SOURCE: Stanwood, P. G. “Richard Hooker's Discourse and the Deception of Posterity.” In English Renaissance Prose: History, Language, and Politics, edited by Neil Rhodes, pp. 75-90. Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997.

[In the following essay, Stanwood surveys the critical reaction toOf the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, arguing that various groups have interpreted Hooker's writings to serve their own ends.]

Though for no other cause, yet for this; that posteritie may know we have not loosely through silence permitted things to passe away as in a dreame, there shall be for mens information extant thus much concerning the present state of the Church of God established amongst us, and their carefull endevour which woulde have upheld the same.

—Richard Hooker, opening statement to “A Preface” Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie (1593)

Clarendon begins his history by recalling Hooker's opening words, directing them to a time of disappointed hopes and bitter nostalgia: “That posterity may not be deceived, by the prosperous wickedness of these times,” Clarendon writes, he shall uncover for the world's view “the grounds, circumstances, and artifices of this Rebellion,” disclosing also the “seed-plots” from which the present mischiefs have grown.¹ Out of his vivid and personal experience, Clarendon is composing an historical narrative of his times; and his allusion to Hooker reinforces the melancholy he wants to convey. Yet the reference is misleading; for Hooker, in setting out his own contemporary intellectual and cultural situation, is being essentially descriptive and polemical. Perhaps with some shade of irony he does begin the most controversial and fiercely partisan section of the Lawes; and if Clarendon saw a wistful mood in these lines—or if we in our turn feel a sense of ruined hope in a still-born treatise—then we are all deceived. Hooker is here writing tendentiously, mischievously, and eagerly on behalf of a cause both topical and universal which was not, except in particular items, ever really to fail.

Hooker has been oddly regarded by posterity since his death in 1600.² He was not looking back, as Clarendon would evidently do, to a better time that seemed about to pass away; for Hooker surely did not see the years around 1593 and 1597—the dates of publication of the Lawes, preface with books 1-4, and book 5, respectively—in such terms. Under the early influence of Bishop John Jewel (1522-71) and the later patronage and encouragement of Archbishop Whitgift (c. 1530-1604), Hooker set out to answer the objections of the Admonitionists, especially John Field and Thomas Wilcox, presumed authors of the first manifesto which was intended for presentation to Parliament, and later Thomas Cartwright, author of the Second Admonition to the Parliament (1572). These persons, and many other clergy who joined them, represented the radical side of reformed protestantism; they attacked episcopal government and a number of ceremonies thought to be romanist, such as the use of wafer-bread at communion, reception of the sacrament while kneeling, making the sign of the cross at baptism, and so on. Walter Travers was another principal figure in this controversy, for he wrote his Book of Discipline (1574)³ which outlined most of the reformers' contentions; and Hooker here is responding to their arguments in his Lawes. He is therefore confronting ecclesiastical antagonists in a way highly dismissive and, by impugning their sincerity, loyalty, and intellectual integrity, he is probably at times unfair. But Hooker is to some extent deliberately writing a document that captures the prevailing view of the established church of his time.

Hooker died before he was able to publish all eight books of the Lawes, which are necessary for understanding the true scope of the work and the magnitude of its argument. Hooker's aim, as a reading of the whole work makes clear, was not simply to undermine the leading proponents in the Admonition controversy but to move beyond particular contentions into the defining of political and ecclesiastical authority and yet further into promoting a systematic and sacramental theology. Hooker was supposed to have embodied Anglican wisdom and passed it on as an inheritance for the post-1600 generations, in the thinking summarized by the comfortable formulation of the preface to the revision of the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 (written by Robert Sanderson, Restoration bishop of Lincoln): “It hath been the wisdom of the Church of England, ever since the first compiling of her publick Liturgy, to keep the mean between the two extremes, of too much stiffness in refusing, and of too much easiness in admitting any variation from it.” Hooker was commonly believed to have negotiated between these extremes, but this view is false; for he really set out to mock the reformers, with an especially lively caricature of the Genevan Calvinists (especially in section 3 of the preface, “By what meanes so many of the people are trained into the liking of that discipline”), and a persistently critical treatment of the “unsound yet true” Church of Rome, full of evils that need to be cured. “They which measure religion by dislike of the Church of Rome,” Hooker suggests, “thinke every man so much the more sound, by how much he can make the corruptions thereof to seeme more large.”⁴ Hooker sets a course that generally condemns false teaching: Rome is consistently wrong on many issues; but reformed religion, toward which he naturally feels drawn, also errs in certain fundamental ways.

