SOURCE: Shuger, Debora. “‘Society supernatural’: the imagined community of Hooker's Laws.” In Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, edited by Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger, pp. 116-42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Shuger discusses community-related matters explored by Hooker in his writings, including jurisdiction, authority, law, and socio-political organization.]

Since the 1970s, studies of Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity have, to no one's surprise, grown suspicious of its lofty disinterestedness. Current scholarship, reacting against the hagiographic tradition established by Walton's Lives, has argued for Hooker's narrowly polemical aims as a propagandist for Whitgift's crackdown on dissent and a paid spokesman for the anti-Puritan faction in the parliamentary debates of 1593. The new Hooker is a “partisan thinker intent on window-dressing the command structure of English society,” whose work offers “a particularly compelling consecration of … [its] power structure.”¹ Richard Helgerson's 1992 Forms of Nationhood provides the most recent version of this interpretative paradigm; for Helgerson, “Hooker's defense of the established church was part of a large and deliberate movement of reaction and repression led by Archbishop Whitgift … against Puritan opponents whose strongest appeal … was to the unreasoning and vulgar multitude. A mark of [Hooker's] success is that his own audience is of a very different sort.”²

Over the same two decades, however, significant new information has come to light that complicates our picture of the motives and occasions informing the Laws. First, it seems unlikely that Hooker undertook the Laws at the behest of either ecclesiastical or parliamentary officials.³ Moreover, the “Sandys” backing the anti-Puritan legislation in the Parliament of 1593 seems not to have been Edwin Sandys, Hooker's friend and patron, but his uncle Miles Sandys.⁴ That Edwin Sandys had to pay for the publication of the Laws out of his own pocket, the London publishers having uniformly rejected the manuscript, itself militates against the assumption that Hooker enjoyed high-level patronage.

Second, there is reason to believe that the Laws is not exclusively, or even primarily, anti-Presbyterian polemic. By the 1590s, Presbyterianism was no longer a burning issue—a consequence of Whitgift's successful campaign against the Genevan discipline. Hooker's closest associates recognized this; in a letter probably written in 1592-93, George Cranmer thus remarks to Hooker that “of late years the heat of men towards the Discipline is greatly decayed. … So as now the discipline which at first triumphed over all, being unmasked, beginneth to droop and hang down her head.”⁵ Internal evidence points in the same direction: very simply, Hooker appears not to have made any extensive study of Genevan ecclesiology; despite the voluminous literature on this topic, he regularly cites only Cartwright and Travers.⁶ Compared to Richard Bancroft's massive research into the intellectual and moral contradictions of the disciplinary platform, Hooker's scholarship on the subject seems remarkably thin. Significantly, we know that Bancroft, unlike Hooker, was Whitgift's protégé and designated spokesman for “the little faction of markedly anti-puritan politicians and civilians” active during the 1593 Parliament.⁷ To read the Laws as official propaganda for the established church and status quo is to confuse Hooker with Bancroft, which no one who has ever read both is likely to do.

Current research thus indicates that Hooker's ties to the “movement of reaction and repression led by Archbishop Whitgift” were looser than one might have supposed, which may explain why his works found such an ideologically diverse audience. Although Helgerson implies that the Laws attracted an elite readership of bishops, conservative academics, and other beneficiaries of the status quo, the fragmentary surviving evidence tells a somewhat different story. If Hooker's writings appealed to Bishop Andrewes and both Stuart monarchs, their audience also included the liberal lay theologians of the Great Tew circle; Edward Coke, champion of the common law and ancient constitution; the Puritan Richard Baxter; the Cromwellian John Hall; the philosopher John Locke; and William Walwyn—a friend of Lilburne, Leveller pamphleteer, and popular agitator, whose 1649 spiritual autobiography (written, not surprisingly, in prison) recounts how he “had, as it were, without book … those peeces annexed to Mr. Hooker's Ecclesiasticall pollicy: hearing, and reading continually.”⁸

But to claim that Hooker did not address an elite audience on behalf of a repressive establishment reopens basic questions concerning the Laws, in particular, the question Helgerson himself raises about its “imagined community”—about what sorts of people get included or excluded, privileged or marginalized in Hooker's text. For as Helgerson convincingly argues, debate over “the inclusion or exclusion of various social groups from privileged participation in the … community and its representations” dominates early modern constructions of English national identity—an identity defined as much by religious as civic commitments.⁹

It is not, however, self-evident that Hooker was much interested in community. The Laws does not directly engage the primary modern senses of the term: whether Helgerson's loosely Marxist class-based notion or Benedict Anderson's “deep, horizontal comradeship” or the activist support-group model endemic to contemporary ecclesiology.¹⁰ The Laws contains little on social ethics, parochial sociability, or class-tensions; while it meticulously explores matters of jurisdiction, authority, and law, these pertain to socio-political organization rather than to what is ordinarily meant by “community” in the sense of “Gemeinschaft.”

At this point, it may be helpful to take a different tack: to attempt, before turning to the imagined community of the Laws, to recover what was at issue and at stake in sixteenth-century debates over Christian community. In order to do this, however, I want to begin somewhat earlier—with, in fact, the Roman polymath Varro's contrast between “physical” (that is, natural) and civic religion.¹¹ According to Saint Augustine, who summarizes Varro's now lost Antiquities, Varro held that civic religion, with its mix of fable, superstition, and ritual, was a strategem devised by intellectuals and politicians to “bring [the populace] under control and keep them there” (4.32). Varro himself, Augustine adds, implied that he found civic theology contemptible, although concealing his distaste in order “to encourage the common people to honour the gods” (4.31). Natural theology, conversely, Varro considered the “special preserve of philosophers,” whose truths were “too demanding for the common folk,” and, in any case, “there are many truths which it is not expedient for the general public to know, and, further, many falsehoods which it is good for the people to believe true” (4.31, 6.5-6). For Varro there are thus two types of religion: the enlightened theology of the philosophers and the mythic/magic paganism of the civic cults.

This division, moreover, is itself simply one version of the commonplace ancient distinction between elite and popular piety. Polybius thus explains that “if it were possible to form a state wholly of philosophers” rituals and fables would be unnecessary, “but seeing that every multitude is fickle, and full of lawless desires … the only resource is to keep them in check by mysterious terrors and scenic effects of this sort.”¹² Livy similarly describes how the early Roman king Numa Pompilius invented “marvellous” tales to inculcate “fear of the gods,” this being the only way to civilize “a mob as rough and ignorant and the Romans were in those days.”¹³ Classical writers by and large simply take as self-evident that popular religion is, as Seneca puts it, a “matter of custom, having little connection with truth.”¹⁴

Much of Augustine's City of God, in turn, offers a massive and explicit critique of this ancient division between popular and elite piety. What Augustine says is that “any old woman, as a baptized Christian, now knew more about the true nature of the invisible world … [than] the most learned of … philosophers.”¹⁵ While a Christian “may be unacquainted with the writings of the philosophers … [this] does not mean that he is ignorant of the teaching thanks to which we acquire knowledge of God and of ourselves, nor that he is ignorant of the grace through which we are united to him and thus attain our happiness.” Augustine thus tirelessly insists that Christianity is a “universal way … by which all souls are liberated,” for the “law of God” was given “not to one man, not to a few sages, but to the whole nation, an immense people” (8.10, 10.13, 10.32).

