As we have seen in part one of this essay, Richard Hooker believes that a proper understanding of God leads to a proper understanding of law, and a proper understanding of law facilitates a proper understanding of God. These reveal that the human toil which comprises ecclesial-political existence is set within – to borrow William Temple’s justly famous phrase – a “sacramental universe”¹ where grace and law exist in harmony, rather than antithesis. Nature, however, does not articulate law in the same way that a written text does, for although nature contains visible signs, they are not linguistic. It is hard to overemphasize the importance of nature in Hooker’s metaphysics, and we do well to deal with the matter at some length. We have already seen that all things, in Hooker’s worldview, are ordered by God’s wisdom; we have seen, too, that law is the primary means by which God orders. Doubly bound by both wisdom and law, nature mediates in a limited fashion between God and humanity. She is “taught” by God and he, being her author, uses her voice as “his instrument.”² Thus, nature has a strongly pedagogical function in Hooker’s theology. He writes of a “schoole of nature,” which serves “to prove things lesse manifest, and to induce a perswasion” upon human beings to apply the laws that they discover within nature, because these “profite many waies for mens instruction.”³

This may seem to yield an “optimistic” perspective on human nature. I do not wish to deny that Hooker had a more positive valuation of basic human capacities than some of his opponents did – we will see in the third section of this paper that this is because of his conception of political order – but Hooker also believed that the post-lapsarian human potential to discover the laws of nature was quite limited. “The first principles of the law of nature are easie, hard it were to find men ignorant of them: but concerning the duty which natures lawe doth require at the hands of men in a number of thinges particular, so far hath the naturall understanding even of sundry whole nations bene darkened, that they have not discerned no not grosse iniquitie to bee sin.”⁴ Human capacity is by no means conterminous with human reality, and although the “schoole of nature” directs those who are willing to learn from her, nature itself has an end – and that end is not to guide humanity to salvation. In a memorable phrase, Hooker writes that “nature even in this life doth plainly claime and call for a more divine perfection.”⁵ Through nature, God gives human beings capacities that are not lost amidst the work of grace, because they remain necessary for social existence. Hooker’s claim is nothing more and nothing less than this.

A number of uniquely human capacities facilitate our living together in community. We have already seen that these include the ability to investigate and discover the laws written in and upon nature; complementing this is the ability to discourse about the same. Nature, however, is not enough to fully guide human flourishing. It is noteworthy that Hooker’s statements concerning the ethics of discourse are not made within the context of his discussion of human nature, but are instead made with reference to the distinctly Christian – and, therefore, revealed – virtue of charity. As he writes in the preface of the Lawes, “There will come a time when three words uttered with charitie and meekenes shall receive a farre more blessed rewarde then three thousand volumes written with disdainefull sharpnes of wit.”⁶ Natural laws govern the human ability to discourse as such, but revealed laws direct human discourse towards an end that, like nature, reaches out “for a more divine perfection.” We are thus reminded that the content of the Lawes is not just dialectical; Hooker wants to change the firmly held convictions of his opponents. In other words, the content of the Lawes is also rhetorical. Serene Jones’s description of rhetoric as “a moral enterprise” concerned with “inculcating an appropriate Christian character and eliciting desired social actions”⁷ is fully appropriate here. Hooker’s famous, unfinished apologia is a call to action, and to this end he sets forth an ethics of charitably disciplined discourse.

Brian Vickers has written that Hooker “deliberately eschewed appealing to the emotions”⁸ because he distrusted “verbal effects”⁹ and considered them to oftentimes be deceptive. This is well illustrated by Hooker’s stated goal of avoiding rhetoric that appealed to “the ignorant and vulgar sort” who “measure by tale and not by waight.”¹⁰ On the one hand, this unapologetically blunt description helps us understand the kind of people that Hooker believed his opponents appealed to. In fact, Hooker also believed that his opponents were themselves inclined towards the same sort of ignorance, albeit willfully so: “Thinke yee are men, deeme it not impossible for you to erre: sift unpartiallie your owne hearts, whether it be force of reason, or vehemencie of affection, which hath bread, and still doth feede these opinions in you.”¹¹ Here we glimpse another element of Hooker’s anthropological realism; he clearly had no illusions about the human propensity for self-deception. On the other hand, Hooker’s description of his opponents’ followers reveals that his own argument about rhetoric is itself rhetorical. What could be more persuasive – and, no less, polemically effective – than successfully persuading others that their own mode of persuasion is irrational and, therefore, entirely unpersuasive? If there is a law of discourse within nature, it is one which orients away from “vehemencie of affection” and towards the “force of reason.” However, the law of discourse must also, with nature, be oriented and perfected by divine grace.

Hooker thus directs us to both charity and the fullness of its eschatological disclosure. Here his language becomes rapturous, as he exhorts his readers to “behold how the wisedome of God hath revealed a way mysticall and supernaturall.”¹² The “divine virtues” of faith, hope, and charity are described by him as an orchestrated ascent, “without which there can be no salvation.” Faith, which discovers “the treasures of hidden wisedome in Christ,” is the very “ground” of the virtues which follow; hope, a “trembling expectation,” looks forward to the resurrection of the dead; and charity, the summit of the other two, begins “with a weake inclination of heart towards him unto whome wee are not able to aproch, [but] endeth with endless union, the misterie wherof is higher than the reach of the thoughts of men.”¹³ The image of an ascent through the virtues is an invitation to Hooker’s opponents to ascend with him out of irrationality and up through reasonable discourse, leading eventually to ineffable union with Christ. Hooker holds out the hope that when charity becomes the ground upon which theological discourse traverses, the discourse itself will be changed, because charity reminds us that the end of theological discourse is its own cessation in the presence of God.

Hooker knew that this recognition, like the theological argument driven by it, stood far from own day, which he described as “full of tongue and weake of braine,”¹⁴ and which he, as noted earlier, believed was lost in “the mist of passionate affection.” His rhetorical attempt thus leans quite heavily upon values he presumed to share with his opponents – most importantly, faith, hope, and love. Hooker argues for their ascending priority within a metaphysical framework defined by law, nature, and divine wisdom, and he proposes that human discourse must be governed by laws that harmonize with those that God orders creation by. The reason for this is simple: truthful and persuasive discourse can only take place when its law orders us toward the revealed end of charity, because only then can the law of discourse, like the law of nature, reach out towards “a more divine perfection.” With this framework now firmly in place, and with law now understood as Hooker’s guiding principle, we may profitably focus on his understanding of divine revelation by turning to his discussions of Scripture, reason, and tradition.