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| Richard Hooker Exeter Cathedral |
Richard
Hooker, Reformed Irenic
by W. Bradford littlejohn
Brad Littlejohn
is completing a Ph.D at the University of Edinburgh, where he is working under
Oliver O’Donovan on the relationship between law, loyalty, and liberty in the
thought of Richard Hooker. His passions include early modern and Reformation
studies, as well as political theology and economics.
Or, A Refutation of the
Calumnious Slanders Lately Lodged Against the Most Judicious and Rev. D. Hooker
by D. Joyce of Birmingham, in Which are Exposed hir sundrie Errors,
Misquotacions, and Misconceipts which do Uniustlie Stayne his moste Noble
Memorie.
In her recent book, Richard
Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology,[1]
Alison Joyce offers an important new salvo in the ongoing battle over the
interpretation and legacy of Richard Hooker. Although perhaps few Protestants
today either know or care about this battle, it is in fact a conflict in which
anyone who calls themselves “Reformed” or “Anglican” should have a stake.
Hooker stands as a theological giant of the English church in the era when it
understood itself as one of an international family of Reformed churches, an
understanding which unfortunately both the “Anglican” church and the other
Reformed churches have since lost. Although it has long been common to read
Hooker in light of this later rift, seeing him, indeed, as one of the seminal
figures in the development of a distinctive un-Reformed “Anglican”
consciousness, the recent work of Torrance Kirby and disciples such as Nigel
Atkinson over the past twenty-five years has set out to correct this reading.[2]
Kirby’s insistence on reading Hooker as a theologian of the Reformed tradition,
challenging his Puritan opponents on the basis of their departures from
Reformed orthodoxy, has proved remarkably contentious, given its prima facie
plausibility. Eminent Hooker scholars such as Peter Lake and Nigel Voak have
vigorously resisted Kirby’s revisionist reading, but although offering helpful
correctives at certain points, they have by and large failed to engage his
central arguments.[3]
Although Joyce’s recent book is
in many ways an excellent contribution to Hooker studies, it suffers throughout
from an ongoing polemic against Kirby that likewise consistently evades the key
issues at stake, or the substance of Kirby’s revisionist argument.[4]
Nowhere is this more true than in chapter three, where she proposes to lay the
groundwork for a historically sound interpretation of Hooker by teaching us how
to discern his rhetorical style and agenda. Although she purports to be
breaking new ground by cutting through the thickets of misunderstanding that
have grown up around Hooker’s text and setting the record straight about
mild-mannered, “judicious” Hooker, she is in fact simply reciting the
fashionable new orthodoxy among Hooker interpreters. She will argue that,
although cultivating a persona of cool objectivity, Hooker is fully engaged in
a polemical battle to discredit and defeat his Puritan opponents. He quotes
selectively from them, uses devious little turns of phrase to make them look
bad, and imputes bad motives to them, trying to convince his audience that
they’re motivated by an emotional agenda, rather than reason. The irony of all
this is that this is in fact precisely what Joyce does to Hooker in this
chapter.
She says that while Hooker tries
to present himself as a cool, detached observer interested only in truth for
truth’s sake, he in fact has a polemical agenda, to show that certain people
are up to no good, are deceptive and not to be trusted, and need to be
silenced. But this is precisely her own method in the book: to claim to present
an objective, historical reading of Hooker in Hooker’s own terms, while in fact
motivated throughout by a desire to discredit a particular school of Hooker
interpretation, which she fears is trying to align him too closely with the
Reformation. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with this, really. Of course our
desire for truth means that we feel the need to combat error forcefully where
we find it; few of us indeed can be moved to write out of a detached love of
truth that has not been stirred to action by the perception of error. So
polemicism in the service of truth is no vice. Joyce gleefully comes to tell us
of the juicy scandal she has uncovered – Richard Hooker was a polemicist –
when, alas, there is no scandal at all, for he never pretended to be anything
else.