This antipathy to the spiritual elitism of classical philosophy permeates Augustine's anti-Donatist writings. These argue, according to Peter Brown's eloquent summary, on behalf of

the average good Catholic layman … who slept with his wife, faute de mieux, and often just for the pleasure of it; touchy on points of honour, given to vendettas; not a landgrabber, but capable of fighting to keep hold of his own property, though only in the bishop's court; and, for all that, a good Christian in Augustine's sense, ‘looking on himself as a disgrace, and giving the glory to God.’¹⁶

Augustine's opposition to the spiritual elitism of the ancient philosophers stands behind his definition of Christian communitas. Whereas for Aristotle, true political community is based on friendship among equals (philia), for Augustine, the members of the church are “united by a common agreement on the objects of their love,” a love binding those who are socially, intellectually, and even morally unequal into a single “people” (19.24).

Augustine's “Christian populism”—to borrow Brown's wonderful phrase—dominates subsequent conceptions of the Church, transmitting a vision of Christian community as that which overcomes the ancient opposition between the gods of the city and the god of the philosophers. But the Reformation reproblematizes this ecclesiology along confessional lines. Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, that is, develop crucially different models of the relation between popular and elite religion. Significantly, a lengthy and thoughtful analysis of this difference can be found in a work Hugh Trevor-Roper terms the “political complement” to Hooker's Laws: the Europae Speculum: Or, a View or Survey of the State of Religion in the Westerne Parts of the World, written in 1599 by Edwin Sandys, Hooker's patron, student, friend, and editor.¹⁷

Sandys's text, the product of his six-year Continental tour, presents a sophisticated and severely demystified account of how the Roman church works, focusing on the ideological mechanisms sustaining the papal imperium. In particular, Sandys analyzes Roman Catholicism as a form of popular religion—like all popular religions, exploiting splendid and lavishly emotional rituals to appeal to the religious sensibilities of Helgerson's “unreasoning and vulgar multitude.” Rome has, he explains, “well-nigh infinite” ways “to ravish all affections,” utilizing whatever “miracles [can work] with the credulous, what visions with the fantasticall; what gorgeousnesse of shews with the vulgar and simple, what multitude of Ceremonies with the superstitious and ignorant.”¹⁸

However, the Roman church has not, Sandys makes clear, lapsed back into the ancient dichotomy of vulgar and philosophic piety. Instead the papal version of Christian populism rests on a strikingly anti-rationalist epistemology that denies theological learning any ultimate advantage over simple faith—any privileged access to Truth. Thus, Sandys reports, Rome teaches that

Christianitie is a doctrine of faith, a doctrine whereof all men even children are capable. … Meane had [God's] regard beene of the vulgar people … whose capacity will not suffice to sound the deepe and hidden mysteries of divinity … if there were not other whose authority they might relye on. Blessed therefore are they which beleeve and have not seene: the merit of whose religious humility and obedience, doth exceed perhaps in honour and acceptance before God, the subtill and profound knowledge of many other.¹⁹

This fideism grounds the Roman church's demand for implicit obedience, its hostility to rational inquiry, and its populist appeal to the senses and emotions. Like Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, the papacy justifies its empire over souls as solicitude—God's solicitude—for “the vulgar people.” In both cases, however, this miracle of inclusiveness has its price; Rome, Sandys concludes, lacks “nothing save onely truth and sincerity” (p. 98).

Hence Sandys sees the Reformation as above all a violent reaction against the pious frauds employed by Rome to trick the ignorant into obedience. The Reformation, that is, resulted from the humanist discovery of papal “untruth”: its “Legends of Saints and tales at which children with us would smile,” its “jugling in their Images to make them weepe, sweate and bleed,” its “falsifying and forgery in all matters of antiquity, thrusting in, cutting out, suppressing true, suborning feyned writings, as their turnes did require”—all which evincing “how small reckoning they make of truth” (pp. 8, 27, 89-90, 99). Conversely, for Sandys the religion of Protestants rests on the humanist imperative to “overbeare” the lies and forgeries of papistry with “the streames of the evidence of reason”; the Protestant, unlike his adversaries, thinks “truth the only durable armor of proofe” and rests his case on the “unity of Verity” (pp. 86, 102, 211).

Sandys clearly shares this protestant humanist commitment, but he also notes that the Reformation had by and large failed because it neglected to develop religious forms capable of reaching the hearts of the people. Its leaders, he observes,

did cut out in such sort their reformation of Religion … in all outward Religious services and ceremonies, in government and Church discipline; to strive to bee as unlike to the Papacie as was possible … [lest they] seeme to any to bee imitators of their wisdome, whose wickednesse they so much abhorred: much like to a stout hearted and stiff-witted Captaine, who scornes to imitate any stratageme before used by the enemy, though the putting it in exploit might give him assured victory.

(p. 75)

Protestantism persuades those who value reason and evidence, not the “simpler sort” who need “outward state and glory” to “engender, quicken, encrease and nourish” their devotion (pp. 9-10).

Sandys's critique points to the central weakness of advanced Protestantism in late Tudor England. Puritanism's humanist emphases on edification and reformation of manners, coupled with its predestinarian theology, tended to “identify the church militant with a select company of saints who are separated from the world by virtue of their faith and holy conduct”; church membership, Walter Travers explains, should be restricted to the “lovers and professors of the truth.”²⁰ The stress on “truth” here is significant; like Sandys's humanistic Protestantism, Travers's scripturalism “undercut the status and the prospects of the unthinking. Good works and worship could be habitual; saving faith could not: it required understanding, decision, interior conviction; it required informed belief.”²¹ This sort of ethical, inward, and informed piety made few concessions to the “simpler sort” and their presumed need for “outward state and glory.” Richard Baxter's terms for his opponents imply a near synonymy of ignorance, poverty, and evil: the ungodly are an “ignorant, dead-hearted people,” “the vulgar,” “an ignorant, rude and revelling people,” an “ignorant rout,” the “rabble,” a “beggarly drunken rout.”²²

The tendency in Elizabethan Puritanism to drive a wedge between pure and popular religion, between godly and ordinary Christians, is unmistakable in the Puritan George Gifford's A briefe discourse of certaine pointes of the religion, whiche is among the common sorte of Christians: which may bee termed the “Countrie diuinitie” (1582). Gifford's text recounts a dialogue between the Puritan “Zelotes” and an old-fashioned “country Christian,” named, rather ominously, “Atheos.” When the latter complains of Puritan divisiveness, Zelotes fiercely rejoins: “Will yee haue light and darknesse for to agree as companions together? … woulde ye haue the godlie and the wicked for to bee as one?” When Atheos praises his own minister, Zelotes responds that in conformist parishes “yee shall not find fiue among fiuescore which are able to vnderstande the necessarie groundes and principles of religion.” Atheos's reaction to this claim that ninety percent of most English congregations lack the knowledge necessary for salvation is perhaps more moving than intended:

What difference can you shewe betweene those whiche are taught as you woulde haue them, and such as haue knowledge[;] they can no more but repent, call for mercie, and beleeve? … I thinke God accepteth the prayer of the honest poore man as well as of … those which knowe most, and are the best learned.

