Abstract
Polemical material which comprises chapters 3 through 6 of Book VI of the Lawes gives the distinct impression of a self-contained polemical site which pits Hooker in a disputation against the Church of Rome and not against the presbyterians, which is the case throughout the entire remainder of the treatise. Do these three chapters belong to an alleged revision of the Lawes? Lee W. Gibbs and Arthur Stephen McGrade share the opinion that chapters 3 through 6 of what has been traditionally published as Hooker’s Book VI—and labelled conveniently “1648” (the date of its first publication)—does, indeed, belong to a revision of what Hooker originally wrote. What Hooker originally wrote—that is, the rebuttal of the case for the presbyterian lay eldership can be reconstructed, with some accuracy, from the notes made by George Cranmer and Edwin Sandys as they read a draft of Book VI subsequently lost.1 The argument for revision goes something like this: Hooker planned to expand significantly his original Book VI (the draft which Cranmer and Sandys read) by moving to “a treatise on English ecclesiastical laws”2 because of the perceived need to ground the refutation of lay eldership on a thorough discussion of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Based on a fundamental discussion of spiritual and ecclesiastical jurisdiction as understood in the traditional Christian church, the argument would be persuasive that lay elders could not exercise powers reserved for the clergy. Thus, an enlarged Book VI would have begun with generalizations on spiritual jurisdiction (based on the existing chapters 1 and 2) and continued with the 1648 chapters on penance. Hooker’s Autograph Notes indicate that he would have next undertaken, in Gibbs’s words, a “much-expanded defense of the English ecclesiastical court system.”3 The book would have ended with the refutation of the lay elder system and perhaps of other aspects of the presbyterian polity.4
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References
The complex history of Hooker’s manuscripts after his death and conjecture on the fate of Book VI are found in C.J. Sisson, The Judicious Marriage of Mr Hooker and the Birth of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940). See Lee W. Gibbs’ article immediately above, “Book VI of Hooker’s Lawes Revisited: The Calvin Connection” and also his valuable Introduction to Book VI of the Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, Vol. 6, Part 1. All references to Hooker’s texts will be to this edition, abbreviated as FLE. With great detail, Gibbs reconstructs “a hypothetically complete Book VI” which he analyzes and defends in this Introduction, although this reconstruction proceeds without much reference to the actual polemic with the papists which I am tracing in this essay. My own contribution to constructing the original Book VI based on the notes of George Cranmer and Edwin Sandys can be found in “Richard Hooker’s Book VI: A Reconstruction,” Huntington Library Quarterly 42 (1979) 117-39. As with so many scholars who have turned their attention to Richard Hooker, I am indebted to the work of W. Speed Hill, especially “Hooker’s Polity: The Problem of the ‘Three Last Books,’” Huntington Library Quarterly 34 (1971) 317–36. Both Gibbs and Hill summarize well the longstanding debate whether 1648 belongs in the Lawes.
Arthur Stephen McGrade, “The Three Last Books and Hooker’s Autograph Notes,” FLE 6(1):241.
See Lee. W. Gibbs, “Hooker’s Book VI Revisited: the Calvin Connection,” 233 above.
McGrade, “The Three Last Books,” 242
McGrade, “The Three Last Books,” 242
Hill, “Hooker’s Polity: The Problem of the ‘Three Last Books,”‘323
Sisson, The Judicious Marriage of Mr Hooker, 144
Gibbs, “The Calvin Connection.” See above, 247.
Speed Hill has also observed how 1648 is discursively different from the Lawes, suggesting in “The Problem” that its theology echoes the sermon Of the Certainitie and Perpetuitie of Faith in the Elect (FLE 5:69-82) and its “rhetorical stance” matches what one finds in the short treatise “The Nature and Number of the Sacraments” in the Dublin Fragments 14 & 15, 4:115–116.
Lawes VI.3.3; 3:10.8–9
Lawes VI.3.4; 3:11.14
Lawes VI.4.15; 3:47.6–7
Lawes VI. Title; 3:1
Disputationum Roberti Bellarmini Politiani, Societatis Jesu, de controuersiis Christianae fidei, aduersus huius temporis hæreticos, tomus secundus (Paris: Michael Sonnium, 1589). Caesare Baronius, Annales ecclesiastici, 7 vols. (Antwerp: Christopher Plantin, 1589–98).
Lawes VI.4.6; 3:24.21ff.
Lawes VI.4.11; 3:38.4–27
Lawes VI.4.13; 3:42.10–14
Lawes VI.4.11; 3:41.22–23
Lawes VI.4.16; 3:51.22
FLE 6(1):279
For a discussion of Hooker’s treatment of the Roman Catholic threat, see Robert K. Faulkner, Richard Hooker and the Politics of a Christian England (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1981 ).
