SOURCE: Lurbe, Eve D. “Political Power and Ecclesiastical Power in Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.” Cahiers Elisabethains 49, (1996): 15-22.

[In the following essay, Lurbe discusses Hooker's attempt to set up a foundation for royal supremacy over the Church of England and his philosophy of Anglicanism as set down in Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.]

In writing his bulky Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Richard Hooker purported to provide an a posteriori foundation to the royal supremacy over the Church, which had been instituted sixty years before by Henry VIII's 1534 Supremacy Act, and was restored in 1559 by Elizabeth I.

Beyond his deep-felt concern for civil peace, Hooker's ambition was to build up a comprehensive theory of Anglicanism. He did not merely hope to appeal to his readers through brilliant eloquence, but to convince them through masterful methodical reasoning. His standpoint is opposed to the Presbyterians', particularly the Separatists'. Hooker charged the latter with sedition, and is was a major object of the Laws to provide, beyond a political justification of the repression exerted on them, a philosophical justification of it. Thus his purpose was not narrowly utilitarian, but truly epistemological.

For a better understanding of the historical context, it is relevant to point out that it was one and the same man (Edward Sandys) who both saw to the publication of the Laws and who devised the 1593 “Act to retain the Queen's subjects in obedience”, directed against Protestant dissenters. As if he were confident that his arguments would eventually rally his opponents, Hooker's tone is never sneering or vindictive, but always retains the lofty serenity of a philosopher enjoying an authoritative and secure position. He lays the challenge on an argumentative and philosophical ground only.

My present point is to synthetically delineate the main theoretical foundations of Anglicanism such as Hooker defines them, regarding the relationships between political and ecclesiastical powers. This will show to what considerable extent Hooker borrowed from mediaeval thought. Consequently, although one might be tempted to characterize him as a full-fledged modern thinker on account of his support of royal supremacy through a secular parliament, this judgement will have to be seriously qualified.¹

Before focussing on Anglicanism proper, and in order to trace better its philosophical descent, it is important to situate it with regard to Catholicism and Puritanism. Y. M. J. Congar² discerns two key notions in the seventeenth century Church. One is “corporation” (referring to the people), the other “institution” (referring to the Church apparatus). Both the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation broke with this traditional, twofold basis of the Church—the former enhanced the corporation, and the latter the institution. The object of Anglicanism is to restore this duality, and Hooker will maintain that a theocratic conception of the Church ruled by a godly prince is not incompatible with the mediaeval unitary conception of a Christian society. Besides, not only is there no political incompatibility about it, but furthermore there is no other system which can claim to be consistent with the Christian doctrine.

To begin with, what arguments does Hooker advance for this dual conception of society?

His starting point is that there can be no society without laws. The notion of law, already present in the very title of the work, is dealt with as early as the First Book (the Laws is composed of 8 Books). With Hooker, it does not basically refer to a jurisdictional corpus, but to an ancient and mediaeval conception of a universe where all the elements of nature, including angels, the spiritual beings who have remained sinless, are governed by a transcendent, perfect order. Hooker admits that the principle of order is potentially ambivalent: thus by what criterion can the right order be singled out, and, once it has been found out to be God, what concrete dispositions will be inferred from it? To illustrate this conception, Hooker uses the traditional notion of “body” with the expression of “body politic”, which comprises on the one hand the jurisdictional corpus (body), or artificial person³, and on the other hand the natural person⁴ of the people united in a kingdom. The kingdom is qualified as a mystical body whose head, or chief, is the king. This idea used to be expressed through the royal title “Head of the Church”. This explains therefore why the term “mystical” is opposed to “natural”; to be more precise still, the former includes the latter; it designates a quality which transforms a mere collection of individuals into a unitary people whose common identity is in fact transcendent to it, so that the reality thus achieved is not reducible to the mere collection of these individuals. This is a holistic conception of the community.

