In the opening chapters of his Second treatise of government (1689), John Locke quotes the Elizabethan divine, Richard Hooker (1554–1600), at some length in support of his anthropology and his doctrine of the state of nature. Men, writes Locke, are equal ‘by Nature’, something which ‘the Judicious Hooker looks upon as self-evident’.Footnote 1 Locke begins to paint Hooker as proto-contractarian in this passage. Later, Locke goes on to bring this assertion home with a long quote about the truth of his own conception of the state of nature. Locke's response to those objecting to his conception of the state of nature was to paint them as opposing ‘the Authority of the Judicious Hooker’.Footnote 2 But was Locke representing Hooker accurately? Or was he, as Robert Eccleshall puts it, ‘unacquainted with the substance of Hooker's thought’, and instead using him ‘as a stick with which to beat Anglican royalists’?Footnote 3 In my estimation, Eccleshall is correct at least with respect to Locke's motivation for using Hooker, even if he underestimates his familiarity with Hooker's ideas.
Unfortunately, Locke's use of Hooker has muddied the waters of interpretation on this question.Footnote 4 Alexander S. Rosenthal is adamant that ‘Hooker's compact theory … preceded these latter theories [of Hobbes and Locke] and to a large degree influenced them.’Footnote 5 Indeed, Rosenthal goes on to conclude that Hooker was a modified Thomist, who introduced a conventionalist account of human government.Footnote 6 Ernst Troeltsch draws a strong link between Hooker's theory of consent with regard to the royal supremacy and Locke's contractarian ideas.Footnote 7 Peter Munz is comfortable with linking Hooker to Locke in the same vein that Locke himself does. According to Munz, they agree on ‘the basic principles of constitutional government, including the question of the origins of society’.Footnote 8 In short, these scholars and others like them maintain that Hooker is essentially proto-contractarian. Upon this interpretation, Hooker is a conventionalist with regard to societal origins, who ‘anticipated’ thinkers like Hobbes and Locke.Footnote 9
It is my contention in this article that Hooker's understanding of law and his theory of the origins of society are quite different to Locke's social contractarian ideas. Hooker has an Aristotelian understanding of humanity's political anthropology, mixed with an Augustinian theological anthropology. Furthermore, Hooker's discussion of the origins of human government precedes his discussion of human law because he understands human government is not a product of human law; it is a product of natural law. In Hooker's thought, God creates human society through the means of the natural law. In this sense, then, Hooker is a political naturalist, though not an Aristotelian naturalist. Humans are granted a subordinate agency in Hooker's thought by virtue of the law of reason, which is itself a subset of the natural law.
Indeed, Hooker's framework for societal origins demonstrates his political naturalism.Footnote 10 His theory of natural law feeds his theory of societal origins and is balanced with the anthropological necessity of human fallenness flowing from his Augustinianism.Footnote 11 For Hooker, political life was not required by humanity's prelapsarian condition, and yet it remains perfectly in accord with the same. It was the Fall, and with it the introduction of human sin, that has rendered political life necessary to the human condition. But because human government is prior to human law in Hooker's thought, human government is not made according to human law.Footnote 12 Hooker does indeed hold that human government is, in the words of Alexander S. Rosenthal, a ‘human arrangement’.Footnote 13 But, rather than politics being a human artifice, it is made according to God's eternal law working through the natural law. Politics remains natural in Hooker's political thought. And it is natural despite his Augustinian anthropology.
To demonstrate the above, I will do the following. In the first section, I will briefly set out Hooker's Augustinian anthropology. In the second, I will examine his theory of law, which will focus on his exposition of the natural law. This will provide the basis upon which I build into the third and fourth sections, which will be an exposition of his theory of the origins of society. The overall picture painted of Hooker will be a mixed one. For Hooker does not adopt the Aristotelian view that politics is ‘by nature’ in its teleology. It is not an end by which humans are perfected. And yet political society is, in a significant sense, necessitated by the law of nature. Indeed, for Hooker, political society is formed under the juridical authority of the law of nature.
