Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity
Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is the masterwork of Richard Hooker (1554–1600) and the foundational work of Anglican theology. Written in defence of the Elizabethan Church of England, it answered the Puritan or "disciplinarian" demand that the government and worship of the Church conform in every particular to an exact pattern laid down in Scripture. Against that demand Hooker argued that Scripture, reason, and tradition together — pictured in his famous image as a threefold cord — guide the Church, and that in things not commanded or forbidden by God's word the Church has authority to order its own life by laws of its own making. The Laws remains the classic statement of the Anglican way of reflection, joining biblical faithfulness to the disciplined use of reason and the wisdom of the Church's past.
Occasion and controversy
The controversy behind the Laws began with the Admonition to the Parliament, the Puritan manifesto that opened the public debate over the Elizabethan settlement by demanding the abolition of episcopacy and the remodelling of the Church on a presbyterian pattern drawn from Scripture. The exchange that followed between John Whitgift, defending the established Church, and Thomas Cartwright, the leading disciplinarian controversialist, set the terms of the argument: whether every feature of church government and worship required express scriptural warrant, or whether the Church might lawfully order matters left undetermined by Scripture. Hooker entered the controversy when the dispute followed him to London. As Master of the Temple, the Church of England's great preaching post at the Inns of Court, he found himself in public controversy with his own afternoon lecturer, Walter Travers, a leading disciplinarian; the two men expounded opposed positions from the same pulpit. Hooker withdrew to the country, becoming rector of Bishopsbourne in Kent, and there devoted himself to the great work that would answer the disciplinarian case not with pamphlets but with a comprehensive treatise on law itself.
Publication
Hooker projected the Laws in eight books. The first four books were published in 1593, during his lifetime, and the long fifth book followed in 1597. Hooker died in 1600 with the work unfinished, and the remaining books were published only posthumously, in 1648 and 1662, from his surviving manuscripts. The eight-book structure moves from the general to the particular: the opening books treat law as such and the rules by which the Church is to be governed; the later books descend to the disciplinarian objections in detail, covering public worship and ceremonies, the power of jurisdiction and the ordination of ministers, and, in the final book, the nature of episcopacy and the royal supremacy. Because the last books appeared so long after Hooker's death, and in imperfect manuscript states, they have sometimes been handled with more caution by scholars than the books he saw through the press; but together the eight books form a single sustained argument, conceived as a whole from the start.
Argument
Hooker's masterstroke was to begin far behind the controversy, with a general theory of law. He distinguishes the kinds of law that govern creation and human life: the eternal law by which God orders all things; the law of nature, by which creatures, including men, are directed to their good; the divine law revealed in Scripture, given for man's supernatural end; and human law, framed by communities for their common life. Only when these distinctions are in place does he turn to the Church. Scripture is supreme in all things necessary to salvation, but it does not follow that every practice of the Church needs an express scriptural command. Where Scripture is silent, the Church is governed by the law of nature and by reason enlightened by faith, and it may learn from the practice of the Church in earlier ages: hence his celebrated account of Scripture, reason, and tradition as a threefold cord not quickly broken. Tradition is not a second scripture rivalling the first, but the accumulated wisdom of the Church, to be received with reverence and tested by reason and Scripture together.
From this foundation the conclusions of the work follow. Ceremonies and forms of worship that Scripture neither commands nor forbids — things indifferent — may be ordered by the Church's authority for the sake of decency and edification, and their lawfulness does not depend on finding a biblical precedent for each. The Church is a supernatural society with its own polity, and episcopacy, its historic form of government, is lawful and apostolic, though Hooker defends it as the Church's received order rather than as a pattern that may never, in any necessity, be altered. The result is a defence of the Elizabethan Church that concedes nothing to Roman claims of an unchangeable divine-right polity, and nothing to the disciplinarian claim that Reformation must mean reconstruction on an exact biblical blueprint.
Influence
The Laws gave the Church of England the theological rationale its settlement had lacked. Where earlier apologists had defended the English Church piecemeal, Hooker grounded its worship, ministry, and government in a philosophy of law and a doctrine of the Church, and in doing so he set the pattern for classical Anglican divinity: scriptural in substance, rational in method, and catholic in its respect for the Church's tradition. Later generations of Anglican theologians studied the Laws as the standard exposition of their tradition, and the work's influence extends beyond theology into English prose, of which it is one of the monuments.
See also
References
- The Works of that Learned and Judicious Divine Mr. Richard Hooker, ed. John Keble (Oxford, 1836).
- The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, ed. W. Speed Hill (1977–1993).