To be sure, he does present
himself as interested in truth for truth’s sake, as opposed to interested in
truth for personal gain, but she makes no attempt to discredit this particular
self-construal; most scholars seem quite agreed that Hooker wrote the Lawes
more to satisfy himself than to please anyone who might offer him advancement,
and she appears to grant this in chapter two of her book. He does present
himself as the voice of reason, having carefully weighed the various
alternatives and found one of them wanting. But who would not go into
writing if they did not think that of themselves? And this is only a
problem if in fact it is shown that he is not arguing rationally, or has not
genuinely considered carefully the alternatives. The latter of these Joyce does
not really attempt to deny, acknowledging in fact the evidence that Hooker was
probably broadly Puritan in his leanings before gradually reconsidering his
views. She does, however, hint at the end of this chapter that she will
undermine the former: “What is perhaps more extraordinary still, however, and
of particular interest to us here, is the discovery that, as we shall see, on
occasions Hooker is in fact prepared to put at risk the logical coherence of
his argument in order to score points at his opponents’ expense” (67). In point
of fact, Joyce makes little attempt later in her book to cash in on her
promissory note here, and the examples she does offer are generally the sort of
tensions that one would expect to find frequently in any book of this sort and
scope.
What Hooker does not make any
attempt to deny is that he is passionately interested in seeing the Puritan
position refuted. Rather, he makes clear from the very beginning that he
considers it dangerous to the truth, and dangerous to society, and he intends
to do his best to expose its flaws. It is only by straw-manning Hooker as
purporting to be a man of her own ilk – that is, an academic scholar who
disclaims any interest in normative judgments, for whom truth and error are
merely interesting points of view – that she can then attempt to display him as
a hypocrite. She speaks of the “literary persona that Hooker created for
himself as the master of objective reasonableness, and the man whose sole
desire was to work constructively with his opponents in the interests of
securing peace and harmony” (64). Elsewhere she describes him as “presenting
himself as a man of unimpeachable Christian charity: an agent of peace and
reconciliation who is determined to seek unity and to find common ground with
his opponents, however much they might resist such a noble and godly cause” (60).
But since when did Hooker ever present himself that way? Joyce triumphantly
reveals that she has seen through his charade: “despite claiming that his aim
is purely to establish the truth through an impeccably even-handed and
impartial exploration of the issues involved, Hooker knows full well what his
eventual conclusion will be, even before embarking upon the discourse … in his
view they [the Puritans] need only look rationally at the evidence that he is
so carefully … laying before them, and they will then see why he is correct and
they are mistaken” (61). Aha! Now we’ve got the criminal!
Guilty as charged: he has the audacity to believe he is right, and his
opponents are wrong! “If Hooker does indeed seek unity with them, it
is abundantly clear that it will be entirely on his own terms” (61).
A considerable portion of her
re-assessment of Hooker thus consists in revealing that he is not in fact doing
something he never claims to be doing: suspending a passionate commitment to
the truth as he understands it in order to seek a cordial meeting of the minds
with his Puritan opponents on mutually-agreeable terrain. On the contrary,
Hooker is convinced that his opponents are in error, and dangerously so, and
that both for their own sakes and the sake of the commonwealth as a whole, the
nature of this error needs to be exposed, as unbiblical, irrational, and
seditious. Did anyone ever think otherwise? Certainly not, I think, Dr.
Kirby, whom Dr. Joyce takes herself to be correcting at this point; given Hooker’s
polemical vigor, she says, “it is difficult to see how Kirby can possibly
regard the fundamental cast of Hooker’s argument in the Lawes to be an
‘irenical appeal to the hearts and minds of the disciplinarian Puritan
opponents of the Elizabethan Settlement’” (51–52). Part of the problem
here, I would suggest, is a confusion of what the terms “polemic” and “irenic”
mean.[5] Irenicism,
although oriented toward peace, is not about compromise. It is about unity
in truth, for it understands that without truth, any peace will be unstable.