Hooker's reputation as the author of the via media may be unfounded—the term itself originated in the Tractarian movement of the earlier nineteenth century—even the notion of the English church as being peculiarly comprehensive is recent and hardly relevant to Tudor and Stuart times.⁵ The first collected edition of Hooker appeared in 1662, with an introductory life by Bishop John Gauden, who hoped for an episcopal see more prominent than Exeter. But Gauden's verbose account is oddly, perhaps unintentionally, disparaging of Hooker. When an undergraduate at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, for example, Gauden writes that he was “a good plodding Student, one that lay heavy on the plow” (ed. 1662, p. 10); as Master of the Temple in the Inns of Court, “he preached like a living, but scarce moving statue: His eyes stedfastly fixed on the same place from the beginning to the end of his Sermons; his body unmoved, his tone much to an Unisone, and very unemphatick” (p. 30). Such remarks are at odds with the reputation that Hooker had by this time acquired among most leading churchmen, especially Gilbert Sheldon, archbishop of Canterbury from 1663, who probably directed Izaak Walton to write a more fitting life. Walton's “holy” Life of Hooker, indeed, displaced Gauden's in the next edition of Hooker's Works of 1666, and it appeared in every subsequent reprinting through John Keble's edition of 1836. Walton treats Hooker reverentially—“he that praises Richard Hooker, praises God, who hath given such gifts to men”—but also casts doubt on the integrity of the posthumously published books 6-8 of the Lawes, in which Hooker may be seen to question the episcopacy and the royal authority. Certainly he is ambivalent and unemphatic about these and many points which the Restoration church had no wish to dispute.

Hooker has been made to serve the interests of various groups, sometimes with opposing views, but in general Walton's hagiographical life and his inventive dismissal of one-third of the Lawes has misled many subsequent readers. Walton especially helped to begin a tradition of uncritical adulation, for he reports in his Life of Hooker that the pope (Clement VIII) was so moved to hear the first book Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie (supposed to have been translated extempore into Latin by Thomas Stapleton) that he exclaimed, “This man indeed deserves the name of an Author; his Books will get reverence by Age, for there is in them such seeds of Eternity, that if the rest be like this, they shall last till the last fire shall consume all Learning”; and with similar credulity, Walton makes King James say that “there is in Mr. Hooker no affected language, but a grave, comprehensive, clear manifestation of Reason.” Every page reveals pictures of “Truth and Reason,” which assure their “Learned, or Judicious, or Reverend, or Venerable” author an immortal remembrance.⁶ Such appreciation is never far from the more measured yet vague assessments of modern writers on Hooker, such as those of C. S. Lewis, who may be typical in calling Hooker's style “for its purpose, perhaps the most perfect in English.”⁷ Hooker's capacity for stimulating reverent admiration without sufficient attention to his meaning may be explained in part by the great length and ambition of his work; for few other English writers have attempted to provide a systematic cultural, political, and theological treatise based upon so broad and deep a foundation of learning and history.

Hooker reveals through his prose what Georges Edelen has properly described as “a cast of mind which is reflected everywhere in the Lawes,”⁸ and which illuminates a rational process and a logical order. That cast of mind results in language that features periodicity or extended grammatical suspensions and an extraordinary facility for joining many parts of a single very long sentence together with virtuosic coherence and persistent clarity.⁹ His distinctive blend of complexity, balance, and expository brilliance has indeed been the subject of frequent scrutiny; yet the relationship of these characteristics to the objectives of the Lawes as a whole still needs more explanation. We are right to urge the essentially polemical outlook of the Lawes and its controversial aim within the context of the later sixteenth century; but this viewpoint does not necessarily lessen the great imaginative and literary power of Hooker's work in its totality.

