560 - Richard Hooker as Theologian

Richard Hooker as Theologian
By Marianne H. Micks

WHAT ARE the major issues challenging theologians today? In the later years of the reign of Elizabeth I of England they were questions of authority, of church and state, of ministry, of the relation between Christ and his church. A strong case could be made that these same four themes claim prime time on our theological agenda in the 1980s. And that is the first reason for rejoicing in the publication of the first two volumes in the new Folger Library Edition of The Works of Richard Hooker, ably edited by Georges Edelen and W. Speed Hill, who oversees the whole project.

What are our contemporary criteria in this ecumenical age for dealing with differences? We are no longer able to stuff fellow Christians into pigeonholes labeled, in the words of one seventeenth century Anglican bishop, "Pope, Presbyter, and Phanatick." Judicious help in wrestling with this question is a second reason for rejoicing in Hooker's return to clear print and definitive text.

What models do we choose to help us speak a liberating word in our time? How can we once more utter the word of God so that, as Gerhard Ebeling put it, "the world will be changed and renewed by it"? Richard Hooker was a master of English prose in the era when that yet-young language was giving birth to Shakespeare. He has much to teach us-all victims of worn-out words and hand-me-down speech-about language that can arouse confidence and offer freedom. Provided, that is, that we are willing to open ourselves to his cadences. The new edition of Hooker challenges us to do just that, and thereby provides a third cause for rejoicing.

I

The first volumes of the present edition of Hooker's writings give us (with clear critical apparatus) the first four books Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, originally published in 1593, and the much longer Book V, which followed in 1597. They also contain a publishing history of the work which has well been called both the Summa and the Institutes of Anglicanism. Two further volumes of text are projected; one on the posthumous sixth, seventh, and eighth books of the Laws was released in late 1979, and another of tractates and sermons is planned.

Marianne H. Micks is Professor of Biblical and Historical Theology at Episcopal Theological Seminary in Virginia and the author of Introduction to Theology (1964) and The Future Present (1970). She is here reviewing the new Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, and the review is based on the first two volumes containing Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Books I-IV, Vol. 1, edited by Georges Edelen, and Book V, Vol. II, edited by W. Speed Hill. The new edition is published by Harvard University Press, and late last year the third volume, covering Books VI-VIII, was issued under the editorship of P.G. Stanwood and W. Speed Hill.

561 - Richard Hooker as Theologian

Further volumes of twentieth century exegesis and commentary are in progress.

Although Of the Laws is unquestionably Hooker's major work, it is difficult for a reader today to enter it without knowledge of the controversy from which it was born (the one on tracts and sermons of the final volume will document), or without help from the commentaries which will illuminate Hooker's distinctive position in the history of Christian thought. Fortunately, the editors have already given us a foretaste of modern Hooker scholarship in their Studies in Richard Hooker: Essays Preliminary to an Edition of His Works (W. Speed Hill, ed., The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1972). That collection admirably crosses disciplinary lines, showing us at once the Hooker who was political philosopher, theologian, humanist, churchman, and literary artist. It also offers a 50-page annotated bibliography-enough to make one stumble over Egil Grislis' statement, in his essay on Hooker's hermeneutics, that "the interpretation of Hooker's thought is in its beginning stages."

Hooker died in November, 1600. Although he wrote Of the Laws in the relative calm of a rural parsonage, every page of his work must be read against the background of post-Reformation conflict in the church and of post-Copernican shaking of other foundations. Only then can its great emphasis on God-given order be viewed in living color.

II

The immediate controversy which gave rise to this prolonged essay, which is both a livre de circonstance and also a systematic exposition of a nascent theological tradition, was with one Walter Travers, a Puritan. In 1585 Travers had lost out in competition with Hooker for appointment to the Mastership of the Temple Church. It was there in the heart of London that "the forenoon spoke Canterbury and the afternoon Geneva," to use Isaac Walton's apt phrase.