Irenicism is the proper end of all good polemics, but it can rarely do without
some resort (often very considerable resort) to polemics. What separates
irenic polemics from non-irenic polemics then? Well, irenic polemics does
not take pleasure in cutting the opponent down just for fun or gratuitously,
but cuts him down only to the extent that is necessary to build him up again. Irenic
polemics is motivated by hatred of error, and its hurtful consequences, but not
by hatred of the erring, whom it seeks to treat with all the respect they are
due. Irenic polemics uses an exposé of the opponent’s errors only as a
means to an end, that by contrast with error truth may shine more brightly,
rather than indulging the unedifying spectacle of dissecting the opponent
without offering anything positive in his place. Finally, irenic polemics
operates on the assumption that there is some common ground that lies behind
the disagreements, however large they may loom, that unity is always prior to
and stronger than division; and it aims to clear disagreements out of the way
in order that this more fundamental unity may be rendered apparent again. This,
it should be emphasized, is what Dr. Kirby has in mind when he characterizes
Hooker’s work as an “irenical appeal” based on shared principles of Reformed
orthodoxy. Hooker believes that his opponents have departed far from these
shared principles, but not so far that there is no point in trying to argue
with them, and reveal to them the nature of their error.
A Hermeneutic of Suspicion
Is it true, though, that Hooker’s
polemics are irenic in this way? That he does not play dirty and get personal?
Well the problem is, as Joyce’s study reveals, that it depends partly on our
assumptions. If we think that his general orientation is charitable and irenic,
then we will take at face value all the passages where he shows himself to be
so, and will argue that in passages that appear rather harsher, the harshness
is justified: e.g., if he accuses his opponents of arrogance, we may deem that
this is because they genuinely were, or at least that he had good grounds for
thinking so. On the other hand, if we begin with a hermeneutic of suspicion,
and are inclined to think that really he’s just interested in tearing them down
by fair means or foul, then we will insist that all the charitable and irenic
passages are just a fa¸ade, a pretense, behind which crueler intentions lurk,
and that anything that can be read as a personal attack should be read as a
personal attack.
This seems to be Dr. Joyce’s
method. She speaks of Hooker’s “consistent charge” against the Puritans,
namely, that “they are motivated by malice.” If this were indeed Hooker’s
consistent approach to his adversaries, judging their personal motives and
dismissing them accordingly, he could hardly be very irenic in orientation, and
could hardly hope to get far in persuasion. But Joyce’s footnote regarding
this “consistent charge” cites only two instances, both of which turn out to
describe his opponents as having fallen into and displayed “gall and
bitterness,” but which do not suggest that this is their root
motivation. On the contrary, he repeatedly attributes basically good
intentions to many of the Puritan leaders, and even at times takes it upon
himself to offer excuses on their behalf – explaining how an error into which
they have stumbled can be understood as the result of a good goal gone
astray. But Joyce, of course, reads all such passages as sarcasm and
backhanded compliments:
And yet, throughout the Preface,
Hooker’s prose is laden with irony and sarcasm: he is, as we shall now see,
more than ready both to damn with faint praise, and on other occasions to exaggerate
his opponents positive qualities, purely to enable him to undercut them with
devastating effectiveness. Indeed, ironically, part of the effectiveness
of his demolition of his opponents’ case comes from his purporting to take
their claims with profound seriousness: this is itself a highly successful and
persuasive literary device…. We see this again in the exaggerated praise that
Hooker gives his opponents for the ‘wonderfull zeale and fervour wherewith ye
have withstood the received orders of this Church’. Initially, Hooker claims,
this led him to deem their writings worthy of serious consideration, assuming
as he did that their position must be based on a solid, ‘reasonable’ basis;
this was, however, before he examined their case in detail: ‘Wherein I must
plainely confesse unto you, that before I examined your sundrie declarations in
that behalfe, it could not settle in my head to thinke but that undoubtedly
such numbers of otherwise right well affected and most religiouslie enclined
mindes, had some marvelous reasonable inducements which led them with so great
earnestnes that way.’ Unfortunately for his opponents, having duly examined
their case ‘with travail and care’ and in an open‐minded fashion … he found that
their case was based on nothing but ‘error and misconceipt’. Moreover, observe
once again the stark contrast in the text that follows between the extravagant
praise he gives to his opponents’ qualities (particularly their ‘right well
affected and most religiouslie enclined mindes’ and ‘great earnestnes’, thus
parodying the self‐image of the disciplinarians) and his own self‐effacing mock
humility (as in the reference to his own ‘slender
abilitie’ and ‘poore
understanding’) (58–59).