To which Zelotes replies that these poor ignorants only say they believe; if one tells them they are breaking God's law, their answer is “I am not so precise, I am not so curious, I will not bee so holy. … And these are the prayers of those poore honest men which you thinke God heareth.”²³ For Gifford, popular religion—his “countrie diuinitie”—is atheism.

While men like Cartwright and Travers “labour amongst the people to divide the word,” Hooker remarks, “they make the word a mean to divide and distract the people.”²⁴ Throughout the Laws, he is clearly troubled by the exclusivity of the Puritan platform, worrying that it “hath bred high terms of separation between such and the rest of the world; whereby the one sort are named The brethren, The godly, and so forth; the other, worldlings, time-servers, pleasers of men not of God, with such like” (Pref.3.11). In this sense, the Laws is haunted by the problem of community—by the need to overcome the tension between popular and elite religion. Hooker's own position with respect to the competing reformed and counterreformation models of Christian community, however, seems confusing, if not confused.

Particularly in book v, the Laws supports what Sandys would have considered Romanist populism. Hooker thus insists that “the tender kindness of the Church of God” reaches out “to help the weaker sort, which are by so great odds moe in number, although some few of the perfecter and stronger may be therewith for a time displeased” (v.35.2). He thus defends the sign of the cross on the grounds that “the rare perfection of a few” must “condescend unto common imbecility” (v.65.10) and praises church music for its ability to rouse “grosser and heavier minds, whom bare words do not easily move” (v.38.3). External ceremonies and signs are legitimate because the Church ought not “despise no not the meanest helps that serve though it be but in the very lowest degree of furtherance towards the highest services that God doth require at our hands” (v.65.10). Hooker likewise movingly celebrates the holiness of beauty and of an intensely emotional piety, whose “inflamed motions of delight” and “tears of devout joy” he evidently prefers to “curious and intricate speculations” (v.25.2, v.67.3).²⁵

This defense of popular religion is of a piece with Hooker's unusually inclusive view of church membership; as Anthony Milton has pointed out, Hooker defines the church “merely in terms of the outward (rather than the true, or pure) profession of Christianity.”²⁶ If, according to Hooker, the Elizabethan Settlement assumed that every member of the English nation also belongs to the English church, Christian charity further assumes that “all men with whom we live” either are or may become children of God (v.49.2, viii.1.2). Perhaps as a consequence of this inclusive ecclesiology, Hooker displays striking unconcern for a general reformation of manners—the crackdown on drunkards, beggars, blasphemers, loiterers, and fornicators—central to the disciplinary agenda.²⁷ Although the Laws does not discuss specific remedies (or punishments) for the weaknesses of the flesh, Hooker's approach to such frailties is implicit in his defense of church music. Since mankind finds virtue difficult and unpleasant, he observes,

it pleased the wisdom of the same Spirit to borrow from melody that pleasure, which mingled with heavenly mysteries, causeth the smoothness and softness of that which toucheth the ear, to convey as it were by stealth the treasure of good things into man's mind.

(v.38.3)

Rather than purify the church of suspect pleasures, Hooker endeavors, as it were, to appropriate them. The strategy has a marked affinity not only with Herbert's attempt to wash, dress, and bring to church the “lovely enchanting language” of the stews but also with the tactic used by Ralph Kettell—President of Trinity College, Oxford, from 1599 to 1643, and, according to Aubrey, “a right Church of England man”—to control undergraduate tippling. Noting that “the Howses that had the smallest beer had the most drunkards,” since their students ended up haunting local taverns, Kettell had Trinity make its own “excellent beere,” to encourage his pupils to experiment with alcohol on campus where opportunities for debauchery and riot would, presumably, be fewer.²⁸ The inclination of a “right Church of England man” like Kettell to incorporate rather than forbid potentially subversive pleasures seems the (slightly comic) counterpart of Hooker's willingness to permit intoxicating “smoothness and softness” into the church as “certain baits” designed to allure the “weaker sort” of ordinary Christians within its walls (v.35.2). Hooker's defense of the sensible and external beauty of holiness rests on Augustinian rather than aesthetic bases; the Laws counters the exclusionary rigor of Puritan ecclesiology by justifying the sensuous and ceremonial worship of Christian populism.

The Laws also defends a form of political populism. Hooker not only asserts that all persons have the capacity to discern “things absolutely unto all men's salvation necessary” (Pref. 3.2) but also that all persons, or at least all Englishmen, “are in no subjection, but such as willingly themselves have condescended unto, for their own most behoof and security” (viii.2.7). Hooker's claim that laws derive their authority from consent of the whole political community—and hence not from any divine right vested in kings—has often been remarked upon (i.10.8, viii.6.11). Like the Levellers half a century later, Hooker rests his case on the “vulgar axiom” of canon law: “Quod omnes tangit, ab omnibus tractari et approbari debet” (viii.6.8).²⁹ Moreover, Hooker applies this consensual theory of law to ecclesiastical polity, insisting that the power “to make church-laws” belongs to “the whole entire body of that church for which they are made” (viii.6.1).

Hooker is not, however, a Leveller; nor is he a crypto-fideist, crypto-Catholic populist. Unlike Sandys's papal theologians with their piae fraudes, childish fables, and general disregard for reason, evidence, and truth, Hooker rests his case on humanist erudition and Thomist rationalism. Whatever its concessions to the “simpler sort,” the whole point of the Laws—governing its argument as well as implicit in its method and style—is that philological training, extensive familiarity with sacred and profane learning, and solid grounding in logic are requisite for framing or judging ecclesiastical polities. The Laws, that is, assumes the same elitist humanism that Sandys considers the distinctive feature of Protestantism.

