Richard Hooker and the Freedom of a “Politic Society”
Between Legalism and Libertinism
Those things which the Law of God leaveth arbitrary and at liberty are all subject unto positive laws of men, which laws for the common benefit abridge particular men’s liberty in such things as far as the rules of equity will suffer. This we must either maintain or else overturn the world and make every man his own commander.
Richard Hooker, Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie V.71.4
[If] all things lawful to be done are comprehended in the Scripture . . . what shall the scripture be but a snare and a torment to weak consciences, filling them with infinite perplexities, scrupulosities, doubts insoluble, and extreme despaires?
Hooker, Lawes II.8.5–6
I. A Crisis of Christian Liberty
As we have seen in previous chapters, Luther’s iconoclastic announcement of the “freedom of a Christian” in 1520 was powerful but dangerous, generating a conflict of loyalties to God and to human authority even as it tried to radically distinguish the two, and putting institutional and individual liberty on a collision course. Seeking an authority to adjudicate the conflict, precisianists tended to fall back upon the divine law of Scripture as an all-encompassing rule for Christian behavior, thus safeguarding in principle the liberty of the individual. Conformists, meanwhile, with a preference for institutional liberty that went right back to the Henrician phase of the English Reformation, minimized the scope of Scripture and offered instead human law as the decisive authority for the Christian life. Each solution, however, undermined in its own way the inward liberty of the justified conscience that was so central for Luther and the early Reformation.
The precisianist approach, as we have already seen, tended to replace the confident freedom of a conscience justified by faith with the wary submissiveness of a conscience seeking assurance through obedience to all the revealed words of God. The result was a legalistic trap, in which an ever more precise delineation of these commands was needed to provide the required assurance, but the demand of such a high standard of precision simply increased the opportunity for doubt. This apparent subjection of the conscience to a new bondage of works, together with their obvious threat to the institutional freedom of the Christian commonwealth to fashion its own polity, understandably elicited the charge of a neo-papalism from alarmed conformists.
The conformist approach, however, risked assimilating human law to divine, the will of the prince to the will of God, so thoroughly that the conscience had no freedom to dissent. Nor did most conformist apologists really escape the orbit of precisianist biblicism; they merely sought to confine it within a much smaller space, leaving a large vacuum to be filled by the royal authority which was itself commanded directly by Scripture.1 Where Scripture did in fact command, it could not be gainsaid; where it did not, the magistrate’s command could not be gainsaid. Although Cartwright contended that in justifying orders not contained in Scripture, Whitgift must be instead relying on “some star or light of reason”2 as his standard for what should and shouldn’t be done in the church, Whitgift would not take the bait; as Mark Perrott observes, he “never publicly affirmed or denied Cartwright’s suggestion that his argument implied an assertion of rational authority and his attitude towards the role of human reason in the ordering of the Church remains unclear.” As we have seen, Whitgift often proved very hesitant to explain why the magistrate found certain policies or ceremonies “edifying” or wise; emphasizing instead “the magistrate’s freedom to establish indifferent orders as he saw fit.”3 By demanding of the believer a blind obedience to orders that lacked clear rational justification, conformists could tend to overthrow the principle of voluntariety so central to early articulations of Christian liberty, rendering the conscience almost wholly passive before authority.4
I shall argue in the following three chapters that Richard Hooker constructs his argument in the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie as (among other things) a response to this twofold crisis in the articulation of Christian liberty. With his sophisticated argument regarding the respective roles of natural, divine, and human law, he seeks, I shall suggest, to regain something akin to the original Lutheran dynamic of Christian liberty in its three dimensions (justification, voluntariety, and indifference), while attempting to stabilize the resulting tensions between individual and institutional liberty, and clarifying the nature and function of adiaphora in the Christian life and church polity.
The present chapter will seek to reconstruct his argument against the precisianist distortion of Christian liberty. He aligns himself with earlier conformists in seeking to defend the pole of institutional liberty in particular; however, he seeks to go further by demonstrating that the precianists undermine individual liberty of conscience as well by functionally removing the category of adiaphora. He thus seeks to get to the root of the conflict by disentangling the different senses of adiaphora and resituating the concept firmly in a soteriological context, as those things “not necessary to salvation.” Moreover, in defending the institutional liberty of the English church-commonwealth to make laws for its common good, he resists the temptation to anchor the royal supremacy in divine law, using a version of the magisterial reformers’ two-kingdoms doctrine to demonstrate the thoroughly human-law basis of ecclesiastical polity.5
Chapter Five will then look more at how Hooker goes beyond a typical conformist argument, attempting to avoid the conformist tendency to trample on liberty of conscience, and seeking to offer a positive harmonization of his opponents’ loyalties. This required that he, unlike Whitgift, assure their consciences and invite voluntary obedience by demonstrating the sound rational basis and the edifying character of the orders and ceremonies of the Church of England. The latter part of the chapter will show how Hooker seeks to achieve this without sacrificing his earlier emphasis on institutional liberty, by expounding his carefully constructed arguments about the role of corporate decision-making and the element of consent in English laws. By this means he seeks to argue that the freedom of subjects is not incommensurate with their willing subjection to the decisions of their representatives.
Where Chapter Five seeks to show how Hooker renders loyalty to the magistrate both rational and free, Chapter Six will show how it is a form of loyalty to Christ, who rules over both church and commonwealth. This sometimes-neglected aspect of Hooker’s argument comprises his response to the dual threat of a secularizing or sacralizing conception of the state that we observed in Thomas Cartwright’s political theology in Chapter Three. It also offers, perhaps, an alternative to the conundrums presented in Chapter One, in which the liberal state supposed to emerge from the Reformation seems to oscillate between a public neutrality that leaves religious conscience to its own quiet sphere, and a tumultuous forum in which conscientious zealots seek to enact their conceptions of the higher law. For Hooker, a modest civil state that restrains religious disputes in service to the public good is only possible in a polity that acknowledges the kingship of Christ. Whether or not his model remains compelling today, Hooker’s clear sense of the harmony of nature and grace, and his careful application of an orthodox Christology and doctrine of the ascension offer an intriguing reconciliation of the purely natural and the distinctively Christian dimensions of the commonwealth.
Unbinding the Church
When he comes to the end of Book III of the Lawes, having painstakingly traced the errors in precisianist claims about the kind of authority Scripture wields in the church, Hooker offers an admirably clear and succinct expression of what he considers to be the essential point at issue between the conformists and precisianists:
The fault which we find with them is, that they overmuch abridge the Church of her power in these things [matters of order and ceremonies]. Whereupon they recharge us, as if in these things we gave the Church a liberty which hath no limits or bounds, as if all things which the name of discipline containeth, were at the Church’s free choice. . . . So as the question is only how far the bounds of the Church’s liberty do reach. (III.11.13; FLE 1:259.18–22, 260.13–15)
Cartwright and the precisianists, Hooker charges throughout, are in danger of so much abridging this liberty in favor of a legalistically construed biblical authority that they “overthrow such orders, laws, and constitutions in the Church, as depending thereupon if they should therefore be taken away, would peradventure leave neither face nor memory of Church to continue long in the world, the world especially being such as it now is” (II.7.1; FLE 1:175.9–13).
For Hooker, the problem with precisianism is a warped doctrine of Christian liberty that will assuredly destroy the liberty of the church (and along with it, the state and the individual). As we have seen already, the doctrine of Christian liberty declared that Scripture alone had authority over the conscience, and that therefore, no other authority outside Scripture could bind the believer. Given the original thrust of this doctrine as a weapon against papal authority, it is no wonder that it should tend to abridge the liberty of the church, pitting against it the freedom of the individual and the authority of Scripture. For Luther, and as we shall see for Hooker, this exclusive authority of Scripture chiefly concerned matters of faith and salvation, in “the spiritual kingdom” into which by definition no man could reach, thus averting (at least in theory) a clash with human institutions that remained suitably humble. But as some precisianists had made church discipline and ceremonies to be matters of faith and salvation, a clash was inevitable.