If, in the hands of a hermeneutic
of suspicion, every compliment can be read as an insult (and to be sure, Hooker
is gifted with that wonderful English penchant for the backhanded
compliment, the savage little turn of phrase at the end that takes the ground
right out from under his opponents), then how are we to know how to judge him
on the whole? Well, the best way, from a historical perspective, is to ask
what we might have expected the book to look like if Hooker were, as Joyce
contends, “unambiguously contemptuous” of his opponents. I would suggest that
it would have been a very different sort of book, one something like that of
Hooker’s contemporary Richard Bancroft, who lost no opportunity whatsoever to
impugn the motives of his opponents, and portrayed their theological scruples
as merely a fa¸ade for their insolence and sedition. Instead, what we find is
an extremely patient attempt to go back to first principles and build up an
argument step by step so that, when Hooker does come to engage his opponents’
particular complaints, he can address them on the basis of an overarching
theological anthropology, epistemology, and ecclesiology that he has carefully
constructed. This does not look like the method of a man who believes his
opponents are unworthy of anything but mockery. Rather, it looks very much
like the method Hooker sets for himself:
Nor is mine own intent any other
in these several books of discourse, than to make it appear unto you, that for
the ecclesiastical laws of this land, we are led by great reason to observe
them, and ye by no necessity bound to impugn them…. [M]y whole endeavor is to
resolve the conscience, and to shew as near as I can what in this controversy
the heart is to think, if it will follow the light of sound and sincere
judgment (Pref. 7.1).
In judging whether we should take
this self-description seriously, a good historian would compare the tone of the
Lawes with the style of writing that was common among his
contemporaries. Indeed, it is striking that, given her professed commitment to
placing Hooker within his historical context, Joyce makes no attempt at all in
this chapter to evaluate his rhetoric alongside similar contemporary
examples. This is particularly problematic given the way she pooh-poohs
other scholars for doing just that: “It seems remarkable that Patterson could
claim of Hooker that ‘He stands apart from theologians who were intent on
ridiculing, belittling, or demonizing their opponents’” (64). Well, it
seems remarkable only if one does not bother to look at said
theologians. It is true that Hooker’s calm detachment has often been
overstated, but if so, it is only because it seems so pronounced alongside
writers like Cartwright, Whitgift, and especially Bancroft.
Of course, none of this commits
us to treating Hooker as some kind of contemplative St. Francis of Assisi,
clothed all in soft pastels and with a warm glow about him, regretting at every
step the onerous task of controversy that the times had forced upon
him. Inasmuch as such a portrait can frequently be found in writing about
Hooker, from his own day to ours – and Dr. Joyce quotes a few abysmal passages
of this sort – Joyce’s corrective is not wholly uncalled-for. This serene
and saintly halo is silly, and indeed, hardly an honor to the man. Hooker was
an extraordinarily gifted polemical writer, and anyone who claims to be a fan
of Hooker ought to appreciate him for this skill, rather than making him out to
be a mild-mannered martyr. Nor need we imagine that Hooker never
stooped to taking cheap shots – misrepresenting his opponents, unfairly attacking
their character, using sarcastic put-downs to avoid the real issues at stake,
etc. He is, after all, human, and few polemicists have managed to always resist
such temptations, especially in a 1,400-page work. The question is whether
taking cheap shots comprises part of his intentional method, or comprises the
exception that proves the irenical rule.
Justified Harshness?
Of course, there is another
dimension to irenical polemics, which cannot afford to think exclusively in
terms of oneself and one’s opponent: there is always the third-party audience
to consider. It is because of this audience that one must sometimes be
rather sterner with one’s opponent than one might wish. If it were merely
I and my opponent alone on a desert island, Christian charity would require
immense patience on my part, as I carefully listened, dialogued, and argued,
seeking to bring my opponent (and myself) toward a better understanding of
truth, to bring him to the point where he could acknowledge his errors of his
own accord. But if his error is genuinely serious, and genuinely dangerous,
then every day that goes by in which he is unchallenged, others may be led
astray, to their own harm and that of others. While a humble faith in God
should prevent us from ever getting too worried about this state of affairs,
sometimes urgency is called for. Urgency never means that we should resort
to slander to discredit our opponent, but it may sometimes mean that we have to
take off the gloves and be very blunt, to quickly convince our hearers that the
opponent should to be listened to. Of course, for such stern procedure to be
justified, the urgency must be real, not imagined. Which is another way of
saying that the irenicism of a given piece of polemics cannot be judged without
considering the question of truth: is there a real error to be
opposed? And if so, how serious of a threat does it pose? When Joyce
and other modern scholars attempt to assess Hooker’s rhetorical agenda in
abstraction from the question of truth, from the question of whether he was
right to charge his opponents with errors and to fear the social consequences
of their agenda, they hopelessly hamstring their interpretive enterprise.