The Laws makes no attempt to conceal the political corollaries of this position. Although even “gross and popular capacities” can grasp basic moral truths—love thy neighbor, honor thy parents, eschew murder, and so forth—those whom Hooker terms the “vulgar sort” have neither the knowledge nor the deliberative skill to adapt such general principles to specific cases and historical contexts; hence since “men of common capacity … are not able (for how should they?) to discern what things are fittest for each kind and state of regiment,” it follows that “none but wise men be admitted … to devise laws.”³⁰ Nor are ordinary Christians competent judges in ecclesiastical matters; in an unusually harsh and anxious passage, Hooker remarks that the Puritan contempt for merely human authority has produced a situation where

a man whose capacity will scarce serve him to utter five words in sensible manner blusheth not in any doubt concerning matter of Scripture to think his own bare Yea as good as the Nay of all the wise, grave, and learned judgments that are in the whole world: which insolency must be repressed, or it will be the very bane of Christian religion.

(ii.7.6)

The Laws thus offers two seemingly antithetic versions of community. On the one hand, Hooker argues for a liturgical and political populism; that is, he defends both the affective ritualism of popular piety and the derivation of all legitimate authority, ecclesiastical as well as secular, from popular consent. On the other, he rejects the fideistic valorization of implicit faith over learning and logic, disallows the political capacities of the “common multitude,” and restricts active participation in the government of either church or state to the well-born and the wise. Although Hooker consistently avoids the sort of spiritual elitism he associated with Puritanism, he defends the humanist elitism that, a few years later, Sandys would associate with Protestantism.

Put this way, the Laws betrays what William Bouwsma has called a “promiscuous mixture of incompatible impulses.”³¹ Some of the contradictions, however, are merely apparent. In Aristotelian political theory, whose general outlines Hooker borrows, rule by elites and consensual government are not mutually exclusive alternatives; rather the type of regime that Aristotle calls polity or constitutional government—and which he considers best among existing regimes—combines aristocratic and democratic/populist elements along lines similar to those Hooker sketches in the Laws.³² In a constitutional government, according to Aristotle, an elite of birth and ability alone hold office in the polis, although the whole body of citizens participates in electing them. Hooker speaks of popular consent rather than popular elections, but in general preserves the Aristotelian division of labor between an elite, who frame the laws, and the people, whose assent is required to give such proposed legislation its constraining force:

The most natural and religious course in making of laws is, that the matter of them be taken from the judgment of the wisest in those things which they are to concern. … Howbeit, when all which the wisdom of all sorts can do is done for devising of laws in the Church, it is the general consent of all that giveth them the form and vigour of laws, without which they could be no more unto us than the counsels of physicians to the sick.

(viii.6.11)

Hooker's model of both secular and ecclesiastical polity derives from this Aristotelian republicanism, which attempts to steer a middle course between mob-rule and oligarchic tyranny by combining democratic and aristocratic elements into a single “mixed constitution.”³³ Calvinist ecclesiology, oddly enough, derives from the same tradition. History has many ironies, not the least of which is that Cartwright and Hooker share the same basic Aristotelian paradigm. Cartwright himself points out this lineage, noting that the Presbyterian discipline “in respect of the ancients and pastors that govern … is an aristocraty, or the rule of the best men; and, in respect that the people are not secluded, but have their interest in church matters, it is a democracy, or a popular estate.”³⁴ Hooker, in turn, objects to the Genevan model for being more autocratic than Aristotelian; he thus remarks that despite its republican pretensions, Calvinist ecclesiology actually gives all real power to a clerical elite, whereas in the Church of England “the people have commonly far more sway and force than with them” (vii.14.10).³⁵

Hooker's political thought has strong affinities to the secular branch of Calvinist republicanism as well. As Cargill Thompson has observed, the Laws betrays an uncanny resemblance to George Buchanan's notorious De jure regni apud Scotos.³⁶ In particular, Hooker consistently affirms the fundamental postulate of both ancient and early modern republican constitutionalism: the desirability of the rule of law.³⁷ “I am not of opinion,” he thus comments, “that simply always in kings the most, but the best limited power is best … the best, that which in dealing is tied unto the soundest, perfectest, and most indifferent rule; which rule is the law” (viii.2.12). Like Cartwright and Buchanan, Hooker stresses the “indifferent” and impartial authority of the law over both kings and subjects. Thus if private individuals must submit to their lawful superiors, the king also stands in “subordination and subjection” to “the whole entire body politic,” which “giveth general order by law how all things publicly are to be done” (viii.2.9-10, viii.8.9). That Hooker rejects the monarchomach conclusion allowing a ruler who violates the laws to be, by law, deposed, does not annul the overall similarities between his account of civil and ecclesiastical polity and those of his opponents. Both strive for an Aristotelian mixture of elite and popular government; both echo Aristotle's preference for the rule of law over either schismatic individualism or royal absolutism.

But neither Hooker's state nor his state-church can be termed a “community.” For Cartwright, and for English Puritanism in general, the true church must be a voluntary society; however exclusive or stiff its criteria for admission, its members are “the brethren,” a freely chosen association of kindred spirits. The true church is thus a community in the full Aristotelian sense: a population united by the bonds of homonoia and philia, of likemindedness and friendship.³⁸ Although Hooker's church is inclusive—or rather, precisely because it is inclusive—it is also fundamentally and essentially a coercive institution, employing the “rod of corporal punishment” to repress schism, dissidence, heresy, and all other such outbursts of individual dissent and ambition (viii.3.4).³⁹ Societies, whether civil or ecclesiastical, are maintained by power, not philia. Hooker makes the point quite explicitly: “Jurisdiction,” he remarks, “is a yoke which law hath imposed on the necks of men in such sort that they must endure it for the good of others, how contrary soever it be to their own particular appetites and inclinations”—or more succinctly, “jurisdiction bridleth men against their wills” (v.62.16). The state-church is not a community but a polity, a term whose relation to “police” is not merely etymological.

For Hooker, social structures do not pertain to community; the members of the Church of England apparently need not be like-minded nor view themselves as brethren. The Laws differs from both classical republicanism and protestant ecclesiology precisely insofar as it ignores the fraternal, gemeinschaftliche aspects of collective existence. So does Hooker have a notion of community?

In one way, this question seems rather easy to answer, since Hooker's defense of the Church of England's liturgy, sacraments, ritual, and ceremonies is, as we have seen, suffused by concern for Christian community. What remains unclear, however, is the connection between this Prayer Book piety and Hooker's ecclesiastical polity. One need not, moreover, be Machiavelli to suspect that the former serves primarily as an instrument of the latter.

To see how these devotional practices might have aims beyond “window dressing the command structure of English society” requires looking at Hooker's theory of the church. Book viii of the Laws makes a fairly traditional distinction between the visible, institutional state-church and the invisible church or mystical body of Christ, administered by “the secret inward influence” of divine grace (viii.4.5).⁴⁰ Book v, however, refers to the church as a “visible mystical body” (v.24.1). This unusual definition, which identifies “the church” neither with Elizabeth's ecclesiastical polity nor with the invisible and inward operations of grace, posits an empirical association (a “visible body”) structured by non-empirical (“mystical”) relations.