The problem this posed for the Church of England is revealed in a fascinating passage in Book V, where Hooker attacks Cartwright’s argument that the church cannot ordain holy days because God, in ordaining the Sabbath, left believers at liberty on all other days. They contend, says Hooker, that it is not “more lawful for the Church to abridge any man of that liberty which God hath granted, than to take away the yoke which God hath laid upon them and to countermand what he doth expressly enjoin” (V.71.3; FLE 2:373.4–6). This, he argues, is anarchistic logic: “Which opinion, albeit applied here no farther than to this present cause, shaketh universally the fabric of government, tendeth to anarchy and mere confusion, dissolveth families, dissipateth colleges, corporations, armies, overthroweth kingdoms [and] Churches.” On the contrary, Hooker avers that God has precisely defined our duties only in “things of the greatest weight,” and has left us to our “own good discretion” only when we are “free from subjection to others.” Whereas the precisians claimed that “every man is left to the freedom of his own mind in such things as are not either exacted or prohibited by the law of God,” this is in fact to render void all human positive laws whatsoever (since such laws by definition govern those things which Scripture does not). To this disastrous logic he peremptorily answers:
The plain contradictory whereunto is infallibly certain. Those things which the Law of God leaveth arbitrary and at liberty are all subject unto positive laws of men, which laws for the common benefit abridge particular men’s liberty in such things as far as the rules of equities will suffer. This we must either maintain or else overturn the world and make every man his own commander. (V.71.4; FLE 2:374.7–11, 16, 21–22, 374.33–375.3)
Of course, the precisianists would have vigorously disputed this interpretation of their principle, insisting that they thus limited the power of human authority only with regard to “spiritual matters,” and the public order of the church. In properly “civil” matters, they insisted that the magistrate remained free to bind by positive law on matters that Scripture left at liberty. However, Hooker is convinced that the underlying logic of their view tends to undermine this distinction (hence their willingness to argue that the magistrate remains bound in civil matters to the Mosaic judicial laws), especially as he is convinced that laws of ecclesiastical polity are of the same nature as those of civil polity.
This seeming libertinism, leaving the believer free in all things not prescribed by Scripture, disappeared into a stark legalism when combined with Cartwright’s dictum that “[i]t is the virtue of a good law to leave as little as may be in the discretion of the judge.”6 On this basis he had concluded that Christ’s love for the church ensured that he had given her the most detailed and comprehensive law.7 Hooker objects that there is no point in saying that God must have blessed the church with detailed laws, when we face the simple empirical fact that he has not: “[I]t is manifest that our Lord and Saviour hath not by positive laws descended so far into particularities with us as Moses with them . . . [therefore] to us there should be freedom and liberty granted to make laws” (III.11.10; FLE 1:256.2–4, 7–9). Here then it is Hooker arguing that we are “left at liberty” when Scripture is silent; only the liberty is that of an institution to make laws, not of an individual to be free from law.
This curious dynamic between legalism and libertinism was a recurrent feature of the Reformation’s search for a certain resolution to the clash of loyalties. This could only be found, it seemed, by resort to the certainty of the Word of God, thus expanding the sphere of loyalty to God and diminishing the sphere of loyalty to the magistrate. By asserting the rigid positivity and massive scope of biblical law, regulating in detail the conduct of a believer, the precisianist platform left the believer, it would seem, very little liberty before God. On the other hand, functioning as it does to obviate the need for human discretion or prudence, this divine law muscles out of the way all other forms of authority; since it leaves no matter in need of legislation untouched, we are to assume that no further legislation is permissible where it does not speak. The believer is thus left a great deal of liberty before man. By failing to distinguish the different planes on which the two loyalties operated, so that freedom of conscience before the one can coexist with submission before the latter, the precisianist has imagined the two to be competing for territory on the same plane, necessarily in conflict, and with the latter sure to give way before the superior claims of the former. Thus the assertion of Christian liberty strikes directly at the foundation of institutional liberty.
On the contrary, says Hooker, those things left uncommanded by divine law, being matters of adiaphora, are grants of liberty to political societies to frame positive laws “for the common benefit,” not chains restricting them from any legislation. If we do not say this, then nothing is left to the authority of such institutions, but all to the individual or to Scripture—privately interpreted.8 The result of this, Hooker is convinced, will be the crippling of any capacity for corporate action, a reasonable concern, as Robert Eccleshall acknowledges: while the effect of the precisianist doctrine was to permit any individual to challenge the established structure at any point he desired, no community could withstand some of its members undermining the social fabric simply because they disagreed with certain features of public policy.9
Hooker thus seeks to turn the burden of proof back against the precisianists. While they had insisted that, since all things in the church must be ordered according to the Word, the burden of proof was on the apologists for conformity to show scriptural justification for existing orders, he denies the premise, and thus establishes a presumption in favor of publicly enacted law against mere private dissent.10 It is thus up to the precisianists to prove that the present order is positively wrong: “Surely the present form of Church-government which the laws of this land have established, is such, as no law of God, nor reason of man hath hitherto bene alleged of force sufficient to prove they do ill, who to the uttermost of their power withstand the alteration thereof” (Pref. I.1; FLE 1:2.17–21).
Unbinding the Conscience
But however convenient the doctrine of adiaphora may have been for shifting the burden of proof, Hooker’s defense of it appears to have a deeper motivation, recognizing that its denial erodes not merely institutional liberty, but individual liberty as well. One of Hooker’s foremost and most clearly stated purposes in the Lawes is to offer reassurance to Christian consciences that may have been driven by precisianist teachings into a spirit of bondage, rather than freedom—undoing, in Hooker’s mind, the gains of the Reformation.11 We saw in Chapter Three that precisianist biblicism stemmed from the very concern to assure the conscience, with Cartwright insisting that unless we “have the word of God go before us in all our actions . . . we cannot otherwise be assured that they please God.”12 In point of fact, however, the appeal to Scripture in all things had not necessarily served as a salve for uncertain consciences; on the contrary, it could have precisely the opposite effect, as Bozeman has shown in his The Precisianist Strain.13 Hooker, accordingly, seeks to turn the tables on the precisians. If Scripture is to be our guide in everything, thus abrogating the law of nature, “what shall the scripture be but a snare and a torment to weak consciences, filling them with infinite perplexities, scrupulosities, doubts insoluble, and extreme despairs?” (II.8.6; FLE 1:190.16–19).
Accordingly, he dedicates Book II to addressing what he takes to be the chief point at issue in the precisianist protest: “For whereas God hath left sundry kinds of laws unto men, and by all those laws the actions of men are in some sort directed; they hold that one only law, the scripture, must be the rule to direct in all things, even so far as to the ‘taking up of a rush or straw’” (II.1.2; FLE 1:145.10–14). As we saw in the previous chapter, it was Cartwright’s argument that this must be the case if we were to have confidence of pleasing God. Hooker (aside from qualifying “all things” to only “actions which have in them vice or virtue,” which does not include picking up straws) rejects this premise. Rather, he insists that although we might grant that Scripture does in some sense guide all moral actions, we are not bound to deduce our rule of action directly from Scripture, so long as it is “framed according to the law of reason,” which being in harmony with Scripture, and embedded in it, will ensure that our action “may be deduced by some kind of consequence” from Scripture (II.1.2; FLE 1:145.19–20, 24–25, 27–28). We do not need explicit recourse to Scripture at every point to be confident of pleasing God.