When the text of Hooker's sermon on Habakkuk 1:4 is republished, we can once again see why the two men drew swords. Matters of faith, justification, predestination were at stake. Understanding of faith is perhaps most useful in seeing where Hooker stood on the question of authority in theology. Once having tasted the sweetness of faith, he contends, we can never lose it completely. But we can and do doubt. Hooker's analysis of doubt is the other side of the coin stamped with his well-known stress on the importance of reason in theology. We doubt not only because of sin, but also because of psychosomatic realities ("melancholy passion") and because of God-given times of spiritual darkness. Nevertheless grace cannot be extinguished; "faith notwithstanding is not hazarded by these things."

Clearly the "reason" that Richard Hooker, one of the architects of Anglicanism, placed alongside Scripture and tradition as authoritative for theology was no disembodied eighteenth-century Reason. She wore a human face. She was the sister of Wisdom, in a fully biblical sense of

562 - Richard Hooker as Theologian

that gift of God. Hooker's understanding of the authority of reason places him far closer to the Augustinian and Anselmian tradition of "faith seeking understanding" than to the rationalism with which he is sometimes branded.

Indeed, in my judgment, Hooker's thought-at least as it comes to expression in Book V-is spacious enough to make room for imagination as part of reason, and to make room for liturgy as part of that tradition which informs theological reflection. Hear him on the presence of Christ in the Eucharist:

What these elementes are in them selves it skilleth not, it is enough that to me which take them they are the bodie and blood of Christ, his promise in witness hereof sufficeth, his word he knoweth which way to accomplish, why should any cognition possess the minde of a faithfull communicant but this, O my God thou art true, O my soule thou art happie? (V, 67.12).

III

Whatever substantive contributions Richard Hooker may have to make to theological discussion of issues in the 1980s, his fundamental attitude toward theology-in an era ready to endow chairs of Controversial Divinity in its universities-is a model of charity, humility, and sanity. Two of his famous remarks bear requotation to illustrate this attitude. The first is from his marginal notations in preparation for an answer to a Puritian critique of The Laws, an answer he did not live long enough to write. It reads, "Two things there are which trouble greatly these later times: one that the Church of Rome cannot, another that Geneva will not erre." To both Rome and Geneva and to every ecumenical dialogue today (if the participants can jump over the sexist language) the judicious Hooker also says, "Thinke yee are men, deeme it not impossible for you to erre: sift unpartiallie your owne hearts, whether it be force of reason, or vehemencie of affection, which hath bread, and still doth feede these opinions in you." (Pref. 9.1)

That second quotation both illustrates and qualifies my contention that this new edition of Hooker can recall us to sharpened thought about theological language, to freedom from boredom with words. The antique spelling and often convoluted sentences of the authentic text are often hard reading for those of us whose regular diet is contemporary Americanese. I am not sure we are willing to make the effort.

I am sure, however, that Shakespeare had read Hooker-even without myself having read studies on that subject cited in the Grislis and Hill bibliography. H.C. Porter, who is preparing commentary on the Preface and Books I-IV for the new edition, has rightly described Hooker as one under the compulsion of the creative artist. "One can best think of Hooker," he writes, "as among the heroic poets." Our problem today is that most of us have lost the art of reading poetry, and of reading theology that approaches that genre.

Perhaps what Richard Hooker, resurrected from a country parish in the late sixteenth century, is asking of us is chiefly to sit down quietly

563 - Richard Hooker as Theologian

under a paragraph. Perhaps it is less important to ask whether Calvin or Aquinas influenced him more, whether Scripture or tradition weighed more heavily in his thinking, than to ask ourselves whether this Christian's vision of the beauty of holiness has anything to contribute to our present understanding of the Christian church. In Hooker's terms, the church is not an assembly but a society-one in which the attire of ministers is of less importance than participation, a participation he defines as "that mutual inward hold which Christ hath of us and we of him" (V,56.1).