Download PDF | Arthur Stephen McGrade (ed.) - Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community- (1997).
448 Pages
Foreword
A SKETCH OF RICHARD HOOKER AS HE APPEARS IN THIS VOLUME AND IN the recently completed Folger Library edition of his works* can be drawn by contrast with two previous views. There is first the traditional portrait. Its legend could be taken from Izaak Walton's declaration that "He who praises Richard Hooker praises God."
The hagiographical image has been durable. The community of Hooker's admirers over the last four centuries includes religious, political, and literary figures who were otherwise great antagonists. Pope and presbyterian, king and Leveller, poets of peace and of revolution, have seen merit in Hooker's sermons of the 1580s or in his later account of English church and society in Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie} Among students of English literature, Hooker's canonical status has rested principally on his eloquence in presenting an Elizabethan worldview of harmonious order, a worldview authoritatively validated for this readership by its concurrent representation in Shakespeare's plays.
The primary text here is the serene first book of the Lawes, a synopsis of "lawes and their several kindes in general," including the eternal laws of God's operations and the laws of angels and physical nature, as well as norms of ethics and political life. For students of western culture generally. Hooker has seemed praiseworthy for providing a description of humanaffairs and the cosmos which any intelligent and civilized reader could respect, if not, necessarily, or still, accept. In sum, Hooker has long andwidely been revered as the best model of an Anglican divine. It has always been recognized, of course, that, setting aside Book I, the Lawes is in some sense a polemic. Its aim is to show, in explicit response to puritan objections and implicit response to Roman Catholic rejection, the legitimacy of Elizabeth I's "settlement" of the English church after its uncertain course through Reformation and Counter-Reformation in the reigns of her father, brother, and sister. Hooker has until recently seemed a reluctant controversialist, however, and to many readers there has seemed to be no controversy at all about the merits of his cause as against those who opposed the Elizabethan order. "Popery," a foreign military threat, and Puritanism, a nasty yet intellectually trivial domestic nuisance, so it seemed, were marginal elements in Elizabeth's golden age. Hooker, it appeared, was not so much making an advocate's case as offering straightforward description of an establishment needing only to be described in order to elicit loyalty from any right-thinking person. Hooker's description was singularly eloquent, but it was nonetheless a description, not a makeover. No smoke and mirrors were needed. No hidden agenda was imaginable. The self-evident virtues of the Elizabethan establishment were simply more attractively self-evident when framed in reflections from perennial philosophy and Christian tradition. A different picture of Hooker and his situation is suggested by a considerable body of recent scholarship, which has raised questions about every feature of the view just outlined: questions about the obvious Tightness of the Ehzabethan settlement Hooker purported to defend and about the sanity of the hierarchically ordered vision of the world underlying it; questions as to whether or in what way the settlement was in fact settled, hence about the extent to which Hooker was only describing or defending something already in place; questions about the purity of Hooker's intentions and even about the non-polemical character of the opening synthesis of past wisdom in Book I of the Lauies. The English Reformation has lost some of its wholesomeness in comparison with the late medieval church, and this has given mainstream prominence to the positions of English men and women of the period who remained at- tached, more or less resolutely, to the old religion. On the other hand, Patrick Collinson, John Coolidge, and others have shown that Elizabethan Puritanism had more intellectual and social substance than Anglicans and their cultural sympathizers have typically recognized. Complementing these upward revaluations of Hooker's opposites, scholars such as James Cargill Thompson and Robert Eccleshall have depicted Hooker himself as an ide- ologue of the powers that were, a man who, in Eccleshall's phrase, pro- vided "window dressing for the command structure of Elizabethan society" and illustrates "a peculiarly English brand of national smugness with re- gard to the native political system." Peter Lake's controversial thesis that Hooker "invented Anglicanism" might seem to signal a return to hagiography, but in view of the scholarship just referred to, one might wonder whether inventing Anglicanism was a saintly thing to do in the 1590s. The studies presented here, like the introductions and annotations of the Folger edition, take seriously the deflationary trend in recent Hooker scholarship and take still more seriously the complexity of Hooker's situation as an apologist for the Elizabethan church, "the Church of God established amongst U5," as he refers to it on the opening page of the Lawes. To be sure, Hooker's work is not read here or in the edition as an ideological defense at all costs of an arbitrarily imposed command structure or as a foundation for national or ecclesiastical self-congratulation, yet neither can the static serenity of the older image be maintained. The gentle dove above all battles has departed. Whatever Hooker's spiritual, moral, or intellectual virtues may have been, they were exercised in more serious and self-conscious engagement with more deeply controversial issues than has customarily been recognized. As seen in the new edition, then, and in this volume. Hooker was neither a misrepresenter nor simply an eloquent describer of Elizabethan church and polity, either as the established order operated in legally enforced liturgy and structures of