This latter point highlights the key problem with precisianist biblicism that we identified in the last chapter: that it was not a matter of how much Scripture governed, but of how it governed, namely, in such a way as to abrogate the law of nature and the exercise of prudence. While interpreters have very often implied that the issue at stake between Hooker and the Puritans is one of the scope of scriptural authority14 (and Hooker does occasionally use this sort of language15), this is clearly not quite accurate. Hooker freely grants here that Scripture does govern all moral actions, but insists that it is not our sole guide, but operates together with the law of reason, with which it is in harmony. Whereas for Cartwright it is essential that the believer not only act in conformity with Scripture, but be consciously guided by it and in submission to it at every point,16 for Hooker it is adequate that we act in conformity with reason, this also being a law God has given us. Otherwise, it is hard to see how the doctrine of adiaphora remains intact:
Whereas therefore they still argue that “wheresoever faith is wanting, there is sin,” and “in every action not commanded, faith is wanting,” ergo, “in every action not commanded, there is sin”: I would demand of them, first for as much as the nature of things indifferent is neither to be commanded nor forbidden, but left free and arbitrary: how there can be anything indifferent, if for want of faith sin be committed, when anything not commanded is done. (II.4.3; FLE 1:153.30–154.5)
In response, Hooker insists, directly contra Cartwright’s claims,17 that adiaphora are those things left free by Scripture, not made free by Scripture; whereas the Puritans say that “unless the word of the Lord had determined of the free use of them, there could have been no lawful use of them at all,” in fact “it is not the Scriptures setting down such things as indifferent, but their not setting down as necessary that doth make them to be indifferent” (II.4.5; FLE 1:155.16–18). Such matters, while indifferent in themselves, are of course not indifferent in use, being still subject to the moral demands of concrete circumstances. Whereas Cartwright, seeking a certain rule to guide the believer in the edifying use of adiaphora, enlists Scripture, Hooker is concerned that this pious-sounding insistence will actually overturn the whole concept, since “[i]f scripture require me so to do, then is not the thing indifferent, because I must do what scripture requireth” (II.4.5; FLE 1:155.25–27). Since adiaphora are those things in which Scripture has not clearly bound us, we should not persist in seeking to wrest guidance from Scripture by dubious deduction, forcing Scripture to speak when it does not. Rather, we should feel free to rely on reason, prudence, or human authorities to make our decision.
Hooker goes on to explain why he considers this point so important:
A hard case, that hereupon [determining an action by discretion, not Scripture] I should be justly condemned of sin. Nor let any man think, that following the judgement of natural discretion in such cases we can have no assurance that we please God. For to the author and God of our nature, how shall any operation proceeding in natural sort be in that respect unacceptable? The nature which himself hath given to work by, he cannot but be delighted with, when we exercise the same any way without commandment of his to the contrary. (II.4.5; FLE 1:155.30–156.2)
The doctrine of Christian liberty that is at stake, therefore, is not simply the liberty of the Christian church or the Christian magistrate; rather, it is, like Luther’s, the freedom of a conscience that does not have to fear divine condemnation at every turn. Such liberty is not to be safeguarded by making Scripture the sole and exhaustive authority, but by using it in conformity with the nature God “hath given to work by.”
III. Defining Adiaphora
Ambiguities
This discussion, however, highlights the difficulty in defining the concept of adiaphora, and the relationship between “indifference” from a moral standpoint and from a scriptural (or epistemological) standpoint. We have also seen above that Luther and others could employ the term from a soteriological standpoint, treating all things unnecessary to salvation as indifferent. A lack of precision in defining and relating these three contexts had dogged disputes between conformists and Puritans throughout the English reformation.
Within the context of moral philosophy, the concept of adiaphora had been a part of discussions regarding what sorts of human actions (leaving aside the complexity of defining an “action”) were intrinsically good or evil, which were good or evil depending on intention, circumstance, and object (for which the word “indifferent” was sometimes used), and which were absolutely indifferent considered in themselves.18 Related to this discussion was also the distinction of actions so good that we are morally obliged to perform them, and goods that are merely recommended, not required, treating the latter as in some sense adiaphorous.19
Distinct from this set of issues was the question of which actions had been prescribed or proscribed in Scripture, which was an epistemological question, distinguishing how we know whether an action is good or evil. Where Scripture has spoken, we have direct knowledge of the good and are obliged to act accordingly; where it has not, however, the good has been left underdetermined, and it is up to us to discern and apply it as we see fit. Of course, if this was merely an epistemological distinction, it did not mean that matters outside of Scripture were morally neutral (indifferent in our first sense), only that we had to use other means (reason or human law) to determine their morality. Nor, for that matter, did it mean that things commanded in Scripture were not, in themselves and apart from such command, morally indifferent; sometimes they were. In other words, not everything scripturally indifferent need be morally indifferent, and not everything morally indifferent need be scripturally indifferent. However, as we have seen, under pressure of demands to conform to unedifying ceremonies, precisianists such as Cartwright had increasingly lost sight of such a distinction.
Within the soteriological context, the concept of adiaphora had its home in Luther’s doctrine of the “two realms” of Christian existence, which distinguished between the salvific “spiritual kingdom” of Christian existence coram Deo and the indifferent “temporal kingdom” coram hominibus. The former contained those things necessary to salvation (on the most minimal definition, passive faith merely, though with suitable qualifications, others could be added to this category); the latter contained those things accessory to salvation and thus of no ultimate significance for the Christian soul. Again, important as this way of putting things was for supporting the Protestant edifice of justification by faith, it sat somewhat uncomfortably with the other dimensions of the adiaphora concept. After all, just because lying to your brother does not exclude you from salvation does not mean that it is morally indifferent; nor, just because feeding the hungry cannot win heaven for you does not mean that there is no moral virtue in such a deed. And, as both these examples show, many deeds could be either commanded or forbidden in Scripture even if, on this soteriological definition, they were “not necessary.”
We have noted how, faced with the need for certainty, many Protestants displayed an increasing tendency to develop the doctrine of Christian liberty from the starting point of sola Scriptura (as we saw later thinkers like Thornwell and VanDrunen doing as well), rather than sola fide (as Luther had clearly done), and thus a tendency to privilege the epistemological dimension of adiaphora. For the precisianists, convinced that God would not leave the Christian adrift without detailed moral guidance, this meant identifying the epistemological dimension with the moral, so that Scripture became the only rule to determine the moral goodness of an action, and very little could be considered adiaphora in the epistemological or moral sense. Moreover, by their intensified focus on sanctification, and on the need for the Christian to walk exactly in all the ways of Scripture, they risked collapsing the distinct soteriological sense into the first two, so that now matters formerly considered “accessory” were taken to be “matters of faith and salvation.”
The other side of this was that conformist apologists, starting too from the second dimension but unable to see in Scripture the profusion of commands that the precisianists read there, could point to Scripture’s formal silence on an issue and conclude thereby that the matter was in every meaningful sense indifferent—left up to essentially arbitrary human judgment, morally and soteriologically insignificant. Or else, still worse, they might exclusively emphasize the third dimension in order to foster a minimalistic quietism. If only a very few things were necessary to salvation, then everything else was essentially free for human authority to devise as it thought best—even if Scripture addressed other subjects, its commands here were not to be taken in any permanently binding sense, since these matters were adiaphorous and changeable. So Starkey could argue that the English people should concern themselves with little more than the Apostles’ Creed; whatever else the authorities might see fit to legislate for the Church of England, they should happily consent to.20 So Whitgift, in his more fatalistic moments, could imply that as the availability of right doctrine was the only prerequisite for God to call sinners to himself, it little mattered what other spiritual provision the Church of England offered.21
Hooker’s Response
In seeking to “open, of what nature and force laws are, according unto their several kinds” (I.16.1; FLE 1:134.21–22), Hooker thus seeks to rightly distinguish these three dimensions, and define their relations to one another. This meant overcoming an exclusive reliance on the scriptural criterion, in which all matters of moral significance were addressed in Scripture, and in which “all the commandments of God . . . are needful for our salvation.”22 The way in which Scripture did and did not bind believers was to be assessed in relation to moral criteria of things that were good, evil, or indifferent in themselves, and soteriological criteria of what things were necessary to salvation, the revelation of which comprised “the principal intent of Scripture” (I.14.1; FLE 1:124.31).