I
While scholarship surrounding Richard Hooker addresses the question of the origins of society in his thought, few have emphasized his place in the Augustinian anthropological family to which he so obviously belongs.Footnote 14 Joan Lockwood O'Donovan makes a fine assessment of Hooker's understanding of law, as well as the details of his theory of societal and political origins, yet she does not fully account for his theological anthropology.Footnote 15 This deprives readers of the possibility of seeing how these two important elements of his thought – anthropology, and his theory of political societal origins – interact with his influential theory of law. Torrance Kirby's work on Hooker's doctrine of the royal supremacy makes enormous headway into properly placing his theology and political theory amongst the magisterial reformers. And yet it lacks a nuanced discussion of Hooker's political anthropology.Footnote 16 W. D. J. Cargill Thompson's essay on Hooker's thought on the ‘politic society’ draws the appropriate parallels between Aristotle and Hooker, as well as Augustine and Hooker, on the question of the origins of political society and the question of consent.Footnote 17 But the question of anthropology is not dealt with at any great length. Finally, W. Bradford Littlejohn, in his recent treatment of Hooker's political theology, rightly denies the Whiggish interpretation of Hooker as proto-liberal in the context of a wider discussion of Hooker's protection of Christian liberty through his defence of the Church of England and her institutional liberty. But, once again, no emphasis is laid on anthropology as a key interpretive ingredient.Footnote 18
My own contribution to this discussion will seek to rectify this lack of attention to the relationship between Hooker's anthropology, his jurisprudence, and his theory of societal origins. The Fall is a significant element in Hooker's understanding of human nature, as is usually the case with most theologically minded Christian thinkers. His understanding of human nature, when addressing the question of the impact of the Fall, is basically Augustinian. As we shall see below, Hooker is an Aristotelian and Thomist when it comes to law. This combination of factors affects his understanding of the origins of political society. Therefore, we shall now briefly examine the key elements of Hooker's understanding the Fall and sin.Footnote 19
In the first place, Hooker affirms the Augustinian conception of original sin. That is, he holds that all humanity is sinful because of their familial connection to Adam. The clearest statement of this comes in a surviving fragment, first published in 1836, where Hooker responds to a letter from some clergymen who dispute his fidelity to the Thirty-nine articles of the Church of England.Footnote 20 In the midst of an argument about the universal efficacious atonement of Christ (and this in spite of the sovereign decree of God to elect some to salvation and not others), Hooker says that all of Adam's posterity are sinful. He writes, ‘[the] whole masse which conteyneth … Adam and Adams naturall posteritie without exception of any one, wee find from the first to the last none in whome there is not unrighteousness, eyther actuall, or att the least originall’.Footnote 21 In another passage, Hooker parallels the redemptive blessings of Christ with the lapsarian curse of Adam. The blessings of Christ ‘passe from him to his whole race as malediction came from Adam unto all mankinde’.Footnote 22 In other words, all humanity is affected by Adam's first sin and all are, therefore, unrighteous. Hooker further describes the deep sinfulness of humanity by asserting that all sin originates in humanity itself, not in God, who is innocent of evil. He writes that no terrible event or ‘calamity’ originates in God himself but, on the contrary, ‘his owne most sacred will, directeth us unto sinne as the verie roote out of which it originallie groweth; and because wee are sinfull, therefore the [burden] under which wee groane, wee impute to none butt ourselves only’.Footnote 23 All evil in human life originates in human sin. This illustrates the import of Hooker's doctrine of human sin.