This becomes glaringly obvious
when we come to the most substantial passage that Dr. Joyce cites as evidence
of Hooker’s “waspish, acerbic, and irreverent assaults” (51). This
comes from Book V, chapter 22 of the Lawes, where Hooker sharply rebuts
the Puritan teaching that only the preached word of God is effective to
engender faith; the public and private reading of the Word can merely nourish
faith already present. She is right to focus on this section as an example
of some of Hooker’s strongest polemics, because Hooker is clearly quite
appalled at the Puritans in this chapter. And no wonder; for if his rendering
of their position were accurate, then this would show them to have quite
undermined the confidence in the power of the Word that had inspired the
Reformation and had been a central pillar of Protestant doctrine. If faith
is impossible without the mediation of the minister, then we have regressed to
a logocentric version of papist sacerdotalism and clericalism, the very kind of
thinking that the Reformers were so concerned about. This passage is thus in
fact an excellent example of the sort of thing that Torrance Kirby has argued:
that Hooker’s enterprise is fundamentally one of calling the Puritans back to
Reformed and Protestant doctrinal commitments that he thinks they have lost
sight of in their zeal. Dr. Joyce quotes the following specifically:
They [the puritans] tell us the
profit of readinge [scripture] is singular, in that it serveth for a
preparative unto sermons; it helpeth pretilie towardes the nourishment of faith
which sermons have once ingendered; it is some stay to his minde which readeth
the scripture, when he findeth the same thinges there which are taught in
sermons and thereby perceiveth how God doth concurre in opinion with the
preacher; besides it keepeth sermons in memorie, and doth in that respect,
although not feede the soule of man, yeat help the retentive force of that
stomack of the minde which receiveth ghostlie foode at the preachers hand. But
the principall cause of writinge the Gospell was that it might be preached upon
or interpreted by publique ministers apt and authorised thereunto. (V.22.7).
Harsh, to be sure, but the
question is, is Hooker fair to the Puritans here? Joyce appears to think not,
introducing the quote by saying, “He goes on to parody their stance in a way
that is not merely barbed, but quite outrageous,” and concluding that Hooker
“parod[ies] the puritans’ stance quite mercilessly in the passage from Lawes
V.22.7 cited above …” (51). This, however, is nothing short of “outrageous” on
Joyce’s part, given that Hooker, in the very passage she cites, does us the
favor of including a footnote, in which he quotes from page 375 of Thomas
Cartwright’s Second Replie. This quotation shows that Hooker’s own
text, explaining the Puritan view of sermons, is a fairly close paraphrase, and
in places, a direct quotation, of Cartwright’s own explanation. Indeed, so
closely does Hooker follow Cartwright’s own language here that it is hard to
see in the particular passage she cites anything particularly “barbed” or
biting on Hooker’s part: he appears to be simply faithfully reproducing their
own teaching, and then moving on to critique it. Now, perhaps Joyce would want
to argue that he has quoted Cartwright out of context, or has singled out one
particularly egregious passage that does not reflect his opponent’s teaching as
a whole. If so, we might blame Hooker for polemical excess here. But she
makes no attempt to do this. She simply ignores the whole question of whether
the Puritans ever said what Hooker attributes to them.
A similar bracketing out of the
question of truth afflicts Dr. Joyce’s attempts to indict Hooker for
fear-mongering and his hostility to private judgment. Of the preface she says,
One is left in no doubt that this
is very far from being a neutral or impartial introduction to his
subject. Such motifs include Hooker’s loathing of individuals who
arrogantly claim an inappropriate status and authority for themselves; his
rejection of newfangled practices that have not been tried and tested by past
human experience … his conviction that the Elizabethan Settlement represents
the most appropriate church polity for these islands; and his utter
condemnation of anything that engenders civil unrest (52–53).