To discern what role the moral dimension plays for Hooker, let us return to the two conditions he insisted on in response to Cartwright’s claim that Scripture “must be the rule to direct in all things.” First, this could only be so “within the compass of moral actions, actions which have in them vice or virtue.” By this, Hooker suggests that there are some actions that are quite simply morally indifferent, and of course we should not expect Scripture to direct in such things.23 But second, he insists that
it sufficeth if such actions be framed according to the law of reason; the general axioms, rules, and principles of which law being so frequent in holy scripture, there is no let but in that regard even out of scripture such duties may be deduced by some kind of consequence . . . howbeit no man bound in such sort to deduce all his actions out of Scripture. (II.1.2; FLE 1:145.24–30)
This serves to render the determination of moral good, evil, or indifference epistemologically independent from Scripture (in principle, at least, though not always in practice, since the postlapsarian corruption of our reason often means that we will need to resort to Scripture). Clearly, it is not metaphysically independent, for he believes the moral substance of Scripture to be identical to that which the law of reason reveals; as he says at one point, “scripture is fraught even with laws of nature” (I.12.1; FLE 1:119.29), and we shall look more closely at this harmonious relationship in Chapter Six. But “the natural measure whereby to judge our doings, is the sentence of reason, determining and setting down what is good to be done. Which sentence is either mandatory, shewing what must be done; or else permissive, declaring only what may be done; or thirdly admonitory, opening what is the most convenient for us to do” (I.8.8; FLE 1:89.2–5).
The permissive sentence of reason, argued Hooker, may permit some things which are “free in their own nature and indifferent . . . left to our own discretion” (such as what kind of clothing to wear), until “some higher duty remove the indifferency that such things have in themselves.” For instance, “if God himself have precisely abridged the same, by restraining us unto, or by barring us from some one or more things of many, which otherwise were in themselves altogether indifferent. Many fashions of Priestly attire there were, whereof Aaron and his sons might have had their free choice without sin, but that God expressly tied them unto one” (II.4.4; FLE 1:154.16–19, 23–28). The moral and epistemological criteria remain clearly distinct here, as the mere fact that God has limited our actions by positive command in Scripture does not change the fact that such things are indifferent in themselves. It is because such moral indifference is antecedent to the epistemological that we saw Hooker insisting, “it is not the Scripture’s setting down such things as indifferent, but their not setting down as necessary that doth make them to be indifferent” (II.4.5; FLE 1:155.16–18)—in other words, Scripture does not have to first positively permit something for it to become indifferent. Thus he attacks the attempt to force Scripture to speak on matters where it simply does not, and he insists that we must take as our starting point not what we think Scripture should have said (because of its moral importance), but what it has in fact said: “When the question is whether God have delivered in scripture (as they affirm he hath) a complete particular immutable form of Church-polity, why take they that other both presumptuous and superfluous labour to prove he should have done it, there being no way in this case to prove the deed of God saving only by producing that evidence wherein he hath done it?” (III.11.21; FLE 1:269.12–17).
Brian Tierney has recently drawn attention to these passages as marking one of Hooker’s most important contributions to the natural law tradition, specifically the idea of permissive natural law. Whereas Cartwright had required explicit scriptural permission to make something indifferent, and Whitgift had wavered when appealing to reason as a standard, Hooker forthrightly argued that reason could and should tell us when actions were not so good as to be required and not so evil as to be forbidden.
A recurrent teaching that runs through Hooker’s work held that we need to be guided by both the law of scripture and the law of reason, or law of nature, in following a Christian way of life; and at the core of the argument was the assertion that reason and nature can teach us not only what is demanded of us but also what is permitted.24
Although such a notion of permissive natural law had been explicitly formulated and defended by many of the medieval canonists, shows Tierney, it was curiously absent from Aquinas’s account of natural law, which Hooker otherwise follows fairly closely. This is accordingly one point where, Tierney suggests, Hooker may have improved upon Aquinas by “making explicit what was implicit”25 in the Summa regarding the relationship between moral law and human freedom.
Taken by itself, however, this line of argument would not seem to get Hooker very far in his polemic against the precisianists. He has rebutted the idea that merely because something is morally significant, it must be the subject of scriptural prescription, thus allowing that God may leave many matters to human discretion. However, he has appeared to concede that, to the extent that Scripture has addressed the matter, it is no longer indifferent from the epistemological standpoint, and such discretion has been taken away from the church. This would appear to leave him the same difficulty as Whitgift, admitting that if Cartwright’s exegesis was sound, then his claims for presbyterianism would follow, and thus condemning himself to an interminable exegetical tug-of-war about what Scripture had and had not spoken to. Hooker thus seeks to provide a satisfactory argument as to why we should expect Scripture to address some matters and not others—why we should be prima facie skeptical of the claims that it has prescribed in detail matters like church polity, rather than leaving them indifferent. This argument involves bringing in the soteriological criterion.
Accordingly, he insists that in praising the sufficiency of Scripture, we define this in terms of “the sufficiency of scripture unto the end for which it was instituted” (I.14; FLE 1:124.27–28; italics mine). Although Scripture contains many things, “the principal intent of scripture is to deliver the laws of duties supernatural” (I.14.1; FLE 1:124.31–32), which he goes on to define as things “necessary to salvation.”26 Against the precisianist tendency to make Scripture the rule of all our actions, Hooker thus seeks to maintain Luther’s emphasis on the gospel of justification as the heart of the Scriptures.27 He returns to this concept at much more length in II.8, where, having spent seven chapters rebutting the precisianist construal of the scope of scriptural authority, he turns to elaborate his own account, synthesizing the moral, epistemological, and soteriological elements.
Having established that “all actions of men endued with the use of reason are generally either good or evil” (II.8.1; FLE 1:186.13), he proceeds to outline three different kinds of morally good action. First, while we might want to say that all actions are in some sense either good or evil, there are some things that are almost absolutely indifferent: “Some things are good, yet in so mean a degree of goodness, that men are only not disproved or disallowed of God for them,” actions, we might assume, like “taking up a rush or straw,” or even trivial matters of church order; in these actions “the very light of nature alone may discover that which is so far forth in the sight of God allowable” (II.8.2; FLE 1:187.29–30). Second, on the other extreme, are those things not only allowed but “also required as necessary unto salvation, by way of direct immediate and proper necessity final, so that without performance of them we cannot by ordinary course be saved.”28 Here, “our chiefest direction is from scripture, for nature is no sufficient teacher what we should do that we may attain unto life everlasting. The [insufficiency] of the light of nature is by the light of scripture so fully and so perfectly herein supplied, that further light than this hath added there doth not need unto that end” (II.8.3; FLE 1:187.30–188.7). But in between these two is a third category, the sphere with which moral theology is usually concerned, those things we normally recognize as virtues or vices:
Finally some things although not so required of necessity that to leave them undone excludeth from salvation, are notwithstanding of so great dignity and acceptation with God, that most ample reward in heaven is laid up for them. Hereof we have no commandment either in nature or scripture which doth exact them at our hands: yet those motives there are in both which draw most effectually our minds unto them. (II.8.4; FLE 1:188.7–13)29
In Hooker’s second category, Scripture is our sole authority, and both clear and sufficient in directing us. If anything is necessary for salvation, we may be sure that it is included in Scripture, and we may be sure moreover that we could not have divined it on our own, without the aid of Scripture (though even here this does not mean that reason plays no instrumental role). Our task is but to carefully attend to and obey the testimony of Scripture; indeed, if we do otherwise, and import doctrines or duties from other authorities, we are sure to err, and in the end to overthrow the gospel. But clearly not all our Christian duties fall under this heading, not even everything of a “spiritual” nature; most fall under Hooker’s first and third headings. There are many things useful for ordering the church and our Christian lives of which Scripture tells us nothing clearly, and on which we may freely make use of reason. On other things, Scripture does give moral guidance, but on duties to which we are already bound by nature, such that reason may already provide adequate guidance. In such cases, we may make use of reason, and even when we seek to be guided by Scripture, we will recognize that the nature of such duties requires us to use prudence in applying Scripture to particular circumstances. Crucial here is Hooker’s at first possibly perplexing distinction between “exacting at our hands” and “drawing our minds unto them”—it is possible for Scripture to direct our paths in a certain direction without prescribing specific actions in a binding way.