authority or as it was expressed in offi- cially approved theological and philosophical assumptions. Rather, inrelation to the established powers, practices, and intellectual presuppositions of its time, Hooker's work is best approached as an interpretation —inplaces a creative interpretation, in other places a surprisingly critical one.In terms of his traditional sobriquet. Hooker attempted to provide ajudicious interpretation and application of the diverse normative principlesbearing on his situation— the "laws" of God, angels, and nature and ofhuman well-doing, personal and social, natural and supernatural. In someof the following essays his character as a strict constructionist with regardto one or another source of "lawfulness" is salient. In others he providesexamples of something like judge-made law. The common element is rec-ognition of the active character of his authorship. The Lawes, continuingthe pastoral emphasis of Hooker's sermons, is arguably what it professes to be, an effort to satisfy the desire for Christian community which was sowidely professed at the end of the sixteenth century, but Hooker servesthis desire with extraordinary alertness to the fact that community is neversimply given. Construction — construing, reconstructing, shoring up, newbuilding — is constantly needed.
like or unlike ourselves— greatly attracts Philip B. Secor, who is preparing a new biography of Hooker. In the account of his work in progress printed here, Secor defends the need and the feasibility of a new Life and draws out some of the biographical implications of recent scholarship on Hooker's works.
Sources and Techniques Following the introductory essays by Hill and Secor, the volume continues with four discussions of Hooker's sources and techniques, where sources are understood as broad intellectual currents rather than as bodies of cited texts. William J. Bouwsma locates Hooker in relation to a perennial tension in western cultural history between tendencies which can usefully be identified with "philosophy" and "rhetoric." Bouwsma's "Hooker in the Context of European Cultural History" notes the stresses involved in being a humanist defender of the church at a time when pressures for confessional orthodoxy and the suppression of dissent were growing everywhere, although still generally countered by a lively creativity. In this ambivalent, eclectic era, Hooker's thought was also ambivalent and eclectic — and tantalizingly rich. Bouwsma's nomination of Hooker as an exemplar of theologia rhetorica rather than theologia philosophica provoked energetic debate following his paper at the Washington conference. While other sessions gave support to traditional appreciation of Hooker's philosophical depth, this was not at the expense of Bouwsma's contention that for Hooker the gospel is a "persuasive appeal to the heart" and that in Hooker the controversial Anglican via media must indeed be understood as a via, a "way" among powerful and competing alternatives, a path on which "strenuous exertion, adaptation, and improvisation" are constantly required, not as the one right place to be for all eternity. While the identification of Hooker as a rhetorician (not, in Bouwsma's view, a demotion) may shock those accustomed to studying Hooker in the context of academic theology or political theory, to students of Renais- sance humanism this characterization seems entirely natural. A close context for such an identification is provided in R. J. Schoeck's "From Erasmus to Hooker: an Overview," a first sample from the larger research project on which Schoeck is now engaged. Schoeck's paper places Hooker firmly within a Renaissance network of institutions and individuals in which rhetoric, shaped by the study of Scripture and the church fathers — especially the Greek fathers, the reading of whom was opened up by the Study of Greek at Corpus Christi College from its beginning and nourishedby their presence in the curriculum— was of central importance. Yet if rhetoric was one source from which Hooker drew — a source muchundervalued in previous scholarship — the sheer volume of philosophicaland scholastic theological citations in the Folger commentaries suggeststhat theologia philosophica is more than an undercurrent in his work. In"Hooker on Scripture, Reason, and 'Tradition,' " W. David Neelandsdiscusses, in relation to one important textual source, Thomas Aquinas,the three general principles commonly taken to define Hooker as asystematic thinker. Since a triad or three-legged stool of Scripture, reason,and tradition is sometimes also taken to define "the spirit of Anglicanism," Neelands's is one of the papers in the volume especially relevant tothe question of what sort of Anglicanism, if any. Hooker invented. How do Hooker's affinities with Thomas Aquinas, and the comparablerelationships with other systematic thinkers indicated in the Folgercommentaries, comport with his character as a humanist rhetorician?Several later papers cast light on this question, including the final essay byRowan Williams. More immediately, in the concluding contribution tothe present section Brian Vickers advances the discussion by first eliciting Hooker's own disparaging view of rhetoric in many of its employments andthen examining his practice. In "Public and Private Rhetoric in Hooker'sLitres," Vickers finds Hooker in frill control of the traditional devices ofpersuasion but using those devices to make evident the logic of his argu-ment. His aim is rather to teach than unfairly to move. Nevertheless,while Hooker expressed a conscious disavowal of rhetoric for the purposesof influencing his readers, his own private response to the Bible and theworks of Christ was formulated in traditional rhetorical terms, and no less sincerely for that. Hooker does move, therefore, in passages where "rea- soned argument yields to the kind of ecstatic identification with a sacredobject that we normally associate with the sensibility of a later generation,the Easter sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, the poems of Herbert, Traherne, and Crashaw."