It is hard to imagine why we
would expect Hooker not to think that the Elizabethan Settlement was the
most appropriate polity for England: no one, after all, has denied that that is
the whole point of his argument. As for his antipathy to novelty, private
judgment, and civil unrest, we could read these as mere prejudices and
paranoias, or else as a legitimate concern about the social implications of
Puritan policy and rhetoric. Which reading we take depends on our reading
of the historical and political situation. Given that most scholars of the
period acknowledge that both Puritan rhetoric and policy had, by the late
1580s, become deeply subversive and radical, and given that England’s political
stability was at this time extremely tenuous, with all of her neighbors engaged
in some kind of religious strife, it seems hard to deny that Hooker’s fears
were broadly justified. Again, Joyce might want to argue that he
overstates his case, and deliberately misrepresents the nature of the Puritan
threat, but she doesn’t really attempt to. Instead, she just observes the
prevalence of “the language of fear and danger; the implication of demagogy and
disorder” (63), and then concludes on this basis, “In short, it is difficult to
see how the kind of account that Kirby and Atkinson have attempted to give of
the fundamental nature and purpose of the Lawes as demonstrating
Hooker’s commitment to Reformed theology can possibly be sustained” (63).
The Calvin Question
Dr. Joyce’s chief argument about
Kirby, Atkinson, and the idea of a “Reformed” Hooker, however, consists in her
extended treatment, in this chapter, of Hooker’s attitude toward Calvin.
Unfortunately, this section suffers from the same hermeneutic of suspicion that
we have described above. Hooker undoubtedly does seem to speak well of Calvin
in places, but Joyce is convinced that such lines are invariably dripping with
sarcasm:
His remarks could hardly be more
scathing: ‘[Calvin’s] bringing up was in the studie of the Civill Lawe. Divine
knowledge he gathered, not by hearing or reading so much, as by teaching
others’ (my italics). Given the puritans’ focus upon scripture as the sole
source of authority for the Christian life, combined with Hooker’s acute sense
of the perils of the clever (but misleading) arguments that human wit can
devise, the passage that follows is particularly barbed. Here, Hooker suggests,
not only did Calvin presume himself to receive instruction direct from the
Almighty, but he was also (damningly) dependent upon his own ‘dexteritie of
wit’ and ‘the helpes of other learning’ for his knowledge of God: ‘For, though
thousands were debters to him, as touching knowledge in that kinde; yet he to
none but onely to God, the author of that most blessed fountaine, the booke of
life, and of the admirable dexteritie of wit, together with the helpes of other
learning which were his guides…’ (54–55).
Is this irony, or
not? Again, a lot depends on your assumptions. But Joyce’s next
paragraph ends up providing evidence for a more balanced reading:
A recurrent motif within the
Preface, and indeed throughout the Lawes as a whole, concerns the perils of a
single individual holding an inappropriate degree of authority over others. A
little later in the Preface, Hooker applies this criticism expressly to the
power that was wielded not only by Calvin but by Luther as well. It must be
said that, however oblique the reference in the example that follows, the
implied association between the faults of men such as these esteemed (and
named) leaders of the magisterial Reformation and the putrefaction caused by
the presence of dead flies in ointment is anything but flattering:
‘Such is naturally our affection,
that whom in great things we mightily admire; in them we are not perswaded
willingly that any thing should be amisse. The reason whereof is, for that as
dead flies putrifie the oyntment of the Apoticarie, so a little folly him that
is in estimation for wisedome. This in every profession hath too much
authorized the judgements of a few. This with Germans hath caused Luther, and
with many other Churches, Calvin, to prevaile in all things.’
For Hooker, the perennial danger
is, as he puts it elsewhere, that ‘Nature worketh in us all a love to our owne
counsels,’ and it is abundantly clear within the Preface to the Lawes that this
criticism is levelled squarely at Calvin himself (55).