Hooker illustrates the difference with the helpful metaphor of the pathway in which the church is to walk. Without the articles of her creed and the sacraments, “the Church of God should not be able to measure out the length and the breadth of that way wherein forever she is to walk,” and here she relies wholly on Scripture. Other things there are, however, “that are accessory hereunto,” and “to alter them is no otherwise to change that way, than a path is changed by altering only the uppermost face thereof, which be it laid with gravel, or set with grass, or paved with stone, remaineth still the same path.” In these things, “because discretion may teach the Church what is convenient, we hold not the Church further tied herein unto scripture, than that against scripture nothing be admitted in the Church, lest that path which ought always to be kept even, do thereby come to be overgrown with brambles and thorns” (III.3.3; FLE 1:211.9–23).
IV. The Variability of Divine Law: The Church as “Politic Society”
Hooker has thus attempted to establish a neat correlation between the realm of epistemological adiaphora (actions left free by Scripture) and of soteriological adiaphora (actions unnecessary to salvation). Those things necessary to salvation are fully revealed in Scripture; for those things accessory, “we have no commandment either in nature or in Scripture which doth exact them at our hands” (II.8.4; FLE 1:188.10–12). Yet still the precisianist may ask why we cannot simply reverse the equation, and insist that anything for which we do find a commandment in Scripture must then be considered “necessary to salvation”; indeed, this was just the sort of reasoning we encountered in Cartwright.30 For Hooker, this is an unacceptable move, displacing the gospel proclamation at the heart of Scripture by an unwholesome focus on peripheral matters. Hooker therefore has to show that in point of fact, when it comes to matters of polity, Scripture does not “exact them at our hands” in the way it does matters of faith. Rather than resorting to point-by-point confutation of disciplinarian proof texts, Hooker thus seeks to categorically redefine all matters of polity as by nature changeable, beyond the scope of divine law in the strict sense. This is why he is able to say that in such matters, “we hold not the Church further tied herein unto scripture, than that against scripture nothing be admitted in the Church.” In other words, just because one can find a scriptural command for something, it does not necessarily continue to bind the church, if it can be shown to be by nature outside the soteriological realm of “things necessary to salvation.”
Hooker mounts this argument in Book III, where he defends his conception of the church as a “politic society,” subject to the same constraints of other human societies, and governed by changeable human laws, rather than unchangeable divine law.31 As Cargill Thompson has argued, this conception ties together the whole argument of the Lawes, and renders Hooker’s case coherent.32 Yet Thompson’s exposition leaves us unclear as to why Hooker might have expected this argument to be persuasive to his opponents, committed as they were to the idea that the church was a supernatural society ruled by Christ alone according to divine law. To them, Hooker’s argument might seem like philosophical sleight-of-hand, cheating Scripture of authority even in those places where Hooker could not deny its clarity, in order to yield the desired result of a church establishment liberated to legislate as it desired. Accordingly, we must understand the theological foundation that undergirds Hooker’s concept of the church as “politic society,” which turns out to be an adaptation of Luther’s “two kingdoms” doctrine that we have encountered before.33
This becomes clear right at the outset of Book III, which Hooker begins with a systematic examination of “[w]hat the Church is, and in what respect laws of polity are thereunto necessarily required” (III.1; FLE 1:194.17–18). Here he draws on the classic Protestant distinction between the church visible and invisible, or in Hooker’s language, “mystical.”34 The mystical church is apparent only to the eyes of faith,35 and its membership known only to God.36 The visible church, on the other hand, is a “sensibly known company” (III.1.3; FLE 1:195.26), identified by the “outward profession of those things, which supernaturally appertain to the very essence of Christianity, and are necessarily required in every particular Christian man” (III.1.4; FLE 1:196.8–11), viz., the creed and baptism. Torrance Kirby has argued that this distinction maps neatly onto the set of distinctions between the internal forum, coram Deo, and the external forum, coram hominibus, which is central to Luther’s two-kingdoms doctrine:
Just as the true believer was simultaneously “in heaven” (coram Deo) with Christ, saved, and totally justified, and “in earth” (coram hominibus) a sinner, gradually being sanctified; so also the Church has a twofold character—it too, one might say, is simul justus et peccator. In its primary and antecedent form the Church is placed altogether in the realm of total justice; in its secondary and derivative form, the Church has lost its divine character. Thus, for Luther the visible Church in the world is a natural, earthly institution, and therefore subject to human custom, tradition, and positive law.37
So it is that we find Hooker describing the mystical church in terms of the passivity of justification, which freely receives and rests on the promises of God by faith, and the visible church with the activity of sanctification,38 which responds to grace, seeking to become more like Christ: “And as those everlasting promises of love, mercy, and blessedness belong to the mystical Church; even so on the other side when we read of any duty which the Church of God is bound unto, the Church whom this doth concern is a sensibly known company” (III.1.3; FLE 1:195.22–26). The former is justus, pure and righteous in the sight of God (III.1.2); the latter is peccator, a mixed company in which are many who are the very “imps and limbs of Satan” (III.1.7; FLE 1:198.22). Accordingly, as Hooker later explains when outlining his theology of worship, the outward visible church should be always striving toward a fuller correspondence with the inward mystical church: “That which inwardly each man should be, the Church outwardly ought to testify” (V.6.2; FLE 2:33.26–27). Moreover, to these two kingdoms correspond, as for Luther, two regiments, two different ways in which these two dimensions of the church are ruled: one in which Christ alone works “secretly, inwardly, and invisibly” as “that fountain, from whence the influence of heavenly grace distilleth,” and the other “external and visible in the Church, exercised by men” (VIII.4.9; FLE 3:378.11–12, 377.19–20, 378.10).39 Laws of church polity are those that govern the latter (III.1.14).
