Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin: Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.

Originally published in Chronicles of Culture, June 1984. Republished with permission.

 

The authors identify “the first recorded reference to Jews in non-Jewish sources” as a report an Egyptian king caused to be written 1200 years before Christ. “Israel is no more,” it boasts. Israel has proved somewhat more resilient than this early critic estimated. The futility of Jew-hatred, which has a history more or less as long as the recorded history of Jew-hatred itself, results primarily from the strength of Jews. Those strengths cannot originate in unrefined nature, for no one imagines Jews to be physically stronger than others, and few today posit an innately superior Jewish intellect. They must come from Judaism itself, from the Covenant with God.

Traditionally, Jews have regarded this source of their strengths as the real object of Jew-hatred. But, as the authors observe, many contemporary explanations of anti-Semitism explain the haters without serious reference to the hated. Scapegoating, economic envy, prejudice, and psychosis may account for some things about anti-Semites, or they may not. What such explanations do not tell us is, why the Jews? They lead us to Jean-Paul Sartre’s conclusion, duly cited here, that Jews were invented by anti-Semites.

The authors defend the traditional understanding that Jew-hatred is about Jews, not merely about hatred and haters. Judaism invokes anti-Semitism, a variant of evil, in at least three ways: by challenging the validity of the non-Jews’ god(s), laws, and national allegiance; by exhorting Jews to act to change the world, not only contemplate it; and by teaching the chosenness, or divine election, of Jews. The authors also make a fourth, much more dubious suggestion. “As a result of the Jews’ commitment to Judaism, they have led lives of a higher quality than their non-Jewish neighbors”; better educated, more temperate, more charitable, with stronger families, Jews provoke resentment. The evidence presented that Jews do enjoy such advantages may convince, but without evidence that non-Jews somehow recognize these advantages the argument fails. Mein Kampf (for example) contains no hint that Hitler resented Jewish virtues, or even recognized them as such. The dilute antisemitism we all see and hear asserts Jewish peculiarity and inferiority, except in anything involving money. Fortunately, this quality-of-life argument disappears from the book after it is made.

The book’s second half contains a survey of Western religions and ideologies, in chronological order, showing their relation to the three plausible provocations to antisemitism. The authors contend that Judaism differed from the ancient religions by insisting on its validity for all peoples, denying the imperial relativism André Malraux praises when he writes, “Rome welcomed into its Pantheon the gods of the defeated.” Furthermore, they say that ancients who disliked the contemplative universalism of the early philosophers could scarcely tolerate the active universalism of Jews, and the doctrine of chosenness exasperated even the sturdy Tacitus.

Later religions imitated Jewish universalism and therefore opposed Judaism all the more vehemently. “If Judaism remained valid, then Christianity was invalid. Therein lie the origins of Christian hatred of the Jews, the most enduring Jew-hatred in history.” A Christian must reply that Jesus teaches hatred of sin and love of sinners—including alleged ‘Christ-killers.’ Insofar as one follows Christianity, one cannot accept the Jewish rejection of Jesus as Messiah, the Jewish rejection of the Gospel. But a Christian cannot extend his rejection of these aspects of Judaism to a hatred of Jews themselves and remain fully Christian. That many Christians sin by making just that extension remains undeniably true and far from trivial.

Islam, equally universal and far more sanguinary, presents a more menacing face than Christianity, especially today. Nonetheless, the authors agree with contemporary Arab publicists who contend that Muslims, over the centuries, have nonetheless treated Jews better than Christians have done. The further claim of such publicists, that Muslims have treated Jews well, does not withstand serious examination. The authors observe that Yemen, the one Muslim country never colonized by the West that harbored Jews, presents a reasonable “test case.” Yemen fails that test, as it featured religiously sanctioned stonings, laws compelling Jews to dress as beggars, and the forced conversion of Jewish orphans. The latter two practices survived as late as the 1940s, when Jews solved the Yemeni ‘Jewish problem’ by emigrating to Israel.

Modern political philosophy resulted in that popular thought-system, or ideology, called ‘the Enlightenment’ by its publicists. Also universalists, Enlightenment partisans offered what is figured as Jewish emancipation in exchange for assimilation, the abandonment of Judaism. Many of the philosophes, including Voltaire and Mirabeau, attacked Judaism; a few did not. This suggests that Enlightenment antisemitism was not entirely accidental. “Most modern Jews, themselves secular, have believed that the demise of religion would lead to the demise of antisemitism. Yet the twentieth century, the most secular century of history, has been the most antisemitic.” Neither has it been especially enlightened. The authors concede that “No violence accompanied Enlightenment antisemitism,” but observe that both inheritors and critics of the Enlightenment—the former mostly on the Left, the latter mostly on the Right—added anti-capitalism to anti-clericalism on the list of encouragements of Jew-hatred. “By the twentieth century, virtually every popular ideology in Europe wanted the Jews to disappear.”

The authors sensibly avoid claiming that earlier antisemitisms caused the Holocaust. “Over the preceding decades and centuries essential elements of Christianity, Marxist and socialism, nationalism, and Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought had ruled the existence of Jews to be intolerable. In the final analysis they all would have opposed what Hitler had done, but without them Hitler could not have done it.” After combining post-Enlightenment, ‘scientific’ racial antisemitism with the ‘cultural’ antisemitism of Richard Wagner and German nationalist antisemitism, Hitler concluded that the final solution to the ‘Jewish problem’ is not to convert the Jews but to kill them.

World War II destroyed the extreme Right as a world power. The Holocaust shocked citizens of the commercial republics comprising what is considered the West—heirs of Christianity and the Enlightenment—into abandoning much of their antisemitism. It is perhaps a measure of the differences between the religion and ideology of the West and those of the East—Islam and Marxism-Leninism—that partisans of the latter pair have if anything intensified their antisemitism. Anti-Zionism, “the first form of Jew-hatred to deny that it hates Jews,” adds hypocrisy to the antisemites’ ragbag of cherished vices. (“In the Museum of Religion and Atheism in Leningrad, an exhibt about Zionism and Israel designates the following as anti-Soviet Zionist material: Jewish prayer shawls, tefillin (phylacteries), and Passover Haggadahs.”) While the authors can hardly be accused of fostering complacency about any source of antisemitism, they insist that the principal threats to Jews today no longer come from the Right but from the Left and from Muslims allied with the Left. They argue that efforts to counteract antisemitism should be focused there.

Of five “possible response[s]” to contemporary antisemitism, the authors reject assimilation as an accommodation to evil. They regard Zionism as worthwhile but limited because Israel remains “the most hated country in the world.” The central and most controversial response, seeking converts, is apparently dismissed: “As Judaism does not hold that it is the only way to God… missionizing is neither necessary nor desirable.” Fighting antisemitic outbreaks by political and other means they judge effective only in regimes of liberty. The final and preferred response is to “affect the values of non-Jews” by disseminating “ethical monotheism”: “The Jewish role is not to bring mankind to Judaism, but to universal moral law.” In this way Judaism, which provokes antisemitism, can also overcome it.

This paradoxical claim needs elaboration. The two basic principles of ethical monotheism are that “ethics need God”—that is, no ethical system can survive without a theistic metaphysical foundation—and that “God’s major demand is ethics.” Ethics without God yields relativism, which yields defenselessness against the secular fanaticisms of Left and Right. “God without ethics” yields just such fanaticisms, and religious ones as well—”crusades and Qaddafi.” Allegedly divine or substitute-divine prerogative (“God” or “History”) inflame ambition, denigrate moderation, invite carnage.

To distinguish between “universal moral law” and Judaism while calling both variations of “ethical monotheism” requires a careful definition of both ethics and God. The doctrine of chosenness, the third of the three plausible Jewish provocations to antisemitism, becomes crucial here. The authors quote Yakov Malik, Soviet ambassador to the United Nations in 1973, who cited this doctrine as ‘proof’ that Zionism is racism. If public opinion polls are accurate, they show that even Americans view the claim of chosenness with suspicion, even though it is clearly enunciated in the Bible. The authors contend that chosenness does not entail superiority or privilege but obligation and suffering, that anyone who converts becomes a Jews and thereby becomes chosen.  One may find a resemblance here to the Christian doctrine of grace or even, much more remotely, to the Marxist doctrine of ‘class consciousness.’

Chosenness is where Judaism and “universal moral law” can collide. Antisemitism “is ultimately a hatred of higher standards,” the authors write, a vague formulation that comports well with “universal moral law.” If Jew-hatred is hatred of people insofar as they partake in Judaism, and if Judaism teaches that some people choose God and that God chooses some people, impersonal laws or “standards” do not constitute absolute reality. Chosenness means not only God-as-standard, a Platonic or neo-Platonic god, but a God Who chooses. This after all is the only possible basis of the claims that “ethics need God” and that “God’s major demand is ethics”; choice and ethics are inseparable. Not any choice, but the right choice: Judaism requires the God and the chosen people of Judaism. Upon reflection, then, the authors’ rejection of “missionizing” turns out to be less than convincing—unless they prefer “universal moral law” to Judaism. If so, it is difficult to see what they mean. Many religions hold up high moral standards, so hatred of such standards cannot explain antisemitism.

Indeed, law does not necessarily imply a lawgiver in the traditional sense. Modern scientists, who act on principle as if atheism were true, seek ‘laws of nature,’ a nature without purpose. In a book that contains a discussion of antisemitism ranging from Abelard to Zeno and from antiquity to the present, it is astonishing that there is not a single mention of Spinoza. A philosopher has described Spinoza as “the greatest man of Jewish origin who had openly denied the truth of Judaism and had ceased to belong to the Jewish people without becoming a Christian.” What Spinoza became, of course, was a proponent of universal natural law—not to be confused, in his case, with universal moral law. He is the first modern antisemite of Jewish origin. He leads political philosophers farther along the road that leads to Marx’s class consciousness as a replacement for chosenness and grace. As with so much antisemitism, this too has been futile.

Why the Jews? does not finally answer its own question. To do so would be to account for God and for rebellion against God. Judaism itself does not ‘account for’ these. It praises and condemns; it asserts, refusing to suggest that human beings can explain the fundamental. We can explain some things partly, however, and these authors do better in that than most of their contemporaries. They do so by taking Judaism seriously in terms resembling its own terms instead of terms imposed by its enemies. We begin to understand antisemitism only if we rediscover the terms of Judaism.

 

Richard Hooker: Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. In John Keble, ed.: The Works of Mr. Richard Hooker. 3 volumes. Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1874.

Robert K. Faulkner: Richard Hooker and the Politics of a Christian England. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981.

“The judicious Hooker,” John Locke called him, borrowing a phrase from Richard Hooker’s admiring contemporary, Sir William Cooper, who also wrote the epitaph incised on his friend’s gravestone. With “the old Adam of religious warfare” still “before our eyes,” Robert K. Faulkner suggests that we can still learn much from Hooker’s “diagnosis of religious strife and of the civic possibilities and problems endemic to religious zeal” (7). Hooker’s diagnosis and prescriptions earned him his reputation for judiciousness; Faulkner “weighs his judiciousness, so to speak.” “His was a mixture of Christianity and Aristotelianism—and it is an old question whether these two mix well…. The most serious task of a student of Hooker is to clarify the consistency of this mixture and, fundamentally, the merits of each part” (9). To undertake this task seriously, one must consider both Hooker’s Laws and Hooker’s circumstance. Prudence or practical wisdom guides men in the navigation of circumstance; both Jesus and Aristotle commend the virtue.

