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Richard Hooker
born March 1554?, Heavitree, Exeter, Devon,
England
died November 2, 1600, Bishopsbourne, near
Canterbury, Kent
theologian who created a distinctive Anglican
theology and who was a master of English prose
and legal philosophy. In his masterpiece, Of the
Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, which was
incomplete at the time of his death, Hooker
defended the Church of England against both
Roman Catholicism and Puritanism and affirmed
the Anglican tradition as that of a “threefold
cord not quickly broken”—Bible, church, and
reason.
Early years and Oxford
Hooker was born at the end of 1553 or the
beginning of 1554 near the city of Exeter,
Devon. His family lacked the financial means to
send him to the University of Oxford, but, with
John Jewel, bishop of Salisbury, as his patron,
in 1568 Hooker entered Corpus Christi College,
Oxford. The dominant influence in the Church of
England at that time was John Calvin’s
Institutes of the Christian Religion, and thus
Hooker was trained in the traditions of Genevan
Protestantism. Leading scholars at Oxford were,
however, loyal to the Anglican Book of Common
Prayer and used the vestments demanded by the
ecclesiastical law of the realm. Hooker, a
staunch Anglican, went beyond even liberal
Calvinism and read the best scriptural
interpretation of his day, the early Church
Fathers, and even Renaissance Thomism (the
philosophical school influenced by the thought
of St. Thomas Aquinas). He thus avoided the
limits of narrow academic Calvinism and became a
man of wide Renaissance learning. Hooker said
that he grew in his opinions and gave up narrow
conceptions previously held. Hooker became a
scholar of Corpus Christi College in 1573, took
his M.A. in 1577, and became a fellow of the
college that same year.
Master of the Temple
In 1585 Hooker was elected master of the
Temple Church in London. The other candidate for
this position was Walter Travers, an ardent
Calvinist who had written A Full and Plaine
Declaration of Ecclesiastical Discipline out of
the Word of God (1574); although he had not
received Anglican orders, he was made lecturer
(preacher) of the Temple Church. Hooker, a loyal
Anglican, preached in the morning, and Travers,
a firm Calvinist, in the afternoon. Thus it was
said that the Temple congregations heard
Canterbury in the morning and Geneva in the
afternoon.
With the defeat of the Spanish Armada in
1588, the Church of England no longer faced the
possibility of the restoration of Roman
Catholicism in the country. However, the English
church was now challenged by Calvinism, not only
in doctrine but in ecclesiastical organization.
Small cells, or conventicles, of Reformed
worship were formed throughout the realm. Their
hold on general sympathy was so strong that even
the bishops were lukewarm about suppressing them
and allowed their growth to increase unchecked.
Travers, in fact, set up an organization in the
afternoon congregation on the model of the
Reformed Church in the Low Countries and chided
Hooker for not using the Reformed organization
in the Temple Church.
The difference between the two men was
radical. Hooker did not agree with many of the
decisions of the Roman Catholic Council of Trent
(1545–63), which attempted to reform the
Catholic church following the Protestant
Reformation, but he did approve of many of the
medieval Scholastic philosophers and
theologians, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, and he
used their teaching. This was anathema to
Travers, who thought of the teaching of the
Scholastics as sheer rubbish. Hooker seems to
have lived not in the parsonage of the Temple
but with John Churchman, a good friend of the
Church of England. There were two reasons for
this: first, the parsonage was not in good
repair, and, second, Travers lived there.
On February 13, 1588, while still master of
the Temple, Hooker married Joan Churchman,
daughter of his friend and host. Izaak Walton,
the English author and biographer, was
responsible for the story, accepted for 300
years, that Hooker’s future father-in-law
tricked him into the marriage with his ill-favoured
daughter. In 1940 it was proved by examination
of the Court of Chancery records about Hooker’s
estate that the story was a tale devised to
explain the incomplete state of the last books
of the Politie. Joan Churchman brought with her
a large dowry. At the time of his marriage
Hooker had no known financial means, and yet at
his death he left a considerable estate.
Title page of
Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie
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His major work
Hooker left his position at the Temple
Church in 1591 and accepted the living of
Boscombe in Wiltshire. Despite his new position,
Hooker continued to live in his father-in-law’s
house, where he wrote his masterpiece, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie. The Politie
was the final chapter of the so-called
admonition controversy: in June 1572 the London
clerics John Field and Thomas Wilcox had issued
from a secret press An Admonition to Parliament,
which demanded that Queen Elizabeth I restore
the “purity” of New Testament worship in the
Church of England. Although its consideration by
Parliament was forbidden by the queen, the
Admonition became the platform of the
Puritans—members of the Church of England who
wished for religious reforms along the lines
developed in Geneva by Calvin. The leading
bishops, now alarmed by the influence of the
Admonition, knew that an answer was needed, and
the archbishop of Canterbury turned to John
Whitgift, vice chancellor of the University of
Cambridge, to reply to the Admonition. Whitgift
responded and was answered in turn by Thomas
Cartwright, professor at Cambridge and the
leading Puritan clergyman. The controversy was
continued in a whole series of books.
The Admonition was still much in the mind of
England when Hooker left the Temple, and he
assumed the responsibility of replying to it.
The Politie was to be a work of eight books, but
the fifth book was the last one to appear in
Hooker’s lifetime. The tradition that his
manuscripts were destroyed by Puritan ministers
who were assisted by Hooker’s wife does not seem
to be correct. The incomplete condition of the
last books of the Politie merely means that
Hooker had not yet revised them at the time of
his death.
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In the Politie, Hooker defended the
Elizabethan church against Roman Catholics and
Puritans. He upheld the threefold authority of
the Anglican tradition—Bible, church, and
reason. Roman Catholics put Bible and tradition
on a parity as the authorities for belief, while
Puritans looked to Scripture as the sole
authority. Hooker avoided both extremes,
allowing to Scripture absolute authority when it
spoke plainly and unequivocally; where it was
silent or ambiguous, wisdom would consult the
tradition of the church, but he insisted that a
third element lay in human reason, which should
be obeyed whenever both Scripture and tradition
needed clarification or failed to cover some new
circumstance. The core of Hooker’s thinking on
the relations of church and state is unity. In
his view, the Puritans adopted an impossible
position: they claimed to be loyal to the queen
while repudiating her church. By law and by
reason, the people of England must be Anglican,
pledged to serve Elizabeth as the supreme
magistrate of the country and the supreme
governor of the church.
According to tradition, Hooker served the
churches at Drayton Beauchamp, Buckinghamshire,
and Boscombe, Wiltshire, following his term as
master of the Temple, but more probably he
practiced pluralism, which means he received his
salary as a vicar but allowed a lesser clergyman
to perform the duties that the parish required.
In 1595 he accepted an appointment as vicar of
Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury, and in 1597 the
fifth book of the Politie was published. He died
three years later and was buried at
Bishopsbourne.
John S. Marshall
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