Abstract
A. J. Joyce,
Richard Hooker and Anglican Moral Theology
, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2012; 272 pp.: 9780199216161, £65.00 (hbk)
Richard Hooker is not the only writer of genius to have been unable to find a publisher for his work, in his case Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie in the reign of Elizabeth I. But, unlike some less fortunate authors, Hooker’s masterpiece was rescued by patronage in high places. Hooker studies have experienced a renaissance in recent years. John Keble’s three-volume edition of The Works of that Learned and Judicious Divine, Mr. Richard Hooker, which gave sterling service to Anglican theology for a century and a half, has been superseded by the meticulous, handsomely produced Folger Shakespeare Library edition. Discussions of Hooker’s thought have burgeoned, but not all who have published on the subject are reliable guides. Alison Joyce is one who is: her book is a mandatory addition to any working library on Hooker and to our shelves of Anglican moral theology. A rather feisty feature of Joyce’s treatment is the way she assesses Hooker’s modern interpreters and castigates those who have misappropriated him for tendentious ends.
Hooker was a highly original thinker and one difficult to categorize (supposing that we wished to do that). He cannot simply be recruited into the ranks of the ‘magisterial’ Reformers (Luther, Calvin, Bucer, Bullinger etc.) on behalf of Anglicanism, as some have tried to do – their names are placarded in the book – though he was raised on Reformed theology and had deeply imbibed Calvin. At the same time, he is no slavish follower of Thomas Aquinas, though his debt to the Angelic Doctor (and therefore to Aristotle) is immense: on natural law, moral reasoning, virtue and character. Hooker’s learning is awesome: texts biblical and classical; theology patristic, medieval and reformed; law civil and ecclesiastical. He died, still only in his mid-40s, in 1600, his own man to the end, but with three of his eight books unpublished.
Hooker has been hailed as the founding father of Anglican moral theology, but the case for his stature as a moral theologian has hardly been made – until now. What Alison Joyce does, and does very clearly, is to place him in his contemporary context in the long struggle for reformation in the English Church, before expounding his theological anthropology (his understanding of human nature as made in the image of God and in its fallen condition), his sophisticated doctrine of the authority of Scripture and the scope of the Church’s discretion, his view of the moral life and of the relationship between principles and practice (allowing for pastoral flexibility and equity). She ends with a study of Hooker’s teaching on matrimony.
There is one obvious snag: the Laws is not a work of moral theology, though it is imbued with acute ethical awareness throughout. So this is a study of the moral-theological dimension of Hooker’s work – and it reveals him as a master. There is some overlap in content with another essential resource, A Companion to Richard Hooker, edited by Torrance Kirby and published by Brill in 2008, but that collection does not deal overtly with Hooker’s moral theology. One striking area of overlap between the two volumes is the attention given to Hooker’s polemical and rhetorical skills, his use of irony, his subtle denigration of his Puritan opponents, whom he found both arrogant and ignorant. This reveals an engaged, passionate Hooker, desperately fighting with every weapon he had for the cause of the Church of England as established under the ironically named Elizabethan Settlement, when the outcome was not at all certain. But, pace Joyce, I don't think that makes him any less ‘judicious’ than his reputation attests. To be judicious is not necessarily to be dispassionate.