Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 422 - The World’s Law - Richard Hooker.txt

 Before we start today, I have some pretty exciting news. About a month ago, I was contacted by Tim Wittenborg, who knows his way around a computer, and offered to convert the sound files from the podcast into written transcripts using automatic voice recognition. Obviously, the scripted episodes, like the one you're about to hear, already exist as text, but I realized this was a chance to produce transcripts for the interviews, and that is what Tim did. The results needed quite a bit of editing, so I appealed for help on social media, and got a small army of about 20 listeners who were generous enough to offer their time. They've been going through all the interview transcripts, there are well over a hundred of them, and preparing them to put on the podcast website. So, many thanks to Bartvoss, Benjamin, Chandler, Dan, Darius, Dave, David, Diana, Faizan, Felix, John, Carl, Kolya, Miguel, Norina, Ray, Susan, Wang, and Zava for their help, and I hope I got everyone there. Also, thanks to the many wonderful interview guests I've had over the years, I contacted them to let them know we were doing this, and no one had any objections. Some even offered to proofread the transcripts of their appearances. Oh, and I shouldn't forget to thank my website designer, Julian, who figured out how to present the transcripts on the website. What this means for you is that you can now go to the website, in particular to www.historyofphilosophy.net forward slash transcripts, there's also a button marked transcripts at the bottom of the page, to see a list of those interview transcripts that are ready, which should be just about all of them by the time you hear this. I think this will be a valuable resource, so thanks once again to everyone who made it possible. Okay, now on with the show. Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, The World's Law, Richard Hooker. When I was learning to drive as a teenager, one of my friends gave me some advice which has stayed fixed in my memory thanks to his somewhat grandiloquent phrasing. When driving on a three lane highway, the middle lane affords one many luxuries. It's a sentiment that has had many adherence from Aristotle to Goldilocks to Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. When faced with extreme options, the best path lies comfortably in the middle. And as we've been seeing, plenty of people in Reformation era Britain would have agreed. The Puritan firebrands and conservative Catholics stick in the memory, but plenty of others were embracing a more moderate approach to matters of state and religion. Or at least they were presenting themselves as moderate, even if this meant welcoming the execution of people who strayed too far from the middle path. That would apply to a good number of the political thinkers we've been discussing, and indeed to Queen Elizabeth herself. The religious settlement of Elizabethan England was Protestant, yet it retained the church structure and rituals familiar from a time before the Reformation. Similarly, the political settlement involved a hereditary monarchy with royal authority granted by God himself, but also granted significant power to influential advisors and to parliament. As for the Puritan firebrands, they saw such compromises as well. They were failures to embrace fully the lessons of the Reformation. Scripture alone should be the arbiter of religion, and true religion should be used as the litmus test for political legitimacy. We're talking here about men like Thomas Cartwright, who adopted Presbyterianism, in other words a rejection of the Episcopacy, or the hierarchy in the Church of England, and who preferred a mixed constitution over monarchial government. Or Robert Brown, who met Cartwright at Cambridge and in 1582 published his Treatise of Reformation without Tarrying, which denied all authority over the church to the sitting monarch. The Queen's power was purely civic in nature, not religious. Instead, religious authority should be arranged in a fashion one is tempted to call democratic. Representatives of the whole church would choose the ministers. Shockingly, Brown then added, we give these definitions so general that they may be applied also to the civil state. Instead of waiting, or tarrying, for the government to catch up with such radical notions, these reformers explored the idea of separating from the wider society. One separatist, Robert Harrison, said that he saw no reason to give allegiance to rulers who failed in their religious duties. A living dog is better than they are. The church can rightfully depose such a ruler, and those rulers who earned the right to stay in office would do so purely on the basis of a compact or covenant agreed, perhaps tacitly, with their subjects. Of course it would hardly count as a radical proposal nowadays to say that rulers should serve at the pleasure of the ruled. But at the time, this was heady stuff which threatened to destabilize both the state and church of late 16th century England. Who was going to speak up for the middle ground that lay between Presbyterianism and the supposed superstition and theocracy of Catholic tradition? Richard Hooker, that's who. Not only him, of course. He was following the lead of his sometime patron, the long-serving Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift. Whitgift engaged in polemical disputes with the aforementioned Thomas Cartwright, who would also be a chief target of Hooker's major work, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. It was dedicated to Whitgift and approved by him. The first four books were published in 1593, but the complete work runs to eight books, some of them appearing only after his death, which came with period-ending finality in 1600. In his refutation of the Presbyterian views espoused by Cartwright and his allies, Hooker ranges widely over substantive and methodological questions. He touches on everything from the relationship of reason to scripture, to the decorations, music, and clothing to be used in churches, to the nature of political rule. But if you had to distill the whole thing down to one simple message, it would be this. The radical reformers are wrong to