stanwood a monumental achievement, a new type of writing, ‘incomparably the best that ever was written in our Church’—so says William Covell, who wrote the first defence of the Politie in 1604. The massive project, so well conceptualized and informed by a sense of classical rhetoric, holds together quite well, Hooker in control of his dispositio. Each book is clearly organized and emphatically designed from opening exodium to confutatio and confirmatio to the conclusio. Indeed, Hooker demonstrates that sustained philosophical writing, with themes integrated and divergent material assembled, could be done in English. While others stuck with merely duplicating the words of the opponent, Hooker risked a discourse that performs as judicial judgement. As such, it does at least three things: leads the reader to embrace that judgement, puts the opponent in his place, and serves the political needs of church and state. As Hooker’s material and methodology separated him from his fellow polemicists, perhaps elevating him in some manner, he may very well have wanted his project to ‘overwhelm’.
Considering the reading practices of the time, Hooker demands more than usual from his readers. The Politie is a call to understand, to obey, to surrender, to embrace, to celebrate the church ‘being both a societie and a societie supernaturall’ (I.131) which includes all English citizens. But the polyvalent invitation assumes a hierarchy of abilities and temperaments. Some should merely obey; some might understand and yet be stubborn; some may see the truth after Hooker’s exposition and embrace it; others might be too lazy even to try. Hooker might be able to educate some towards that ‘certainty of evidence’. Others who are disordered, shrouded by that ‘mist of passionate affection’, may be converted only by prayer. And so, with multiple purposes and readers, Hooker also constructs his different voices—as partisan polemicist, as brotherly teacher, even pastor, as authoritarian schoolmaster, as judge. Obsessed with mature and wise judgement (and not timid in exposing the many who are foolish), Hooker speaks as a public voice representing not only the corporate identity of church and state, but the order, the coherence, the stability, and the variety of the very universe which is described in Book I. And so, Hooker, as he helps shape the identity of the established church (as well as his own multiple identities), is also insisting that the identity of his readers be informed by the public order and public responsibilities of church and state. Hooker writes with a hope, surely naïve, to end an ecclesiastical controversy which had the potential to pull apart Elizabethan society—and we certainly know what happened in the seventeenth century. The desire of the discourse is, to use Speed Hill’s wonderful word, ‘repose’.20 That is, the work itself and often Hooker’s personae (but not always) perform, we might say, tranquillity: they hope to mould readers—partisan, non-partisan, and everyone in between—into tranquil, well-ordered individuals who would rehearse those Elizabethan ideals of security, harmony, humility, and peace. Perhaps this hope is realized as an individual’s inner experience of union with God, which Deborah Shuger explores in Habits of Thoughts in the English Renaissance. However, could it be that Hooker’s goal was to encourage or create a human and social community of citizen-worshippers who could indeed ‘live as it were the life of God’?
A Celebration of Richard Hooker (on the 400th Anniversary of Hooker’s Of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity), Sewanee Theological Review, 36.2 (1993).
Anglican Theological Review, 84.4 (2002), an issue focusing extensively on Richard Hooker.
Armentrout, Donald, 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 (Carlisle, CA: Paternoster Press, 1997).
Brydon, Michael A. The Evolving Reputation of Richard Hooker: An Examination of Responses, 1600–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Gibbs, Lee. ‘Theology, Logic, and Rhetoric in the Temple Controversy between Richard Hooker and Walter Travers’, Anglican Theological Review, 65.1 (1983): 177–88.
Hill, W. Speed. ‘The Authority of Hooker’s Style’, Studies in Philology, 67.3 (July 1970): 328–38.
—— ‘The Problem of the “Three Last Books”’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 34.4 (1971): 317–36.
—— ed. Studies in Richard Hooker: Essays Preliminary to an Edition of His Works (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1972).
Hooker, Richard. The Folger Library Edition of The Works of Richard Hooker, ed. W. Speed Hill et al., 7 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977–98).
Kirby, Torrance, ed. A Companion to Richard Hooker (Leiden: Brill, 2008).
—— ed. Richard Hooker and the English Reformation (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003).
—— The Theology of Richard Hooker in the Context of the Magisterial Reformation (Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary, 2000).
Lake, Peter. Anglican and Puritan? English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988).
McGrade, Arthur S. ‘The Coherence of Hooker’s Polity: The Books on Power’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 24.2 (1963): 163–182.
—— ed. Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997).
Secor, Philip. Richard Hooker: Prophet of Anglicanism (Toronto: The Anglican Book Centre, 1999).
Shuger, Debora Kuller. Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
Sisson, C. J. The Judicious Marriage of Mr Hooker and the Birth of ‘The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940).
Voak, Nigel. Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology: A Study of Reason, Will, and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).