He writes elsewhere, in his response to the critics of his Laws of ecclesiastical polity, of the will in human nature, saying that it is ‘soe indisposed through a native evill habit that if God's speciall grace did not aid our imbecilitie, whatsoever wee doe or imagine would only be continuallie evill’.Footnote 24 In his exploration of human law, he notes that humans cannot ‘learne of our selves’ nor learn from others how to enjoy a good life because ‘wickedness and malice have taken deepe roote’.Footnote 25 This wickedness is so ingrained in human nature, according to Hooker, that even when there was only one family on the earth (referring to Adam, Eve, and their sons, Cain and Abel), ‘no instruction humane or divine could prevent effusion of bloud’.Footnote 26 When he preached on Habbakuk 2:4, focusing on pride, he emphasized that ‘[we] are not dust and ashes but wourse, our mindes from the highest to the lowest are not right’.Footnote 27 Indeed, ‘[all] being wrapped up in sinne and made therby the children of death’.Footnote 28 The picture painted by Hooker of the effects and extent of human sin is, as Egil Grislis notes, ‘strikingly radical’.Footnote 29
Despite the depth of human depravity, Hooker holds that people can know the natural law of God. However, this ability is a kind of grace from God, even if it is one separate from the saving grace offered through Jesus Christ. In his Answer to the critics of his Laws, Hooker affirms that ‘without Gods preventing and helping grace wee are nothing att all able’ to do any good that will please God.Footnote 30 But humankind is still capable of natural knowledge. That is, Hooker affirms the ability for people to discern God's law as set down in nature, but special intervention is needed to bring them to salvation. God graciously ‘[bestows] gifts, to take away those impediments which are growne into Nature through sin’.Footnote 31 Humankind's ‘naturall powers and faculties’ are ‘through our native corruption soe weakened’ that we need God's ‘speciall grace’ to produce ‘blossoms [and] buds that tende to the fruit of eternall life’.Footnote 32 Indeed, ‘[there] is no kind of faculty or power in man … which can rightly performe the functions allotted to it, without the perpetuall aid and concurrence of [God]’.Footnote 33 In other words, sin has so marred humankind's ability to function and reason that our grasp of the natural and moral law of God is, in Littlejohn's words, ‘no longer clear and reliable’.Footnote 34
But humankind still retains ‘a reasonable understanding, and a will thereby framable to good things’, and with God's help people can pursue goodness and virtue.Footnote 35 Things that are good are knowable for humans ‘if Reason were diligent to search it out’.Footnote 36 ‘He is the author of all that we thinke or doe by vertue of that light, which he himselfe hath given’, writes Hooker.Footnote 37 And these gifts from God, which illumine humankind's natural capacities and abilities, Hooker identifies with the Apostle Paul's statements about people knowing God's law ‘by the light of nature’ in Romans 1 and 2.Footnote 38 Indeed, ‘[that] little sparke of the light of nature which remayneth in us may serve us for [the affairs] of this life’.Footnote 39 This ‘little sparke’ can be logically linked to Hooker's understanding of human reason and the role it plays in his jurisprudence. Despite the depravity of humankind, Hooker saw that people still had use of reason and, as discussed below, reason is linked with an understanding of the law of nature. It is to Hooker's jurisprudence that we now turn, where we will observe the links between Hooker's doctrine of sin, his understanding of law, and his understanding of the origins of political society.
II
The foundation for Hooker's ideas on the origins of society is found in his exposition of the multiple forms of law in his Laws. This foundation supplies the basic structural content of his theory of the origins of political society, while also providing material for his polemic against non-conformist arguments about church government which were raging in the decades prior to him writing.Footnote 40 His jurisprudence is, fundamentally, Thomist, although there are some small differences.Footnote 41 Hooker also displays a variation in the typical Aristotelian and Thomist understanding of societal origins. He places great emphasis on human reason in the formation of society. In short, Hooker is a modified political naturalist, but a political naturalist nonetheless. As will be demonstrated below, Hooker's conception of law affirms the goodness of the natural order as well as the natural necessity of civic life. Law is understood to be prior and underneath everything, including humankind itself. Life in political society flows naturally out of the orderly, law-filled universe which Hooker describes in the opening chapters of the Laws. Despite human sin and the occasional departure from the natural order, political society is a natural, good outworking of his God-ordered universe.Footnote 42
A key problem for Hooker was the relationship between ecclesiastical law, civil law, and natural law.Footnote 43 Hooker was concerned to show that his chief opponents, who happened to be biblicist Presbyterians, were right to say that people are obliged to obey God's law. But he was principally concerned to show they were wrong in thinking there was only one law to obey.Footnote 44 Divine law, as revealed in the scriptures, was not the only source of authoritative law which guided action. The polemical needs of the moment required a response which balanced the need to defend the Elizabethan settlement while still appealing to the opponents of that settlement. Hooker did this by adopting a broadly Thomistic approach to law, as outlined below.Footnote 45 However, as noted by Littlejohn, Hooker's Thomistic approach to legal theory was not without some deliberate modifications. And these modifications suited both his polemical context and his theological tradition.Footnote 46
Hooker's definition of law is ‘that which doth assign unto each thing the kind, that which doth moderate the force and power, that which doth appoint the form and measure, of working’.Footnote 47 In short, Hooker's understanding of law is that it is a rule directing or limiting something in order to guide it to its telos.Footnote 48 The similarities to Thomas are obvious. Thomas writes that law is ‘a rule and measure of acts, by which man is induced to act or is restrained from acting’ which humans, guided by practical reason, are directed to a particular purpose.Footnote 49 Further, it is, for Thomas, ‘an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community’.Footnote 50 The role of reason in relation to Hooker's understanding of law will be expanded upon below, but the parallels are significant enough to suggest Hooker's reliance on Thomists, if not Thomas himself, for this basic formulation. As A. S. McGrade points out, Hooker's conception of law is, like Thomas's, a non-coercive one, which has the virtue (for Hooker, at least) of ‘[allowing] him to apply the idea to God’.Footnote 51 Therefore, when Hooker recapitulates his definition of law at another point in the Laws, he includes God: ‘A law therefore generally taken, is a directive rule unto goodnes of operation.’ God determines the rule of ‘divine operations’ in himself, and ‘[the] rule of naturall agents … is the determination of the wisedome of God, known to God himselfe the principle Director of them’.Footnote 52 So, Hooker's conception of law is that of the Christian–Aristotelian synthesis exemplified in Thomas and is attached to God as a foundational and providential agent in the operation and enforcement of law.