try to base everything in scripture because we often need to use our natural reason as well. This is, according to Hooker, no departure from true godliness because it was God who gave us rationality as well as revelation. By the time Hooker published The Laws, he was already an experienced theologian, almost 40 years in age. Born near Exeter in 1554, he studied at Oxford and was a lecturer in Hebrew there, so he gives us yet another example of the merger between Protestant religion and the humanist study of ancient languages. He then became master of the temple church at the Inns of Court in London, the epicenter of legal study in England, so his later focus on the topic of laws was hardly accidental. It was here that Hooker engaged in his first prominent dispute with a Puritan theologian named Walter Travers, who had views like those of Cartwright. Travers and Hooker offered rival lectures at the temple church, and it was famously said that, "...the pulpit spoke pure Canterbury in the morning and Geneva in the afternoon." The point of this remark was to contrast Hooker's Anglican views with those of Travers, which were modeled on a more rigorous form of Calvinism. The main issue at dispute between the two was one we've seen generating arguments across several generations now, not least with Luther and Erasmus, namely sin and grace. Anticipating the positive evaluation of human nature found in his later treatise, The Laws, Hooker pushed back against Travers' radically Calvinist view that the human has no role in salvation, with God predestining the saved and doing all the work to save them. Of course, Hooker agreed that divine grace is needed for salvation. No Protestant would deny that in this period, and no Catholic either. But he suggested that the function of grace is to perfect human nature after its corruption by sin. This is pretty familiar to us, but things get more interesting when we look at the related question of whether a believer can know that they have been offered grace and redemption. In 1585, Hooker wrote a work with the charming title, A Learned and Comfortable Sermon on the Certainty and Perpetuity of Faith in the Elect. Here, comfortable means comforting, and that is indeed the point. Hooker's central question is, they in whose hearts the light of grace doth shine, they that are taught of God, why are they so weak in faith? He wants to reassure his readers that they can have a degree of confidence or certainty in their own salvation. He compares this attitude to the faith we should have in our own reason. Though we cannot know everything, the things we can establish through rational investigation are known with certainty. The certainty in question, though, is a rather special kind. Hooker makes a nice distinction between what we would now call subjective and objective certainty. Imagine you're taking a mathematics test. You're nervous, and you know you have often made mistakes on math tests in the past. So as you write out a slightly tricky proof, though you are pretty confident it's right and have even double checked it for mistakes, you wouldn't venture to say that you are 100% sure that it is right. Maybe you wouldn't even bet money on it. But good news, your answer is right, and in itself it is completely certain. It's a mathematical proof, after all. Thus the objective certainty of the proof outstrips your limited, subjective feeling of certainty. Now, Hooker wants to apply this to truths of religion. God's bestowal of grace to the faithful is as certain as anything could be. Still, we might feel a lot less certain about it than we do about, say, mathematical proofs or things we believe on the basis of the senses. As Hooker puts it, we have less certainty of evidence concerning things believed than concerning things sensibly or naturally perceived, of the latter who doubts at any time, of the former at some time who doesn't. It is acceptable, indeed natural, to doubt in matters of faith, but one should remember that these doubts do not affect the rock-solid certainty of what is believed. Such modesty in belief is, Hooker thinks, a great comfort. Let them beware who challenge to themselves a strength which they have not, lest they lose the comfortable support of that weakness which indeed they have. As you can tell from this, Hooker could strike a calm, even gentle tone, even in rather polemical contexts. The same is shown by the laws, which despite its sustained attack on the Presbyterians, is at pains to argue in a measured and persuasive way. Hooker even suggests that what divides Cartwright and his allies from the Elizabethan consensus view is not, in the end, that big a deal. Surely, as fellow Christians, they can reach some sort of agreement. Toward that end, it would do the Presbyterians good to reflect on how certain they truly are about their dissident opinions. After all, we're not talking about mathematical proofs here, but deep and difficult matters of religion and politics. While Hooker's opponents surely feel that they have good reasons on their side, they can hardly take these reasons to be completely decisive, so it would behoove them to stop making so much fuss. Indeed, Hooker suggests in the preface of the laws that the Presbyterians should, given the inevitable uncertainty that surrounds the thorny issues at stake, submit publicly to the appointed authorities in those issues. These would of course be the crown and the established church. Instead, as private men, they go around smashing up churches and trying to win the allegiance of common believers whose opinions are easily swayed and, in Hooker's view, hardly worth taking seriously. So here we have an all-purpose argument for conservatism and obedience to authority. Gentle tone or not, it's hard to imagine Puritan readers being persuaded to change their minds, and not only because it's hard to imagine the Puritans changing their minds for any reason. But Hooker's case grows stronger as the work proper begins. He puts his finger on a genuinely weak point in the Presbyterian position, namely their appeal to the principle of Scripture alone. As Catholics like Thomas More had pointed out, this methodology is problematic if not incoherent. For one thing, Scripture can hardly be the warrant for its own