My present wish is to observe the intellectual movement and development of Hooker's theme and the way in which his discourse, broadly and stylistically speaking, reveals his overall purpose. By “discourse,” I mean to refer narrowly, or at least in terms that Hooker and his contemporaries would understand, to those aspects of rhetorical practice and invention important to the construction of sermons and treatises. “Discourse,” in this sense, contains style, in the special features that embody it, from the syntactic and grammatical arrangements of words, to such devices as antimetabole and epanalepsis. I mean “style” to comprehend these particular embellishments while yet being capable of defining the overall arrangement and quality of an argument.¹⁰ We now refer to the coherence of Hooker's Lawes, by which we mean that all of its parts are necessarily related, or as Hooker himself claimed at the beginning of his work, “I have endevoured throughout the bodie of this whole discourse, that every former part might give strength unto all that followe, and every later bring some light unto all before” (1.1.3; 1:57). I want to discuss this wide design and suggest certain ways in which Hooker orders it with his style of seeing “two-sidedly,” in terms of bifurcation and dichotomy. I believe that through such attention we may see better how Hooker displays a bold imagination in a style that ideally upholds Renaissance literary discourse. But first we need to observe Hooker's typical rhetorical invention, for the sentences obviously contain and provide the fundamental structural units of the work as a whole and illustrate its concerns in microcosm.

II

Hooker is deservedly known for his long sentences, which he frequently constructs periodically, that is, holding in suspension the finite verb until nearly the end of the statement, anticipating the conclusion with a series of compound-complex clauses. Hooker is also often supremely ironic and witty, succinct and cogent, and a master of the apothegmatic style. Examples of proverbial statements abound. He says early in the first book that “the lawes of well doing are the dictates of right reason” (1.7.4; 1:79); that “we all make complaint of the iniquitie of our times: not unjustly; for the dayes are evill” (1.10.3; 1:98); and wittily, “I am perswaded, that of them with whom in this cause we strive, there are whose betters amongst men would bee hardly found, if they did not live amongest men, but in some wildernesse by themselves” (1.16.6; 1:140); and later, “he that will take away extreme heate by setting the body in extremitie of cold, shal undoubtedly remove the disease, but together with it the diseased too” (4.8.1; 1:298); and “No man which is not exceeding partiall can well denie, but that there is most just cause wherefore we should be offended greatly at the Church of Rome” (4.9.2; 1:302), this last comment employing the ironic understatement that is typical of much of Hooker's writing. We meet such irony in many places, especially, for example, in book 4 (chap. 2.1; 1:276-77), where he is answering the Admonitionist objection that the Church of England lacks “ancient Apostolicall simplicitie”:

For it is out of doubt that the first state of thinges was best, that in the prime of Christian Religion faith was soundest, the scriptures of God were then best understood by all men, al partes of godlines did then most abound: and therefore it must needs follow, that customes lawes and ordinances devised since are not so good for the Church of Christ, but the best way is to cut of later inventions, and to reduce things unto the auncient state wherin at the first they were.

And further to the same point:

It is not I am right sure their meaning, that we should now assemble our people to serve God in close and secret meetings, or that common brookes and rivers shoulde be used for places of baptisme, or that the Eucharist shoulde bee ministred after meate, or that the custome of Church feasting shoulde be renewed, or that all kinde of standing provision for the ministerie shoulde be utterly taken away, and their estate made againe dependent upon the voluntary devotion of men.

(4.2.3; 1:278)

Periodic sentences occur on almost every page of the Lawes. In book 1 is the long and important tenth chapter on the formation through reason of human laws. In order to show clearly the organization of one particularly arresting sentence (of section 10), I shall set it off by clauses. There is first of all a kind of prologue: “That which plaine or necessarie reason bindeth men unto may be in sundry considerations expedient to be ratified by humane law: for example,”

if confusion of blood in mariage,
          the libertie of having many wives at once,
          or any other the like corrupt and unreasonable custome
                    doth happen to have prevailed far
                    and to have gotten the upper hand of right reason
                              with the greatest part, so that no way is
                              left to rectifie such foul disorder without
                              prescribing by lawe the same thinges
                                        which reason necessarilie doth enforce
                                        but is not perceyved that so
                                                  it doeth,
or if many be grown unto that, which thapostle did lament insome,
                    concerning whom he wryteth saying, that
                              Even what things they naturally know, in
                              those very thinges as beasts void of
                              reason they corrupted them selves;
or if there be no such speciall accident,
                    yet for as much as the common sort are led by the
                    swaye of their sensuall desires,
                                        and therefore do more shun sinne for the
                                                  sensible evils which follow it amongst
                                                  men, then for any kinde of sentence
                                                  which reason doth pronounce against it:
this verie thinge is cause sufficient
          why duties belonging unto ech kinde of vertue,
                              albeit the law of reason teach them,
          shoulde notwithstanding be prescribed even by humane law.
Which lawe in this case wee terme mixt,
          because the matter whereunto it bindeth, is the same
                              which reason necessarily doth require at our handes,
and from the law of reason
it differeth in the maner of binding onely.(11)