Situation and Aims Hooker did not use his exceptional scholarly and stylistic resources for display. Remarkable as his works are simply as texts, they must also beread as attempts to achieve extra-textual ends in an extra-textual situation. The next four papers, beginning with Patrick Collinson's "Hooker and the Elizabethan Establishment," take up questions pertinent to such a reading. After charting Hooker's career from its apparently mainline Reformed beginning to its conclusion in apparent service to ecclesiastical authorities troubled, diminishingly, by presbyterian Puritanism, CoUinson appraises Peter Lake's thesis that Hooker was not so much defensively recapitulating Anglicanism as inventing it. He concludes that, even when exaggeration of the distinctiveness of Hooker's emphases is avoided and even when allowance is made for the self-serving motives behind contemporary accusations of novelty against him, we may indeed say that Hooker presented the English church with "an original account of its identity" — but an account that was, arguably, disturbing and destabilizing. In "They Are and Are Not Elymas: The 1641 'Causes' Notes as Postscript to Richard Hooker's Of the Lawes of EcclesiasticaU Poiitie," Rudolph P. Almasy argues that an undated fragment of Hooker's reflections on issues of church government may indicate a change of attitude corresponding in some degree to the career stages traced by CoUinson. From initial hopefrilness that reasoning with the advocates of presbyterianism would convert them to his own position, Hooker moved, Almasy suggests, to the conviction that his opponents were so driven by passion as to be beyond reasoning. But who were Hooker's opponents? If he indeed intended to present the English church with an original account of its identity, why did he think this was needed? Arthur P. Monahan and W. J. Torrance Kirby explore different answers to this question in the context of late medieval and sixteenth-century political thought. In "Richard Hooker: CounterReformation Political Thinker," Monahan finds a substantially greater affinity of Hooker with scholasticism, both medieval and contemporary, than with the distinctive political ideas of the Reformation. On this view, Hooker must have been aiming at acceptance of principles — at least politi- cal principles— which were honored more in Roman Catholic than in Protestant thought. In "Richard Hooker as an Apologist of the Magisterial Reformation in England," Kirby argues to the contrary (although contrary less to Monahan than to depictions of Hooker as the exponent of a distinctively Anglican via media), that Hooker stands squarely with Luther and Calvin on key questions of political authority in religious matters. Kirby here adds to the account in his recent Richard Hooker's Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy. On Kirby's view, the Christian community Hooker sought to uphold was the one officially in place. His presentation of the es- tablishment was calculated to avoid deflection of the English church from its identity as a national Protestant community by presbyterian radicals. It is clear from these studies that Hooker remains an important re- source—as yet unexhausted— for determining Anglican identity in the Tudor-Stuart period. This larger problem should be borne in mind whenreading the next set of papers, which consider more particular topics relevant to building or maintaining Christian community.