Book v can be viewed as an extended gloss on this unfamiliar entity. For Hooker, the visible, public worship of the church—its liturgy, prayers, and sacraments—creates a “society supernatural” (i.15.2) structured along a vertical axis and mediated by “Angels of intercourse and commerce between God and us” (v.23.1).⁴¹ In the sacraments, Christ “imparteth himself even his whole entire Person … unto every soul that receiveth him” (v.67.7); the “power of the ministry of God … raiseth men from the earth and bringeth God himself down from heaven” (v.77.1). The visible mystical body is a “society of souls” bound not by Anderson's “horizontal comradeship” but by vertical communion. And, of course, this communion—or community—does not owe its being to the Crown-in-Parliament; on the contrary, it can provide a site of legitimate resistance to secular power.

Hooker mentions the possibility of such resistance only once: in the final chapter of the Laws, before the manuscript abruptly breaks off for reasons we cannot know. The chapter attempts to refute Cartwright's claim that princes are subject to ecclesiastical discipline and hence church officials have the judicial authority to excommunicate them. Hooker denies that any ecclesiastical tribunal or person has lawful power to judge rulers, but then in the final paragraph appends a striking qualification:

But concerning excommunication, such as is only a dutiful, religious, and holy refusal to admit notorious transgressors in so extreme degree unto the blessed communion of saints, especially the mysteries of the Body and Blood of Christ, till their humbled penitent minds be made manifest: this we grant every king bound to abide at the hands of any minister of God wheresoever through the world.

(viii.9.6)

The established church has no legal jurisdiction over its temporal head, but any priest, as a minister of God, possesses a spiritual authority unmediated by legal or institutional structures. The Laws ends with this Foxean scene in which “any minister” confronts “every king.”

No one who has read the Laws will suppose Hooker deeply interested in resisting royal authority. His definition of the church as a visible mystical body—and hence essentially distinct from any ecclesiastical polity—bears directly, however, on questions of Christian community, on the incorporation of the simpler sort and their betters into a single body unified by something more than the yoke and bridle of jurisdiction.

The nature of Hooker's imagined community is most fully disclosed in the moving prosopopoeia that climaxes his discussion of the Eucharist. On the face of it, this seems a paradoxical claim; whereas for Bishop Jewel, the Eucharist is “the sacrament of christian society, whereby we understand what sincere love ought to be betwixt the true communicants” and for Cartwright “a declaration … that we are at one with our brethren,”⁴² Hooker conspicuously avoids describing the sacrament as creating or signifying mutual friendship among the congregants. Yet community figures crucially in Hooker's account of the Eucharist. The speaker of the magnificent concluding passages is, Hooker notes, “that mind which … hath not perhaps the leisure, perhaps not the wit nor capacity to tread out so endless mazes, as the intricate disputes of this cause have led men into” (v.67.12). The speaker, that is, belongs among the simpler sort; as Brian Vickers has observed, Hooker here describes “the needs of the ordinary Christian.”⁴³ In this passage, however, the voice of popular piety expresses an intense spiritual interiority and passionate intuition of divine presence; it expresses the highest capacities of heart and mind.

Let curious and sharp-witted men beat their heads about what questions themselves will, the very letter of the word of Christ giveth plain security that these mysteries do as nails fasten us to his very Cross, that by them we draw out … even the blood of his gored side, in the wounds of our Redeemer we there dip our tongues, we are dyed red both within and without, our hunger is satisfied and our thirst for ever quenched. … This bread hath in it more than the substance which our eyes behold, this cup hallowed with solemn benediction availeth to the endless life and welfare both of soul and body. … With touching it sanctifieth, it enlighteneth with belief, it truly conformeth us unto the image of Jesus Christ.

(v.67.12)

This passage, furthermore, does not merely register the popular voice. As Vickers has likewise observed, it articulates Hooker's own response to the holy. In this imagined moment of sacramental participation the difference between the inner voice of Augustine's old woman and the judicious humanist theologian vanishes. One cannot distinguish the language of popular and elite devotion—a rhetorical trompe l'oeil that enacts the community it images. Hooker's prose here belongs to the Augustinian sermo humilis with its unclassical synthesis of low and high styles that adumbrates both theological and congregational at-one-ment. For the utterly private experience of transcendent communion that Hooker records is the basis of community. George Herbert's “Faith” makes the same point:

          A peasant may believe, as much
As a great Cleark, and reach the highest stature.
Thus dost thou make proud knowledge bend and crouch,
                    While grace fills up uneven Nature.(44)

Peasants and philosophers share the same access to Truth, the same object of love, the same inwardness; the interior reciprocities of faith and grace, which level (as Herbert's metaphor implies) the “natural” hierarchies of estate and education, triangulate a “society of souls” as radii link different points on a circumference via a common center.

Hence in the Laws, ritual acts do not “declare” (i.e., signify) Gemeinschaft but create it. Compassion, fellowship, and mutual love seem possible only when relations among persons are mediated by a “ghostly fellowship with God, and Christ, and the saints” (viii.4.6); conversely, the text consistently politicizes and demystifies horizontal relationships. But the chapters on public worship celebrate the liturgical exfoliation of inwardness into community. Thus antiphonal psalmody—where the minister “joyfully beginneth” and the congregation “with like alacrity follow, dividing between them the sentences wherewith they strive which shall most shew his own and stir up others' zeal, to the glory of that God whose name they magnify”—itself creates bonds of “love insoluble, and … inviolable amity … in each of the people towards other, [and] in them all towards their pastor” (v.39.1). The encomiastic warmth with which Hooker draws this scene recurs in subsequent evocations of the visible mystical body. The most striking (because least sacerdotal) of these occurs in book vi, where Hooker is defending the early Christian practice of allowing any Christian to act as confessor for any other; although people usually are loathe to “sound the trumpet of their own disgrace,” in such lay confessionals

when thou dost … put forth thy hands to the knees of thy brethren, thou touchest Christ; it is Christ unto whom thou art a suppliant; so when they pour out their tears over them, it is even Christ that taketh compassion.

(vi.4.7)

As in the passage on Holy Communion, egalitarian community forms at the sites of transcendence.

Hooker's analysis of community evidently responds to the same tendency that troubled Sandys: the post-Reformation fissure of Augustinian ecclesiology into either the popular piety of fable and spectacle or the purified devotions of a moral, spiritual, and intellectual elite. Hooker pointedly opposes any tendency to define the true church in terms of freedom from superstition and ceremony—or in terms of its members' godliness. At the same time, one could scarcely enlist Hooker on the side of pious fictions, medieval accretions, or playing fast and loose with historical evidence. As Helgerson notes, the Laws relies on an “aggressively demystifying” historicism that calls attention to the contingent origins and coercive mechanisms of ecclesiastical polity. But within, alongside, or athwart (Hooker never explains the exact relationship) the church's “external regiment,” the Laws posits a visible mystical body of persons united by common agreement on the objects of their love: a community realized in antiphonal chant, sacramental participation, and pastoral care. Hooker views the church as primarily a house of prayer and sacramental worship; he is, moreover, the first Elizabethan Protestant to define the church in this way. This vision is central to the Laws because the love and longing for God that these acts embody constitute the common bond linking vulgar and learned, rich and poor, Whitgift and Walwyn into the mystical body of Christ; without this bond, the church would be simply a politique institution for insuring conformity to state-ideology: Varro's religio civilis.