(1:105-6)

This elaborate sentence, typical of the Lawes, begins with a series of three adverbial “if” clauses, each with its own dependencies, at the end of which Hooker introduces the long-awaited independent clause [here in italic small capitals]; but this “cause sufficient” is a temporary conclusion, for not only does it complete one sentence but it also provides the pivot upon which rests a further succession of dependent clauses. Hooker intends to balance the earlier part of the sentence with the later part, and to reflect grammatically the weighing of the sides, even as he is carefully discriminating “mixt” laws, or defining the conjunction of human (or positive) law with natural (or divine) law. The effect is expressive of Hooker's logical method, with its suspension of opposing ideas in a steadying equilibrium of confident poise.

III

Hooker divided the eight books of the Lawes in half, the first four dealing with “generalities,” the last four with “particulars” (4.14.7. advertisement; 1:345). Such a division is natural, just as the one More makes in Utopia, or Bacon in his Advancement of Learning, or Milton in The Reason of Church Government, or Browne in Religio Medici, and in Hydriotaphia and Garden of Cyrus (as the first and second parts of separate but complementary works). These partitions may seem fortuitous or inevitable, yet they enable their authors to arrange material that is evidently hemispherical so that we have two views of a single object. Hooker means to do this, but his conception must be sustained over an enormous length, like a colossal and far more coherent Religio Medici. That he succeeds in his ambition, not only in the large ordering of the Lawes, but also, as we have briefly seen, in the management of its discrete parts, needs to be recognized and named as one of the great achievements of English literature.¹² Hooker starts with the abstract or natural law, with God himself who is that law which man may know through right reason. He is careful to distinguish the different, yet interlocked, kinds of law; for all men are subject to many laws, which ask for a variety of responses. There are thus eight kinds of law, the first four relating particularly to the natural law, the last four to the positive or man made law, with the eighth forming the foundation of the rest:

[1] The lawe which God with himselfe hath eternally set downe to follow in his owne workes; [2] the law which he hath made for his creatures to keepe, [that is,] the law of naturall and necessarie agents; [3] the lawe which Angels in heaven obey; [4] the lawe whereunto by the light of reason men finde themselves bound in that they are men; [5] the lawe which they make by composition for multitudes and politique societies of men to be guided by; [6] the lawe which belongeth unto each nation; [7] the lawe that concerneth the fellowship of all; [8] and lastly the lawe which God himselfe hath supernaturally revealed.

(1.16.1; 1:134)

Each law is unique yet laws together rest in the “bosome of God”:

Her voyce [is] the harmony of the world, all thinges in heaven and earth doe her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power, but Angels and men and creatures of what condition so ever, though ech in different sort and maner, yet all with uniforme consent, admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy.

(1.16.18; 1:142)

Hooker is here defining that one law which harmonizes the rest, toward which Providence moves all people, and heals the disjunction and conflict between the positive law of “politique societies” and the divine law of God.

Having founded his whole treatise on the natural law, and also assumed man's informed reason in the making of his own laws in accordance with that law, Hooker turns to the authority of the scriptures (books 2-3), of the church and its “proceedings” (book 4), its ceremonies and its government (books 5-7), and finally to the authority of the king or “Civil Governour” in matters civil and ecclesiastical (book 8). To collect and integrate the details that follow from Hooker's general discussion of the natural law in book 1, which finally leads to and supports his argument about the jurisdiction of kings in book 8, requires a complicated kind of patience and the judgment of detached observation. All authority derives from the natural law and from God himself; “all men are not for all thinges sufficient.” The prince may not act for the bishop, nor the bishop for the prince, yet both are subject to the universal law:

And therefore publique affayres being devided, such persons must be authorized Judges in each kinde as common reason may presume to be most fitt. Which cannot of Kings and Princes ordinarily be presumed in causes meerly Ecclesiasticall, so that even Common sense doth rather adjudge this burthen unto other men.¹³