The outward, visible church, engaged in the process of sanctification, is Hooker’s primary concern in the Lawes,40 and Hooker is keen to oppose the disciplinarian tendency to spiritualize this visible church, thus attributing the perfection of the mystical church, justus in Christ, to the visible, still very much peccator. The result, as Kirby notes, “is a ‘humanizing’ of the church as an external, political organization, with the consequence that there is no longer a theological or metaphysical necessity for an ‘essential’ distinction to be drawn between ecclesiastical and civil power; both belong properly to the sphere of the ‘politic society.’”41 Hooker accordingly proceeds in the remainder of Book III to explain why church polity, as an external government of the visible church that does not belong to the realm of faith and salvation, is mutable like any other earthly government:
There is no reason in the world wherefore we should esteem it as necessary always to do, as always to believe the same things; seeing every man knoweth that the matter of faith is constant, the matter contrariwise of action daily changeable, especially the matter of action belonging unto Church polity. . . . Which kind of laws (for as much as they are not in themselves necessary to salvation) may after they are made be also changed as the difference of times or places shall require. (III.10.7; FLE 1:244.21–245.7)
Hooker has thus provided a theological foundation for his claim in I.15.2 that the church, as a “politic society,” functions within the sphere of human law. Therefore, to say that Scripture does not strictly bind us on these matters is in no way to demean or dismiss Scripture, but simply to understand that Scripture necessarily functions differently as the matter differs: immutably on matters that are coram Deo, and to some extent mutably on matters coram hominibus. This is in a way the central contention of the first three books of the Lawes, summarized in Hooker’s pregnant statement of I.15.1: “Positive laws are either permanent or else changeable, according as the matter itself is concerning which they were first made” (FLE 1:130.26–28; italics mine). In the three concluding chapters of Book III, Hooker at last elaborates on this statement, delineating carefully how we may know when the church is given institutional liberty to legislate in the adiaphora, and when it is not.
In III.10, Hooker details four subcategories of positive law, and how long they continue in force. Some positive laws will state just how long they continue in force; many, however, will not. In the latter case, the only way for us to determine whether they are still in force is “by considering the nature and quality of such laws,” which is to be judged “by the end for which it was made, and by the aptness of things therein prescribed to the same end” (III.10.1). This yields four categories: laws with unknown ends; laws with known permanent ends; laws with known temporary ends; and laws with permanent ends but impermanent matter.42
First are those laws whose end has simply not been disclosed to us by the lawmaker, and in which we are unable to divine it on our own. As an example, Hooker gives God’s original command to Adam, not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We know it must have had a good reason, but not knowing what that reason was, we cannot be sure whether the command had permanent force or would have expired when certain conditions changed. When the end of the law is unknown, says Hooker, only the lawmaker has power to change the law; otherwise, we must assume it to be perpetually binding.
But what if we do know the end for which a law was instituted? Well, if that end is known to be permanent, then such laws are “also perpetual, unless they cease to be effectual unto that purpose for which they were at the first instituted” (III.10.1; FLE 1:240.16–18). The qualification here is a crucial one, distinguishing the second (permanent means to permanent end) and fourth (impermanent means to permanent end) subcategories of positive law, so it is worth paying attention to Hooker’s elaboration: “[W]e cannot be ignorant, how sometimes that hath done great good, which afterwards, when time hath changeth the ancient course of things, doth grow to be either very hurtful, or not so greatly profitable and necessary” (III.10.1; FLE 1:240.21–24).
Before elaborating on this, Hooker turns to the third subcategory, positive laws with temporary ends: “Whether God be the author of laws by authorizing that power of men whereby they are made, or by delivering them made immediately from himself, by word only, or in writing also, or howsoever; notwithstanding the authority of their maker, the mutability of that end for which they are made doth also make them changeable” (III.10.2; FLE 1:240.27–32). Examples here include the ceremonial laws of the Old Testament, and even New Testament laws such as the decree of the Council of Jerusalem. These are laws made to serve temporary purposes, which expire when these purposes expire. Hooker is particularly insistent on this category because his Puritan opponents are arguing that the divine authority of the lawmaker should be sufficient proof that we have no right to change his laws—to do so would be to assert our authority above his. This argument rests on a fundamental confusion, and an inability to distinguish the different kinds and purposes of laws, says Hooker.
Those who concede this point, however, insist that any law with a permanent end must be unchangeable, considering any change to be “execrable pride and presumption, if so be the end and purpose for which God by that mean provideth be permanent.” Specifically, his opponents argue that “if it be necessary always that the Church of Christ be governed, then doth the end for which God provided remain still, and therfore in those means which he by law did establish as being fittest unto that end, for us to alter any thing is to lift up ourselves against God and as it were to countermand him” (III.10.3; FLE 1:242.4–9). This too, however, manifests a crucial misunderstanding:
[T]hey mark not that laws are instruments to rule by, and that instruments are not only to be framed according unto the general end for which they are provided, but even according unto that very particular, which riseth out of the matter whereon they have to work. The end wherefore laws were made may be permanent, and those laws nevertheless require some alteration, if there be any unfitness in the means which they prescribe as tending unto that end and purpose. (III.10.3; FLE 1:242.9–16)43
This thus leads him to discussion of the fourth category, laws with permanent ends but impermanent matter. The end of the law (e.g., “good order in the church”) is completely good, and remains as long as the world lasts, but the matter may change, so that a law formerly good ceases to be so, and must be altered so as to realize the original end in new circumstances. There is plenty of evidence for this happening in the Old Testament itself, and it is clear that many of the apostolic injunctions to the New Testament church, while their general aim remains constant, may require alteration when the church finds itself in new settings. To be sure, it will be hard to reach agreement about precisely which injunctions fall under this heading, but everyone will ultimately have to grant that some laws do.
And therefore laws though both ordained of God himself, and the end for which they were ordained continuing, may notwithstanding cease, if by alteration of persons or times they be found unsufficient to attain unto that end. In which respect why may we not presume that God doth even call for such change or alteration, as the very condition of things themselves doth make necessary? (III.10.4; FLE 1:243.6–12)
Together, these distinctions establish a template for determining the proper scope of the church’s liberty in adiaphora. By highlighting the soteriological function of Scripture as providing a “way that leadeth us from misery into bliss,” a “way of supernatural duty . . . ‘that ye believe in him whom he hath sent’” such that “without belief all other things are as nothing” (I.11.6; FLE 1:118.22–30), Hooker has given the doctrine of Christian liberty and adiaphora a clear compass. Whatever God commands in Scripture beyond the supernatural duties “necessary to salvation” are things soteriologically indifferent, and thus mutable to the extent that their object is mutable. Some are unchanging moral duties, but these coincide with the natural law, so that Scripture illuminates the weakness of fallen reason at this point. Once we move to the concrete realization of these moral duties in human law, we are in the realm of the mutable, where only a careful application of reason can determine to what extent scriptural teaching and precedent continue to bind. Accordingly, the category of epistemological adiaphora is reconfigured in terms of the soteriological and moral. If something is soteriologically indifferent—not necessary to salvation—it may still not be morally indifferent, but a perpetual duty of natural law (which will also be contained in Scripture either expressly or by deduction). If it is not such a perpetual duty, then it is morally indifferent, in the sense that its goodness or badness will depend on changeable circumstances, whether or not Scripture addresses the matter; Scripture may specify additional circumstances (e.g., when the high priest served in the Jewish temple, his clothing was not indifferent), but outside of these, it does not bind.
V. Implications
We thus find Hooker—in his resolute defense of the importance of things indifferent, of the liberty of the authorities to make binding judgments regarding their use, in his distinction of the two kingdoms in terms of two realms, and his clear positioning of the institutional structures and rituals of the visible church in the “civil kingdom,” the realm of adiaphora—following closely in the footsteps of conformists such as Whitgift. But he is not merely repeating their arguments. On the contrary, Hooker has succeeded in providing a much clearer and more comprehensive account of what it means to be a “thing indifferent,” so as to avoid the apparent fatalism that seemed to exhort dissenters to rest content that the gospel was preached and ask for no more. He has also supplied conformists with a powerful hermeneutical key for determining when and how Scripture dictates matters of church polity, rather than simply engaging in piecemeal exegetical wrangling. Moreover, he has taken the offensive against precisianist Puritans, attempting to show how it is their view which, by reintroducing a legalistic understanding of Scripture and the church, has overturned the Protestant commitment to Christian liberty. Hooker has thus accomplished the impressive feat of limiting the role of scriptural authority vis-à-vis ecclesiastical authority, while effectively positioning himself on the side of the Reformers and of Christian liberty, and refusing this honor to the precisianists. He has done this by focusing unswervingly on the distinction between the “two realms,” which marks out Christian liberty before God, freedom from all earthly authority in bondage to Scripture alone, as something purely spiritual, in contrast with Christian existence in the world, in “politic societies” that wield authority by God’s institution outside of Scripture.