The primary assertion of Hooker's legal theory is that God himself is law.Footnote 53 God has internal workings which operate according to a kind of law, and he is the unmoved mover, the ‘first cause, whereupon originally the being of all things dependeth’.Footnote 54 This is the ‘law eternall’ founded in God himself which, according to Hooker, is the cause and working of all things.Footnote 55 However, even though God is himself law, in the sense that all law is founded upon him, Hooker also understands that God binds himself to observe this eternal law, but is not subject to it, properly speaking. That is, ‘the author and observer [of the eternal law] is one’.Footnote 56 This statement places Hooker firmly within the ‘intellectualist’ school of jurisprudence, of which Thomas's statement about God's relationship to law is archetypal: ‘God's will is His very Essence, it is subject neither to the Divine government nor to the eternal law, but is the same thing as the eternal law.’Footnote 57 Here, Thomas makes the same equivalence between God and the eternal law: God is the law. But also, Thomas concedes that ‘we may speak of God's will as to the things themselves that God wills about creatures’, and therefore God observes his own eternal law with respect to his will for created things.Footnote 58 Despite this submission to the eternal law, which is also immutable, Hooker maintains that God voluntarily places himself within the limits of that law and remains perfectly free.Footnote 59 However, Hooker distinguishes himself from Thomas by making a distinction between two kinds of eternal laws: the first is one by which God is a law in relation to himself, the second by which God is a law in relation to all created things.Footnote 60
Hooker understands that there are multiple types of law which are all derived in some sense from the second eternal law. The first two of these are the celestial law and the natural law. The celestial law is the law which is observed by heavenly beings, namely angels.Footnote 61 The natural law is the law ‘which ordereth natural agents’. This law of nature undergirds the formation of human political society, as we shall soon see. Within the law of nature, there is a division between the law which governs creatures who are reasonable and voluntarily keep the law, and those who ‘keep the law … unwittingly’.Footnote 62 In both cases of natural law, which governs both types of agents, the agent working through the law is God. Hooker writes that ‘ever since the beginning’ nature has been used by God ‘to work his own will and pleasure withal’. Indeed, ‘Nature … is nothing else but God's instrument.’Footnote 63 This is vital for our understanding of Hooker's account of the origins of society. In Hooker's view, the natural law is God's implement through which he governs and guides his creatures. He even calls God's use of the natural law ‘Providence’, which implies God's active government in the created order.Footnote 64 At this point, it worth noting that Hooker's focus on the natural law also has a polemical purpose. As Cargill Thompson observes, Hooker's discussion of natural law ‘has an important role’ in his debate with Presbyterian ideas about church government and ‘was intended to provide a philosophical basis for the … concept of “things indifferent” (adiaphora)’.Footnote 65 Hooker wants to show his readers and, surely, his opponents that good and just laws, even non-biblical ones, have true force behind them, and that they are derived from God himself.Footnote 66 All of these explorations contribute, he says, to the ‘question [concerning] the qualitie of Ecclesiasticall lawes’.Footnote 67
Along with the natural and celestial laws, Hooker also posits two kinds of positive laws under the rubric of the ‘second eternal law’. There are human laws and divine laws. The former are laws laid down by humans themselves, and the latter are those revealed by God through special revelation.Footnote 68 Hooker is here concerned to decipher accurately the relationship between the natural law and these latter two laws. How does God's positive law as revealed in the scriptures relate to human law as laid out in the civil and ecclesiastical realm? And how does the natural law relate to the same? As already noted, the natural law is, according to Hooker, fundamentally drawn up and enacted by God. Just as natural, irrational agents are guided by the natural law ‘to their owne perfection’, so too the rational agent, humankind, has a similar law for