Hooker argues that the king is supreme while nevertheless he points out his limitations both in the spiritual and political realm. This double nature of the royal supremacy is in fact an analogical extension of the positive and the divine law, of the church militant and heavenly, of Christ himself in two natures, the incarnate word, in hypostasis, realized in the “real presence” of the eucharist itself. All things work together in a mysterious duality which embraces simultaneous separateness and unity.¹⁴

In considering the totality of the Lawes, we must especially recognize the essential contribution of the last three (posthumous) books to the whole work, yet their curious history makes this task difficult. Books 6-8 seemed orphans for so long because of their unfinished or dubious state, and to some readers they reflected a falling off from Hooker's best expository skill. But Hooker's careful description both of the natural and of the positive law in book 1 states the general principles which make possible his later distinction in book 8 between the two kinds of headship of the church, that is, the differences between the governance of Christ and of the king.¹⁵ The intervening books enable us to see the application of the different species of the law from a variety of two-eyed standpoints, such as the relation of reason to revelation, the visible church to the immutable faith of Christ, and so on. These relationships are reciprocal and they are fundamental to Hooker's grand scheme, and to a style that develops ideas already exposed. Any difficulty in reading and responding to the Lawes occurs on account of our traditional disinclination to realize the extent to which Hooker is able to join all the parts that he also separates; at the same time, we easily become disoriented within the work, like travelers in a dark wood who see one tree illuminated only to find the rest of the forest in obscurity.

Hooker's seeming ambivalence over so many issues expresses what Sir Thomas Browne later called the “divided and distinguished worlds” which amphibious mankind must negotiate. These worlds are mortal, on the one hand, and spiritual, on the other; and while we live in both, we are not always aware of such a dual existence. Nor is Hooker always helpful in leading us through this strange landscape of earth and spirit, and so I must be selective in illustrating what can be found there. The great scheme and its supporting style does seem to break down by book 6, which is, in its present state, primarily about penitence and confession, and it serves mainly as a kind of preface to the jurisdiction of lay elders. Book 7, however, which is essentially complete, deals at length with the state of bishops and the episcopal function. Here it is easy to see that Hooker upholds the episcopacy principally because of its “publique benefit” and long tradition, an estimation that falls far short of the divine right theories upheld by Richard Bancroft or Hadrian Saravia.¹⁶ Bishops gather to themselves virtues uncommon among other kinds of leaders: “Devotion, and the feeling sence of Religion are not usual in the noblest, wisest, and chiefest Personages of State, by reason their wits are so much imployed another way, and their mindes so seldom conversant in heavenly things” (7.24.15; 3:299). Hooker's support of the episcopacy is based mainly upon the conservative view that traditional forms if not obviously harmful should be preserved. The “regiment” by bishops is “a thing most lawful, divine and holy” (7.2.3; 3:153). Hooker warily rejects the limitations on their authority proposed by the reformers (especially in chapter 15 of book 7), and he is at pains to show how the same person combines a civil and ecclesiastical function as long as this is a matter of positive law. The immutable law of God and Nature is silent on this issue and by implication the episcopacy itself: “From contrary occasions, contrary Laws may grow, and each be reasoned and disputed for by such as are subject therunto, during the time they are in force. … Wherefore … Canons, Constitutions, and Laws which have been at one time meet, do not prove that the Church should always be bound to follow them” (7.15.14; 3:241).

The adrotiness with which Hooker manages these distinctions, applying to them his great scheme of positive and natural law, is entirely characteristic of his style, whether we mean the particularity of the diction and the periodic sentences, or the broader formulations of theme. For the present, I am most concerned to see Hooker's style as thematic function, and in having recalled book 7, one of the least read and appreciated parts of the Lawes, to suggest that this style—a kind of architectural maneuvering—pervades the whole work. An understanding of this point may release us from posterity's false teaching. Hooker, indeed, would poise his arguments for the episcopacy on standards that change while remaining the same, a fact which may have caused the deliberate “loss” of book 7 until the Restoration “found” it, nearly sixty years after Hooker's death. Yet Hooker's “double vision” is the means whereby he sees everything, with ambivalence its characteristic mode, “periodicity,” or the simultaneous balancing of divergent points, its strength. Perhaps this idea can be still better presented by illustration from the longest and most detailed of the books of the Lawes; this fifth book is just as conceptually and fundamentally clear as any of the others, while signalling and epitomizing the issues of the entire work.