Confidence, Authority, and the Construction of Christian Community The first paper in this section concerns a topic which seems, from a modern perspective, to have little to do with community, the theological problem of assurance. In "The Assurance of Faith according to Richard Hooker," Egil Grislis compares Hooker's early preaching on assurance, centered on the individual's adherence to Christ, with his balancing of conscience, probability, and authority in the Lawes. Confidence in one's relation to God could not, for Hooker, be simply a product of social reinforcement. Yet the dangers he saw in a puritan private judgment which seemed to demand exemption from legal control led him to urge zealots for further change in the English church to weigh the validity of even their most intensely held personal convictions in the light of objective, publicly accessible criteria. The contemporary relevance of the kind of appeal outlined in Grislis's paper is the subject of Don H. Compier's essay, "Hooker on the Authority of Scripture in Matters of Morality." Compier starts from current contentions between Anglican conservatives and liberals, who hold, respectively, that Scripture is the sole authority in morals or, on the other hand, that it constrains Christian moral choices hardly at all. Compier argues that Hooker's complex treatment of scriptural authority may be an improvement on the simpler views of both sides today. In both Grislis's and Compier's papers. Hooker is presented as showing an unusual sensitivity to the variety of grounds for authentic belief. If religious convictions are regarded as objectively valid or invalid, not simply as peculiarities of individual psychology, who, if anyone, is to declare with public authority what beliefs are acceptable? Lee Gibbs takes up a particular form of this problem in "Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes on Priestly Absolution." Gibbs compares texts of Hooker and his most eminent protege on one of the issues which most sharply divided Christians of their day: who is to represent the community's convictions concerning standards of acceptable conduct when it is a matter of judging a sinner's repentance and declaring absolution of the individual's sins? Andrewes is sometimes taken to represent a significant step toward the ecclesiastical authoritarianism of Archbishop Laud. Gibbs does not find essential differences between Andrewes and Hooker. Both agree that penance is not a sacrament, but both also agree that declaring God's forgiveness of sins is an action restricted to clergy. In the three papers just summarized, individual and community are in one way or another in tension. For Grislis and Compier the question is what weight public authority or rational reflection should have in relation to personal conviction claiming a scriptural foundation. For Gibbs the question is who shall declare the readmission to good standing of individuals who have fallen short of professed communal norms. The remaining two papers in this group are concerned with forming community anew or reconstituting a community which has broken apart. In "Performing Prayer in Hooker's Lawes: The Efficacy of Set Forms," Ramie Targoff argues that Hooker's apparently conservative defense of prescribed Prayer Book devotional forms was animated by subtle aesthetic and psychological considerations favoring creation of a cohesive national religious community. TargofPs conclusion concerning the particular topic of prescribed forms of prayer has broad implications. Detailed studies of other parts of Hooker's argument, including those not directly concerned with answering puritan complaints, are needed to determine whether or how they are part of an effort to bring about community. The final paper in this group brings us back, obliquely, to the problem of Hooker's relation to Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. In "Hooker on Ecumenical Relations: Conciliarism in the English Reformation," W.B. Patterson sees Hooker's discussion of the nature and function of general councils as central to an understanding of English thought on this topic in the periods before and after him. To Patterson, Anglican identity, however intentionally forged in a community of English Christians, seems compatible, at least in aspiration, with membership in a communion of communions which extends beyond the national state.
Interpreting the Interpreter • The final four papers in this volume stand back from the details of six- teenth-century controversy and consider Hooker in a variety of historically or conceptually broader contexts. Debora Shuger puts the Reformation debate itself in a setting of religious categories from Augustine's City of God to argue for the distinctively inclusive character of Hooker's idea of Christian community. In " 'Societie Supernatural!' : The Imagined Community of Hooker's Lfliues," Shugerreads Hooker's account of the English church as his response to a "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 sharply opposed any tendency to define the true church in terms of freedom from Romish ceremony or in terms of its members' godliness. At the same time he is not a cryptofideist. A major point of his work is that training in logic and languages and also extensive familiarity with both sacred and profane learning are necessary for framing or judging ecclesiastical practices. The central, uniting vision of the Lawes is of a community of prayer and sacramentalworship linking vulgar and learned, rich and poor, prelate and Leveller, in acts expressing a common love and longing for God. If Shuger is right, it is not surprising that both catholic and reformed sensibilities shouldrespond favorably to Hooker. The context shifts forward in time in Charles Watterson Davis's " 'For conformities sake': How Richard Hooker Used Fuzzy Logic