its own perfection.Footnote 69 In other words, human beings have a telos to which the natural law directs them.Footnote 70 The telos is ultimately spiritual, in that it is ‘participation in God himselfe’.Footnote 71 But there is a temporal, ethical element to humanity's telos as well. The natural law is observable by humanity, and Hooker sees that, with training and education, humans are better ‘able to judge rightly betweene truth and error, good and evill’.Footnote 72 Therefore, it is by reason that people can understand things ‘that are and are not sensible’.Footnote 73 Accordingly, humans follow their reason in order to ascertain truths of ethical and social conduct. Here, we must, again, note a key variant on the Thomist schema in Hooker's legal theory (although, as Littlejohn notes, his ‘reasoning is thoroughly Aristotelian’).Footnote 74 Hooker divides the natural law into one law for irrational agents, and one for rational agents, which he terms the ‘Law of Reason’. Natural law is accessible and provides humans with evidence and guidance as to right conduct, and sin is the deliberate disordering of conduct in light of this. ‘There is not that good which concerneth us, but it hath evidence enough for it selfe, if reason were diligent to search it out’.Footnote 75 The good dictates of natural law are available by human reason. It is here, in the inclusion of human reason in the working out of the natural law, that Hooker offers humankind a limited role in their establishment of political society, as we shall see below.
But there seems to be a tension. The natural law is, according to Hooker, ‘[the] rule of natural agents’ that works toward their good, and God is the ‘Director’ of those operations. If this is so, how can humans have agency in the outworking of a natural law-driven formation of society? If God directs the natural operations of humankind toward the good of human society, where does humankind fit in? This is where Hooker balances, whether successfully or otherwise, the question of God's ordination (through the created order) and founding of political society with human action. It is through the category of human reason that Hooker provides a release from this tension. Human reason also plays an important role in Hooker's overall polemic against the Presbyterian and biblicist claims against episcopal church government. We shall not go into this in any detail, as others have done so already.Footnote 76 But it suffices to note that Hooker intended human reason to fill the gap between humankind's finite capacity and his opponent's emphasis on the sufficiency of scripture. Reason would lead to clarity and resolve the debate. Hooker writes in the ‘Preface’ to the Laws; ‘Nor is mine own intent any other … than to make it appeare unto you, that for the ecclesiasticall lawes of this land, we are led by great reason to observe them’.Footnote 77 Further, Hooker believed that his argument in favour of the Elizabethan settlement would be vindicated if his readers ‘follow the light of sound and sincere judgement’.Footnote 78
But more specific to our purposes, reason plays a mediating role between human fallenness and the interpretation of the natural law, while also giving humankind a role in the establishment of political society. For Hooker, reason is the ‘rule of voluntary agents’, whereby they discern ‘the goodness of those things which they are to do’. In other words, reason guides action toward the good ends which are evident by understanding the natural law. Indeed, the law of nature is itself the ‘law of reason’. Hooker writes that the ‘Law rationall’ is that law which people ‘commonly use to call the law of nature’, and is the law which human nature knows by reason.Footnote 79 It ‘may be termed most fitly the lawe of reason’ and encapsulates everything which people know they ought to do through their own natural understanding.Footnote 80 And obedience to the law of reason is righteous, whereas the contravention of it is sinful.Footnote 81 So, the natural law is also the law of reason, meaning that the natural law is both accessible to human reason and useful to humans in understanding natural things. This is important as we explore Hooker's ideas about the origins of political society because Hooker holds that it is natural and, by virtue of his natural law framework, God-ordained. But because political society (as we shall see) is formed by nature and, accompanying and equivalent to this, by reason, humankind is also implicated in the act.