Faulkner considers Hooker’s circumstance in Elizabethan England in Part I of his book. In its first chapter, he describes a weak Anglican Church in need of a new foundation, a church endangered by three classes of external enemies: “atheists, Catholics, and [Protestant] reformers” (19). Each of these receives a chapter’s attention. Perhaps the most interesting facts brought to light concern the Elizabethans’ firsthand knowledge of Machiavelli, which was more extensive than many scholars recognize. His Art of War was translated and published in 1563, with a dedication to the queen. The Prince and the Discourses were not translated until the 1600s, after Hooker’s death, but they were circulated in manuscript long before that. Faulkner meticulously describes Hooker’s subtle response to those “wise malignants,” the Machiavellians, later showing how the Christian zealotry of the reformers would “leave the church defenseless” against such worldly wisdom (47). As a defense against these extremes, Hooker explores reconciliation or alliance with the Roman church, an institution with much experience in dealing with extremes. Hooker “restores practical judgment to reformed theology” (52), an accomplishment one appreciates only after seeing that Christianity heightens the religio-political problem by advancing a doctrine of “faith in other-worldly substance, in Christ’s saving grace” (49). By exacerbating the zeal and fear of the Christian flock, reformers diminished “deference, judgment, and moderation” (55)—all required for decent politics. Hooker attempts to reconcile the faith behind Christian zeal and fear with the practical reason politics requires. He does so by arguing that since the end of the age of prophecy, “grace illuminates now by prompting reason” (57). “The root of the church’s problem, and of Hooker’s fears, is the conviction of preacher and believer that through the Spirit of God they speak the Word of God,” thus animating believers to pursue “without limit the unlimited good” in a dangerous temper of high moral dudgeon (49).

Hooker addresses the Preface of his work to the would-be reformers of the ecclesiastical laws and orders of the Church of England, reformers exemplified by the English Calvinist Walter Travers whose 1574 treatise, “The Book of Discipline,” “claimed a strict New Testament warrant” for specific laws and orders that even “Calvin did not exactly claim” (41). Devout, well-educated, wealthier than the Anglicans but less aristocratic in their politics, the reformers controlled the House of Commons from the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign. Against them, Hooker asserts, “The present form of church-government which the laws of this land have established is such, as no law of God nor reason of man hath hitherto been alleged of force sufficient to prove they do ill, who to the uttermost of their power withstand [i.e., support] the alteration thereof” (Preface, Keble Vol. 1, 127).

Hooker praises Reformation “founder” John Calvin as “incomparably the wisest man that ever the French church did enjoy, since the hour it enjoyed him” (Preface, Vol. 1, 127), reminding his English epigoni that in Geneva Calvin sought not to divide the Church but to unify it, propounding a single, authoritative set of doctrines founded upon a brilliant and scholarly exegesis of the Bible. Calvin’s “discipline” consisted of a standing ecclesiastical court consisting of Christian ministers with lifetime tenure sitting alongside laymen elected annually; the lay judges would outnumber the clerics by two to one, but Hooker observes that the ministers would likely dominate the tribunal, given their superior learning and stature within the Church. The court would “have the care of all men’s manners, power of determining all kind of ecclesiastical causes, and authority to convent, to control, to punish, as far as with excommunication, whomsoever they should think worthy, none either small or great excepted” (Preface, Vol. 1, 132). Like Aristotle, Hooker maintains that moral thought rightly addresses the circumstances in which men act, and he judges Calvin’s proposal good: “This device I see not how the wisest at that time living could have bettered, if we duly consider what the present estate of Geneva did then require” (Preface, Vol. 1, 132). But even in Geneva, dissenters arose to complain that “such a discipline was little better than Popish tyranny disguised and tendered unto them under a new form” (Preface, Vol. 1, 133)—precisely the charge leveled by English Calvinists against the Church of England. The dissenters relented only when they “thought it better to be somewhat hardly yoked at home, than for ever abroad discredited” for initiating a reform movement the results of which they themselves could not stomach (Preface, Vol. 1, 135).

Hooker thus sets himself the task of sifting truth from error in Calvin’s writings, beginning with an account of how he (or anyone else) should proceed with a just assessment of another’s ideas. “The first mean whereby nature teacheth men to judge good from evil, as well in laws as in other things, is the force of their own discretion” (Preface, Vol. 1, 143). By discretion he means both prudence and conscience. Second, more complex truths must be studied by men who “spend their whole time” doing so (Preface, Vol. 1, 144); there is what Aristotle (and indeed Thomas Jefferson) calls a natural aristocracy who will best inquire into such matters. God is not a God of sedition; the people should put themselves forward as judges in their own case when it comes to the regime (“regiment,” in Hooker’s vocabulary) of either a “civil polity” or and “ecclesiastical polity” (Preface, Vol. 1, 145).

Against this natural-aristocratic regime, reformers make appeal to the people. “The method of winning the people’s affection unto a general liking of ‘the cause’ (for so ye term it)” amounts to a form of demagogic speech in which “the faults especially of higher callings are ripped up with marvelous exceeding severity and sharpness of reproof,” redounding to the prestige of the indignant speakers; an imputation of “all faults and corruptions, wherewith the world aboundeth, unto the kind of ecclesiastical government established”; proposals for “their own form of church-government, as the only sovereign remedy of all evils”; interpreting Scripture so as to make the people “think that every thing soundeth towards the advancement of that discipline”; and finally to claims of “special illumination of the Holy Ghost” (Preface, Vol. 1, 146-150). On this latter point, Hooker intervenes to remark that there are “but two ways whereby the Spirit leadeth men into all truth”: the “extraordinary” way of direct revelation, opened by God only to a very few, and the “common” way, which is reason. But specific revelation of divine law has passed with the passing of the last prophet, Jesus, leaving subsequent generations with only Scripture, nature, and the natural capacity of reasoning. No generation before this one has been able to conjure such radical ecclesiastical reforms as proposed by English Calvinists: “We require you to find out but one church upon the face of the whole earth, that hath been ordered by your disciple, or hath not been ordered by our ours, that is to say, by episcopal regiment, [since] the time that the blessed Apostles were here conversant” (Preface, Vol. 1, 156).

Again summoning Aristotelian philosophy, Hooker asserts that the proofs the reformers put forward have no “demonstrative” or logically “necessary” weight such that “the mind cannot choose but inwardly assent” (Preface, Vol. 1, 170). At best they can assert “probabilities” concerning the governance of the early Church. Probable reasoning is the very stuff of the prudence Aristotle commends, but it too speaks against the reformers, inasmuch as the “peace and quietness” of civil and ecclesiastical polity alike requires that “the probable voice of every entire society or body politic overrule all private of like nature in the same body” (Preface, Vol. 1, 171). Hooker calls for a conference for discussing such matters, and his book amounts to a massive prolegomena to such a discussion of the true nature of religious authority.

He outlines eight topics, to be addressed in each of the eight books of the “Laws”: a discussion of law in general—what it is, what “kinds of laws there are, and what force they are of according to each kind”; a discussion of divine law, and specifically the reformers’ doctrine of sola scriptura, that Scripture should be the only rule of all our actions; that Scripture sets down the laws of ecclesiastical polity, and does so inalterably; an answer to the reformers’ claim that the institutional forms of the Church of England have been corrupted by “manifold popish rites and ceremonies”; an answer to the charge that Anglican prayer, sacraments, and practices of consecrating men to the ministry are un-Scriptural; a critique of the reformers’ demand that laypersons join the ranks of the governing elders of the Church; a critique of the reformers’ objection to the Anglican bishops’ place of honor in the Church, and their power over other pastors; and finally, a discussion of the question whether the monarch may rule the Church within the confines of “the whole body politic” of England (Preface, Vol. 1, 172-173). “I have endeavored throughout the body of this whole discourse, that every former part might give strength unto all that follow, and that every later [part] bring some light unto all before” (Book I, chapter 1, Vol. I, 199). Hooker thus adjures his reader to read him as it were reflexively.

“The greatest danger of all” in the reformers’ cause may be seen in their claim that their proposals for ecclesiastical and civil regime change amount to expressions of “the absolute commandment of Almighty God,” which “must be received although the world by receiving it should be clean turned upside down” (Preface, Vol. 1, 182). “Which restless levity they did interpret to be their growing to spiritual perfection, and a proceeding from faith to faith” (Preface, Vol. 1, 185), “never suffering them to take rest till they have brought their speculations into practice” (190).

As Faulkner observes, in Hooker “priority of law displaces human judgment from its crowning place in practical virtue” (62), where Aristotle had placed it. What, then, are “the grounds and first original causes” of “good laws” (Book I, chapter i., Vol. 1, 198)? There is really one ground: “the Eternal” or, more exactly, God—the Person one encounters in Scripture, not the impersonal ‘First Cause’ of Aristotle. God works through law, both revealed and natural. Law aims at “some fore-conceived end for which it worketh,” and the law must be “fit to obtain” the end the lawgiver aims at (I. ii. Vol. 1, 200); both its end and the means give a law its goodness.  Law itself is “that which doth assign unto each thing the kind, that which doth moderate the force and power, that which doth appoint the form and measure, of working”; limited by both its end and its way of operating, law provides regularity to Being, as seen in one word for law, regulation (I. ii. Vol. 1, 200). Although God as originator of all law cannot be said to be subject to law, “the being of god is a kind of law to his working,” perfecting his work even within himself; Hooker calls eternal law the “natural, necessary, and internal operations of God,” namely, “the Generation of the Son, the Proceeding of the Spirit” (I. ii. Vol. 1, 200). Through the external operations of God, “all things are” (I. ii. 201). Reason depends upon the perception of kinds for the operation of the principle of contradiction which reason is. And with respect to ends, the Good consists not merely in God’s will but in “the Counsel of his own will,” in His “wise resolution”—”albeit that reason be to us in some things so secret, that it forceth the wit of man to stand, as the blessed Apostle himself doth, amazed thereat” (I. ii. Vol. 1, 203). Hooker may mean that God, as both the First and Last ’cause’ of all else, the originator of Creation, its lawgiver, and the One who sets its end or purpose, must be the very definition of ‘the Good.’ The Good is personal, not a principle or idea.

Be this as it may, Hooker’s emphasis on the lawfulness of nature, on natural law instead of (as in Aristotle, for the most part, natural right) brings nature into closer consonance with the personal, Creator-God of the Bible. In additional to eternal law, Hooker identifies natural law (itself divided into involuntary and voluntary, unthinkingly obeyed and consented to); celestial law, which governs angels; rational law, which applies to rational creatures in this sub-celestial world; divine law, known only by “special revelation” (I. iii. Vol. 1, 205); and human law or expediency. Natural law is divine in the sense that God has ordained it; “Nature… is nothing else but God’s instrument,” the product of His art (I. iii. Vol. 1, 210). Goodness in all natural beings consists of achievement of their divinely-ordained end or perfection. Men differ from angels because they are not born with “full and complete knowledge in the highest degree that can be imparted to them”; indeed, a birth they have no understanding or knowledge at all—the human soul being “at the first as a book, wherein nothing is and yet all things may be imprinted” (I. vi. Vol. 1, 217). Men differ from beasts in their capacity to learn what angels know, by means of a rational ascent in their “conceits” or ideas, ideas formed as we perceive “contradictions in speech” and distinguish true from false, good from evil, over time (I. vi. Vol. 1, 218). Reason can be theoretical—as seen “in philosophers, who best know the nature both of fire and gold”—or practical—as seen in artisans whose “common sense” enables them in the practice of their art to know when the fire has heated the gold sufficiently for it to be worked into the shape desired (I. vii. Vol. 1, 219). Although “understanding” is “eye” which perceives goodness, reason is the “light of that eye” (I. vii. Vol. 1, 220). For Hooker, reason first of all deduces conduct from law (Faulkner, 63).

Because “man in perfection of nature” is “made in the likeness of his Maker,” he too can choose good or evil, rationally. Whereas appetite directs him to “sensible” goods, the will can override appetite and aim at “that good which Reason doth lead us to seek”; whereas “Appetite is the Will’s solicitor,” “Will is Appetite’s controller” (I. vii. Vol. 1, 221). “The Laws of well-doing are the dictates of right Reason” (I. vii. Vol. 1, 222). It is therefore crucial that reason and the good beheld by noetic understanding or “intuitive intellectual judgment” (I. viii. Vol. 1, 228)  in turn control the will, both in terms of ends and also in terms of means—the practical reason which separates the possible from the impossible. Otherwise, long-inured custom or habit will rule the will, drawing strength from the “sensible Goodness” which is “most apparent, near, and present” instead of the insensible or non-material goodness which we perceive only by the regular exercise of reason, a “wearisome labor” to which we are not ordinarily inclined (I. vii. Vol. 1, 223-224). Hooker concurs with Aristotle in seeing a “natural thirst for knowledge” in the human soul, but other natural thirsts call more insistently (I. vii. 224), as seen in “this present age,” which is “full of tongue and weak of brain” (I. viii. Vol. 1, 226). All of this makes Hooker more austere than Aristotle, as Faulkner remarks (92-93).

