Richard Hooker

Hooker, Richard (1554–1600)

Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593–1662) is the first major work of English prose in the fields of philosophy, theology and political theory. After setting out an entire worldview in terms of the single idea of law, Hooker attempted to justify – and, arguably, to transform – the religious and political institutions of his day. Hooker’s work contributed to later, more narrowly political, political thought (Locke cited ‘the judicious Hooker’ at crucial points in his Second Treatise of Civil Government), but the Laws is chiefly significant for articulating the ideal of a society coherent in and through its religion, a body politic which succeeds in being – not merely having – a church. In Hooker’s England this meant that royal authority in religion was extensive, but derived from the community and limited by law. Modern separations of politics from religion and of philosophy from edification have made him difficult to assimilate. More recent critiques of Enlightenment secularism and purely technical philosophy help make him again intelligible.

1 Life

Hooker was born in England, near Exeter. With the help of Bishop John Jewel, the first official apologist for the Elizabethan religious settlement of 1559, Hooker attended Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he later taught logic and Hebrew. In 1585 his appointment as Master of the Temple made him chief pastor of an important centre of legal studies. His surviving sermons, all from this period or earlier, show notable concern for the crises of faith experienced by reflective Christians during the Reformation. In 1591 he resigned from the Temple to work on Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. The preface and first four books were published in 1593, Book V in 1597. Hooker died in 1600. The politically sensitive last three books were published, in unfinished form, between 1648 and 1662.

2 The kinds of law and other principles

Although formally addressed to Puritan critics of the Elizabethan religious establishment, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is also directed to the large number of Hooker’s compatriots who were reluctant or unwilling to participate in the life of the English church after Pius V’s excommunication of the Queen in 1570. Hooker’s aim in Book I was thus to lay out normative principles acceptable to the broadest possible range of Christians at a time when violent accentuation of differences was more usual.

The scheme of laws Hooker set forth in Book I comprises (1) a twofold eternal law, in accordance with which (a) God’s own voluntary actions are carried out and (b) creatures are directed to their various ends; this second eternal law subdivides, in application to the different kinds of creatures, into (2) a law governing the lives of the angels; (3) laws of purely ‘natural’ (that is, non-rational) agents; (4) principles of individual and social morality rationally discoverable by human beings; (5) laws made by humans themselves, consisting of (a) ‘mixedly’ human laws, which set down what we are already obliged to do on rational grounds, and (b) ‘merely’ human laws, which make obligatory actions which had not previously been obligatory; and (6) divine law, the supernatural law of biblical revelation, by which God directs fallen human nature to eternal blessedness.

It is a mark of Hooker’s success in constructing a generally acceptable normative context for his later discussion of disputed issues that Book I can be read as an extraordinarily eloquent but unoriginal distillation of the wisdom of the ages. There is more to it than that. Hooker weaves together some quite diverse past wisdoms, and his elaboration of at least three particular points has substantive significance. First, in defining law as any rule directing to goodness of action, Hooker explicitly refrains from making imposition by a superior essential to law. Further, he argues that human beings are naturally equal with respect to political association. Accordingly, he urges the necessity of consent as a basis for governmental authority and, particularly, for legislative authority (see Authority §3).

The presentation of a lawful cosmos in Book I of the Laws has commonly been taken to be Hooker’s greatest claim to philosophical merit. Other, more overtly polemical, parts of his work also deserve attention. Before undertaking his account of ‘laws and their several kinds in general’ in Book I, Hooker had found it necessary to gain breathing space from the Puritan contention that God’s law, revealed in the Bible, uncompromisingly commanded major changes in church and society. The preface he composed for this purpose includes an astute analysis of what Hooker presents as an implicitly revolutionary movement, as well as discussion of the comparative authority of conscience and consensus.

Following his attempt to set out acceptable general norms in Book I, Hooker sought in Books II–IV to refute three principles he saw as underlying the numerous particular Puritan complaints. These principles were (1) that the Bible is the sole rule for everything to be done in this life; (2) that the Bible must of necessity contain full directions for church government; and (3) that the adequacy of a church’s reformation could be measured by its distance from the practices of the Roman church. Against (1) Hooker defended (partly on biblical grounds) the competence of human reason. Against (2) he defended the competence of individual national churches to govern their own affairs. Against (3) he developed a historically contextualized account of the scandalous and the edifying in religion.

3 The public duties of religion

The fifth and longest book of the Laws is primarily a defence of particular features of the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer, which was thought by Puritans to be insufficiently Protestant. Hooker begins the book’s two main sections, however, with general discussions of the contributions of religion to social well-being. Even in its details, Hooker’s championing of public worship as the central setting for personal participation in the life of God is of philosophical interest. It challenges the widespread modern assumption that faith is purely an inward matter or, at its most external, one component of individual ethics – in any case something private rather than public. (Hooker’s account of the ‘virtue’ and ‘discipline’ of repentance in Book VI also negotiates the border between the subjective and outward sides of religion and does so with a sensitivity unusual in a defender of law and order.)

4 Supreme authority in religion

In the three last books of the Laws Hooker turned to the weightiest political problem of his day, the location of supreme human authority in religion. Three positions concerned him: the Presbyterianism advocated by some Puritans as divinely ordained; the papal supremacy advocated as divinely ordained by, among others, Jesuits clandestinely active in England after 1570; and the supremacy of the English crown asserted in parliamentary acts under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.

Some of Hooker’s case against Presbyterianism can be gathered from earlier books, from the preface, and from his defence of episcopal authority in Book VII, but his chief objection both to Presbyterianism and to papal jurisdiction independent of national authority is put most cogently in the first chapter of Book VIII: both positions assume an untenable dualism of ‘church’ and ‘commonwealth’ even when the membership of both is identical.

With reliance on Aristotle (§§27–8), Hooker argued that the aims of political association included psychological goods (goods of the soul) and that, since the most important of these was religion, every body politic properly ‘cared’ for religion. Given the assumption, uncontested in his circumstances, that Christianity is the true religion, Hooker concluded that a commonwealth of Christians is a church, a body politic distinguished from other bodies politic, not by religion but by truth of religion: ‘We say that the care of religion being common unto all Societies politic, such Societies as do embrace the true religion, have the name of the Church given unto every of them for distinction from the rest’ ( [1593–1662] 1989: VIII 1.2).

On this analysis, a royal supremacy of some kind was one way for a (national) community of Christians to care for its Christianity. Hooker’s emphasis on the theoretically optional, communally chosen character of the royal supremacy is noteworthy. It may indeed explain why Book VIII was not published during the heyday of divine right monarchy under the early Stuarts. Besides grounding the crown’s authority in communal consent, Hooker was also more insistent than any contemporary English author in construing that authority as legally limited. And further, as his recently discovered notes for Book VIII reveal, he intended to conclude the book with a substantial discussion of whether and how a community might correct an errant supreme ruler.

Although Hooker defended a supremacy in religious affairs granted to the civil ruler of the land, the limitations he placed on the royal supremacy, at a time when absolutism was budding in both theory and practice, suggest that Locke’s use of Hooker to support the authority of community and law over regal power has more to be said for it than is often supposed. However, while Hooker could still envisage an agreed integration of spiritual and civil life as a feasible social goal, Locke saw the achievement of such coherence as a problem for individuals, who were likely to solve it in fundamentally different ways.