Following Hooker, we shall deal with the question of human laws next. Up until this point in the outline of the different types of laws, Hooker has dealt with the eternal law of God and the types of laws deriving from that eternal law. The eternal law establishes the overall order and structure of all law in the universe and even within the Godhead itself. The celestial and natural laws flow out from this, with the former governing angelic beings and the latter governing temporal beings. The latter law, the natural law, is itself divided into the law governing irrational and rational creatures, with the latter being named the law of reason. All of these laws are implemented and enforced by God himself, according to Hooker. ‘Rewards and punishments’ for obedience and contravention of laws are, in Hooker's words, in ‘the hands of such as being above us have power to examine and judge our deedes’.Footnote 82 The obvious question for Hooker's readers at this point is how humans come to have this kind of power over other humans.Footnote 83 How does human law come about? And what are the appropriate grounds for such a law to be made and enforced? He begins addressing these questions by first addressing the origins of human government. It this question that we turn to next.
III
As I unpack Hooker's argument surrounding the origins of political society, I will start in Book i of the Laws and then address the relevant statements in the remaining books. Book viii warrants special attention, as these texts are where Hooker seems to offer a conventionalist account of human government. The texts found in Book viii, taken on their own and out of context, seem to justify the claim that Hooker has embraced a conventionalist understanding of the origins of society. And, indeed, he does differ from Aristotelian naturalism in that he does not view politics as the highest end for humanity. However, these texts must be read in light of the carefully constructed jurisprudence of Book i, in which case they can be interpreted differently to the conventionalist reading of Hooker.
As noted above, up until chapter 10 of Book i, Hooker has been outlining his theory of natural law and the ‘law of reason’. Instead of continuing on the typically Thomist route and theorizing about the divine law, Hooker's next stop is human law. For our purposes, it is most notable that, in Hooker's account, human law is not possible without the consent of a properly formed commonwealth.Footnote 84 If the commonwealth must precede the existence of human positive law, then human government must be formed apart from human law. Indeed, it is pertinent that Hooker begins his discourse on human law by reinforcing the existence of laws above those made by humankind, and that ‘nature it selfe teacheth lawes and statutes to live by’.Footnote 85 Hooker is stating that the foundation for what follows is the natural law. The natural law is effective and binding, says Hooker. However, because humankind is not able to ‘furnish’ those things which are necessary for the life ‘which our nature doth desire’, we ‘naturally’ seek community with others.Footnote 86 This natural desire to seek community sets up a key distinction in Hooker's thought on the question of the origins of society: the distinction between pre-political society and post-political society. Or, put another way, between society (as in social life) and government (as in political life).
The distinction is important, but I would contend it is so in a different way to some scholars. For example, Joan Lockwood O'Donovan says that, for Hooker, society springs from the above-mentioned insufficiency of humans in and of themselves, whereas human government ‘originates in the sinful depravity of individuals’.Footnote 87 But O'Donovan does not acknowledge that Hooker allows for the possibility of political life before the Fall. According to Hooker's jurisprudence, and his stated theory of the origins of society and government, both society and government spring from the same natural root. Both are as a result of two aspects of human nature. One is human sin, the other is human insufficiency. First, Hooker states that the prelapsarian condition did not require political society as such. Indeed, he writes that ‘men might have lived without any publike regiment’, even if political life was not contrary to the sinless human condition.Footnote 88 Even though there might have been no specific requirement for political life flowing out of prelapsarian human nature, it was still consonant with it. However, the Fall altered things so much that ‘the lawe of nature doth now require of necessitie some kinde of regiment’.Footnote 89 Instead of being simply a possible prelapsarian arrangement, political life is now absolutely necessary, according to Hooker, because of the Fall.
The second aspect of Hooker's explanation for the natural origins of human society is humanity's natural lack of self-sufficiency. Hooker holds that ‘[humans] are naturally induced to seeke communion and fellowship with others’.Footnote 90 And this natural inclination was ‘the cause of men's uniting themselves at the first into politique societies’.Footnote 91 The thing which compelled humankind to pursue political fellowship was their perfectly natural desire to live with others. Indeed, ‘Civill society doth more content the nature of man than any private kind of solitarie living.’Footnote 92 Here, the law of nature is the foundation upon which the origins of political society are built. However, there is one more foundation. Hooker writes of ‘an order expresly or secretly agreed upon touching the manner of their union in living together’.Footnote 93 This latter foundation is human positive law, agreed upon by either explicit or tacit agreement.Footnote 94 It seems, from this, that Hooker holds that human law precedes the formation of human government or human political society. If both the natural inclination toward social life and this agreed upon form of law governing that social life are the ‘foundations’ of ‘public societies’, surely Hooker intends for human law to be the means by which political society comes about. But this is not the case.