Although custom can lead men astray, long-settled opinions “of all men generally”—across the nations—deserve respect because “that which all men have at all times learned, Nature herself must needs have taught; and God being the author of Nature, her voice is but his instrument” (I. viii. 226).  This respect nonetheless seeks the rational grounds of reality, the “axioms or principles” of thought, such as “the greater good is to be chosen before the less” (I. viii. 228). Such axioms usually express universally-held opinions in a manner useful to further rational deliberation, as “they require no proof or further discourse” (I. viii. 229). Human self-knowledge is “the mother of all those principles” which collectively constitute the “Law of Nature, whereby human actions are framed” (I. viii. 230), as for example the superiority of soul to body, and of the soul’s intellect to the soul’s appetites. Jesus’ command to love God and love neighbor as oneself derives from natural reason—a remarkable claim indeed, inasmuch as Jesus announces the Great Commandment as the sum and substance of God’s law revealed to Moses. The command to love my neighbor as myself flows from my “seeing those things which are equal”—in this case, equally human—”must needs all have one measure” (I. viii. Vol. 1, 231); if I love myself, I must love my neighbor as a being equal fundamentally equal to myself. The natural law discovered by reason can be “mandatory” (as here), “permissive” (“declaring only what may be done”), or “admonitory” (“opening what is the most convenient for us to do”) (I. viii. Vol. 1, 232). Within these broad boundaries, “the Law of Reason or human Nature is that which men by discourse of natural Reason have rightly found out themselves to be for ever bound unto in their actions” (I. viii. Vol. 1, 233).

But if so, where does revelation come in? It enters because “there is no kind of faculty or power in man or any other creature, which can rightly perform the functions allotted to it, without perpetual aid and concurrence of that Supreme Cause of all things” (I. viii. Vol. 1, 236). Without the lawful regularity imparted by God to the nature He created, and without perception of that regularity by those creatures capable of perception (rational or noetic perception in man’s case), God’s creations quickly swerve off-course. Hooker “understands theoretical inquiry as guided and illuminated by a revealed way” (Faulkner, 67). Although Hooker does make room for conscience, perhaps out of his “distrust of anything like the reformers’ internal light” and perhaps because he puts no little emphasis on human sinfulness, he makes less of it than the greatest of the Christian Aristotelians, Thomas Aquinas (Faulkner 86).

God has so created man as to make him insufficient to furnish his own needs by himself for “a life as our nature doth desire, a life fit for the dignity of man” (I. x. Vol. 1, 239). Aristotle rightly perceived God’s creation by calling man a political animal, one which requires both “sociable life and fellowship” on the one hand and government consisting of “an order expressly or secretly agreed upon touching the manner of their union in living together”—”the Law of a Commonweal, the very soul of a politic body, the parts whereof are by law animated, held together, and set on work in such actions, as the common good requireth” (I. x. Vol. 1, 239). The “depraved mind” of man, “little better than a wild beast,” will otherwise swerve away from God’s way, marked in human nature considered in its perfection or idea (I. x. Vol. 1, 240). Man’s depravity comes out when man “take[s] it upon him[self] to determine his own right,” and the rights of those he loves, toward which every man is partial, all-too-partial (I. x. Vol. 1, 242). To prevent this, men join in civil societies governed by “the assent of them who are to be governed” (I. x. Vol. 1, 242). The “arch-philosopher” Aristotle distinguishes between paternal rule in the household, based on “the natural superiority of fathers,” and the consensual rule of those fathers when the band together to form a civil society. The character of that civil society will vary according to the “regiment” or regime consented to; “Nature tieth not to any one, but leaveth the choice as a thing arbitrary” (I. x. Vol. 1, 243). This is not to say that any regime is as good as any other; a good regime will counterbalance human selfishness with rewards and punishments that incline us toward the common good of our civil society, that good being seen in the law of nature and reinforced by positive or man-made law. “Laws do not only teach what is good, but they enjoin it, they have in them a certain constraining force” (I. x. Vol. 1, 245).

How to (as we now say) ‘institutionalize’ such consent to a given regime? Hooker is well aware of the principle of representation, whereby large civil societies can elect “agents” who act “in our behalf” to enact laws “no less effectually to bind us than if ourselves had done it in person” (I. x. Vol. 1, 246). Such laws rightly stand, sometimes for centuries, so long as they are not revoked afterwards “by the like universal agreement” (I. x. Vol. 1, 246). As to the choice of the regime itself, “law-makers must have an eye to the place where, and to the men amongst whom” the constitutional law will rule, as “one kind of laws cannot serve for all kinds of regiment” (I. x. Vol. 1, 247). Again, Hooker looks to Aristotle and his regime types: democracy and oligarchy especially, which require different sets of laws in order to function. Such conventional or positive laws will then add duties to the natural law which pre-exists them.

The world will then consist of human beings governed by the law of nature, divided (as nature itself requires) into civil societies governed by regimes, systems of conventional law established by human rulers. The relations among these regimes are in turn governed by “a third kind of law,” the “Law of Nations” (I. x. Vol. 1, 250). The law of nations reflects man’s natural sociality as seen among civil societies, just as constitutional and other conventional laws reflect man’s natural sociality as seen among individuals. It was in this sense that Socrates “professed himself a citizen, not of this or that commonwealth, but of the world” (I. x. Vol. 1, 250); in her capacity as the ruler of her civil society, the Queen of Sheba desired to visit her ruling counterpart, Solomon. “The strength and virtue of that law is such that no particular nation can lawfully prejudice the same by any their several laws and ordinances, more than a man by his private resolutions the law of the whole commonwealth or state wherein he liveth” (I. x. Vol. 1, 251); Hooker here enunciates the principle of the Peace of Westphalia, enacted a half-century after his death.

How then does Scriptural or revealed law fit in? Hooker regards it as the invisible consummation of the human desire for happiness, the true Aristotelian summum bonum unknown to Aristotle himself. Man desires not only happiness but infinite happiness. His natural desires point him to God, “our felicity and bliss” (I. xi. Vol. 1, 254), even as our natural limitation, our mortality, frustrates us.  We are happy “when fully we enjoy God, even as an object wherein the powers of our souls are satisfied even with everlasting delight” (I. xi. Vol. 1, 254). “He is that sea of Goodness whereof whoso tastest shall thirst no more” (I. xi. Vol. 1, 255-256). Man thus seeks “a triple perfection”: sensual, intellectual and spiritual—the last being impossible to attain but by supernatural means, beyond “the capacity of reason” (I. xi. Vol. 1, 257) but not beyond the capacity of God to reveal. For man’s part, while simply doing good sufficed for Adam in pleasing God, post-lapserian human nature requires what have long been known as the ‘theological’ virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity, “without which there can be no salvation” (I. xi. Vol. 1, 262). This notwithstanding, the very fact that Scripture itself comprehends laws of nature, that “Natural Right” which “exacteth those general duties that concern men naturally even as they are men” (I. xii. Vol. 1, 262). God’s revealed law teaches “such natural duties as could not by light of Nature easily have been known,” given the sinfulness which now clouds our natural reason (I. xiii. Vol. 1, 264). God has commanded that His revealed law be reduced to writing to avoid the hazards of verbal “report, how maimed and deformed it becometh” (I. xiii. Vol. 1, 266). “The principal intent of Scripture is to deliver the laws of duties supernatural,” unblemished by fallible human speech (I. xiii. Vol. 1, 267). Such duties “are appointed of God to supply the defect of those natural ways of salvation, by which we are not now able to attain thereunto” (I. xv. Vol. 1, 273). Nature and Scripture thus “do serve in such full sort, that they both jointly and not severally either of them be so complete, that unto everlasting felicity we need not the knowledge of any thing more than these two may easily furnish with on all sides”; to “add traditions as a part of supernatural necessary truth” (as Roman Catholics do) is a mistake (I. xiv. Vol. 1, 271). As Faulkner put it, “Reason finds its laws—but reason unspotted by the original sin which revelation reveals”; “the reason that knows truly is the reason aided by grace” (73-74).

To this point it has seemed that positive laws are human or conventional. Many are, but Hooker now clarifies his idea. Positive laws may also be of divine origin; they differ from natural laws not in their origin but in their impermanence. Natural laws “always bind”; positive laws bind “only after they have been expressly and wittingly imposed” (by God or man) and only until they are expressly and wittingly rescinded (by God or man), although some are never rescinded and thus take on a sort of contingent permanence (I. xv. Vol. 1. 272-273). Positive laws may be among individuals (promises to God or to other men), civil (as in the “constitutions peculiar unto each particular commonweal”), military (the law of heraldry) or “judicial” (as seen in the judgments of God on Israel) (I. xv. Vol. 1, 273). “Although no laws but positive be mutable, yet all are not mutable which may be positive… according as the matter itself is concerning which they were first made” (I. xv. Vol. 1, 273). But they are not eternal and they are not natural, either. They are of great importance because they include laws that human beings would otherwise not know, not devise, and thus never regularly obey. “What can be more immediate to our salvation than our persuasion concerning the law of Christ towards his Church?” (I. xvi. Vol. 1, 279). Whereas “in moral actions, divine law helpeth exceedingly the law of reason to guide man’s life,” in “supernatural [matters] it alone guideth” (I. xvi. Vol. 1, 281).

Hooker gives the example of food. The senses tell us what is food and what is not; reason tells us what food is good (discernment) and how much of it is good (moderation); divine laws tell Jews the supernatural uses of food. The law of Christ toward his Church may or may not enjoin dietary laws in a given Christian denomination, but these are not to be imposed on other denominations, as they are a matter of convenience (I. xvi. Vol. 1, 285). This latitude forms the basis of a Christian-Aristotelian liberalism (to deploy a term invented later) that enables Christians to limit their quarrels with other Christians.

Hooker’s distinctive liberalism also makes room for a right to disobedience to civil law. “The public power of all societies is above every soul contained in the same societies,” and it “give[s] law unto all that are under it; which laws in such case we must obey, unless there be reason shewed which may necessarily enforce that the law of Reason or of God doth enjoin the contrary” (I. xvi. Vol. 1, 281). Merely “probable” reasonings must be overruled, however, lest “we take away all possibility of sociable life in the world” (I. xvi. Vol. 1, 281). This means that “the best men otherwise are not always the best in regard of society”; Hooker wryly observes that the Calvinist opponents of the Church of England are individuals “whose betters amongst men could be hardly found, if they did not live amongst men, but in some wilderness by themselves” (I. xvi. Vol. 1, 282).

Hooker takes up the several socially and politically corrosive claims of his opponents in the remaining seven books. Book II concerns their insistence on the doctrine of sola Scriptura, “that Scripture is the only rule of all things which in this life may be done by man” (II. title. Vol. 1, 286). The laws of the English ecclesiastical polity are positive laws framed by the Church of England for the Church of England. But do they conform to the Bible, even when they require actions not specifically prescribed in the Bible? Hooker stipulates two “restraints” on the discussion: to stay “within the compass of moral actions, actions which have in them vice or virtue”; to stay within “the law of Reason” with regard to proof-texting, by which he means he will keep the debate focused on the “general axioms” of Scripture and not on any one text.

If wisdom is the right guide to moral action, then it must be admitted that “wisdom hath diversely imparted her treasures unto the world” by means of Scripture but also “the glorious works of Nature,” “spiritual influence,” and “worldly experience and practice” (II. i. Vol. 1, 290). We glorify God “most effectually” by obeying him, and we obey him not only by evangelical activity but even by those actions “we naturally perform”—moving, sleeping, “tak[ing] the cup at the hand of our friend” (II. i. Vol. 1, 291). God ordained nature as much as He ordained Scripture, all to His glory, all governed by one or more of the various kinds of laws He set down. Further, Scripture cannot be self-validating, “for if any one book of Scripture did give testimony to all, yet still that Scripture which giveth credit to the rest would require another Scripture to give credit unto it” (II. iv. Vol. 1, 295). Only God Himself, as the Holy Spirit, can fully assure us of the validity of Scripture, although the natural order and “natural arguments”—themselves used by the prophets and the Apostles—also reinforce our impression of Scripture’s truth (II. iv. Vol. 1, 295).