authority, since that would be circular. For another, it clearly does not give us guidance on all matters. As Hooker says, we do not have to consult the Bible to know how to go about picking up a piece of straw. Rather, Scripture tells us what is necessary for our salvation, especially things we would not have been able to work out on our own. It leaves much else undecided, even with regard to religion. Hence the aforementioned discussion of things like church decorations, which for Hooker are, in keeping with the Church of England's view since the time of Henry VIII, indifferent, that is, left to human discretion. They concern only the outward form of the church, whereas salvation is attained through membership in the invisible inward church. As Hooker says, Scripture tells us how to arrive at salvation, but its directions are compatible with traveling along a paved or a gravel road. Furthermore, some guidelines found explicitly in the Bible may not be intended to apply to us. Commandments handed down to the ancient Israelites don't necessarily remain in force now, a point of some political significance, since the Puritans like to refer to the Old Testament as a model for English governance. Rather, God's commands always look to certain goals, and when the goals are no longer relevant, neither are the commands. As these examples show, Hooker believes that Christians needed to do some careful thinking to understand the Bible and its demands, and they also need to work out for themselves other rules to live by. Fortunately, God has provided them with the means to do just that, natural reason. God, Hooker remarks, is nature's author, and her voice merely his instrument. Far from honoring God by denigrating reason and exalting Scripture above it, the Presbyterians were rejecting a precious divine gift. Certainly, the clear verdict of Scripture is always a powerful consideration. Indeed, says Hooker, it would be the most powerful proof of all, having more weight than a thousand church councils. But usually, we lack such clear directives, so we must rationally reflect and follow the course that seems most probable. Hooker develops this idea when he comes to talk about the different kinds of law. Following Thomas Aquinas, he speaks firstly of the eternal law, which may be considered as being in a sense identical to God. This is the ultimate standard for all law. The eternal law gives rise to two kinds of lower laws, the revealed laws found in Scripture, and the natural law. I mentioned last time that the hotter Protestants, as they were called at the time, had little use for the concept of natural law, and here we can see why. Hooker is explicitly contrasting it to scriptural laws, which his opponents saw as the sole source of true religion. Understanding this full well, Hooker says that the root of the Presbyterian error is a failure to grasp how other kinds of law relate to the eternal law. Of course, Scripture is rooted in that law, but so is the natural law. Furthermore, specific human laws, like the laws of England, are rightly made in accordance with scriptural and natural laws. It's been observed in a recent book by Paul Domeniak that Hooker is here deploying a Platonist theory of participation. Platonists standardly taught that transcendent causes contain their effects. So here, the natural law, and even human laws, are participations of the eternal law, and unfold its commands. We use our power of rationality to discern principles of natural law, for instance that children should respect their parents, and to forge useful and good laws for running our societies, for instance that children can come into their inheritance at the age of 18. These are my examples, not Hooker's. Thus, as Domeniak puts it, the law of reason constitutes the rational cognitive participation of human beings in the providential order of the universe. Hooker applies these ideas to the fraught question of political authority by saying that political institutions are, in general, guided by the natural law, and in particular instances, determined by human choice. It's natural for humans to group together in societies to fulfill our basic needs, and then to seek peace and justice within these societies. We do this by appointing certain people to rule over us, to enforce laws, and prevent conflict. This has to be achieved artificially and by consent, unlike in the family, where nature itself puts the parents in charge over the children. But unlike many Puritan theorists, Hooker does not think that political life is based purely on consent. Though each individual state is brought into existence through a covenant between ruler and ruled, the general tendency and need to create such covenants is rooted in human nature. Thus, Hooker is both a constitutionalist, who believes in a hereditary monarchy put in place by the will of the people, and a naturalist, who believes that this act of consensus was prompted by the natural law. Ultimately, in fact, it is God who decrees that we set up political states, because our doing so is just one more way to participate in the eternal law. All this is explained in detail in the posthumous eighth book of Hooker's Laws. Here he also defends the fact that the queen or king is the head of the Church of England. Of course, he doesn't insist that this arrangement is required by scripture, or even by nature. Rather, it's just one good way to arrange things. Church and state power are in principle distinct, and could be exerted by different authorities. It's just that in England, it has been found expedient to unite both kinds of authority in one sovereign. All this is just about philosophically clever and subtle enough to forestall the lingering suspicion that the whole theory is simply engineered to justify the Elizabethan settlement. As our recent interview guest, Darmon McCulloch, has written, One feels that if the parliamentary legislation of 1559 had prescribed that English clergy were to preach standing on their heads, then Hooker would have found a theological reason for justifying it. As I've said, Hooker seems to be a conservative figure, no less than Thomas More earlier in the century. For More in the 1530s, that meant fighting Protestantism. For Hooker in the 1590s, it meant being a moderate