Instead, human law comes after the formation of political society in Hooker's thought. It is a foundation for political society in the sense that it undergirds all human societies in an ongoing way. But Hooker does not hold that it plays an important role in the origins of that society. Rather, it is nature that establishes the grounds for political society. Hooker's theological anthropology plays an important role in understanding this. According to Hooker, all human laws should be framed with human fallenness in mind.Footnote 95 It is evident, according to Hooker, that humankind is evil, so much so that without human government there is the inevitable spread of ‘envy, strife, contention and violence’.Footnote 96 Such being the case, Hooker posits that humans saw it entirely necessary to ‘[ordain] some kind of government publike’, and to do so by consent.Footnote 97 Consent is necessary because the nature of political power is, according to Hooker, different to the nature of familial, or patriarchal, power. Political authorities do not enjoy the same ‘naturall superioritie’ as fathers do in their families.Footnote 98 At first glance, this seems to undermine my central claim, but that would be mistaken. Political power is still founded upon the natural law. Hooker allows for the possibility of there being no ‘public regiment’ if ‘nature’ is ‘considered by it selfe’, but because of the Fall and the resulting human evil, ‘the lawe of nature doth now require of necessitie some kind of regiment’.Footnote 99 So, despite the difference in the nature of patriarchal and political authority, and despite the necessary presence of consent in the right constituting of political authority, it is ‘the lawe of nature’ that ‘doth require’ political society because of human sin.Footnote 100
It is only at this point that Hooker examines the nature, extent, and purpose of human laws as utilized in a political society. This reinforces my earlier point that human government precedes human law in Hooker's thought, implying that the formation of human government is not itself subject to human law but is subject to natural law. Hooker also does not hold that human government originates in human sinfulness; he holds that human government is necessary because of human sinfulness. But they are two different things. Hooker holds most fundamentally that human government originates in humankind's impulse to seek community, and in the postlapsarian world human community must be political community. In other words, the efficient cause of politics is natural for Hooker. He never denies the naturalness of political authority as such. Certainly, his political naturalism is not an Aristotelian naturalism. Aristotle's naturalism is focused on teleology and the ‘final cause’. For Hooker, politics is natural when considered in light of the ‘efficient cause’. It is natural to the human condition but is not (as with Aristotle) the highest purpose or end of human life.
We will now briefly examine some key texts in Book viii of the Laws which seem to contradict this framing of Hooker as a political naturalist. However, the foregoing analysis shows that these texts do not require a conventional understanding of political society. In each case, Hooker places the consent of the people in the given society in the pre-political condition, a condition governed by the natural law. Therefore, even these cases of consent are evidence for his political naturalism. Hooker notes, in Book i of the Laws, that there are some ‘very great and judicious men’ who hold that there is a kind of natural right to rule ‘in the noble, wise and vertuous’.Footnote 101 He is, of course, referring to Aristotle, and those who follow him. It seems that Hooker does not disagree. But he thinks that some kind of consensual agreement is necessary for this natural right to be better enacted. Indeed, ‘strifes and troubles would be endlesse’ if people were not able to give ‘their common consent all to be ordered by some whom they should agree upon’.Footnote 102 This mechanism of consent looms large in Hooker's thought, especially in Book viii of the Laws. It is there we turn to next.