Hooker charges that the real aim of those who preach sola Scriptura has been to undermine the “orders, laws, and constitutions in the Church”; if accomplished, he predicts, this task would efface the Church itself (II. vii. Vol. 1, 318). He regards this as catastrophic because all teaching at least initially requires “the authority of man”—namely, a teacher whose learning makes his interpretation of Scripture credible at least initially to his students, however they may choose to reinterpret his teachings as they grow in learning and experience, seeking “the most infallible certainty which the nature of things can yield” (II. vii. Vol. 1, 321-322). Following Aristotle, Hooker observes that there are degrees and kinds of knowledge: “The greatest assurance with all men is that which we have by plain aspect and intuitive beholding” or noesis; “where we cannot attain unto this, there what appeareth to be true by strong and invincible demonstration” or logic; failing any of these, the mind inclines toward “which way greatest probability leadeth” (II. vii. Vol. 1, 322). Although scriptural proof remains “the strongest proof of all,” there are passages of Scripture the meaning of which remains doubtful, and in such cases “we may lawfully suspend our judgment”; Hooker gives the time of the Fall of Man and angels as an example, inasmuch as the Bible does not tell us when these events occurred (II. vii. Vol. 1, 323). “For men to be tied and led by authority, as it were with a kind of captivity of judgment, and though there be reason to the contrary not to listen unto it, but to follow like beast the first in the herd, they know not nor care not whither, this were brutish” (II. vii. Vol. 1, 325). Authority must yield to reason, but some authority is indispensable to preparing our minds to reason. Thus Hooker navigates between a Church conceived as inherently authoritative (Catholicism) and a Church conceived as following Scripture alone (Calvinism).

To claim that Scripture alone suffices as a guide to moral conduct inclines the reformers to the claim that Scripture alone also provides the materials with which Christians must construct their ecclesiastical polity. Hooker begins his discussion of this claim in Book III by remarking that members of the true, invisible Church are known to God but not to men. Members of the visible Church are known to their fellow-men by their profession of faith and by their obedience to the command of baptism. As a result, Hooker teaches a liberalism within the limits of religion alone: that members of one denomination may “hold fellowship with” members of another denomination, inasmuch as (for example) many Catholics will be members in good standing in the invisible Church (III. i. Vol. 1, 347), even if they do not belong to “the sounder part of the visible Church” (III. i. Vol. 1, 342). Indeed, “for preservation of Christianity there is not any thing more needful” in a time of violent religious warfare “that such as are of the visible Church have mutual fellowship and society one with another” (III. i. Vol. 1, 351). By “ecclesiastical polity” Hooker means “a form of ordering the public spiritual affairs of the Church of God” (III. i. Vol. 1, 352); the public spiritual affairs of the Church of God are those teachings and practices necessary to salvation. The path must be God’s path, yet that path may be “laid with gravel, or set with grass, or paved with stone” without altering the course of the path itself (III. iii. Vol. 1, 356). The nature of the path’s surface is a matter of discretion and convenience, worthy of defense but not bitter dispute or warfare.

Here reason enters in. Although some properties of God can be known only by “the special operation of God’s good grace and Spirit”—the rising of Christ from the dead, for example—the “attentive consideration of heaven and earth” can and has led even “mere natural men” (i. e. men exercising only natural powers of observation and thought) to some knowledge of God (III. viii. Vol. 1, 367). As the Apostle Paul teaches, in Hooker’s words, “nature hath need of grace, whereunto I hope we are not opposite, by holding that grace hath use of nature” (III. viii. Vol. 1, 367). And while Paul warns against allowing “philosophy and vain deceit” to spoil us, he means false philosophy; “true and sound knowledge attained by natural discourse of reason” is no less solid for being un-Scriptural (III. viii. Vol. 1, 367). Moreover, respecting practical reason, “he that exorteth to beware of an enemy’s policy does not give counsel to be impolitic, but rather to use all provident foresight and circumspection, lest our simplicity be overreached by cunning sleights” (III. viii. Vol. 1, 368). As for false doctrine, it too “prevaileth only by a counterfeit show of reason,” the remedy for which is not blind faith of Scripture but right reasoning (III. viii. Vol. 1, 368). Finally, Hooker points to the fact of very substantial knowledge attained by non-Christian peoples: the mathematics of Egypt and Chaldea (“wherewith Moses and Daniel were furnished”); the “rational and oratorical wisdom” of Greece (which the Apostle Paul brought from Tarsus”); and of course the magnificent legal erudition of Israel, along with the “natural moral, and civil wisdom exhibited by King Solomon (III. viii. Vol. 1, 370).

Without natural reason, there is no understanding of Scripture in the first place. Beasts don’t read the Bible or anything else, and children do not read it with much comprehension. “Theology, what is it but the science of things divine? What science can be attained unto without the help of natural discourse and reason?” (III. viii. Vol. 1, 374). “In vain it were to speak of any thing of God, but that by reason men are able somewhat to judge of that they hear, and by discourse to discern how consonant it is to truth” (III. viii. Vol. 1, 374). This takes nothing away from the need for divine revelation, or the grace we need to accept those elements of it that our natural powers cannot apprehend without its aid. But God did not give us our natural powers utterly in vain, however they may have been corrupted by sin; they help us sift true from false prophecy by the very power of reason, discerning contradictions between what false prophets say and what Scripture says. “The light, therefore, which the star of natural reason and wisdom casteth, is too bright to be obscured by the mist of a word or two uttered to diminish that opinion which justly hath been received concerning the force and virtue thereof, even in matters that touch most nearly the principal duties of men and the glory of the eternal God” (III. viii. Vol. 1, 379). The Spirit of God does not contradict natural reason but instead “aid[s] and direct[s]” men toward “what laws are expedient to be made for the guiding of his Church, over and besides them that are in Scripture” (III. viii. Vol. 1, 380). In this, Hooker acknowledges Thomas Aquinas, who regarded sound human laws as logical deductions from the “undemonstrable principles” of revelation, adjusted to the circumstances of the legislators constrained by both the law of God and the law of nature (III. ix. Vol. 1, 381-382).

Natural reason enables us to adjust laws to changing circumstances, “the place and persons for which they are made” (III. x. Vol. 1, 398). “God never ordained any thing that could be bettered. Yet many things he hath that have been changed, and that for better” (III. x. Vol. 1, 388). New articles of faith and doctrine, no: but “new laws of government what commonwealth or church is there which maketh not either at one time or another?” (III, x. Vol. 1, 389). Means must shift even if ends do not. The ‘inward’ law of faith never changes, but “the outward order and polity” does, and rightly so (III. x. Vol. 1, 389) because human actions change with circumstances or else fail to attain the purposes of faithful Christians. This is the political part of Christian liberty, seen in both commonwealth and church. We Church of England Christians “have no where altered the laws of Christ further than in such particularities only as have the nature of things changeable according to the difference of times, places, persons, and other the like circumstances” (III. xi. Vol. 1, 406).

The Calvinists also criticized the Church of England for retaining “Popish orders, rites, and ceremonies” the reformers had banished from their churches (IV, title. Vol. 1, 416). Hooker begins his reply by defending the need for ceremony in church services. While the written Word that is Scripture and the spoken words of Christian preachers remain central to the service, it remains true that the eye, not the ear, is “the liveliest and most apprehensive sense of all other,” “fittest to make a deep and strong impression” (IV. i. Vol. 1, 418). Accordingly, “we must not think but that there is some ground of reason even in nature, whereby it cometh to pass that no nation under heaven either doth or ever did suffer public actions which are of weight, whether they be civil and temporal, or else spiritual and sacred, to pass without some visible solemnity”; the “sensible actions” of the priest supplements verbal teaching (IV. i. Vol. 1, 419). Calvinists who throw up their hands in horror at ceremonies identical or similar to those of Rome fail to ask the real question: Are these “profitable” and “good”? (IV. iv. 429). If so, why not retain them? The earliest Christian churches sometimes borrowed elements of pagan ceremony, and paganism was much less Christian than Catholicism is. The charge of “popishness” smacks of polemic and prejudice, not Scripture and reason; “the freer our minds are from all distempered affections, the sounder and better is our judgment” (IV. ix. Vol. 1, 446)—as good a summary as Hooker offers of his own credo. As for the Calvinists, “to remove out of the Church whereat they shew themselves to be sorrowful, would be, as we are persuaded, hurtful if not pernicious thereunto. Till they be able to persuade the contrary, they must and will I doubt not find out some other good means to cheer up themselves” (IV. x. Vol. 1, 449). In writing that sentence, Hooker found his own good means to the purpose.

Reformers would take such ecclesiastical laws and ceremonies as are need from Jewish practice. Hooker concurs, to a point. With respect to law, God Himself set down seven commands to the remnants of the human race after the Flood: to live under “some form of regiment under public laws”; “to serve and call upon the name of God”; to reject idolatry; to avoid bloodshed; to “abhor all unclean knowledge in the flesh”; to “commit no rapine”; and not to eat any living creature without draining it of blood (IV. xi. Vol. 1, 456). While the laws of Moses were for the Israelites, the Noachide Commandments were universally authoritative. Similarly, although Jesus epitomized and simplified Mosaic Law with the Great Commandment, this does not ban altars, priests, and some forms of sacrifice from Christian churches; as with the Noachide Commandments, a core set of practices remains valid universally, with or without the details of Mosaic law and Temple ceremonies.

Calvinists find such traces of Roman Catholic ceremonies offensive. Hooker replies that the mere fact that some people at offended or scandalized by such ceremonies doesn’t make them scandalous in the eyes of God, “scandalous and wicked in their very nature” (IV. xii. Vol. 1, 466). No one demands that the names of the months and days in the Roman calendar be changed on account of their pagan origins; Augustus was no Christian, but we do not for that reason re-name the month of August. “Customs once established and confirmed by long use, being presently without harm, are not in regard of their corrupt original to be held scandalous” (IV. xii. Vol. 1, 467). “Preservation of peace and unity among Christian churches by all good means” rightly overbears such squabbles (IV. xiii. Vol. 1, 472). Hooker suspects that Calvinists love their own service precisely because it is their own, in which case “they must in equity allow us to be like unto them in this affection” (IV. xiii. Vol. 1, 480). He adds to this the Aristotelian observation that in general laws should not be revised if the proposed reform is small, inasmuch as “to bear a tolerable sore is better than to venture on a dangerous remedy” (IV. xiv. Vol. 1, 482). A “reasonable moderation” ought to prevail in this and much else in the ecclesiastical polity (IV. xiv. Vol. 1, 485). With a final touch of gentle and pious irony, Hooker suggests, “If any refuse to believe us disputing for the verity of religion established, let them believe God himself thus miraculously working for it, and wish life even for ever and ever unto that glorious and sacred instrument whereby he worketh” (IV. xiv. Vol. 1, 488).

The first four books of Hooker’s Laws were the only ones published in his lifetime. As it happened, the Fifth Book marks a new beginning, although Hooker continues to address the criticisms of the reformers. He marks this beginning with an epistle dedicatory to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the man most immediately responsible for the enforcement of the laws of ecclesiastical polity in England. By far the longest part of the work, the Fifth Book addresses the practical core of the Hooker’s topic: the reformers’ complaint that the Church of England misconceives the “public duties of the Christian religion” and thereby lends itself to abuse of the power to maintain the order of the Church by the persons, the rulers, of the Church, with the consequent corruption of Church “laws and proceedings,” as well (V. Title. 2, 13). The Archbishop might very well consider himself the locus of the controversy.