Lawes VI.5.4; 3:55.19–22 z3 Lawes VI.5.5; 3:59.20
Lawes VI.5.9; 3:67.12–17
Lawes VI.5.9; 3:67.24
Lawes VI.5.9; 3:69.10–12
McGrade, “Repentance and Spiritual Power: Book VI of Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 29 (1978), 170
McGrade and others are not convinced that the first thirteen sections of chapter 6 were originally part of Hooker’s alleged expanded discussion on repentance in 1648. The writing is Hooker’s but inserted into 1648 either by Hooker or someone else. See McGrade’s discussion in “Repentance,” especially pages 172 – 76.
Lawes VI.6.2; 3:70.11ff.
See n. 13 above.
William Allen, Libri tres de Sacramentis in genere ( Antwerp: John Fowler, 1576 )
Lawes VI.6.8; 3:82.12
Lawes VI.6.10; 3:84.17, 85.4
Lawes VI.6.11; 3:87.22
Lawes VI.6.12; 3:91.34
Lawes VI.6.14; 3:97.1–8
Lawes VI.6:18; 3:102.14–16
Lawes VI.6.18; 3:103.16–19
W.D.J. Cargill Thompson, “The Philosopher of the ‘Politic Society,’” SRH, 12
See Rudolph Almasy, “The Purpose of Richard Hooker’s Polemic,” Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978), 251 – 70
Sandys’s Notes, FLE 3:135 (s. 36)
McGrade, “Repentance,” 166
The letter is printed in Keble, 2:598–610.
Keble, 2:605
Lawes Pref.8.1; 1:36.15–17
Lawes Pref.8.5; 1:42.3–4
Lawes Pref.8.6; 1:43.27
Dedication to John Whitgift,” Lawes V.Ded.2; 2:1.14–16
Lawes V.Ded.7; 2:5.4
Lawes V.Ded.3; 2:2.25
Lawes V.Ded.8; 2:6.2
Lawes V.37.1; 2:149.23–26
If Hooker were going to write extensively on repentance as the end of spiritual jurisdiction and this discussion was to be preliminary to an attack on the power of lay elders, as those argue who wish to include 1648 is a revised and enlarged Book VI, it is important to note that in a work such as Walter Travers’ A full and plaine declaration of Ecclesiasticall Discipline owt off the word off God (Heidelberg: M. Schirat 1574 ), Travers shows no interest in the internal state of the sinner, nor mentions penance nor repentance in the sections on elders, the consistory, ecclesiastical correction, and excommunication.
Cranmer’s Notes, FLE 3:126, 67
Sandys’s Notes, FLE 3:130,
Sandys exhorts: “I will here put you in mynd once for all, that you must needes set down Mr Cartwrights and W.T. [Walter Travers’s] woords at large in the margent of this booke wheresoever they are impugned. Els will your discourse want much credit of sinceritie: which in your former it hath especially by that means” (Sandys’s Notes, FLE 3:137), 62.
Sandys’s Notes, FLE 3:140, 85
Brian Vickers, “Public and Private Rhetoric in Hooker’s Lawes,” RHC, 115. See also Vickers’s essay “Hooker’s Prose Style” in the abridged edition of Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, ed. A.S. McGrade and Brian Vickers, New York: St. Martins Press, 1975.
Vickers, “Public and Private Rhetoric,” 120
Vickers, “Public and Private Rhetoric,” 126
Cicero], Ad C. Herennium De Ratione Dicendi, trans. Harry Caplan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954 ), 187
Cicero, De inventione, trans. H. M. Hubbell ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949 ), 57
Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, trans. Rev. John Selby Watson ( London: Henry G. Bohn, 1856 ), 130
Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, trans. John Henry Freese (New York: G.P. Putman’s Sons, 1926 ), 459
Lawes Pref.1.2; 1:2.17–23
FLE 6(1):294. Indeed, McGrade (“Repentance,” 172) believes that 1648 should be considered an introduction to the final three books of the Lawes, not merely to Book VI.
McGrade, “Repentance,” 172
When we see that Book VIII is very much focused too (the ecclesiastical dominion of the supreme regent defined, his specific powers defended), it is difficult to believe that Hooker would have radically modified the polemical focus of Book VI to write less of a refutation of the disciplinarian office of lay elders and more diffusely about “spiritual discipline established in the church and commonwealth of England,” as Gibbs contends, FLE 6(1):271.
Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric (1560), ed. Peter E. Medine (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 185. Elsewhere Wilson writes: “Not only is it wisdom to speak so much as is needful, but also it is good reason to leave unspoken so much as is needless” (53).
Wilson, Art of Rhetoric, 46
Wilson, Art of Rhetoric, 139
Wilson, Art of Rhetoric, 184-85
Wilson, Art of Rhetoric, 141
Wilson, Art of Rhetoric, 139. “Gross sum” means, I take it, an abridgement of the matter, the essence of the controversy, proceeding in summary fashion.
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Almasy, R.P. (2003). Book VI and the Tractate on Penance: do they belong together? . In: Kirby, W.J.T. (eds) Richard Hooker and the English Reformation. Studies in Early Modern Religious Reforms, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0319-2_16
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