The discussion thus far suggests two more general observations on the Tudor church and its historians. The first concerns the current identification of popular culture with resistance to hegemonic power, the second pertains to the role played by religion in early modern constructions of nationhood and national identity.

The confrontational model of class relations informing recent work on popular culture goes back to both classical political thought—to writers like Aristotle and Livy who focus explicitly and intently on the struggles between rich and poor, patrician and plebeian—and to the Christian martyrologies (including Foxe), with their myriad narratives of artisans, apprentices, and women battling the blind cruelties of temporal power. But a second representational paradigm, one likewise traceable to classical and Christian sources, does not associate popular culture with opposition to the dominant structures of power and privilege but with the affective, tangible, ritualized, and customary; “the people,” in this sense, are defined by their lack of abstract, critical rationality. Furthermore, since, as Hooker points out, the emotions fall under the “inferior powers of the soul” (v.34.1), on this model, “subjectivity” or affective inwardness belongs within the popular domain—a categorization that seems more historically defensible than the “Marxist” association of interiority with bourgeois individualism.

These two versions of the elite/popular dichotomy are not mutually exclusive; Hooker employs both, as do Plato and Livy. But they do pick out different problems. Modern narratives of class-tension and popular resistance primarily concern access to goods and power. The contrast between high and demotic culture concerns access to truth. For the few capable of escaping the shadowy cave into the sun, “popular” does not refer to peasants hurling pitchforks but to the region of blind custom, superstition, and false-consciousness. Classical writers—Plato, Livy, Polybius, Seneca, Varro—assume this invidious contrast. But Augustine clearly rejects it and makes the rejection a fundamental characteristic of the church. Those who do not know how to read may still know the Truth. For Augustine, as for Herbert, the doctrine of justification by faith, rather than works or gnosis, “fills up uneven Nature.”

Even at its most pejorative, this version of the popular/elite antithesis presupposes that “the people” develop traditions, rituals, myths, and other symbolic forms. It represents the lower orders in terms of their styles of knowing and feeling, their modes of apprehending the divine, their beliefs, desires, and practices. It portrays them as capable of emotions other than resentment, skepticism, and hostility. Although men like Varro consider demotic beliefs and practices invalid, they nevertheless consider them.

Conversely, the modern obsession with subversive and revolutionary activities has discouraged inquiry into popular beliefs, unless, like witchcraft or Presbyterianism, they seem to threaten the established order. But this tendency to resolve Tudor/Stuart religion into the dialectic of popular resistance and government repression renders invisible what it purports to illuminate: the role played by religion in early modern state formation. That the Crown attempted to reinforce political unification by imposing religious uniformity is evident. It is equally evident that this project met with opposition. The hagiographies, autobiographies, parish records, devotional manuals, theological polemics, and pastoral handbooks written between the late Middle Ages and the Restoration document the ensuing conflicts. But they primarily document something else: the proliferation of private and local experiments in sacred community, experiments sometimes at odds with the laws of ecclesiastical polity, sometimes not. Book v of Hooker's Laws is itself one such experiment, as is the imagined community of his presbyterian antagonists.

The parochial landscape of early modern England is strewn with imagined and improvised communities. Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars profusely details the ways in which late medieval lay persons “appropriate, develop, and use the repertoire of inherited ritual to articulate their experience of community and their sense of the larger order and meaning of the world in which they lived”: the Candlemas plays instituted by a guild at Beverley; the lay-sponsored Corpus Christi processions lavishly adorned with banners, garlands, and lights; the Corpus Christi guild begun by three men for providing candles to accompany priests as they carried the viaticum through the streets to the dying; the bonfire on Saint Thomas eve with “long pies of mutton, and Pease Cods set out upon boards” for the poor; the proliferation of guilds, local cults, religious plays, and other para-liturgical rites “of non auctorite, but of custom of folke.”⁴⁵

The post-Reformation church was, of necessity, improvisational, although protestant experiments in sacred community were distinctly less spectacular. But one can view the Reformation as a series of (often incompatible) attempts to evolve new forms of “holy neighbourliness.” Hooker, Cartwright, Ferrar, Herbert, Andrewes, Wren, Baxter all lovingly (and sometimes ruthlessly—the two are not mutually exclusive) endeavor to fashion visible mystical bodies. The domesticized monastery at Little Gidding is an experiment in sacred community, as is Baxter's Kidderminster parish, where on the Lord's days “you might hear an hundred families singing psalms and repeating sermons,” where for a few years Baxter could hope that his successes might presage the transformation of England into “a land of saints and a pattern of holiness … and the unmatchable paradise of the earth.”⁴⁶ Puritans and high-churchmen were notorious improvisors. Under Elizabeth and James, nonconformist parishes substitute Sabbatarianism and sermons for the calendar and liturgy of the Prayer Book, shielded from ecclesiastical authority by sympathetic Puritan aristocrats. Andrewes at Ely, Wren at Peterhouse, and Cosin at Durham experiment with incense, images, chasubles, chalices—rites and ornaments to elicit Hooker's “society supernatural.”

In the localities—in parishes, prophesyings, homes, and chapels—early modern English Christians extemporized symbolic and social forms of sacred community designed to express their beliefs, desires, ideals, and solidarities. These are varieties of popular religious experience: not because they have an exclusively lower class origin (although since the Tudor clergy came by and large from the third estate, one cannot draw a hard line between clerical and demotic initiatives) but insofar as they are not imposed from above.⁴⁷ Thus in 1581, John Aylmer, Bishop of London, found to his distress that only seven out of three hundred and fifty Essex perishes performed their services identically.⁴⁸ While some of these experiments came in conflict with government agenda, most did not; such communities are, as it were, tangential to state-religion rather than opposed to it.

These sacred communities are not exclusively local. Tudor/Stuart religion functions as a locus for multiple loyalties that do not coincide with the socio-political structures of the state or state-church. Roman Catholicism and the Calvinist internationale obviously entail allegiances that cut across national boundaries; in a more subtle way, so does Hooker's patristic tradition. The past, like the Pope, provides an authority and identity not based in nationhood.

One can, I think, argue that early modern religion typically both creates and occupies spaces outside the jurisdiction of the state. Its various visible mystical bodies colonize the interstices of polity, erecting international, local, and vertical “societies of souls” that supplement (and potentially displace) national identity. Such interstitial spaces include priest holes, conventicles, and Puritan domestic interiors, but also the apertures in public worship where one holds “ghostly fellowship with God, and Christ, and the saints” (viii.4.6), as well as “the soules most subtle roomes,” which are not, as Aquinas points out, subject to state control.⁴⁹ The point of intersection between the timeless and time is also the point of slippage between the domains of polity and community, subjection and subjectivity.