Hooker presents the Archbishop with some observations on political psychology. Although the reformers in England now are weak (thanks in part to the Archbishop’s actions), small sparks may yet ignite big fires. Because we tend “to cast a doubtful and a more suspicious eye towards that over which we know we have least power,” our vigilance directs itself at foreign dangers, which often unite us, while overlooking “domestical evils, for we think we can master them at all times” (V. Dedicatory Letter. Vol. 2. 4). Religious factions are the worst of all, for two reasons: “all men presume themselves interessed [sic]” in them; and “they are for the most part hotlier prosecuted and pursued than other strifes” because in religious matters we so often valorize zeal rather than the “coldness” which otherwise betokens moderation (V. Dedicatory Letter. Vol. 2. 4). Finally, the reformers appeal to the ruling principle of democracy, egalitarianism, charging the Church hierarchy with conducting itself with unwarranted pomp and circumstance. Obeying the Christian injunction to practice “the wisdom of serpents tempered with the innocent meekness of doves,” Churchmen should “vigilantly note and prevent by all means those evils whereby the hearts of men are lost” (V. Dedicatory Letter. Vol. 2. 7-8). Hooker urges the Archbishop to recognize the appeal of the reformers’ democratic rhetoric, both in its danger to the Church and the possibility of beating the reformers at their own game. Although Faulkner may go too far in saying Hooker moves toward republicanism, it is unquestionable that he wants the political and ecclesiastical aristocracy to take thought of their vulnerabilities, not by retreating to their castles and cathedrals but by defending their prerogatives at the bar of “the public and common good of all” (V. Dedicatory Letter. Vol. 2. 8). He proceeds to show them the arguments they will need to do so.

“Our endeavor is not so much to overthrow them with whom we contend, as to yield them just and reasonable causes of those things, which, for want of due consideration heretofore, they misconceived accusing laws for men’s oversights, imputing evils, grown through personal defects unto that which is not evil, framing unto some sores unwholesome plasters, and applying other some where no sore is” (V. i. Vol. 2. 13). Political order depends upon personal virtues, and godliness is “the chiefest top and wellspring of all true virtues, even as God is of all good things”; “so natural is the union of Religion with Justice, that we may boldly deem there is neither, where both are not” (V. i. Vol. 2. 14). Prudence may be the summit of statesmanship in a polity or a church, but rulers will not never benefit from the fruit of experience unless their “conscience, and the fear of swerving from that which is right, maketh them diligent observers of circumstances” (V. i. Vol. 2. 14-15). Similarly, courage, magnanimity or greatness of soul, and learning all require the inner strength best nourished by religious conviction. “If Religion did possess sincerely and sufficiently the hearts of all men, there would need no other restraint from evil” (V. i. Vol. 2. 16). And of all religions, the “true religion,” Christianity is the thing most needful (V. i. Vol. 2. 19). By contrast, Hooker identifies “a resolved purpose of mind to reap in this world what sensual profit or pleasure soever the world yieldeth, and not to be barred from any whatsoever means available thereunto” as “the very radical cause of [the] atheism” of most atheists, very few “of whom God is altogether unapprehended” (V. ii. Vol. 2, 19). “A politic use of religion they see there is, and by it they would also gather that religion itself is a mere politic device, forged purposely to serve that use,” as the “wise malignants” who have read Machiavelli’s Discourses believe (V. ii. Vol. 2, 21), undertaking “to create God in man by art” while supposing that true Christianity only “bringeth ruin unto commonwealths” (V. ii. Vol. 2, 22-23) .

“Zeal, unless it be rightly guided” and “ordered aright” proves itself the opposite extreme, being founded not on insolence in the face of God but in excessive fear, that “betrayer of the forces of reasonable understanding” (V. iii. Vol. 2, 24). Fear can lead to superstition, “wrong opinion touching things divine” spawned by “think[ing] and do[ing] as it were in a phrensy [fearful men] know not what” (V. iii. Vol. 2, 24). In the “two grand parts” of the Christian world, the East—influenced by “the subtle wits of the Grecians, evermore proud of their own curious and subtile inventions” and given to the linguistic facility that tempts toward sophistries or heresies—invents theological “monsters,” whereas the West—influenced by the Latins, inclines more to “gross” rather than to subtle superstition (V. iii. Vol. 2, 25). This leaves the moderate, Christian-Aristotelian middle way open to the Church of England, if Churchmen will but take it and defend it.

The reformers threaten this middle way because they too see the superstitious characteristics of Eastern and Western Christianity but zealously go too far in condemning Churchmen and the ceremonies of Anglican worship. Although mindful of the distinction between nature and convention, Hooker defends the reasonableness of some conventions of worship. He praises “inward” reasonableness in the pious human soul, distinguishing it from “outward serviceable worship” while insisting that the latter too involves “virtuous duties that each man in reason and conscience to Godward oweth” (V. iv. Vol. 2, 27). The Fifth Book amounts to a massive argument for why this is so.

Hooker sets down four “axioms” that will guide his argument. First, existing Church customs and rites may not always be superior “than any other that might possibly be devised,” but it enough to “shew their conveniency and fitness, in regard of the use for which they should serve” (V. vi. Vol. 2, 28). This can be shown so long as the rites and ceremonies correspond “to the majesty of him whom we worship,” inasmuch as “signs must resemble the things they signify” (V. vi. Vol. 2, 29). Second, experience “hath never yet found it safe” to “swerve” from “the judgment of antiquity” and “the long continued practice of the whole Church” (V. vii. Vol. 2, 30). Here Hooker must tread carefully, inasmuch as the Church of England most assuredly did swerve from Roman Catholic judgments and practices, but again he seeks the middle way between atheism and zealotry, whether superstitious or fundamentalist. Third, it is “Wisdom, as the queen or sovereign commandress over other virtues,” who must guide us in that middle way, as seen in the moral wisdom of the individual, the civil wisdom of “politic secular affairs,” or “wisdom Ecclesiastical” (V. vii. Vol. 2, 33). Ecclesiastical wisdom adjures us to respect the authority of the Church in matters where neither divine law nor “the light of reason” nor “any notable public inconvenience” contradicts its laws (V. viii. Vol. 2, 35-36). Fourth, if necessity so dictates we may choose the lesser of two evils. Here it is not so much the rigor of law but equity that guides us, given the fact that “in polity as well ecclesiastical as civil, there are and will be always evils which no art of man can cure, breaches and leaks more than man’s wit can stop” (V. ix. Vol. 2, 38). It is in matters of equity that the few and not the many must prevail. Deviations from law are necessary but dangerous, and to make them prudently and justly requires “exact judgment”; yet exact judgment is exactly what most people don’t have (V. ix. Vol. 2, 39). Most of us have common sense; our opinions are guided by “generalities” (as Tocqueville would observe, while in the great American democracy, more than two centuries later). “General laws are like general rules of physic according whereunto as no wise man will desire to be cured,” preferring the advice of an experienced physician (V. ix. Vol. 2, 39). Laws themselves number among these readily comprehensible generalities; making exceptions to the ordinary rule of law belongs in the hands of the few. But not of any ‘few’; Machiavellians, after all, are few. Given human selfishness in both the common-sensical many and the Machiavellian few, a commonwealth needs “to arm with some authority some fit both for quality and place, to administer that which in every such particular shall appear agreeable with equity” (V. ix. Vol. 2, 40). Judges and Churchmen apply or “administer” laws, usually enforcing them but sometimes with equitable leniency, “rather than all men always [be] strictly bound to the general rigor thereof” (V. ix. Vol. 2, 41). Authority must be lodged somewhere, and if “the Church did give every man license to follow what himself imagineth that ‘God’s Spirit doth reveal’ unto him, or what he supposeth that God is likely to have revealed to some special person whose virtues deserve to be highly esteemed, what other effect could hereupon ensue, but the utter confusion of his Church under pretence of being taught, led, and guided by his Spirit?” (V. x. Vol. 2, 41). Jesus Himself (it might be added) could be and was charged with such innovation, to which he replied that He came not to change “one jot or tittle” of the Law as enjoined by His Father upon the Jewish nation, even as He also overturned moneychangers’ tables in the Temple, forcefully correcting a violation of that Law.

Certain particulars follow from these axioms. Public services for worship will need places set aside for the purpose, such as the Jerusalem Temple, inasmuch as private services readily shelter heresies; churches should be hallowed ground, set apart for their purpose; churches should be appropriately named, and it’s not superstitious to honor a saint by naming a church after him; church architecture need not imitate that of the Jerusalem Temple, so long as it directs souls ‘Godward,’ to use Hooker’s language. Catholic churches and even pagan temples may be re-purposed for Protestant use; God’s strictures against Canaanite groves and altars flowed from His intention to have only one Temple for His people in the land He gave them. Also, and crucially, “we should likewise consider how great a difference there is between their proceedings, who erect a new commonwealth, which is to have neither people nor law, neither regiment nor religion the same that was; and theirs who only reform a decayed estate by reducing it to that perfection from which it hath swerved” (V. xviii. Vol. 2, 60). Just as (absent God’s express command) “idolaters may be converted and live, so the temples which have served idolatry as instruments may be sanctified again and continue” (V. xviii. Vol. 2, 61).

Of these particulars, Hooker pays considerable attention to the church as a center of teaching and preaching “right opinion touching things divine” (V. xviii. Vol. 2, 62). Simple catechism respecting the basic principles of Christianity may be done at home, but instruction on the more complex teachings belongs in a church, under the direction of a pastor. Such teaching includes public readings of Scripture itself; against the reformers’ claim that “reading is not feeding” (V. xxi. Vol. 2, 84 n. 3), Hooker reminds his readers that Scripture is “the word of life,” the very means of salvation used by the Holy Spirit (V. xxi. Vol. 2, 85; see also xxii. Vol. 2, 92-93). “They which live by the word must know it” (V. xxi. Vol. 2, 85). Reading Scripture is feeding, although of course no food will enter the mouth that remains obdurately shut (V. xxii. Vol. 2, 91). Similarly, Hooker defends public prayer, including the use of the Book of Common Prayer, as a way of bettering congregants “by our good example” (V. xxvii. Vol. 2, 124), and singing from the Psalter, as a way of teaching souls “due proportional disposition” by means of musical harmony, wherein “the very image and character even of virtue and vice is perceived” (V. xxx. Vol. 2, 159-160).

As to the doctrinal content of the service to be conveyed by speech, ceremony, and music, Hooker first turns to the question of death—both our own and that suffered by Christ on the Cross, which he had earlier called “the only subject of all our preaching” (V. xxii. Vol. 2, 97). Example counts here, too, and Hooker points to those of Cyrus the Great in Xenophon and Socrates in Plato, along with the Biblical examples of Jacob, Moses, Joshua, and David—men who “taught the world no less virtuously how to die than they had done before how to live” (V. xlvi. Vol. 2, 196). Here God teaches more clearly through Scripture in His Book and His Church than he does through nature. Nature teaches us to want a sudden and painless death, but death “is a general effect of the wrath of God against sin,” and “to be preserved against sudden death is a blessing of God,” giving us time to prepare our minds prayerfully before meeting Him (V. xlviii. Vol. 2, 201). Hooker reminds us that Jesus’ dual nature as Son of Man and Son of God gave him two reactions toward the death he foresaw: as a natural man wishing to be saved from it, as Son of God steeling himself to obey His Father’s command. In this He set the example for us, because “as the body is subject to the will of man, so man’s will to the will of God,” “for so it behoveth that the better should guide and command the worse” (V. xlix. Vol. 2, 216). Very importantly, Hooker reaffirms that the incarnation of God does not suggest that God is or ever has been immanent in His creation, as taught by pantheists and later by G. W. F. Hegel. “In both natures there is a co-operation often, an association always, but never any mutual participation, whereby the properties of the one are infused into the other” (V. liii. Vol. 2, 230).