It is not only the body as a whole which deserves consideration, but also each of its constituent parts. What is more, the body is forever undergoing a process of development thanks to its dynamic constituent parts. So, in accordance with the Aristotelian philosophy which imagined nature as fragmented into self-contained units, Hooker enhances the notion of participation between head and limbs, the latter being no longer reduced to merely obeying the former's orders. If, as we have seen, the king is Head of the Church (before becoming its “Supreme Governor”), he is also the “chief and principal part” of the nation (VIII, 4.7)⁵. Hooker continues: “so that by comparing the body with the head as touching power, it seemeth always to reside in both, fundamentally or radically in the one, in the other derivatively, in the one the habit, in the other the act of power.” (VII, 2.10)

As Olivier Loyer remarks⁶, Hooker takes up two of the categories of Aristotle—passion and action⁷, to account for the dynamics of power. Passion here is to be understood as a possibility, a passive power (opposed to active power or action), just as for instance⁸ a piece of marble holds the passive power of a statue, which a liquid mass does not. But Hooker does not keep to a strict use of these categories, whose resulting clear-cut dualism might involve advocating a static rather than a dynamic social and political hierarchy, in which the head (or the action) would make a purely instrumental use of its body (or passion). There is no doubt that this conception of society is foreign to Hooker, which is why he modifies the concept of passion by the concept of possession. Indeed power is closer at hand when one possesses it actively rather than passively, and this is the distinction which Hooker is drawing in the quotation above. One should notice that as a consequence of this, the distinction between active possession of power and active power is made very tenuous. This, in turn, makes it very complex to translate these notions into jurisdiction. Indeed, if active power lies only “derivatively” in the head, but on the contrary if it lies “fundamentally” in the body (its sole possessor then), does this not raise the question of the legitimacy of supreme power in a fundamental, hence permanent way? Does it not seem as though all the prerequisite conditions for a formulation of a theory of democratic contract were gathered? But this is not the case. This would have exceeded Hooker's intention, which was in fact to thwart both those who favoured clericalism, and those who favoured congregationalism: the former wanted the head to maintain its unfettered supremacy, while the latter entrusted too much power to the body—two fatal pitfalls to be averted.

Erastians were downright foes in Hooker's view as their purpose was to terminate the duality of the existing jurisdictional system, by transferring the powers of spiritual courts over to civil courts, which would consequently have abolished ecclesiastical law.”A two-headed body would be a monster” Erastus proclaimed⁹. Such a radical stand for the secularisation of institutions has no common point with the thesis of the duality of powers according to Hooker, and one should not be misled into seeing any concordance between the two philosophers even in some of Hooker's statements such as the following one, advocating the rights of Parliament over the Church: “The Parliament of England together with the convocation annexed thereunto is that whereupon the very essence of all government within this kingdom doth depend. It is even the body of the whole Realm”, (VIII, 6.11).

Now the question is, why should the secular power wield authority over the ecclesiastical power and not the other way round? For in fact there is no sign of any such necessity so far. But Hooker had fed on Aristotle's thought, which founds political power on the community's consent, as well as on the mediaeval doctrine of the body politic, which is by definition mostly secular.

Now, the nation expresses itself through laws, and Hooker proclaims the latter's sovereignty as early as his preface: “A law is the deed of the whole body politic” (5.2). What place is then allotted to the king (or queen) in this system? He answers: “What power the king hath he hath it by law, the bounds and limits of it are known.” (VIII, 8.9). Indeed, Hooker explains, if the king has more importance than any of the members of the nation taken separately, he has nevertheless less importance than the nation taken as a whole. The supremacy of the secular parliament is thus philosophically founded, but Hooker's reasoning was to fail to convince Reformers such as Thomas Cartwright who always objected to the excesses of a centralized ecclesiastical power, or Catholics such as Thomas Stapleton who always found fault with its excessive secularization. Fitting into the same reasoning scheme, Hooker was very pleased about the 1559 Act whereby the queen's title was altered from “Head of the Church”, as Henry VIII was qualified, to “Supreme Governor of the Church by the authority of this present Parliament”. In fact, the queen's powers were not reduced, but the way the new title was worded changed profoundly the nature of things. For Hooker, the new wording would promote a political consensus, and the long-term future proved him right.

My present purpose is not to deal with the concrete jurisdictional dispositions that Hooker advocated. Suffice it to recall here that the queen's political power in spiritual matters (that is: the “power of ecclesiastical dominion”) suffers a threefold limitation: 1) the supremacy of God, 2) the supremacy of the law, and 3) the supremacy of the community. If the last two limitations (law and community) are easily understandable, the former one (God) is far less obvious, and needs some explanation.