Protestant and adhering to the Anglican settlement. It has, though, been strenuously argued that Hooker was far more principled than this would suggest, and that in the landscape of late 16th century Protestantism, it was Hooker who was the true heir of Calvin and Luther. This case has been made extensively by a leading Hooker scholar, W. J. Torrance Kirby. He has criticized the longstanding tendency to identify Hooker, and by extension, Anglicanism, with a middle way between Calvinist Protestantism and Catholicism. Kirby points out that, despite their rallying cry of scripture alone, the leading reformers did give a place in their theories to merely human nature. For example, they contrasted the two realms of inner grace and of worldly affairs, and warned against confusing the two. So Hooker was just following the lead of Luther and Calvin when he said that political affairs should be governed by the world's law, whereas Puritans like Cartwright insisted on identifying the spiritual with the external. This is why they insisted that no external authority could be recognized who violated the demands of religious life. By contrast, as you'll remember, Luther and Calvin tended to deny that their revolutionary understanding of the spiritual realm should lead to real revolution in the political realm. To take another example, Kirby sees it as being faithful to Calvin when Hooker and Archbishop Wittgift say that the external form of the church is a matter for the wit of man to determine. Kirby also provides ample evidence that Hooker saw himself as being true to the great reformers, and not as departing from their teachings. This is all quite convincing, and I'm not going to presume to argue with it. I would point out, though, that Cartwright, Brown, and the other Puritans were also picking up on themes genuinely present in the writings of the leading reformers, especially Calvin, and they were just as convinced as Hooker that they were adhering to his thought. I think the real problem in late 16th century England is not that one group was being true to Protestantism, while another wasn't. It was that Protestantism and its founding authors simply left plenty of room for disagreement. So, disagree they did. Shortly before Hooker's death in 1599, he was pilloried in a text called A Christian Letter of Certain English Protestants. It accused him of setting up the natural law as a second and independent source of authority apart from scripture. Far from supporting the true church, this would undermine its very foundations. In fact, the authors of the letter thought Hooker sounded like a Catholic, writing that he sought to scatter the profane grains of potpourri. As if that weren't bad enough, they also said he wrote as if he were a shudder philosopher. Hooker was one amongst a group of sinister poets, philosophers, rhetoricians, physicians, schoolmen, and whatsoever, and wrote like another Aristotle by a certain metaphysical and cryptical method so as to bring men into a maze. And you have to say that these certain Protestants, who were, as Hooker forewarned, indeed mighty certain in their opinions, had a point. I already mentioned in passing that some of Hooker's argumentative moves repeat those made by defenders of Catholicism, like Thomas More. Back in 1530 or so, a supporter of the papacy might very well have pointed out that, given the uncertainty and difficulty of religious questions, one should follow the established authority, namely the one in Rome. Of course, Hooker was no Catholic. He dismissed the teachings of Rome as mere superstition. Indeed, it would probably be fair to say that he was willing to indulge in arguments like the ones criticized in the letter, simply because he didn't take Catholicism seriously as an intellectual or theological threat. For him and most people, it was no longer a live option in late 16th century England, so he did not hesitate to use against the Presbyterians arguments that could, in theory, be used just as well by Catholics. But there is another, more principled reason that Hooker's arguments could not be used to support Catholicism. The pope claimed to exercise universal spiritual authority over all Christians. In contrast, Hooker thought in strictly national terms, In this respect, too, he truly was a defender of the Church of England. As I mentioned, Hooker did us the favor of dying in 1600, which is both memorable and makes him a good figure for rounding off this little series of episodes on religious and political debates in the 16th century. Before leaving the topic, though, it should be noted that those debates are going to carry on well into the 17th century. The signature events of that period in England began when King Charles I and Archbishop William Logg annoyed Parliament by adopting Armenian teachings and straying too close to Catholicism, and then annoyed the Scots by trying to impose English church practices upon them. When this led to war and Charles was forced to recall Parliament to get them to pay for it, he wound up coming into open conflict with them. This led to a civil war and his own execution, and then the rule of Oliver Cromwell before the ultimate restoration of the crown. It was in this context that authors like Thomas Hobbes developed their political theories. As I keep saying, we need to understand the Reformation and its many implications in order to understand early modern philosophy. But of course, religion and politics aren't the only things that philosophers ought to know about when it comes to Reformation-era Britain. There are plenty of other topics awaiting us, including scholastic logic and scientific explorations, where we'll be focusing on theories of eyesight and magnetism. But next, we'll discuss a topic that may be even more attractive—Elisabethan literature. Like the political debates we've been studying, literary works of the 16th century were shaped by the Reformation and the rise of humanism. Of course, the first name that leaps to mind here is Shakespeare, and we'll get to him. But first, we will set the stage by talking about two other historical actors who played important roles in the story, Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney. That's next time, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.