Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Priest & Teacher of the Church
November 3 · d. 1600
Richard Hooker was the Elizabethan priest and theologian whose Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity gave the reformed Church of England its most careful account of itself. Master of the Temple in London and afterward a country parson in Kent, he wrote in defense of the English church's order against those who would remake it wholly on the Geneva pattern, arguing that Scripture holds the first place and that reason and the settled judgment of the church rightly order what Scripture leaves free. He died in 1600, and later ages came to call him the judicious Hooker and the father of Anglican theological method. His feast is November 3.
Richard Hooker was born about 1554 at Heavitree, a village just beyond the walls of Exeter, to a family with more respectability than money. He was a quiet, short-sighted, unassuming boy, quick at his books; his uncle John Hooker, a man of some standing in the city, brought him to the notice of John Jewel, the learned bishop of Salisbury, who took him up as his scholar and sent him to Corpus Christi College, Oxford. There he mastered the languages and the divinity of the age and stayed on as a fellow, a man made for the study rather than the crowd.
In 1585 Hooker was called to London and made Master of the Temple, the church of the lawyers between the City and the river. It should have been a quiet preferment. It was not. The afternoon lecturer, Walter Travers, was a learned and eloquent Presbyterian who wanted the Church of England stripped of its bishops, its set prayers, and its ceremonies, and rebuilt on the pattern of Geneva; and Sunday by Sunday he rose to answer from the same pulpit what Hooker had preached in the morning. The stakes were larger than two men's tempers. A powerful party held that a church might do only what Scripture expressly commanded, and that a church which kept what Scripture did not command, its bishops and its Prayer Book and its ceremonies, was scarcely a true church at all. Two generations later Thomas Fuller, writing his Church History of Britain, caught the contest in a line that has never been bettered: that "the pulpit spake pure Canterbury in the morning, and Geneva in the afternoon."
Hooker did not answer eloquence with eloquence. His preaching was plain, even dull to some ears, his eyes fixed on his notes. His gift was patience and thought, and he saw that the quarrel could not be won Sunday by Sunday; it had to be answered at the root, in writing, and at length. So he asked to be released from London to a country living where he could work. He was given the parsonage of Boscombe in Wiltshire, and then, in 1595, the quiet parish of Bishopsbourne in Kent, near Canterbury; and in those country years, out of the noise, he wrote the book that outlived every sermon preached against him.
Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is a great, deliberate argument that God governs the whole of creation by law, and that the ordered life of the church is not a betrayal of Scripture but a part of that same divine ordering. Against those who would allow the church nothing but the bare letter of the Bible, Hooker answered that God had given his people reason as well, and the gathered wisdom of the church, to guide them in the countless things Scripture leaves free. He set Scripture first and above all, but he would not let its supremacy be turned into a cage. Near the end of his first book he wrote the sentence for which he is best remembered, a hymn to law itself. In the first book of the Laws, in the collected Works, he wrote:
Of Law there can be no less acknowledged, than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world: all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power; both Angels and men and creatures of what condition soever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent, admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy.
The work was never finished. Books I to IV came from the press in 1593, and the great fifth book, longer than the four before it, in 1597; the last three he left in rough papers, to be gathered and printed long after his death. He had no illusion that he had silenced anyone. But he had done something more lasting than winning an argument: he had given the English church a reasoned account of why it was as it was, in a prose so weighed and so grand that men read it as literature when they had forgotten the controversy that called it out.
Richard Hooker died at Bishopsbourne on the second of November 1600, not yet fifty, worn out over his manuscripts. He had been no bishop and no martyr, only a shy parson who thought carefully and wrote slowly in a country parsonage. Yet the church he defended learned from him to hold Scripture supreme and to receive reason and good order as gifts beneath it, and it kept his balance long after the men who had shouted him down were forgotten. Later ages, reaching for one word, called him judicious; and the patient work of his obscure last years has steadied his church for four hundred years.
How we know Richard Hooker is a matter of two very different kinds of record. His mind is on the page in his own great work, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, and there is no doubt of what he thought or how he wrote. His life is another matter. Almost everything we know of the man, his poverty, his shyness, his marriage, his death, comes from a single book written sixty-five years after he died: Izaak Walton's The Life of Mr. Richard Hooker, published in 1665. Walton, best loved for The Compleat Angler, was a devout churchman of a later generation who wrote to hold up Hooker as a model of quiet, learned holiness, and his Life is a work of affection as much as of record. It preserves real memory, gathered at a remove from men who had known Hooker; it also shapes and softens, and in at least one famous case it is demonstrably wrong.
The clearest case is Hooker's marriage. Walton tells that Hooker, an unworldly scholar, was tricked by his London hostess into marrying her plain and ill-tempered daughter, Joan Churchman, and that his great work suffered for the unhappiness of his home. The story was believed for nearly three hundred years. In 1940 C. J. Sisson, examining the surviving Court of Chancery records of Hooker's estate, found a different picture: Joan brought a substantial dowry, and the marriage appears to have been ordinary and settled. Walton's tale seems to have grown up to explain why the last books of the Laws were left unfinished. It is a fair measure of the whole Life, reverent, vivid, and shaping, to be read with gratitude for how much it preserved and care for a witness writing long after the events.
The book itself has its own uncertainties. Hooker saw the first four books into print in 1593 and the fifth, the longest and most finished, in 1597. The remaining three he did not live to complete. Books VI and VIII were first printed in 1648 and Book VII not until 1662, all assembled from rough and scattered papers; and their text has been debated ever since, with the authenticity of Book VI in particular long in question. The Laws we read whole is in part the work of later editors piecing together what Hooker left.