But how are we to understand the relationship of Son to Father, and of each to the Holy Spirit? The three persons of the Trinity are “really distinguishable from one another,” with the Son “proceeding from” the Father and the Spirit proceeding from both (V. li. Vol. 2. 220), but at the same time they are one, even as one man is both individual and a member of the same species. This explanation suffers from the obvious defect that it could as easily fit polytheism (a charge leveled at Christianity by both Jews and Muslims), inasmuch as both Zeus and Ares are both individuals and also gods. Hooker begins to clarify and correct this by identifying for “principal heresies” regarding the Trinity. The Arians reject the divinity of Christ; the Apollinarians misinterpret human nature; the Nestorians divide Christ into two persons; and the Entychesians confound in His divine and human natures as one—making Christ into a patch of pantheism in an otherwise created, and therefore non-holy world. All heresies can be classified as variants of one of these four. The principle of non-contradiction teaches “that no one substance, nature, or quality, can be possibly capable of both finitude and infinitude. The perfection of each creature means the full achievement of its defining limits; “measure is that which perfecteth all things, because every thing is or some end, neither can that thing be available to any end which is not proportionable thereunto, and to proportion as well excesses as defects are opposite” (V. lv. Vol. 2, 238). Here Hooker links Aristotle’s moral definition of virtue as a mean between extremes to Aristotle’s understanding of nature as teleological, with each entity within it aiming at a purpose, the fulfillment of its own nature.

God, who is unlimited, is therefore everywhere present. “He filleth heaven and earth, although”—affirming the principle of non-contradiction—”he takes up no room in either, because his substance is immaterial, pure” (V. lv. Vol. 2, 239). He is always with us, but never simply part of us. Christ exercises a “spiritual regiment,” a spiritual regime, over his subjects (V. lv. Vol. 2, 244), ruling His subjects by their consent and His—the New Covenant. This same idea of co-presence governs the relation of the Persons of the Trinity, with one difference: “the Persons of that Trinity are not three particular substances to whom one general nature in common, but three that subsist by one substance which itself is particular, yet all three have it, and their several ways of having it are that which maketh their personal distinction” (V. lvi. Vol. 2, 246). By this Hooker means that unlike nature, according to which individuals of the same kind or species partake of a nature, a set of defining limits, general to all members of that species, God Himself is ‘one of a kind,’ with three ways of being. In this sense, “The Father therefore is in the Son, and the Son in him, they both in the Spirit, and the Spirit in both them” (V. lvi. Vol. 2, 246), but God is one; the Father manifests Himself as goodness, the Son as wisdom, the Spirit as power.  What “moveth God to work is goodness, that which ordereth his work is Wisdom and that which perfecteth his work is Power” (V. lvi. Vol. 2, 248). When men accept Christ’s offer of the New Covenant, he stops being merely present before them and enters into them, without ever amalgamating Himself with them. The presence of Christ within us is the seed of God in our souls, and it is our duty as members of His church, as well as the Church’s duty in its laws and customs, to foster the growth of that seed.

The ways in which the Church fulfills that duty is by ceremony (baptism, the Eucharist) and also by exegesis of Scripture. With respect to the latter, “I hold it for a most infallible rule in expositions of sacred Scripture, that where a literal construction will stand, the farthest from the letter is commonly the worst. There is nothing more dangerous than this licentious and deluding art, which changeth the meaning of words, as alchymy doth or would do the substance of metals, making of any thing what it listeth, and bringeth in the end all truth to nothing” (V. lxix. Vol. 2, 263). Alchemical treatments poison God’s seed. And to those who scorn Christians who ‘believe in’ God’s seed, Hooker replies in effect that noesis is as noesis does, that some forms of noetic understanding do not come to us through nature but only through divine revelation, which is at God’s disposal to grant, not ours to seize by force of our natural capacities. What is self-evident by God’s grace is not self-evident to the natural human mind.

But this is no issue with the reformers, who accept God’s revelation. They criticize the Church for the practice of infant baptism and the celebration of the Eucharist. Baptism has moral, ecclesiastical, and spiritual dimensions. Morally, it is “a duty which men perform towards God,” and in the baptism of infants a duty of Christian parents to dedicate their children to Him; ecclesiastically, it “belongeth to God’s Church as a public duty”; mystically, it betokens respect for “what God doth thereby intend to work” (V. lxii. Vol. 2, 294). In its moral dimension, baptism registers the fact that God “respect[s] adverbs more than verbs“—by which Hooker means that it is the “virtuous disposition of the mind” of parents and priests who perform the baptism that counts in God’s eyes, not the mere act itself (V. lxii. Vol. 2, 295). In its ecclesiastical dimension, baptism is “a gift of no mean worth” from the Church to the child, who as yet of course does not understand the gift, or indeed that it is one (V. lxii. Vol. 2, 295). Mystically, baptism makes “secret reference” to the life and also the life-sustaining remission of sins “by virtue of Christ’s own compact solemnly made with his Church,” to which the child is now admitted, even though in later years he may reject the compact (V. lxii. Vol. 2, 295). “The promise of eternal life is the seed of the Church of God” (italics added) (V. lxiii. Vol. 2, 304).

The Eucharist may be received only by those who have been baptized “because no dead thing is capable of nourishment,” and the Eucharist feeds God’s grace to us. Just as our bodies need physical food, our souls need the food meant for them; “it may be that the grace of baptism would serve to eternal life, were it not that the state of our spiritual being is daily so much hindered and impaired after baptism” (V. lxvii. Vol. 2, 348). Hooker dismisses the fierce controversies over the exact nature of the Eucharistic transaction itself—”consubtantiation” versus “transubstantiation”—as spiritually needless, so long as we understand that transaction as “the co-operation of [Christ’s] infinite power” with our finite power (V. lxvii. Vol. 2, 355).

Hooker concludes the Fifth Book with a discussion of religion generally and the characteristics that distinguish the Christian Church from other religious institutions. There have been three kinds of religion: paganism, the religion of those who “lived in the blindness of corrupt and depraved nature”; Judaism, “embracing the Law which reformed heathenish impiety” and pointing men toward the one genuine God who would eventually be exalted as Lord of all men; and Christianity, which “yieldeth obedience to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and acknowledgeth him the Savior whom God did promise” to the Israelites (V. lxviii. Vol. 2, 368). The Christian Church is therefore that organization of persons acknowledging the divine and salvific authority of Jesus Christ, as no other religion does. Humanly speaking, members of that Church are those who outwardly accept that authority, although the true Church, seen only by the God who sees us inwardly, consists only of those who are “truly and sincerely with him” (V. lxviii. Vol. 2, 374). The Church as humanly perceives celebrates God in fellowship with its appointed feast days and frames the Christian family with its marriage ceremony, including the vows to fidelity which, if followed, make the family a stable home for the rearing of children.

Politically, the Church honors kingship in the secular realm, ministers in the ecclesiastical. Hooker’s portrait of the Christian prince, contrasting at every point with Machiavelli’s principe, finds in his faith not escape from the harsh realities of “this our unquiet life” but solace while facing them, “temper[ing] rigor with lenity” and carrying themselves with humility amidst royal trappings because “the true knowledge of themselves hath humbled them in God’s sight no less than God in the eyes of men hath raised them up” (V. lxxvi. Vol. 2, 453). Christian ministers—”Christ’s ambassadors and laborers” (V. lxxvii. Vol. 2, 456)—are men who have answered the call heard by the prophet Esai: “Here, Lord, I am, send me” (V. lxxvii. Vol. 2, 465), the best human response to the God whose name means “I am.” Hooker brushes aside much-vexed terminological disputes: “Whether we call it a Priesthood, a Presbytership, or a Ministry it skilleth not” (V. lxxviii. Vol. 2, 472); it is the offering of the Eucharist as the replacement for the old Israelite sacrifices, along with the minister’s other functions, guided by the Holy Spirit, which matter. He condemns the “insatiable hunting after spiritual preferments without either care or conscience of the public good,” while pointing to the true pastoral duties of teaching and preaching, counselors and watchmen to their parishioners, and contented residence in one parish—this last against the practice of obtaining ministries in two parishes for the sake of added income (V. lxxxi. Vol. 2, 509-510). In so being and acting, ministers will live by “moral laws, [which] are the rule of politic, those politic which are made to order the whole Church of God rules unto all particular churches, and the laws of every particular church rules unto every particular man within the body of the same church” (V. lxxxi. Vol. 2, 514).

This leads Hooker to his final teachings in the Fifth Book. He concurs with Plato’s Socrates in remarking that “the higher we ascend” in following the true rules, the farther we are removed from the practical details of governing. “This is the reason why men altogether conversant in study do know how to teach but not how to govern; men experienced contrariwise govern well, yet know not which way to set down orderly the precepts and reasons of that they do” (V. lxxxi. Vol. 2, 514). And he ends with the anti-Machiavellian remark that “liberty of the law” in ancient Rome depended upon the classical virtues, not virtù (V. lxxxi. Vol. 2, 531), and that the regime of the Caesars, imperial Rome, rose only when those virtues declined.

In the Sixth Book Hooker continues this theme by addressing the reformers’ charge that Anglican ecclesiastical laws have become “corrupt and repugnant to the laws of God in matters belonging to the power of ecclesiastical jurisdiction,” as distinguished from the ecclesiastical order considered in the previous book. (VI. Title, Vol. 3, 3). The Seventh Book will examine the issue respecting clerical “dignity,” while the concluding Eighth Book will examine it with respect to clerical “dominion.” By ecclesiastical order Hooker means the authority to preach and baptize in remembrance of Jesus; by ecclesiastical jurisdiction he means the rule or administration of holy things. As in any political regime, ‘Who rules?’ remains a crucial question to answer for the Church of England.

The reformers want to supplement the jurisdiction of Churchmen with lay-elders, which amounts to another aspect of their strategy of ‘democratization’: “the people… are much more easily drawn to favor it, as a matter of their own interest” (VI. i. Vol. 3, 3).  Jurisdiction implies the power to enforce; “all multitudes, once grown to the form of societies, are even thereby naturally warranted to enforce upon their own subjects particularly those things which public wisdom shall judge expedient for the common good” (VI. ii. Vol. 3, 4-5). The purpose or end of the Church’s regime is “the health and safety of men’s souls” (VI. iii. Vol. 3, 5), and the most important means to that end is repentance. How shall the obligation to repent our sins be managed, and who within the Church’s earthly organization shall do so?

Jesus originally gave rule over the Church to His Apostles, who were “thereby signified to be stewards of the house of God, under whom they guide, command, judge, and correct his families” (VI. iv. Vol. 3, 13). Stewards guard treasure, and “the souls of men are God’s treasure, committed to the trust and fidelity of such as must render a strict account for the very least which is under their custody” (VI. iv. Vol. 3, 13). To guard souls, God empowers the stewards of his treasure to remove “rebellious and contumacious persons” from His store-room (VI. iv. Vol. 3, 13). But He, and they, prefer to keep such persons within any given church, “to heal their consciences” and “cure their sins,” and “reclaim offenders from iniquity” (VI. iv. Vol. 3, 13). Confession, first of all to God, and repentance are the means by which this can happen.

For centuries after the first generation of the Church, priests did not absolve offenders from sin. Rather, public confession was the mode of reinstatement as full citizens in the regime of God—”a discipline of humiliation and submission,” made openly in the hearing of the whole both ecclesiastical consistory and assembly” (VI. iv. 23). But experience proved this objectionable, as some sins are so heinous that public confession would expose the sinner to vengeance, fear of which would deter the sinner from confessing at all. The Church of England hit upon a middle way between requirement of public confession (although that is still a possibility) and private absolution by a priest: the Anglican priest begins with a public prayer of acknowledgment of sin by all the parishioners (as each is sure to have committed sins since the last service); he then grants a public absolution. Each repents before God and men, but only God knows the actual sins repented.

How then shall sinners give “satisfaction” to God, repay the debt that he has incurred? “Faith alone maketh Christ’s satisfaction ours” (VI. v. Vol. 3, 57), but to this prayers, fasts, and alms-giving should be added. “All offices of repentance have two properties; there is in performance of them painfulness, and in their nature a contrariety to sin” (V. v. Vol. 3, 63). The Church of England “stand[s] chiefly upon the true inward conversion of the heart,” whereas the Roman Catholic Church stands “more upon works of external show” (Vi. vi. Vol. 3, 73); and Catholics “would make all sores seem incurable, unless the priest have a hand in them” (VI. vi. Vol. 3, 74). Hooker dismisses as a “phantasy” what Thomas Aquinas teaches, that the priestly act of absolution and the sacramental objects handled by the priest in church ceremonies “receive a certain supernatural transitory force” which as it were channels God’s grace to the penitent (VI. vi. Vol. 3, 90).