Hooker presents a test case for the claim that early modern English Christianity restricts, even when it does not resist, the centralizing and hegemonic encroachments of the state. The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity defines the Church of England as coextensive with the nation, defends the royal headship, and argues that religion supplies the moral buttresses holding up the political order. There are passages in the Laws, especially the sections on the “politic use of religion” (v.2.3) that begin book v, where Hooker sounds like Hobbes. As one moves through the eighty-odd chapters that make up the fifth book, however, this initial argument for the political benefits of piety increasingly appears more a defensive maneuver than a guiding principle, since the rest of the book develops Hooker's concept of the visible mystical body, a concept premised on the disjunction between “society and society supernatural.” While this imagined community emerges in the prescribed worship of the state-church, its constitutive praxes—communicating, praying, singing, confessing—have at best an oblique political utility, nor does book v pursue the issue. Its account of the visible mystical body, however, responds explicitly to Puritan attacks on popular religion; Hooker, that is, defends the Prayer Book because its affective and corporeal devotions lift the simpler sort to the throne of God. But Hooker's church slips away from institutional and politic structures precisely because the latter organize popular/elite relations in terms of law and coercion, while the former deals with ghostly fellowships, affective interiority, sacerdotal mediation, leagues of amity created by antiphonal chant, societies of souls, the spiritual longings of ordinary Christians, and such things as are “not in the power of man” (v.77.3). If Hooker's church does not contest the Tudor status quo, neither does it reproduce it. And, as Peter Lake notes, Hooker invents this church.⁵⁰ It is an imagined community, and like other sacred communities imagined and improvised in early modern England, it lodges in the outskirts and interstices of the nation-state.

The state, not surprisingly, attempted to repossess these spaces. Divine right absolutism, which transforms the king's body politic into a visible corpus mysticum, and Hobbes's ultra-Erastian ecclesiology, with its call to revive the ancient religio civilis, locate the sacred in the sovereign in order to disallow its presence elsewhere. Neither project, however, averted the mid-century pandemic of imagined communities. Only with the Enlightenment does the existence of mystical bodies within forms of nationhood cease to raise compelling issues. Men like Spinoza, Hume, and Gibbon resurrect the ancient two-tier model of culture, with its “hard” division between the idols of the marketplace and the god of the philosophers.⁵¹ This refurbished model, which has subsequently enjoyed a long shelf-life, located all manifestations of popular religion—a category now including the dissenting sects as well as papistry, Laudianism, and (at least by implication) Christianity tout à fait—in the regions of untruth as having “non auctorite, but of custom of folke.” The Enlightenment, that is, accepted the radical implications of the gnostic bias Hooker thought he detected in Puritanism, namely, that “the full redemption of the inward man … must needs belong unto knowledge only” (v.60.4). Which is not to say that sacred communities withered away after the Restoration,⁵² but that, shorn of epistemic validity, they no longer attracted serious attention, except of antiquarians or if armed.

Notes

1. W. D. J. Cargill Thompson, “The Philosopher of the ‘Politic Society’: Richard Hooker as a Political Thinker,” in W. Speed Hill (ed.), Studies in Richard Hooker: Essays Preliminary to an Edition of His Works (Cleveland, 1972), p. 14; Robert Eccleshall, “Richard Hooker and the Peculiarities of the English: The Reception of the Ecclesiastical Polity in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” History of Political Thought, 2 (1981), 63, 83.

2. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992), pp. 272, 279.

3. W. Speed Hill (ed.), Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Commentary, vol. vi of W. Speed Hill (general ed.), The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, 6 vols. (Binghamton, 1993), p. 54; Richard Bauckham, “Hooker, Travers and the Church of Rome in the 1580s,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 39 (1978), 50. W. Speed Hill hypothesizes that Hooker initially wrote the Laws without official prompting or patronage; having failed to find a publisher, he was driven to accept Edwin Sandys's offer to print the work at his own expense, an offer apparently contingent on Hooker's recasting the Laws along more polemically topical lines (W. Speed Hill, “The Evolution of Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity,” in W. Speed Hill [ed.], Studies, pp. 130-33, 145-6).

4. W. Speed Hill Of the Laws: Commentary, pp. 34-5. Edwin Sandys became a leading opposition M.P., widely suspected of republican sympathies.

5. Hooker, The Works of Richard Hooker, ed. John Keble, rev. R. W. Church and F. Paget, 3 vols., 7th edn. (1888; repr. New York, 1970), vol. ii, p. 599; Speed Hill discusses the dating of this letter in “The Evolution,” pp. 137-8.

6. W. Speed Hill (ed.), Of the Laws: Commentary, pp. 148, 220; Speed Hill, “The Evolution,” p. 130.

7. Collinson, “Hooker and the Elizabethan Establishment,” conference paper given at Richard Hooker: Celebration of Editions, Appraisal of an Author, Washington, D.C., September 1993.

8. Eccleshall, “Richard Hooker and the Peculiarities of the English,” pp. 71-3, 88, 92; Thomas Fuller, Selections, ed. E. K. Broadus (Oxford, 1928), p. 126; Hugh Trevor-Roper, Renaissance Essays (Chicago, 1985), p. 104; William Walwyn, The Leveller Tracts, 1647-1653, ed. William Haller (New York, 1944), p. 362.

9. Helgerson, Forms, pp. 9-10, 226.

10. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn. (London, 1991), p. 7.

11. Saint Augustine, The City of God, ed. David Knowles, trans. Henry Bettenson (Middlesex, 1972), 6.5 (further references to this edition will be given in the text). Varro actually used a tripartite division, but his third category—poetic theology—does not pertain to this discussion.

12. Polybius, The Histories of Polybius, trans. Evelyn Shuckburgh, intro. F. W. Walbank (Bloomington, 1962), 6.56.

13. Livy, The Early History of Rome: Books I-V of “The History of Rome from its Foundation”, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt, intro. R. M. Ogilvie (Middlesex, 1960), p. 54.

14. Quoted in Saint Augustine, The City of God, 6.10.

15. Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (Madison, 1992), pp. 73-4; cf. Saint Augustine, The City of God, 10.11.

16. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley, 1967), p. 348.

17. Trevor-Roper, Renaissance Essays, p. 111.

18. [Edwin Sandys], Europae Speculum (London, 1637), pp. 34-5. Further references will be given in the text.