Book 5 seems superficially to be an extended discourse on the forms of religious worship, especially according to the Book of Common Prayer. While it does, of course, function in this way, Hooker is offering much more than a commentary. The book begins by affirming its own importance: “Pure and unstayned religion ought to be the highest of all cares apperteyninge to publique regiment” (5.1.2; 2:16), Hooker writes. The commonwealth depends on justice united with religion, and on the rule of reason that depends on the interaction of the positive and the divine law. After twenty-two chapters about the outward form of churches and on public worship and preaching, chapter 23 opens another aspect of the subject: “Of Prayer” gracefully directs us “betwene the throne of God in heaven and his Church upon earth” (5.23.1; 2:110). This harmonious touching of the two realms of heaven and earth, with its angelic commendation, looks forward to George Herbert who defines prayer as “the Churches banquet, Angels age” in his poem on “Prayer” (1633); and Hooker inspired John Cosin who borrows his phrases in the preface of the celebrated Private Devotions (1627).¹⁷ Hooker eloquently describes prayer as a “worke common to the Church as well triumphant as militant, a worke common unto men with Angels … so much of our lives is coelestiall and divine as we spend in the exercise of prayer” (5.23.1; 2:111). Now this second principal division of book 5 continues until we reach chapter 50, “Of the name, the author, and the force of Sacraments,” which provides a further, and final introduction for the concluding, yet unequal third of the book. Hooker ends this chapter cautiously by advising us of the importance of what is to come: “And for as much as there is no union of God with man without that meane betwene both which is both, it seemeth requisite that wee first consider how God is in Christ, then how Christ is in us, and how the sacramentes doe serve to make us pertakers of Christ. In other thinges wee may be more briefe, but the waight of these requireth largenes” (5.50.3; 2:208-9).

Hooker amply justifies his admonition, and for most of the considerable length of book 5 that remains he explores sacramental theology in detail. To comprehend what remains largely ineluctable we must exercise our abilities to the utmost: “The strength of our faith,” Hooker says, “is tryed by those thinges wherein our wittes and capacities are not stronge” (5.52.1; 2:211). Essential to our understanding of faith—or truth more plain than it is clear—is the doctrine of the Incarnation defined by the Chalcedonian formula, “in fower words’αληθω̑s, τελέωs,’αδιαιρέτωs,’αsυγχύτωs perfectly, indivisibly, distinctly; the first applyed to his beinge God, and the seconde to his beinge man, the third to his beinge of both one, and the fowrth to his still continuinge in that one both” (5.54.10; 2:227). This fundamental distinction forms the basis of Christ's presence to us by means of that participation inherent between Him and this world. Sacraments are therefore necessary because “they are heavenlie ceremonies, which God hath sanctified and ordeined to be administred in his Church, first as markes wherebie to knowe when God doth imparte the vitall or savinge grace of Christ unto all that are capable thereof, and secondlie as meanes conditionall which God requireth in them unto whome he imparteth grace” (5.57.3; 2:245-46). Hooker steers us carefully between the spiritual realm and the ordinary or external realm in all of these distinctions, as he has done and continues to do throughout the Lawes. Participation is the generally descriptive term for what he says about the sacramental presence, and indeed about all of life, where “we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.”¹⁸

Participation, of course, depends upon the dual activity of one going forward to meet another who has simultaneously advanced, with the mingling of two identities defined as one which yet remain the same and apart. Hooker gracefully evokes this curious linking in his chapter, referred to already, “Of Prayer”: “For what is thassemblinge of the Church to learne, but the receivinge of Angels descended from above? What to pray, but the sendinge of Angels upward? His heavenly inspirations and our holie desires are as so many Angels of entercorse and comerce betwene God and us” (5.23.1; 2:110). Hooker here sustains in the imagery of earthly ascending and heavenly descending, and their transposition, a mysterious process that tells of order, simultaneity, and interaction, the defining features of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity. Within a discourse of such coherence exists the life that Hooker would not have us miss or allow dreamily to pass away.

Notes

1. See Edward, earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. Dunn Macray (1888; repr., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 1:1.