Hooker upholds the analogy between Christ and the king regarding sovereignty (“the headship of Christ and of the king”) in Book VIII, Chapter 4. But analogy does not mean identity (or sameness), and three elements minimize the king's sovereignty. Between the sovereignty of Christ and that of the king, there is firstly a difference of order, for the king's power is subordinate to Christ's, which is free from subordination; then a difference of measure, for the king's power is limited in time and space, whereas Christ's is beyond measure; last a difference of nature, for the sovereignty granted to kings only organises the external frame of the Church's affairs. (“The Headship which we give unto kings is altogether visibly exercised and ordereth only the external frame of the Church's affairs here amongst us, so that it plainly differeth from Christ's even in nature and kind.” VIII, 4.5.) On the contrary, Christ acts within the Church: “by the secret inward influence of his grace ‘he’ giveth spiritual life and the strength of ghostly motion thereunto” (ibid.). The effects of this latter point will be considered later.

If supremacy belongs to the secular Parliament, one must not infer from this that the Church and religious observance are of minor importance for Hooker. The queen and the representatives of secular power can well be lay people, they still are lay Christian people. The state they are ruling is a Christian state. The central point of Book VIII, chapter 5, is to found the equation, which is fundamental in Anglicanism, between Church and kingdom. Under Elizabeth, the principle of the State Church is applied in a very strict way. She does make allowances for differences of opinions as long as they are kept private, but the principle of uniformity in religious service brooks no arrangements. Hooker devotes the whole of Book V to work out the “public duties of religion”. For him just as for his contemporaries, civil peace is necessarily linked with devotional uniformity. Hooker takes on a conformist's attitude here, which however does not arise from purely pragmatic considerations, as we will see later.

To what extent is conformity in religious matters mandatory according to Hooker? As early as the preface (6.6), he advises obedience, except if “any just or necessary cause” compels against it. This expression is remarkably vague. Hooker's position, however, can be traced fairly easily through his preface. He starts by saying: “Neither wish we that men should do anything which in their hearts they are persuaded they ought not to do, but …” (6.3), then he seems to qualify his position (“but” …), saying as a conclusion to this question: “my whole endeavour is to resolve the conscience … if it will follow the light of sound and sincere judgement, without either cloud of prejudice, or mist of passionate affection.”(7.1). In other words Hooker does not give any credit to individual judgement, and all credit to the determinations of national authority, a highly important point which cannot be examined further here.

Hooker does not envisage that anyone might refuse to conform. Still with the view to build up national unity, he prefers to be content with urging his fellow citizens to follow what he considers as the sensible and wise path. The Laws is a philosophy treatise, not a penal code necessarily detailing all hypotheses, including the worst ones. This may account for the irenic tone which has traditionally been put to Hooker's credit. However there is nothing of the idyllic in his vision of social relationships. He thinks that social peace cannot be established spontaneously and that it is preferable for its sake to resort to a certain degree of coercion rather than let division settle and spread only for private, illiberal ends. This is expressed in these line: “So full of wilfulness and self-liking is our nature, that without some definitive sentence, which being given may stand, and a necessity of silence on both sides afterwards imposed, small hope there is that strife thus far prosecuted, will in short time quietly end.”(Pref. 6.3). To the indirect address of the Presbyterians, Hooker purposefully refers to the biblical times related in the Deuteronomy, when the Jews were compelled to comply to the Synod of Jerusalem, whatever the outcome of prior debates might be. If the God-inspired Hebrews acted in this way, how then could today's men be so presumptuous as to dismiss disdainfully such edifying examples? The duty of obedience is thus definitely rooted, according to Hooker, in natural reason on the one hand, and in God's plans on the other: “The sentence of judgement finished their strife, which their disputes before judgement could not do. This was ground sufficient for any reasonable man's conscience to build the duty of obedience upon, whatsoever his own opinion were as touching the matter before in question.” (Pref. 6.3). Following which Hooker quotes from Deuteronomy 17. 4: “That man which will do presumptuously not hearkening unto the Priest that standeth before the Lord to minister there, nor unto the judge, let him die.”But, rather than claiming to follow such sentences to the letter, Hooker chooses to urge his adversaries with peaceful words:“We are led by great reason to observe them ‘the ecclesiastical laws’, and ye by no necessity bound to impugn them” (ibid.).