Unlike Catholics, Anglicans insist on public confession, albeit without public exposure of particular sins; unlike the reformers, the rite of confession and absolution remains strictly a duty of priests, with no authority granted to laymen. Hooker again defends the middle way.

Reformers also condemn the Church of England for endowing its bishops with a high degree of “authority and honor” or “dignity.” Hooker refutes this charge in the Seventh Book, not by denying the fact but by defending it. He begins with an account of a speech made in “a famous kingdom” (possibly France, possibly Scotland) where an early reformer delivered “a solemn sermon” comparing the regime to a tree, “huge and goodly to look upon, but without that fruit which it should and might bring forth”—truly Christian souls (VII. i. Vol. 3, 141). Echoing the language of later English reformers, the preacher identified “the only way of redress” as “a full and perfect establishment of Christ’s discipline (for so their manner is to entitle a thing hammered out upon the forge of their own invention)” (VII. i. Vol. 3, 141) (italics added). Such discipline would require a severe pruning, indeed: cutting off “three great limbs” of the regime—the nobles (“whose high estate would make them otherwise disdain to put their necks” under the yoke of the new discipline), lawyers, whose courts must be replaced by ecclesiastical courts, and prelates, whose “ancient dignity” contradicted “the simplicity of the intended church discipline” (VII. i. Vol. 3, 141). The preacher’s sermon proved “plausible” to “active spirits, restless through desire of innovation,” but “heavier and more experienced” souls “began presently thereat to pull back their feet again, and exceedingly to fear the stratagem of reformation for ever after” (VII. i. Vol. 3, 141).

The church aristocrats who particularly inflame reformers’ theological ire have been the bishops. Bishops are Churchmen who not only administer the Word and the sacraments but also ordain the lower-ranking ministers and rule both them and the laymen. Reformers protest this “permanent superiority” of one set of ministers over another (VII. iii. Vol. 3, 149). Hooker replies by noting that Jesus Himself ordained the Apostles as “the principal founders of an house of God, consisting as well of Gentiles as of Jews” (VII. iv. Vol. 3, 154); they were the first bishops, and their superiority to other ministers may be seen in Paul’s letters to the several churches he had established. The custom has continued since then, and experience proves it sound, teaching the younger ministers the “humility and moderation” reformers often lack (VII. v. Vol. 3, 166).

Arius was the first of those “to have bent themselves against the superiority of bishops,” motivated (Hooker suggests) by disappointed ambition, having been passed over for high office in the Roman Catholic Church. He raised “a new seditious opinion, that the superiority which bishops had was a thing which they should not have,” that a bishop “ought not any way to be distinguished from a presbyter” (VII. ix. Vol. 3, 200). His opinion simply contradicted the practice of the Church from its beginnings in Jerusalem. But “of the selfsame mind are the enemies of government by bishops, even at this present day” (VII. x, Vol. 3, 203).

But even if the bishops’ authority lacked Scriptural pedigree, it would still meet God’s “approbation,” inasmuch as “of all good things God himself is author, and consequently an approver of them” (VII. xi. Vol. 3, 212). “The brain of man hath devised it” is no adequate refutation of a long-established custom of the Church, inasmuch as God designed the brain of man (VII. xi. Vol. 3, 213). “Doth not the Apostle term the law of nature, even as the evangelist doth the law of Scripture, God’s own righteous ordinance?” (VII. xi. 213). The Church, not a natural body but analogous to one, must proceed like a natural body in order to endure. Since “all things natural have in them naturally more or less the power of providing for their own safety; and as each particular man hath this power, so every politic society of men must needs have the same, that thereby the whole may provide for the good of all parts therein,” “the Church therefore being a politic society or body, cannot possibly want to the power of providing for itself; and the chiefest part of that power consisteth in the authority of making laws” (VII. xiv. Vol. 3, 222). The body of the Church has endured, although in different places it has undergone different, and not invariably optimal variations; “it hath the same authority still, and may abrogate old laws, or make new, as need shall require” (VII. xiv. Vol. 3, 223). But in the case of the bishops, where is the need to eliminate them?

“The pretended disorder of the church of England is, that bishops ordain them to whose election the people give no voices, and so the bishops make them alone” (VII. xiv. Vol. 3, 225). No previous bishops had behaved differently. “Now in very truth, if the multitude have hereunto a right, which right can never be translated from them for any cause, then there is no remedy but we must yield” to the reformers’ claim, as to “make ministers without asking the people’s consent” would be “the exercise [of] a certain tyranny” (VII. xiv, Vol. 3, 225). But the people have never possessed such a right, and therefore they cannot be said to have had it “translated” from them.

Reformers also chastise the bishops for disciplining subordinate Church members with “secular punishments” while additionally “meddl[ing] with civil affairs” (VII. xv. Vol. 3, 236). The secular punishment is imprisonment, “allowable in priests amongst the Jews,” whose priests cannot be said to having been more worthy of such authority than “any man which beareth office in the Church of Christ” (VII. xv. Vol. 3, 236). With regard to civil affairs, some kinds are “fit” for ecclesiastical meddling, some not (VII. xv. Vol. 3, 237). For example, in a society where a church may be “planted amongst their professed enemies,” it would be a foolish Christian who did not prefer the jurisdiction of a bishop to that of some local judge (VII. xv. Vol. 3, 237), as in fact the Apostle Paul told the Christians at Corinth. And in Christian kingdoms, the great universities have vice-chancellors who serve as “civil judges over them in the most of their ordinary cases” (VII. xv. Vol. 3, 239). And finally, a Christian king will act as judge in his royal court. Christian ministers very often have that “devotion and reverence towards God himself” that makes for a fine judge in secular as well as ecclesiastical matters (VII. xv. Vol. 3, 243). “In the prime of the world, kings and civil rulers were priests for the most part all” (VII. xv. Vol. 3, 250). Why not today?

All societies need rulers, because “there is not any amongst us all, but is a great deal more apt to exact another man’s duty, than the best of us is to discharge exactly his own” (VII. xviii. Vol. 3, 268). In this we ought again to seek the middle way: “Not to dislike sin, though it be in the highest, were unrighteous meekness; and proud righteousness it is to contemn or dishonor highness, though it should be in the sinfullest men that live” (VII. xviii. Vol. 3, 268). The “highness” or prominence of bishops itself recommends respect in the sense that it commands respect “in the eyes of foreign beholders,” in the eyes of posterity, and in the eyes of those highly placed in secular government who might otherwise despise the counsel of Churchmen (VII. xviii. Vol. 3, 269). Good Christian bishops “are both an ornament and a stay to the commonwealth wherein they live,” calming civil disorders (VII xviii. Vol. 3, 271).

“The whole body politic wherein we live should be for strength’s sake a threefold cable, consisting of the king as a supreme head over all, of peers and nobles under him, and of the people under them”; “the second wreath of that cable should, for important respects, consists as well of lords spiritual as temporal,” “nobility and prelacy being by this mean twined together” (VII. xviii. Vol. 3, 272). As for the people, who will teach them their Christian and civil duties if not men whom they respect? And as for the lower clergy, yes, they are ruled by the bishops, but those bishops are fellow-ministers who “have trodden the same steps” before they did, understanding of and sympathetic to their cares (VII. xviii. Vol. 3, 273).

As for the delicate matter of superior material goods enjoyed by bishops, Hooker begins by considering tithing and material goods generally. The Apostles “maintained themselves and the poor of the Church with a common purse, the rest of the faithful keeping that purse continually stored” (VII. xxiii. Vol. 3, 296). The bishops designated a presbyter as treasurer of the Church, and the bishop controlled the disbursement of funds. While rejecting the practice in some denominations of selling church offices, Hooker also warns against forcible expropriation of unjustly accumulated priestly wealth by enemies of all hierarchy. Further, commonality of wealth does not imply equality of wealth. “Nature is not contented with bare sufficiency unto the sustenance of man, but doth evermore covet a decency proportionable unto the place which man hath in the body or society of others”; we expect bishops to exercise “great liberality, great hospitality,” and “for actions which must be great, mean instruments will not serve” (VII xxiv. Vol. 3, 316). To this natural order, Hooker adds a consideration relevant to the social conditions of his own time in place: “Where wealth is had in so great admiration, as generally in this golden age it is,” that without it angelical perfections are not able to deliver from extreme contempt, surely to make bishops poorer than they are, were to make them of less account and estimation than they should be” (VII. xxiv. Vol. 3, 317). An age materially if not morally and spiritually golden requires prudent adjustments to such realities in God’s Church.

The Tudor monarchy under which Hooker lived had seized the property of the Roman Catholic Church in order to establish the Church of England. Hooker must tread carefully but firmly: “As for the case of public burdens, let at politician living [Henry the Eighth, the arch-expropriator, being deceased) make it appear, that by confiscation of bishops’ livings, and their utter dissolution at once, the commonwealth shall ever have half that relief and ease which it receiveth by their continuance as now they are, and it shall give us some cause to think, that albeit we see they are impiously and irreligiously minded, yet we may esteem them at least to be tolerable commonwealth’s men” (VII. xxiv. Vol. 3, 321). But all Englishmen do see that Churchmen bear greater burdens in the commonwealth than any other class, including even the royal family, so the benefits of expropriation will not nearly outweigh the losses. Hooker of course does not foresee the establishment of the modern ‘welfare state,’ which ‘tithes’ or taxes at rates considerably higher than those of any church, while taking on churchlike functions of charity and even the orchestration of hope, invoking popular faith in its own superior competence.

This leaves Hooker with the need to justify the expropriation of Roman Catholic Church property by Henry. The distinction lies in the way Catholic clergy lived. Those “religious persons were men which followed only a special kind of contemplative life in the commonwealth,” cloistered away from civil society, thus “being properly no portion of God’s clergy (only such amongst them excepted as were also priests), their good (that excepted which they unjustly held through the pope’s usurped power of appropriating ecclesiastical livings unto them) may in part seem to be of the nature of civil possessions, held by other kinds of corporations such as the city of London has divers. Wherefore as their institution was human, and their end for the most part superstitious, they had not therein merely that holy and divine interest which belongeth unto bishops” as “receivers and disposers of [Christ’s] patrimony,” the tithes all Christian owe to the visible part of His Church (VII. xxiv. Vol. 3, 321). Shall Levi “be deprived of the portion of God or no, to the end that Simeon or Reuben may devour it as their spoil” (VII. xxiv. Vol. 3, 325)?

Even as Churchmen may rightly exercise some forms and degree of civil authority as part of the aristocracy, so may Christianity unite with monarchy as well. So Hooker argues in the Eighth Book, against the reformers’ objections to “ecclesiastical dominion” held by English monarchs, a dominion exercised in the form of royal prerogative (VIII. i. Vol. 3, 327). Unlike later liberals, Hooker rejects the separation of Church and State, then urged by the reformers. Instead, he looks to ancient Israel, in which kings were invested with both supreme jurisdiction in civil affairs and dominion in ecclesiastical affairs. Against the reformers, “We say that the care of religion being common unto all societies politic, such societies as do embrace the true religion have the name of the Church given unto every [one] of them for distinction from the rest; so that every body politic hath some religion, but the Church that religion which is only true” (VIII. i. Vol. 3, 329). By the true religion Hooker means Christianity generally, not any particular denomination. Any political society in which Christianity predominates in the population blends its religion with its politics.

Aristotle holds that political society concerns itself not only with the protection of and provision for life, but for the means of living well. “Human societies are much more to care for that which tendeth properly unto the soul’s estate, than for such temporal things as this life doth stand in need of: other proof there needs none to shew that as by all men the kingdom of God is the first to be sought for, so in all commonwealths things spiritual ought above temporal to be provided for” (VIII. i. Vol. 3, 332). In the ancient world, the transition from a pagan to the Christian understanding of “living well” officially occurred with the conversion of Constantine, at which point the regime necessarily took on certain characteristics of the Church, with the emperor at its head. “Members of a Christian commonwealth have a triple state; a natural, a civil, and a spiritual (VIII. i. Vol. 3, 338). Malefactors who commit civil crimes may be civilly disabled, removed from civil society but not from the Church; malefactors who commit ecclesiastical crimes may be excommunicated—cut off “from the Church, and yet not from the commonwealth” (VIII. i, Vol. 3, 339). In Rome before Constantine’s conversion, Church and commonwealth “were two societies independent”; in Roman Catholic commonwealths, “one society is both the Church and the commonwealth,” but the pope “doth not suffer the Church to depend upon the power of any civil prince or potentate”; in England, however, “one society is both Church and commonwealth,” but the monarch also heads the established church, as in ancient Israel (VIII. i. Vol. 3, 340). This is what Hooker means by “dominion”; the king has the supreme power over both civil and ecclesiastical affairs.