2. Richard Hooker was born in or near Exeter in April 1554, was educated at the Exeter Grammar School, and, through the influence of Bishop John Jewel, admitted to Corpus Christi College, Oxford (B.A. 1574, M.A. 1577). He became a probationary fellow of Corpus Christi in 1577, a full fellow in 1579, and was appointed deputy professor of Hebrew in 1579. He was ordained deacon, 1579, and priest, 1580. In 1584, he was presented to the living of Drayton Beauchamp, Buckinghamshire, and in 1585 he was appointed Master of the Temple, where he publicly opposed the presbyterian views of Walter Travers, the current Reader. In 1591 he was instituted subdean of Salisbury, prebend of Netheravon, and rector of Boscombe, Wiltshire, offices which he resigned in 1595 when he was presented by the Queen to the living of Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury, where he died on 2 November 1600, and is buried. Hooker was married to Joan Churchman in 1588; two sons (b. 1589 and 1596) predeceased him; he was survived by his wife and four daughters. The best recent biography is by C. J. Sisson, The Judicious Marriage of Mr. Hooker and the Birth of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1940). Georges Edelen is preparing a new and full Life of Richard Hooker (forthcoming).

3. Travers published his principal work as the Ecclesiasticae Disciplinae et Anglicanae Ecclesiae ab illa Aberrationis plena e verbo Dei et dilucida Explicatio anonymously at La Rochelle; it was simultaneously translated by Cartwright and known formally as A full and plaine declaration of ecclesiasticall discipline. Travers, who was dismissed from his position at the Temple in 1585, subsequently wrote and circulated A Supplication made to the Privy Counsel by Master Walter Travers (1586), but not published until 1612, with Hooker's Answer (also of 1586). These works, along with Hooker's treatises central to the controversy, especially Of Justification, have been newly edited for The Folger Library Edition of The Works of Richard Hooker, vol. 5, by Laetitia Yeandle with commentary by Egil Grislis (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1990).

4. See Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie, 4.8.2, in The Folger Library Edition of The Works of Richard Hooker, gen. ed. W. Speed Hill (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1977), 1:299. All subsequent references to Hooker are taken from this edition and cited in the text, first by Hooker's book, chapter, and section, then to The Folger Library Edition by volume and page. Vol. 1 (noted here), comprising Hooker's preface and books 1 to 4, was edited by Georges Edelen; vol. 2 (also 1977) which gives book 5, was edited by W. Speed Hill; vol. 3, books 6, 7, 8 (1981), was edited by P. G. Stanwood. See also vol. 4 (1982), “Attack and Response,” edited by John E. Booty, and vol. 5 (1990), “Tractates and Sermons,” texts edited by Laetitia Yeandle and commentary by Egil Grislis (cited in n. 3). Vol. 6, in two parts (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1993), contains introductions and commentary for all of the Ecclesiastical Polity (preface, William P. Haugaard; book 1, Lee M. Gibbs; books 2 to 4, William P. Haugaard; book 5, John E. Booty; book 6, Lee M. Gibbs; book 7 and 8 and Hooker's notes and fragments, Arthur S. McGrade). A concluding vol. 7, with bibliography and indexes, is forthcoming.

5. See Robert K. Faulkner, Richard Hooker and the Politics of a Christian England (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), who discusses Hooker's moral and religious stand in the context of his times.

6. See The Life of Mr. Richard Hooker (1665), in Lives, ed. George Saintsbury, The World's Classics (1927; repr., London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1956), 212-13. For a description of the circumstances that led to Walton's writing about Hooker, see David Novarr, The Making of Walton's Lives (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1958), 197-298. There is, in fact, no evidence that Stapleton ever went to Rome. See Dictionary of National Biography, 54:101.

7. See C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 462. Cf. this nineteenth-century assessment of Hooker's Lawes: “The chief characteristic of the work is its elevated calmness of luminous and reasonable thought. … No writer ever conducted a great argument in a higher, purer, and more enlightened spirit. None ever dwelt in a more lofty, serene, and truthful atmosphere, or raised himself more directly, by mere grandeur and largeness of conception, above all the petty and vulgar details which beset controversy even on the greatest subjects” (John Tulloch, Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth Century, 2nd ed. [Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1874], 1:53). John Carey is reacting against such appraisals in his dismissive account of Hooker's style, which he finds manipulative and disingenuous; but Carey seems to miss the largeness and complexity of Hooker's argument (see “Elizabethan Prose,” in English Poetry and Prose 1540-1674, ed. Christopher Ricks [London: Sphere Books, 1970], 368-73).