and Legal Rhetoric against Political Extremes." Hooker's role in the rise of modernpolitical ideologies has been under question in recent scholarship. Davisassesses the analytic categories currently used to place Hooker (the oppressive state versus the free individual, absolutist apologetic versus revolutionary dissent, tyrannical laws and abstract reason versus individual, class- based, or ethnic identity and desires) and judges them to be anachronisms. He situates Hooker in a principled central position, between reaction andrevolution, which is the direct ancestor of modern constitutionalism. Crucial to this argument is the Renaissance humanist's union of rhetoric and philosophy, which in Hooker leads to distinctive ideas of lawful rule and the conditional character of political discourse. In "Eric Voegelin's Two Portraits of Hooker and their Relation to the Modern Crisis," Dante Germino presents, first, a scathing indictment of Hooker from Voegelin's unpublished History of Political Thought, and thena wholly positive assessment from the same author's influential NewScience of Politics. The context here is broader than political science as usually understood, embracing nothing less than the history of the humanspirit. Germino suggests that Voegelin's two views of Hooker signal animportant shift of perspective in Voegelin's own conception of political thought in this broader sense. VoegeUn's initial perception of Hooker seems to have missed the alertness to circumstance (alertness not only to his own circumstances but to the circumstantial character of communal life in general) which properly kept Hooker from propounding a dogmatic political theology. When he wrote the New Science of Politics, Voegelin had come to see Hooker as an exemplary defender of fundamental civiliza- tional values — in VoegeUn's terms the values of the "Mediterranean tradi- tion" as against Gnosticism. Brian Vickers's striking finding, that rhetoric and reason together led Hooker to ecstatic identification with the sacred, fits well with Rowan Williams's "Hooker: Philosopher, Anglican, Contemp>orary," an account of Hooker as a specifically "sapiential" theologian. Considering Hooker in the broadest systematic contexts, Williams argues that the anchoring of the church's life in the nature and the revealing action of God is no less firm in Hooker's theology of law than in the argument from scriptural revelation and authority mounted by the Elizabethan settlement's opponents. For "law," as Hooker employs this integrative metaphor, embraces both the voluntary actions of God, which are all, frindamentally, aspects of the diffusion and sharing of divine life, and also the principle of limitation, which at once allows and historically extends our proper response to God's self-bestowal: discernment and enjoyment of it. All of this is to say that theologia philosophica in Williams's account of Hooker is not so antagonistic to theologia rhetorica as an overly specialized practice of either style of theology might lead one to suppose. Williams's characterization of Hooker's position as "contemplative pragmatism" suggests a conception of human involvement with God — an involvement contingent yet rich in content— which has much to offer contemporary theology. The present collection of essays, drawn from a conference marking completion of the Folger edition of Hooker's works, complements a collection published more than two decades ago as a point of departure for the edition. Studies in Richard Hooker: Essays Preliminary to an Edition of His Works, edited by W. Speed Hill, the architect and mover, through three presses and nine contributors, of the six Folger volumes which have indeed emerged. The Studies volume concluded with a bibliography of Hooker scholarship prepared by Egil Grislis and Hill. The present volume fittingly ends with a bibliography of more recent scholarship on Hooker, also prepared by Grislis and Hill, many of the entries in which were stimulated by the essays and bibliography in the earlier volume and by the Folger edition itself.
Considered as a whole, the papers offered here suggest that severecriticism of the traditional hagiographical view of Hooker has not diminished his stature as an Elizabethan author. Hooker is surely a more infor- mative figure for us when we see how deeply, deliberately, and personallyengaged he was in controversies of great moment and uncertainty. If Anglicanism is seen as a via in Bouwsma's sense, and if sanctity is as compatible with struggle as with serenity, then Hooker's stature as anAnglican saint is also arguably undiminished —perhaps even enhanced —inthe accounts offered here. But this is a more complicated question. Thepresentation of Hooker as a "constructive interpreter" does not settle exactly what his interpretation of "the Church of God established amongstus" was intended to construct. The answers to this question explored inthe following essays are not all mutually exclusive, but neither are they all mutually compatible, nor do they exhaust the possibilities. The presentvolume focuses on community, but for all his concern to continue, defend,foster, or inaugurate a specific form of Christian community, Hooker didnot reduce the meaning of personal existence to membership in anyhumanly identifiable earthly aggregation. Any process for his canonization—or recanonization— would thus require further examination of thecandidate not only as Christian political communitarian but also as pastorand theorist of souls. Further still, his account of God and nature needsweighing. If, however, the present volume does not decide whether thosewho praise Richard Hooker praise God, it amply confirms that those whoread him carefully will better understand the English sixteenth centuryand much else besides.
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