By combining this “two realms” doctrine with a Thomistic division of the different kinds and functions of law, Hooker has arrived at a much more satisfying and consistent understanding of human law, both civil and ecclesiastical, than either his precisianist opponents or conformist predecessors. The church in its external and institutional form is a “politic society” subject to the same limits as any other human society. The ordering of the church, as of other societies, is thus a matter accessory to salvation, and consequently a matter on which we should not expect detailed scriptural guidance, and should not feel the need to justify every law directly from Scripture. Not only that, but concerning as they do those matters of human social life that are subject to great mutability by time, place, and circumstance, even divine positive law itself does not necessarily bind us to follow it to the letter. Scripture provides instruction and precedents in the government of both church and state, but how these instructions are to be applied and how far these precedents are to be followed, reason must judge, according to the particular circumstances of a politic society.44 This, then, is the first step of his strategy for harmonizing loyalties to prince and to God: seeking to distinguish precisely between the proper scope for each.
This does leave us in considerable uncertainty within the outward realm, required to judge at every turn according to discretion and prudence—precisely what Cartwright considered the mark of a bad law. However, by recovering the soteriological center of Christian liberty Hooker seeks to reassure his readers that such uncertainty is acceptable outside the sphere of those things necessary to salvation. Indeed, it is unavoidable, and to demand certainty will simply be a snare and a torment to weak consciences, “filling them with infinite perplexities, scrupulosities, doubts insoluble, and extreme despairs” (II.8.6; FLE 1:190.16–19). Accordingly Hooker is not afraid to overturn the hermeneutic that had for decades helped undergird conformist defenses of royal supremacy—the authoritative examples of Old Testament rulers. The royal supremacy itself is defended on grounds of prudence and good order, that which is most suitable for government of civil and ecclesiastical polity in England as it now stands.45 Hooker clearly believes that something like the royal supremacy will be best for most if not all Christian societies, but it is not in itself a matter of divine law. By tempering the zeal for absolute certainty in earthly matters, he has rehabilitated the usefulness of reason as a way of determining good and evil within the adiaphora. This sets the stage for the second step of Hooker’s strategy for harmonizing loyalties, which we shall turn to now.
1. As André Gazal has shown in ch. 8 of his Scripture and Royal Supremacy in Tudor England: The Use of Old Testament Historical Narrative (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2013), the standard conformist defense of royal supremacy during this period was divine right, resting on the same hermeneutic that the precisianists then deployed in favor of a divine-right presbyterianism.
2. SR 56.22.
3. M. E. C. Perrott, “Richard Hooker and the Problem of Authority in the Elizabethan Church,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 49, no. 1 (1998): 43–44. See also Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 39, and 119, 125, where Lake shows the same problem at work in later conformists such as John Bridges.
4. Of course, it would be unfair to exaggerate this tendency. After all, the conformists did not simply resort to bald coercion. On the contrary, they wrote lengthy tracts and treatises arguing against Puritanism and calling for conformity, and the very act of writing is an attempt to rationally persuade an intelligent reader. Nonetheless, as Lake has argued, they drew upon a rather thin arsenal of arguments for the purpose, and were quick to flee to the skirts of the magistrate for protection when they had run out of weapons (Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? 119).
5. It is worth noting how both sides in this dispute sought to defend the liberty of “the church”; where Puritans saw their opponents as enslaving the church to the state, conformists saw their opponents enslaving both church and state to a legalistic construal of Scripture. We often tend to view the controversy through Puritan eyes, as one between church and state, and might thus expect Hooker to set the question of the royal supremacy and the relative powers of civil and ecclesiastical authorities front-and-center in his argument. And yet it is in but one, and the last, of the “particular decisions” that Hooker undertakes to discuss, and plays no role in the “general meditations” of Books I–IV. The fundamental problem, for Hooker, is correctly characterizing the relationship between the two realms, coram Deo and coram hominibus; once he has shown that both civil and ecclesiastical polity belong in the latter, their specific administration is a comparatively secondary matter.
6. SR, Appendix, i.21–22. See n. 13 in Chapter Three above.
7. WW I:264–67, II:90; Cartwright, SR 440.
8. In V.10.1 he asks, “[If] the Church did give every man license to follow what himself imagineth that God’s Spirit doth reveal unto him, or what he supposeth that God is likely to have revealed to some special person whose virtues deserve to be highly esteemed, what other effect could hereupon ensue, but the utter confusion of his Church under pretense of being taught, led, and guided by his spirit[?]” (FLE 2:46.22–28).
9. Robert Eccleshall, “Richard Hooker’s Synthesis and the Problem of Allegiance,” Journal of the History of Ideas 37, no. 1 (1976): 114.
10. Eccleshall, “Richard Hooker’s Synthesis,” 114. Cf. “We therefore crave . . . to have it granted, that where neither the evidence of any law divine, nor the strength of any invincible argument otherwise found out by the light of reason, nor any notable public inconvenience doth make against that which our own laws ecclesiastical have although but newly instituted, for the ordering of these affaires, the very authority of the Church itself, at the least in such cases, may give so much credit to her own laws, as to make their sentence touching fitness and convenience weightier than any bare and naked conceit to the contrary” (V.8.5; FLE 2:40.24–33).
11. Perrott, “Problem of Authority,” 38–39, 48–52. See also Barry G. Rasmussen, “The Priority of God’s Gracious Action in Richard Hooker’s Hermeneutic,” in Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, ed. W. J. Torrance Kirby (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), 12–14, for the argument that Hooker is responding to a perceived “Pelagianism” in his precisianist opponents.
12. SR 61.10–12.
13. See chs. 7 and 8 in Theodore Dwight Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). It should be noted that Hooker’s preoccupation with the subject of assurance extended beyond merely the moral dimension that we are focusing on here. In his surviving sermons from the 1580s, the issue of attaining assurance of saving faith is a prominent theme (see especially A Learned and Comfortable Sermon of the Certaintie and Perpetuitie of Faith in the Elect, in FLE 5:69–82), and has engaged the attention of several scholars (see for instance Egil Grislis, “The Assurance of Faith According to Hooker,” in Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. Arthur Stephen McGrade [Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997], 237–50; and Deborah Shuger, “Faith and Assurance,” in A Companion to Richard Hooker, ed. W. J. Torrance Kirby [Leiden: Brill, 2008], 221–50).
14. See for instance the discussions in H. C. Porter, “Hooker, the Tudor Constitution, and the Via Media,” in Studies in Richard Hooker: Essays Preliminary to an Edition of His Works, ed. W. Speed Hill (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1972), 104–7; Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, Theology of Law and Authority in the English Reformation, Emory University Studies in Law and Religion 1 (Atlanta: Scholars, 1991), 142–45; and Glenn Burgess, British Political Thought: 1500–1660: The Politics of the Post-reformation (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 131.
15. See for instance I.1.2 (FLE 1:145.6–10), I.1.4 (FLE 1:147.3–6), although in the larger context of both passages, it becomes clear that Hooker is more concerned with describing the mode of scriptural authority (operating conjointly with reason) than in limiting its scope.
16. Cartwright, SR 59–60; John S. Coolidge, The Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 11.
17. SR 59.9–13.
18. For a general background on this pre-Reformation usage of the concept of adiaphora, see Bernard J. Verkamp, The Indifferent Mean: Adiaphorism in the English Reformation to 1554 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977), 21–26.