8. See Georges Edelen, “Hooker's Style,” in Studies in Richard Hooker: Essays Preliminary to an Edition of His Works, ed. W. Speed Hill (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve Univ., 1972), 257. I am generally indebted to Edelen's excellent study.

9. In his Church History (1655), 9:216, Thomas Fuller described Hooker's writing as “long and pithy, driving on a whole flock of several separate clauses before he came to the end of a sentence.” The comment is reprinted by John Keble in his edition of The Works of … Hooker, 7th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), 1:79 n. 2.

10. “The term style comprehends all at once a multiplicity of things—manner in language and diction, texture, so to speak, and further, thought and judgment, line of argumentation, inventive power, control of material, emotion, and what the Greeks call η̑θοs,—and within each one of these notions a profusion of shadings, no fewer, to be sure, than the differences in talent, which are as numerous as men themselves”: so Erasmus in his edition of Jerome (quoted from Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. James F. Brady and John C. Olin [Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1992], 61:78). In addition to Edelen's study of Hooker's style, see also Brian Vickers in his introduction to an abridged edition Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, ed. A. S. McGrade and Vickers (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1975), 41-59, and cf. P. E. Forte, “Richard Hooker as Preacher,” in The Folger Library Edition of The Works of Richard Hooker, vol. 5, Tractates and Sermons, 657-82.

11. Georges Edelen quotes the long passage that follows this sentence as an example of Hooker's expository mode (Edelen, “Hooker's Style,” 264-65).

12. But see W. Speed Hill, “Editing Richard Hooker: A Retrospective,” Sewanee Theological Review 36 (1993): 187-99, esp. 198.

13. 8.8.8; 3:430. Hooker's church polity is normative, I believe, for the Anglican communion. The fact that so many Laudian churchmen ignored or misrepresented his message does not change its essential meaning or significance. See Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), on the later sixteenth century from the standpoint of Hooker's opponents; and The Religion of Protestants (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), which demonstrates the continuity of the church from Elizabethan through Jacobean times. See also 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): 63-117; Hugh Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans (London: Secker and Warburg, 1987), esp. chap. 4, “The Great Tew Circle”; and W. J. Torrance Kirby, Richard Hooker's Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990), 34-35.

14. See Kirby, Richard Hooker's Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy, 116-17, who forcefully elaborates this point. By appealing to the personal unity of the divine and human natures in Christ, “Hooker demonstrates the unity of sovereign power or dominion over both Church and the secular political order” (and chap. 4, “Supremum Caput: Hooker's Theology of Headship”).

15. On the fundamental unity of the Lawes, see the important studies by A. S. McGrade, “The Coherence of Hooker's Polity: The Books on Power,” Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963): 163-82, and also his introduction to an edition of Hooker's preface, books 1 and 8, in “Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought” (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989); and W. D. J. Cargill Thompson, “The Philosopher of the ‘Politic Society,’” in Studies in Richard Hooker: Essays Preliminary to an Edition of His Works, ed. W. Speed Hill (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve Univ., 1972), 3-76, repr. in Cargill Thompson, Studies in the Reformation, ed. C. W. Dugmore (London, 1980). I give a detailed explanation of the authorial integrity of books 6-8 of the Lawes in my textual introduction to them in The Folger Library Edition, vol. 3 (1981).

16. See Richard Bancroft, Daungerous Positions and Proceedings published and practised within this Iland of Brytaine, under pretence of Reformation, and for the Presbiterial Discipline (London, 1593), and Hadrianus Saravia, De diversis ministrorum Evangelii gradibus (London, 1590; Frankfurt, 1591). See the detailed study of Saravia by Willem Nijenhuis, Adrianus Saravia (c. 1532-1613) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1980), and also J. P. Sommerville, “Richard Hooker, Hadrian Saravia, and the Advent of the Divine Right of Kings,” History of Political Thought 4 (1983): 229-45.

17. See A Collection of Private Devotions, ed. P. G. Stanwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 14.

18. See John E. Booty, in Commentary, introduction to book 5 (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1993), 6:197-99. Cf. also Booty's “Hooker and Anglicanism: Into the Future,” Sewanee Theological Review 36 (1993): 215-26.