As Jean-Fabien Spitz remarks¹⁰, the period between the earliest Reformers after Luther and the henrician treatises of which Hooker is the follower, witnessed a reversal in the relationships between prince and Church. The former ones saw the prince as the servant of the Church, the latter ones considered that clerics owed obedience to the prince. Both modes merge in Hooker's theory, in so far as the prince is in the service of Christ and of the country and cannot be said therefore to reign supreme over Church or men. Nevertheless, theology and politics are so intrinsically linked that there is no room for any overt individualistic behaviour. Presbyterianism, true, is not as monstrous as atheism and superstition in Hooker's view, but it is nonetheless erroneous and blamable.

So we have seen how intolerance is given both political and theological justification. The latter aspect, treated in detail in Book V, is based on Hooker's adhesion to the Catholic sacramental theology. First Henry VIII's Reformation, then Elizabeth's schism, had released the country from the domination of Rome; the third and final stage of the edification of Anglicanism was to come with the defence of the sacramental theology of Catholicism against the Presbyterian theology, in which Hooker saw a danger of political and social disruption. He therefore denied it any title to spiritual legitimacy.

However, he makes a careful distinction between the Church as a natural society or a body politic, and the Church as a supernatural society or mystic body. This distinction fits into the first limitation to supreme power mentioned before, which was God himself. In this way Hooker intends to reject on the one hand the Catholics' charge of secularism: “We are accused as men that will not have Christ Jesus to rule over them, but have wilfully cast his statutes behind their backs, …” (I; 1.3), and on the other hand the Presbyterians' charge of confiscating spiritual power. Here is Hooker's retort to all: “So far forth as the Church is the mystical body of Christ and his invisible spouse, it needeth no external policy … But as the Church is a visible society and a body politic, laws of polity it cannot want.” (III; 11.14). Hooker takes up here the traditional distinction between the visible Church and the invisible Church. The former is the institution, its laws, its government, its ceremonies, its rites, and the latter is the invisible and indirect government of Christ, through its visible organization. However, Hooker mentions once the Church of Christ as “that visible mystical body which is his Church” (V; 24.1). This statement is quite essential, as it brings together the two aspects which Hooker had endeavoured to differentiate, as we have just seen. This statement synthetizes perfectly well Hooker's conception of the Church, the which is quite faithful to the traditional teaching of the Fathers: the Church is a sacrament, that is a visible sign of the invisible Grace. One can see here in the clearest way that in Hooker's eyes the theology of the Church far exceeds merely pragmatic considerations. Obviously, we see here again that Hooker is not a “modern” thinker, nor is he a “conservative” one according to modern standards precisely—indeed it is not only for the sake of moral and political order that he defends the institution of the Church. Of course this aspect is far from negligible, but Hooker does not view order as requiring a specific form of institution, but rather as a consequence which in all likelihood will result from the spiritual awakening which is fostered by the Church. Hooker has sincere faith in the mystery of grace and sanctification which the Church both receives and arouses. One sees here that in this respect he sticks to Catholic dogmas and that, on the contrary, he is fundamentally at variance with the Calvinist Presbyterians who nullify the distinction between the visible Church and the invisible Church, and claim that only a Church showing visible signs of holiness can hold spiritual and hence sacramental validity.

This conception of a dual Church sheds a new light on the relationships between Church and State (or the Commonwealth) as it shows that they cannot be viewed in terms of opposition. Indeed, according to Hooker, although the Church and the State are “in nature the one distinguished from the other”, yet they are not “in subsistence perpetually severed”. (VIII, 1.2). In fact, the whole theory of Hooker rests on subtle distinctions and considerations such as this one. In some respects, which are no longer political, but metaphysical, the two concepts merge, and Hooker's ultimate concern is truly metaphysical. Firstly, he concurs with Aristotles's view that in gathering originally, men certainly expected to meet their economic needs, but they also yearned for more elevated fulfilments. Here lies all the difference between “living” and “living well”. Hooker quotes the Greek philosopher in VIII, 1.4: “That the scope thereof is not simply to live, nor the duty so much to provide for life as for means of living well”¹¹. Living well according to Hooker means growing spiritual, maturing one's soul: “… even as the soul is the worthiest part of man, so human societies are much more to care for that which tendeth properly unto the soul's estate than for such temporal things as this life doth stand in need of. Other proof there needs none to show that as by all men “the kingdom of God is first to be sought for” (Mt. 6. 33)” (VIII, 1.4). This is where there is a necessity for religion to become institutionalized: the quest of the kingdom of God must be translated somehow into the organisation of society: “So in all commonwealths things spiritual ought above temporal to be provided for. And of things spiritual the chiefest is religion.” (VIII, 1.4).