19. See for instance Hooker’s distinction between the law of reason’s “mandatory,” “permissive,” and “admonitory” declarations in I.8.8 (FLE 1:89.1–31), and Joyce’s discussion of the same in A. J. Joyce, Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 177–78.
20. Thomas Starkey, Exhortation to Unitie and Obedience (London, 1540; facsimile repr., Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1972), 7v.
21. Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? 41; “The ‘Anglican Moment’? Richard Hooker and the Ideological Watershed of the 1590s,” in Anglicanism and the Western Christian Tradition: Continuity, Change and the Search for Communion, ed. Stephen Platten (Norwich, UK: Canterbury, 2003), 98.
22. Cartwright, Replye, 18 (WW I:231).
23. However, we should note that he later argues in II.8 that, inasmuch as all voluntary actions are directed toward an end, from which they take their moral character, “all actions of men endued with the use of reason are generally either good or evil” (II.8.1; FLE 1:186). To this extent, he would agree with Cartwright (and Augustine!) that all actions must be ordered toward the love of God, or else they are evil. The problem was that Cartwright had tried to replace this wholly internal and circumstantial determination of goodness with a requirement of explicit outward conformity to Scripture.
24. Brian Tierney, Law and Liberty: The Idea of Permissive Natural Law, 1100–1800 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2014), 179.
25. Tierney, Law and Liberty, 179.
26. Richard Muller observes (After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003], 11) that this kind of distinction was becoming common in late-sixteenth-century Reformed discussions of the clarity and sufficiency of Scripture.
27. See for instance in Freedom of a Christian: “You may ask, ‘What then is the Word of God, and how shall it be used, since there are so many words of God?’ I answer: The Apostle explains this in Romans 1. The word is the gospel of God concerning his Son” (LW 31:346).
28. It should be noted that Hooker, like Luther, would include here the observance of sacraments (see for instance V.57.3–4), thus complicating any attempt to simplistically map “things necessary” onto the “internal” and “things indifferent/accessory” onto the “external.” However, Hooker is much more nuanced in his treatment of the necessity of sacraments than most of his interpreters. See my Richard Hooker: A Companion to His Life and Work (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015), ch. 11.
29. These range from the “cup of cold water” bestowed in Christ’s name mentioned in Matt. 10:42 to the selling of possessions described in Acts 4:32–37.
30. Cartwright, Replye, 14 (WW I:181). See also SR 5.
31. Hooker first makes this identification in I.15.2, saying that “as it is a society” the church has “the selfsame original rounds which other politic societies have” (FLE 1:131.11–12).
32. Cargill Thompson, “Philosopher of the Politic Society: Richard Hooker as Political Thinker,” in Studies in Richard Hooker, ed. W. Speed Hill, republished in W. D. J. Cargill Thompson, Studies in the Reformation: Luther to Hooker, ed. C. W. Dugmore (London: Athlone, 1980), 177–82.
33. Torrance Kirby has persuasively argued that “[t]he distinction of the two realms constitutes the pivotal link between Hooker’s fundamental theological premises, on the one hand, and his ecclesiology and political theory, on the other. Indeed, this same pattern of thought permeates the argument of the Lawes and connects one stage of the discourse to another like a golden thread” (Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy [Leiden: Brill, 1990], 31).
34. For whatever reason, many scholars have been resistant to the idea that Hooker means by his distinction quite the same thing as the magisterial reformers did (see for instance William P. Haugaard, “Introduction to ‘Books II, III & IV,’” in FLE 6[1]: 172–73, William H. Harrison, “The Church,” in A Companion to Richard Hooker, ed. W. J. Torrance Kirby [Leiden: Brill, 2008], 306), with Peter Lake going so far as to insist that the purpose of Hooker’s theology is to “conflate” the two (Anglicans and Puritans? 180–81), notwithstanding his forthright statements in III.1. This claim seems to stem from several misunderstandings. One simply concerns the term “mystical,” which is hardly unique to Hooker in this context, and often functioned as a virtual synonym for “invisible” in the sixteenth century. Another is the contention that for Hooker, the “mystical” church is defined not so much in terms of predestination but in terms of the believer’s invisible union with Christ. The same, however, could be said of Luther and Calvin. In point of fact, it would probably be more accurate to say that in certain respects, Hooker radicalizes the invisible-visible distinction, by renouncing any attempt to define which visible churches are “true churches” that properly embody the invisible church; outward profession of faith alone designates the boundaries of the visible church. See Paul D. L. Avis, “‘The True Church’ in Reformation Theology,” Scottish Journal of Theology 30, no. 4 (1977): 341–45. See also my Richard Hooker, ch. 10.
35. “That Church of Christ which we properly term his body mystical, can be but one, neither can that one bee sensibly discerned by any man. . . . Only our minds by intellectual conceit are able to apprehend, that such a real body there is . . . a body mystical, because the mystery of their conjunction is removed altogether from sense” (III.1.2; FLE 1:194.27–195.3).
36. “They who are of this society have such marks and notes of distinction from all others, as are not object unto our sense” (III.1.2; FLE 1:195.9–10).
37. Kirby, Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy, 62. For Luther’s treatment of the visible church as part of the civil kingdom, see John Witte Jr., Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 7; F. Edward Cranz, An Essay on the Development of Luther’s Thought on Law, Justice, and Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 144–45, 173–77; James M. Estes, Peace, Order, and the Glory of God: Secular Authority and the Church in the Thought of Luther and Melanchthon, 1518–1559 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 41, 66–67, 107–10.
38. Although some older scholarship questioned the orthodoxy of Hooker’s understanding of the relationship of justification and sanctification in general, Kirby has argued that it is essentially that of Luther and Calvin (Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy, 41–59), a judgment that a careful recent study by Ranall Ingalls (“Sin and Grace,” in Companion to Richard Hooker, 151–84) has by and large confirmed.
39. See Chapter Six, Sect. 5 below for fuller exposition of how this distinction functions in his account of the royal supremacy.
40. See William H. Harrison, “Powers of Nature and Influences of Grace in Hooker’s Lawes,” in Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, 15–18.
41. W. J. Torrance Kirby, “From ‘Generall Meditations’ to ‘Particular Decisions’: The Augustinian Coherence of Richard Hooker’s Political Theology,” in Law and Sovereignty in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Robert S. Sturges (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 62. As we shall see in Chapter Six, this “humanizing” does not mean a wholesale desacralization, taking place as it does within a Christological logic of what Kirby calls “an ecclesiological ‘communication of idioms’ between the mystical and institutional Churches, just as in Christology between the human and divine natures” so that for Hooker, there is “an explicitly divine basis for the human, positive laws and external institutions of the Church” (Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy, 76).
42. For a similar set of distinctions applied to a similar question, see the fascinating treatise by Hooker’s contemporary, Franciscus Junius, The Mosaic Polity, trans. Tom M. Rester, ed. Andrew M. McGinnis, Sources in Early Modern Economics, Ethics, and Law (1613; repr., Grand Rapids: Christian Library’s Press, 2015), 71–96.
43. Cf. Thomas Aquinas, ST I–II q. 104 a. 3 ad. 2.
44. To be sure, Hooker hardly seeks to give reason unlimited discretion in such matters. In fact, Hooker closes his statement of these issues by recognizing that both sides agree that there are scriptural limits to the church’s discretion; the question is just how extensive they are: “Besides, in the matter of external discipline or regiment itself, we do not deny but there are some things whereto the church is bound till the world’s end. So as the question is only how far the bounds of the Church’s liberty do reach” (III.11.13, FLE 1:260.11–15).
45. Gazal documents this hermeneutical turn, and the need for it given the failures of existing conformist polemics, in Scripture and Royal Supremacy, 495–519. See also Daniel Eppley, “Royal Supremacy,” in Companion to Richard Hooker, 508–9.