19. [Sandys], Europae Speculum, pp. 28-32. Descartes thus explains that he decided not to waste his talents on theology since it is “a most highly assured fact that the road is not less open to the most ignorant than to the most learned” (Descartes Discourse on Method, trans. E. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, in The European Philosophers from Descartes to Nietzsche, ed. Monroe Beardsley [New York, 1960], p. 9). See also Pascal's observation: “Other religions, like those of the heathen, are more popular, for they consist in externals, but they are not for clever men. A purely intellectual religion would be more appropriate to the clever, but would be no good for the people. The Christian religion alone is appropriate for all, being a blend of external and internal” (Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer [Middlesex, 1966], p. 99).

20. Stephen Brachlow, The Communion of the Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology, 1570-1625 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 116, 119; see Catharine Davies, “‘Poor Persecuted Little Flock’ or ‘Commonwealth of Christians’: Edwardian Protestant Concepts of the Church,” in Peter Lake and Maria Dowling (eds.), Protestantism and the National Church in Sixteenth-Century England (London, 1987), p. 80.

21. Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993), p. 286.

22. Baxter The Autobiography of Richard Baxter, Being the “Reliquiae Baxterianae” Abridged from the Folio (1696), ed. J. M. Lloyd Thomas (London, 1925), pp. 18, 23, 25, 28, 39, 40. In fairness, one should note that Baxter grew far less censorious and elitist with age. See also Haigh, English Reformations, pp. 286-90; Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580-1680 (London, 1982), p. 213; David Little, Religion, Order, and Law: A Study in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York, 1969), pp. 74, 100.

23. Gifford, A briefe discourse (London, 1582), pp. 42, 47-8, 71-2.

24. See the edition of Hooker's Laws in Keble (ed.), The Works of Richard Hooker, v.81.11. Further references to this edition will be given in the text.

25. See Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988), p. 165.

26. Anthony Milton, “The Church of England, Rome, and the True Church: The Demise of a Jacobean Consensus,” in Kenneth Fincham (ed.) The Early Stuart Church, 1603-1642 (Stanford, 1993), p. 206.

27. See Little, Religion, pp. 100, 77 n. 175.

28. George Herbert, “Forerunners,” in Barbara Lewalski and Andrew Sabol (eds.), Major Poets of the Earlier Seventeenth Century (Indianapolis, 1973), pp. 365-6; John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. O. L. Dick (London, 1958), pp. 181-3.

29. A. S. P. Woodhouse, (ed.), Puritanism and Liberty: Being the Army Debates (1647-9) from the Clarke Manuscripts, 2nd edn. (London, 1951), p. 81.

30. Hooker, Laws, ed. Keble, v.9.2-3, Pref.3.2, Pref.4.4-6, i.10.7; see Helgerson, Forms, p. 273.

31. William Bouwsma, “Richard Hooker in the Context of European Cultural History,” conference paper given at Richard Hooker: Celebration of Editions, Appraisal of an Author, Washington, D.C., September 1993.

32. Aristotle, Politics, 3.11, 4.8.

33. Hooker is, of course, not a republican; rather, like many medieval and Renaissance political theorists, he conflates the Aristotelian analyses of polity and constitutional monarchy (Aristotle Politics 3.16).

34. Quoted in Little, Religion, p. 94; see Lake, Anglicans, p. 212.

35. Lake thus comments that “any English monarch thinking of endorsing Hooker's opinions needed to read the small print rather carefully” (Anglicans, p. 225). On the “aristocratic” clericalism of Calvinist ecclesiology, see Little, Religion, pp. 71-3, 77n, 88, 93.

36. Cargill Thompson, “The Philosopher,” p. 44.

37. Aristotle, Politics 3.11, 3.15-16; see George Buchanan, The Powers of the Crown in Scotland (1579), trans. Charles Arrowood (Austin, 1949), pp. 92, 129; Hugh Languet, A Defence of Liberty against Tyrants, trans. Harold Laski (New York, 1925), pp. 63, 152.

38. Aristotle, Politics, 2.4-5, 4.11. See Little, Religion, pp. 88, 91.

39. See also Hooker, Laws, ed. Keble, Pref.6.3, vii.3.1, vii.5.2-4, vii.13.4, vii.18.5.

40. Peter Lake, “Presbyterianism, the Ideal of a National Church and the Argument from Divine Right,” in Lake and Dowling (eds.), Portestantism and the National Church, p. 217.

41. I have been unable to persuade myself that “intercourse” and “commerce” have, in this instance, their modern sexual/economic connotations.

42. Jewel, Certain Sermons or Homilies (London, 1864), pp. 481-3. See also Little, Religion, pp. 69, 91; Lake, Anglicans, p. 181.

43. Brian Vickers, “Hooker and the Decorum of Controversy,” conference paper given at Richard Hooker: Celebration of Editions, Appraisal of an Author, Washington, D.C., September 1993.

44. Herbert, “Faith” in Lewalski and Sabol (eds.), Major Poets, p. 230.

45. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400-c. 1580 (New Haven, 1992), pp. 7, 18, 20, 44, 101, 138, 142.

46. Baxter, Autobiography, pp. 77-9, 84; see Lake, “Presbyterianism,” p. 200.

47. A survey of Essex parishes done in the late 1580s includes an illuminating list concerning the social origins of the Elizabethan clergy: “Mr Whiting, parson of Toppesfield, sometime a serving man; Mr Potts, parson of Tolleshunt Darcie, sometime a tailor; Mr Hickson of Munden, sometime a serving man; Mr Washer, parson of Upminster, sometime a grocer; Mr Hewet, parson of Copford, sometime an apothecary; Mr Ellis, curate of Abberton, sometime a linen draper; Mr Perkins, parson of South Hanningfield, sometime a fishmonger, now a button maker” (quoted in Tindal Hart, The Country Clergy in Elizabethan and Stuart Times, 1558-1660 [London, 1958], pp. 24-5).

48. In 1565 Grindal commented with evident frustration on the uncontrolled proliferation of such liturgical experiments: “Some say the service and prayers in the chancel, others in the body of the church … some keep precisely to the order of the book, others intermeddle psalms in metre; some say in a surplice, others without a surplice; the Table standeth in the body of the church in some places, in others it standeth in the chancel … administration of the Communion is done by some with surplice and cap, some with surplice alone, others with none; some with chalice, some with a communion cup, others with a common cup; some with unleavened bread, some with leavened; some receive kneeling, others standing, others sitting … some with a square cap, some with a round cap, some with a button cap, some with a hat” (quoted in Hart, Country Clergy, p. 21).

49. Herbert, “The H. Communion,” in Lewalski and Sabol (eds.), Major Poets, p. 232; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 2.2.104.5 in St. Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics, trans. and ed. Paul Sigmund (New York, 1988), pp. 75-6.

50. Lake, Anglicans, p. 227.

51. Peter Brown, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, 1982), pp. 9-11.

52. The 1994 Pacific Bell yellow pages for the western San Fernando Valley list seventy-four separate Christian denominations (including five types of Presbyterianism). My favorite entry is the advertisement for the Faith Baptist Church of Canoga Park, which proclaims: “We believe the KJV is the Word of God without error.”