Then, after stating what he deems to be the meaning of human life from a philosophical point of view, the next step for Hooker is to work out an appropriate jurisdictional model.

The starting point of his reasoning is that political society “consisteth of none but Christians” (VIII, 1.2). Hooker takes the unity of the kingdom for granted. Consequently, there is no reason to fear that Anglicanism should impinge on people's consciousness; on the contrary its mission consists of providing the frame, or better still, the home which each and every one, being both a Christian and a citizen, will find hospitable for themselves. This theorisation of the comprehensiveness of Anglicanism sounds like an echo of Christ's phrase: “In my Father's house are many mansions”¹². Hooker writes: “We hold that seeing there is not any man of the Church of England, but the same man is also a member of the Commonwealth, nor any man a member of the Commonwealth which is not also of the Church of England” (VIII, 1.2). Furthermore, Hooker shows that each person belongs both to the Church and to the civil society through the metaphor of the triangle: any of its sides can be called the basis or a side, depending on the way it is positioned and viewed.

Hooker is here clearly endeavouring to keep together two propositions which might rather strike one as irreconcilable: the one is the reiterated practical distinction between Church and Commonwealth (in other words between the spiritual and the temporal), involving a substantial downgrading of the role of the Church, and the other is the latter's essential pre-eminence. Hooker apparently does not see any contradiction there. As I have explained before, he is a relentless advocate of the parliamentary system, and it would have been hardly apposite for him to point out its difficulties, not to mention its contradictions. He does not worry about the concrete jurisdictional dispositions, for he thinks that a well-advised Parliament will use secular means to build a society immersed in spirituality, the dawning of which he dearly wishes to promote and to witness. The jurisdictional distinction of the temporal and the spiritual does not imply a similar distinction in real facts. “The power political … and the ‘power spiritual’ ‘are’ wholly separate, but in Christian Commonwealth joined though not confounded” (VIII, 1.4).

One sees here, and this will be my conclusion, that the notion of the profane is foreign to Hooker. The “polity” does designate the public field, which is the object of a secular jurisdiction. But with Hooker, even what is not specifically ecclesiastical is subsumed within a mystical order, so that a secular “polity” should not be misconstrued as a profane “polity”. Following here again the tradition of the Fathers, Hooker imagines the existence of a transcendent order which is both the source and the fulfilment of the natural order, and where accidents are resolved into a unity which has already been foreshadowed by man's works. Although he is against Presbyterian scripturalism which he deems excessive, he nevertheless refers copiously to the Scriptures as a means to back up his stance. To take but one significant example, he considers the High Court of the Hebrews, founded by Moses, as the epitome of the ideal religious society, united and fair, illustrating the Anglican ideal. A society combining union with justice would be just like the kingdom of God, in which the political and the religious have merged. The concluding vision of the Laws is a fairly optimistic vision of a human life opening up onto blessedness.

Notes

1. I am much indebted to Olivier Loyer's 1979 doctoral dissertation—Olivier Loyer, L'Anglicanisme de Richard Hooker (Lille: Atelier de reproduction des thèses, Université de Lille III, 1979).

2. Y. M. J. Congar, L'Eglise: de Saint-Augustin à l'époque moderne (Paris: Editions du Cerf, coll. “Histoire des Dogmes”, 1970) 149.

3. In French: “personne morale”.

4. In French: “personne physique”.

5. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Oxford, Clarendon Press, Ed. by John Keble, 4 volumes, 1836) All quotations from the Laws will refer to this edition and all references will be mentioned in the text itself.

6. Anglicanisme, livre II, Chap. V, 186.

7. In French: “puissance” et “acte”.

8. Etienne Gilson, Le Thomisme (Paris: Vrin 1942, 4° Ed.) 244-5.

9. Joseph Lecler, Histoire de la Tolérance au siècle de la Réforme (Paris, Aubier, coll. “Théologie”, 31) vol. II, 228.

10. Jean-Fabien Spitz, in Preface to Locke's Lettre sur la tolérance (Paris, Garnier-Flammarion, 1992) 20, n.13.

11. Aristotle, Politics, 129 1a.

12. Gospel according to St. John,14.2 (in: The Holy Bible, Authorized Version).