Supreme does not mean unlimited, however. An English monarch is no tyrant; “where the law doth give him dominion, who doubteth but that the king who receiveth it must hold it of and under the law” (VIII. ii. Vol. 3, 342). English monarchs lawfully possess more power than any one segment of civil society, but not greater power than all of civil society put together; if that were not the case, the English monarch might be a tyrant or, if not that, then surely an absolute monarch along the lines of the Bourbon monarchs of France. “Power of spiritual dominion therefore is in cases ecclesiastical that ruling authority, which neither any foreign state, nor yet any part of that politic body at home, wherein the same is established, can lawfully overrule” (VIII. ii. Vol. 3, 343). Every “independent multitude” has “full dominion over itself” under “God’s supreme authority”; it then either chooses which regime it will have (rule by the one, the few, or the many) or it will have one imposed upon it by force of conquest which, if the war was “just and lawful,” rightly commands the obedience of the people so ruled (VIII. ii. Vol. 3, 344). “As for supreme power in ecclesiastical affairs, the word of God doth no where appoint that all kings should have it, neither that any should not have it; for which cause it seemeth to stand by human right, that unto Christian kings there is such dominion given” (VIII. ii. Vol. 3, 345). Hereditary monarchs, for example, derive their right to rule from “that first original conveyance” of power by the independent multitude; absent an heir, the right to choose a new monarch, or indeed a new regime altogether, returns to the people (VIII. ii. Vol. 3, 349). In choosing a monarchic regime, that people will do best for whom “the law is their king”: “Where the king doth guide the state, and the law the king, that commonwealth is like an harp or melodious instrument, the strings whereof are tuned and handled all by one, following as laws the rules and canons of musical science” (VIII. ii. Vol. 3, 352). This holds true “in ecclesiastical as in civil affairs” (VIII. ii. Vol. 3, 357). As Faulkner puts it, this makes the laws of God serve the moderating function served by competing classes in the mixed regime of Aristotle (162-164). “The king is said to rule, yet through him the church rules”; Hooker slyly defends the sort of primacy of monarchs that will restore the decisive primacy of the church” (165).

As Aristotle teaches, “A gross error it is, to think that regal power ought to serve for the good of the body, and not of the soul; for men’s temporal peace, and not for their eternal safety: and if God had ordained kings for no other end and purpose but only to fat up men like hogs, and to see that they have their mast” (VIII. iii. Vol. 3, 363). Now that many monarchs are Christian, the use of temporal power, including force, to rule in such ways as serve the good of souls is fully justifiable, if that force is guided by the restraint of natural and human law and also tempered by counterbalancing civil-social powers, all under the final judgment of Christ, Who rules His Church, and all the church denominations within it, by invisible and spiritual power, even as the English monarch rules the Church of England with “power external and visible” (VIII. iv. Vol. 3, 390). To say that the English monarch rules the Church of England doesn’t mean he rules it in all respects, and initially it is the Church as a whole which raises him to its head, and he must rule in accordance with ecclesiastical laws established before his elevation (VIII. vi. Vol 3, 396-397). Any new laws must obtain consent of clergy, laity, and the monarch (VIII. vi. Vol. 3, 404). As in Aristotle, “Peace and justice are maintained by preserving unto every order their rights, and by keeping all estates as it were in an even balance”; to maintain that balance, there needs to be a balancer, and that is the monarch’s prerogative (VIII. vi. Vol. 3, 405). No Christian kingdom at any time, in any place, has not given its monarch the right to approve laws either before or at least after they were put forward (VIII. vi. Vol. 3, 406). English monarchs have exercised this power mostly after the laws were proposed, by exercising or withholding a veto (VIII. vi. Vol. 3, 411); after the enactment of those laws, they too must obey them (VIII. vi. Vol. 3, 411, 413).

If Church-State separation is only a relic of times when Christians were scattered and weak, needing protection from the interference of pagan monarchs in Church affairs, why return to it when monarchs embrace Christianity (VIII. vi. Vol. 3, 414)? The churches still control the power distinguishing bishops from other pastors and the Christian population over which he exercises that power; the monarch determines only the material aspects of his life: “the place of his seat or throne, together with the profits, preeminences, honors thereunto belonging” (VIII. vii. Vol. 3, 419).

Hooker concludes the Laws with a discussion of who should judge the judges of legal cases in a Christian commonwealth. This proves a hard question. The good condition of a commonwealth depends upon two “special affections,” fear and love: “fear in the highest governor himself; and love, in the subjects that live under him” (VIII. ix. Vol. 3, 444). Hooker’s readers will recognize this as a Machiavellian theme, and Hooker in effect formulates a Christian reply to Machiavelli. The subjects’ love for their king “for the most part continueth as long as the righteousness of kings doth last,” whereas righteous kings will “fear to do that which may alienate the loving hearts of their subjects from them” (VIII. ix. Vol. 3, 444-445). But given the fact that “the mighty upon the earth… are not always so virtuous and holy that their own good minds will bridle them,” should kings be subject to some sort of coercive power (VIII. ix. Vol. 3, 445)?

Hooker does not see how this can be so. Just as in natural bodies there can be “no motion of any thing, unless there were some which moveth all things and continueth unmoveable,” so in political bodies “there must be some unpunishable, or else no man shall suffer punishment” (VIII. ix. Vol. 3, 445). Punishments proceed from superiors; “otherwise the course of justice should go infinitely in a circles, every superior having his superior without end, which cannot be” (VIII. ix. Vol. 3, 445). In a monarchic regime, who but the king or queen can have this authority? The monarch will appear before a tribunal only in Heaven, and should remember that “the grievousness of sin is aggravated by the greatness of him that committeth it” (VIII. ix. Vol. 3, 449). Although Hooker understands Aristotle’s best practicable regime, the mixed regime, and proposes his own version of that regime, his need to acknowledge and to some extent justify the power of the English monarchy of his own time steers him away from a system resembling the separation of powers with checks and balances designed by the American founders, who looked to Locke, Montesquieu, and others, and surely not any firm defender of an established church, hereditary monarchy, or aristocracy.

In Robert K. Faulkner, a judicious philosopher has been graced with a judicious interpreter. Faulkner emphasizes the differences between Hooker’s Christian Aristotelianism and Aristotelianism itself, observing how Hooker more sharply distinguishes ethics from politics by more stressing law, command, and duty (will, not habituation, is near the core of his ethics), in his stronger sense of certainty about the right (bringing to ethics the deductive method Aristotle reserves for science), and in his displacement of friendship with charity and religious community. Although in his emphasis on lawful obedience Hooker “diminishes politics and moral prudence” in contrast to Aristotle (even as he fortifies them in contrast to Calvin), Hooker’s “moral expectations prepare a stringent polity” wherein statesmen impose laws that “guide even nature depraved to a right end” (96).

Faulkner argues that for Hooker “Christian salvation” displaces politics from the relatively high place politics enjoys in Aristotle’s thought. Although it is too much to say that for Hooker “Biblical universality points to universal fellowship under God’s rule, not to particular politics under human rule” (103)—after all, he does rather insist on defending the laws of the English ecclesiastical polity—politics as “the exercise of virtue in ruling,” and more specifically in the strict Aristotelian sense of ruling and being rule, does get downplayed (102). Political life concentrates its attention primarily on the formulation of human laws and their adaptation to circumstances. Again in contrast to Aristotle, Hooker would substitute belief for music and action, instruction in true doctrine for political education, and both the Christian Church and a given church for civil religion. Churchmen guided by Hooker’s Laws will supply needed practical wisdom to the ecclesiastical polity. Faulkner writes that “The judicious Hooker seeks with respect to belief or theory the mean, that middle but fitting path, which Aristotle had thought restricted to practical conduct” (123). This suggests that Christian “belief or theory” points finally to action, not thought, although it also points to Hooker’s understanding of the difficulty in achieving a moderate politics under a dispensation that can lend itself to excessive zeal. “Christian wisdom is a kind of practical wisdom… that finally ranks prudence ahead of a simply theoretical wisdom” (123). It comes to us by what one might call a divine action, grace. With Hooker, faith in divine grace always remains a “judicious faithfulness” (124).

Hooker’s judicious faithfulness produces what Faulkner calls “a political-theological miracle”: a reconciliation of Christ and Caesar that even Scripture itself finds unlikely (154). Hooker “manages to inform his flock with both the moderate political wisdom of the philosophers and the theocratic political practice of the Jews” (154). “It seems that Christ denied the temporal sword only because His political judgment saw it then impolitic!” Faulkner exclaims (162). But now temporal coercion can be both politic and divine, with Christian monarchs moderated by natural, ecclesiastical, and civil laws in alliance with aristocrats civil and clerical.

In calling Hooker a republican, then, Faulkner means that he  proposes a mixed regime, not the absolute monarchy of Tudor inclination. But it is important to notice the tilt of this republicanism, especially in view of the way English republicanism later took. As did many of the monarchs who built centralized modern states, the Tudors made an alliance with ‘the many’ against ‘the few.’ This opened them to the need to settle with the democratizing reformers, who threatened to deploy the many against both the few and ‘the one,’ the monarchy. Two centuries later, English mixed-regime republic gradually began to give way to democratic republicanism, as seen in the three Reform Acts of the nineteenth century. Hooker advocates a different alliance, an alliance of the one with the few in which the many would remain firmly subordinated in obedience to Crown, lords, and the Church of England. This republic would have been neither the democratic republicanism of the reformers (or of the Americans, later); nor would it have been the mixed-regime republicanism of Aristotle, with its balance of the many poor and the few rich, democracy and aristocracy. Hooker’s mixed regime in the modern state needs Pauline-Christian obedience to law more than the Aristotelian mixed regime in the ancient polis. It needs this partly because statism cannot offer the degree of political participation the city-state did, partly because the modern state needs to counter the virulent modern form of factionalism seen in Machiavelli’s followers on the one hand and Calvin’s followers on the other.

 

 

At the time when a proposal for a “nuclear freeze”—that is, a cessation of the construction of nuclear weapons by the United States and the Soviet Union—had appeared as a ballot referendum in several states, including New Jersey, the Home News of New Brunswick, New Jersey requested statements on the question, “What is the meaning of ‘peace on earth’ today?” The replies were published on Christmas Day, 1983. Here is mine:

 

The phrase “peace on earth” occurs in the New Testament. In the Gospel According to (2:14), angels sing to shepherds of the Christ’s birth:
Glory to God in the highest,
And on earth peace among men with whom
He is pleased.

There is no utopianism, here. The angels do not herald peace on earth among all men—only peace on earth among those with whom God is pleased. The New Testament famously insists that only those who sincerely worship the Christ please God.

In Christian terms, then, there can be no general peace on earth today because genuine Christians do not rule all the nations. Nor will they ever rule on this earth, according to Scripture. Only the Christ can bring peace on earth, and only after He returns to earth, eventually creating a new heaven and a new earth. Centuries earlier, Jews also understood that divine intervention alone can bring peace to the nations. The prophet Isaiah foresaw swords beaten into plowshares after, not before the coming of the Messiah.

Today, many people at “peace on earth,” believing that peace-loving human beings can themselves fashion perpetual and universal peace. There is no evidence for this belief either in history or in Scripture. Such persons transform Judaism and Christianity into a kind of politics called ‘pacifism.’ They confused themselves with the Messiah, forgetting both the realism of the political man and the humility of the religious one. Their utopian worldly ambitions are too spiritual, their proud spirituality too worldly. They invite martyrdom without redemption.