Joyce seems unaware that the line
about the “dead flies” here is a quote from Ecclesiastes, not Hooker’s own
metaphor, and thus reads it as a more biting insult than necessary. More
importantly, though, she seems to take Hooker as hostile to Luther here as
well, which suggests that she must be overreaching, because it is hard to
imagine that Hooker would intend to present himself to a Protestant audience as
an opponent of Luther as well as Calvin. In fact, the reference to Luther
makes Hooker’s overall purpose quite clear here: it is not that Hooker denies
that Luther or Calvin were great theologians, but as a good Protestant, he
wants to remind his readers that even the greatest human authority is merely
human. When German Protestants started treating Luther’s word as infallible,
and certain English Protestants began treating Calvin’s word as infallible,
they played right into the hands of papal apologists. All men err, Calvin
included. Hooker thus, throughout the Preface, makes a point of complimenting Calvin
in a very measured way, a way that may seem like an insult to his admirers, but
which is intended as a call to remember that he was a great man, but just a
man. So with the most mis-quoted line in the Lawes, when Hooker says
that Calvin was “incomparably the wisest man that ever the French Church did
enjoy, since the hour it enjoyed him.” Joyce rightly points out the error of
scholars who only quote the first clause, without the second qualifying clause,
but she overstates the effect of the qualification. Hooker is saying that
Calvin is without a doubt the greatest French theologian of the past sixty
years – since the Reformation began – but he will not hazard a judgment beyond
that. Is he the greatest of all Protestant theologians? Or the
greatest theologian in the history of the French church? Time will tell
how highly his legacy should be valued. Indeed, it is worthy of note, as
the anti-Kirbian Hooker scholars consistently fail to note, that throughout the
Reformed world of the late 16th century, Calvin did not enjoy the kind of
exclusive prominence that the Elizabethan Puritans sought to attribute to him.
For the German Reformed, Dutch Reformed, and even French Reformed, he was one
of a number of chief authorities. In seeking to qualify his authority,
conformists such as Whitgift and Hooker were arguably more in line with
the continental Reformed than were their Puritan adversaries.
Elsewhere in the Lawes,
when critiquing the Puritan tendency to attribute too much to Scripture in
their desire to exalt it, Hooker will note that “incredible praises given
unto men do often abate and impair the credit of their deserved commendation”
(II.8.7); so, he pointedly stops short of giving Calvin “incredible praises.”
Indeed, the two are linked, as we see in Hooker’s description of Calvin’s
introduction of Presbyterianism.
The reason which moved Calvin
herein to be so earnest was, as Beza himself testifieth, ‘For that he saw how
needful these bridles were, to be put in the jaws of that city.’ That which by
wisdom he saw to be requisite for that people, was by as great wisdom
compassed. But wise men are men, and the truth is truth. That which
Calvin did for establishment of his discipline, seemeth more commendable than
that which he taught for the countenancing of it established. Nature
worketh in us all a love to our own counsels. The contradiction of others is a
fan to inflame that love. Our love set on fire to maintain that which once
we have done, sharpeneth the wit to dispute, to argue, and by all means to
reason for it. Wherefore a marvel it were if a man of so great capacity,
having such incitements to make him desirous of all kind of furtherances unto
his cause, could espy in the whole Scripture of God nothing which might breed
at the least a probable opinion of likelihood, that divine authority itself was
the same way somewhat inclinable. (Pref. 2.7)
This passage is actually an
excellent example of Hookerian rhetoric, ending as it does with one of his
satirical understatements: the jure divino case for Presbyterianism
boils down to the probability that God was “somewhat inclinable” toward it. But
the overall attempt is not to show “contempt” for Calvin, as Joyce
argues. Rather, his point is simply to insist that “wise men are men” and
they will make mistakes like everyone else, mistakes like trying to claim
divine authority for their wise ideas. This is, notably, a mistake that
Hooker himself is careful throughout the Lawes not to commit
himself. Instead of countering Presbyterian claims with an argument that
the Elizabethan polity is the one that God himself has called for, he
deliberately refuses to take that tack, and defends it as the best framework
that human wisdom could come up with under the circumstances, one consonant
with Scripture, but not mandated by it.
Given this concern, it should not
surprise us that Hooker quotes so little from Calvin in the course of the Lawes.