Hooker is popularly remembered as the author of the "three-legged stool" of Anglicanism, the image of Scripture, tradition, and reason as three balanced supports of equal weight. The image is a useful later shorthand, and it draws on something genuinely his, but it is not his own, and it flattens what he actually argued. Hooker did not set the three side by side as equals; he ranked them. In the fifth book of the Laws, in Ronald Bayne's edition, he wrote that "what Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that the first place both of credit and obedience is due; the next whereunto is whatsoever any man can necessarily conclude by force of reason; after these the voice of the Church succeedeth." Scripture is supreme; reason and the judgment of the church follow it, as the appointed guides where Scripture is silent. The three-legged stool is a later distillation of that ordered account, not a slogan Hooker coined.
Richard Hooker is commemorated on November 3, the day after his death, in the calendars of the Church of England, the Episcopal Church, and the Anglican Church in North America, where he is kept as a priest and teacher of the faith. He is remembered above all as the father of Anglican theological method and, in the epithet that has clung to him since his own century and stands on the title page of Keble's edition, as the judicious Hooker, the careful and weighing mind of the English church.
His great memorial is his prose. The Laws is reckoned among the monuments of early modern English, and Hooker is read for his sentences as much as for his theology. In stone he is best known from the seated statue by Alfred Drury on the green before Exeter Cathedral, unveiled in 1907, which shows him bearded and gowned with the open book of the Laws upon his knee, near the city of his birth; a monument marks his burial in the parish church at Bishopsbourne, where he served his last years and did his last work. Four centuries on, the church he defended still traces to him its habit of holding Scripture first and reasoning carefully beneath it.
Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity(English, 1593 onward)
Hooker's masterwork and the foundational statement of Anglican theological method; Books I-IV (1593) and V (1597) in his lifetime, Books VI-VIII posthumous and textually uncertain.
Public domain: The works of that learned and judicious divine, Mr. Richard Hooker (collected Works, vol. 1), Internet Archive
Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, the Fifth Book(English, 1902 (Bayne ed.))
The longest and most finished book of the Laws, in Bayne's 1902 edition; carries the ordering of Scripture, reason, and the church (V.8.2) that lies behind the later "three-legged stool."
Public domain: Of the laws of Ecclesiastical polity, the fifth book, ed. Ronald Bayne (1902), Internet Archive
The Life of Mr. Richard Hooker(English, 1665)
The 1665 Life that shaped Hooker's reputation and preserves nearly all the personal anecdotes; devout, vivid, written two generations after his death.
Public domain: Project Canterbury (anglicanhistory.org)
Richard Hooker: Prophet of Anglicanism(English, 1999)
The readable modern biography for the general reader; sympathetic and full-length, strong on the life and the age.
Public domain: Burns & Oates, 1999 (Google Books)
Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist(English, 2005)
The leading study of Hooker from within the Reformed tradition; the scholarly way into the modern rebalancing of his thought.
Public domain: Ashgate, 2005 (Google Books)
Primary sources. Everything of Hooker's own mind is in Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Books I to IV appeared in 1593 and the fifth book in 1597; Books VI and VIII were first printed in 1648 and Book VII in 1662, gathered from his papers after his death. The whole work is free in the older collected editions at the Internet Archive and at the Online Library of Liberty (the Keble text), and in a modern critical old-spelling form in the Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker (Harvard University Press), the scholar's standard.
Principal hagiography. Izaak Walton's The Life of Mr. Richard Hooker (1665) is the source of nearly every personal anecdote and the fountainhead of Hooker's reputation; it should be read for what it is, a loving Life written two generations after the fact, and it is free at Project Canterbury.
Recommended modern biography. Philip B. Secor's Richard Hooker: Prophet of Anglicanism (Burns & Oates, 1999) is the readable modern life, a sympathetic full-length biography for the general reader who wants the man and his world before the technical theology. For going deeper, W. J. Torrance Kirby's Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist (Ashgate, 2005) is the leading study of Hooker read from inside the Reformed tradition, the scholarly way into the modern rebalancing of his thought.
Further reading. Nigel Atkinson's Richard Hooker and the Authority of Scripture, Tradition and Reason and Nigel Voak's Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology carry the debate over Hooker's Reformed sympathies; Michael Brydon's The Evolving Reputation of Richard Hooker traces how each age has read him; A Companion to Richard Hooker (Brill), edited by Torrance Kirby, is the fullest scholarly survey.
Online resources. The collected Works are at the Internet Archive and the Online Library of Liberty; Walton's Life is at Project Canterbury (anglicanhistory.org); the Temple Church's own account of the Hooker and Travers dispute is online at templechurch.com.
Hooker's stature grew steadily after his death, and how he has been read is itself a long story. Walton's Life fixed the image of a saintly, moderate divine, and in 1836 John Keble, one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement, produced the edition of the Works that carried Hooker to the nineteenth century and cast him as the theologian of a via media, an English middle way charted between Rome and Geneva. That High Church reading held for more than a century. Since the late twentieth century a body of scholarship, among them Nigel Atkinson, W. J. Torrance Kirby, and Nigel Voak, has pressed a different case, recovering how deeply Hooker stood within the Reformed theology of his own day and reading him less as the architect of a middle way than as a conformist defender of the Elizabethan settlement from inside the Reformed mainstream. The two readings are still weighed against each other. That so careful a writer can be claimed by such different heirs is part of why he has never stopped being read.
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52
Almighty God, you gave your servant Richard Hooker special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.