Unlike Whitgift, he does not want to get drawn into a tit-for-tat of lining up
Reformed authorities for his position over against the Puritans, though there
are a few key points at which he does point out to the Puritans that Calvin is
on his side, not theirs (a point that Joyce notes, but fails to see the
significance of; that Hooker was able to do so lends credence to Kirby’s
argument). That whole style of argument, he seemed to think, bred an
unhealthy idolatry of human authorities. So, in resolving the question of
Hooker’s Reformed identity, we must look at the substance of his ideas, not how
often he quotes Calvin; and we certainly cannot take the fact that he considers
his opponents unhealthily obsessed with Calvin as evidence that he had no use
for the Reformed tradition (which, after all, was far broader than Calvin at
his time).
A final note: neither can we
resolve the question of Hooker’s Reformed identity by taking the judgment of
certain of his opponents at face value, as Joyce does. Twice she suggests
that Kirby’s thesis, of an overall irenic intention that is committed to
Reformed fundamentals, is rendered highly doubtful by the fact that the
anonymous Christian Letter, written in response to Hooker in 1599,
clearly didn’t see his work that way. “Kirby attempts to dismiss the
response of A Christian Letter by maintaining that Hooker’s ‘irenical
purpose’ was ‘radically misconstrued’ by its author. It would appear to
be intrinsically more likely that Hooker in fact hit his intended target with
devastating precision, and it was this that elicited such an outraged
response’” (52). But why is this intrinsically more likely? Later she says,
“the fact that the author of A Christian Letter read Hooker’s remarks
about Calvin as being deeply insulting, and regarded his theological and
ecclesiological position as being dangerously ‘unsound’, cannot lightly be
dismissed, since they are a telling indication of how Hooker’s remarks were
received and interpreted by his principal target audience” (60). We might
object that a single respondent can hardly claim to speak exhaustively for the
“target audience”; indeed, it is notable that, whether or not this is due in
part to Hooker’s Lawes, most Puritans were largely reconciled to the
established church over the three decades after he wrote. More importantly,
though, Joyce seems blissfully ignorant of the world of Reformed theological
controversy, in which, however irenic an author’s intentions, and however much
common ground he in fact shares with his opponent, he can usually expect to be
rebuffed out of hand as insulting, unsound, and inadequately respectful of
Calvin. Indeed, one might rather suggest as a maxim that one should never
interpret a theological work primarily on the grounds of how it is received by
its target audience. Perhaps this suggests that Hooker’s hope of “resolving the
conscience” was naïve, but it hardly proves that he never had any such
intention.
Kirby’s interpretation of Hooker
certainly cannot claim to be the final word, and there is much work that
remains to be done in understanding the many threads and influences that
comprise Hooker’s thought. The interpretation of his work, however, can be
advanced only by our taking the text seriously; while this certainly includes
attentiveness to Hooker’s use of irony and understatement, “rhetorical
criticism” does not give us license to pretend that Hooker never means what he
says. Such an interpretive approach, so fashionable among Hooker scholars
today, enables those eager to oppose Hooker’s Reformed identity to ignore the
agenda that he announces for himself, and substitue an agenda of their own
devising. Despite their pretensions to non-partisan historical
objectivity, we have seen that their own method is not merely blind to
considerations of theological truth, but also shockingly inattentive to
historical context.
[1]
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
[2]
See for instance W. J. Torrance
Kirby, Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy (Leiden: Brill,
1990); Richard Hooker: Reformer and Platonist (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2005); Kirby, ed., A Companion to Richard Hooker (Leiden: Brill, 2008);
Nigel Atkinson, Richard Hooker and the Authority of Scripture, Tradition, and
Reason: Reformed Theologian of the Church of England? (Carlisle: Paternoster,
1997).
[3]
See for instance Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? : Presbyterianism and
English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988);
“Business as Usual: The Immediate Reception of Hooker’s Polity,” Journal of
Ecclesiastical history 52:3 (2001): 456–86; Nigel Voak, Richard Hooker
and Reformed Theology: A Study of Reason, Will, and Grace (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003).
[4]
For an introduction to her book, and a review of its first two chapters, see my
recent post here.
An ongoing review of the remaining chapters in the book will follow over the
next couple weeks at www.swordandploughshare.com.
[5]
For a fuller discussion of this point, see my recent posts here
and here,
and also Steven Wedgeworth’s expansion
of the same with specific reference to Hooker.
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