In Book viii, Hooker addresses the question of the royal supremacy over the Church of England. This was disputed by his opponents on the grounds that no one but Jesus Christ could be the head of the church. Therefore, making the monarch the titular head usurped the role properly given to Christ himself.Footnote 103 It was Hooker's aim to prove the legitimacy of the crown's claim to be the constitutional head of the church and state. He did this, in part, by emphasizing the role of the people in the establishment of political authority, showing that government can only be legitimized by consent.Footnote 104 The church and the commonwealth in England are personally one and the same, in Hooker's understanding.Footnote 105 And because, as Littlejohn puts it, ‘religion is central to the life of virtue, and thus the life of the commonwealth’ in Hooker's thought, the monarch can legitimately see to the betterment of both under his or her reign.Footnote 106 Further, it was by consent that the English monarch ruled both the church and the commonwealth.Footnote 107
One of Hooker's primary claims with regard to the necessity for consent is that ‘every independent multitude before any certaine forme of regiment established, hath … full dominion over it self’.Footnote 108 This dominion, or what might be called sovereignty in today's language, entails an ability and right for a group to decide for itself how its members will live in community. Indeed, ‘God creating mankinde did indue it naturally with full power to guide it self in what kindes of societies soever it should choose to live’.Footnote 109 So, the ‘independent multitude’ can choose the shape and form of their social life, and they do so because God has ‘indued’ them naturally with the capacity and ‘dominion’ to do so. While the agency and ‘dominion’ is placed upon the shoulders of the human ‘multitude’ in this passage, Hooker believes God has ‘indued’ them naturally with this agency. And, in accordance with the jurisprudence outlined above, this is all occurring under the governance of the natural law and not human law. Hooker then goes on to outline two further ways that a group of humans can come under a particular regime: by conquest and by divine fiat. But, importantly, ‘it is God who gives the victory on the day of war’, so that even in the case of conquest, God is the principal founder of the political society.Footnote 110 So, there is a very important, fundamental sense in which God is the author of political society in Hooker's thought. And this is the case whether he uses the means of nature or other nations and peoples.
In another passage, Hooker reaffirms the ‘dominion’ of the people when he writes that ‘[the] naturall subject of power civill all men confesse to be the bodie of the Commonwealth’.Footnote 111 The people are the natural possessors of civil power, which is again grounded by Hooker in nature itself. Furthermore, ‘the naturall subject of power to make lawes civill is the Commonwealth’, and similarly for ecclesiastical laws, where the power is founded upon the ‘whole intire body of that church’.Footnote 112 Indeed, regarding ecclesiastical laws, the ‘positive laws of the apostles’ can be laid aside with ‘general consent’ of the church.Footnote 113 The theme of consent is prominent in these passages, to be sure. But the necessity for consent to form civil laws is based not on human convention, first and foremost, but on nature. And this human consensus is formed, according to Hooker's jurisprudence, in the context of the rule of the natural law, not human law. For Hooker, God is the giver of the natural power to make laws. This marries quite comfortably with the jurisprudence in Book i of the Laws. Hooker understands that the formation of political society precedes the making of human law, therefore political society is formed naturally, being under the natural law. God is the author and enforcer of the natural law and is, therefore, the primary agent in the formation of political society in Hooker's thought. Consent dominates Hooker's discussion with regard to human law and political arrangements, but this is all in the context of humans being secondary agents in these matters. For Hooker, political society remains natural.
IV
Alessandro D'Entreves is, then, correct to say that in Hooker's thought, ‘political organization may only claim a secondary, not primary value, and is not “natural” in the Aristotelian sense, as being a condition of human perfection’.Footnote 114 But whether Hooker is Aristotelian is not the primary question as we consider his doctrine of the origins of political society. I have argued that, whether strictly Aristotelian or not, Hooker understands politics to be natural to the human condition. It is natural insofar as humanity is naturally inclined toward social life and that the law of nature requires that they form political societies. Further, the formation of political society occurs under the auspices of the natural law in Hooker's jurisprudence, not under the auspices of human law. The natural law is administered and enforced by God himself, making God the primary agent in the formation of human society. Of course, Hooker does not ignore or diminish the role of humankind. But he holds that any agency humans have in the formation of political society occurs under the auspices and power of the natural law, and is not an act of human law. Consent looms large in Hooker's thought, perhaps because of his polemical context. His emphasis on consent counters his opponents’ arguments about the unlawfulness of episcopal church government and royal supremacy. But I would argue that it does not play an important role in his jurisprudential account of the origins of political society.
I have also argued that Hooker's theological anthropology plays a key role in his political thought, something few scholars have observed. Indeed, he does not diminish the role of the Fall in his theory of societal origins, but rather argues that political society is a counterweight to the effects of the Fall and that humankind is deeply sinful. However, political society does not exist simply because of the Fall. Yes, the Fall has had a significant impact on human social relations, and human government mitigates the effects of this degradation. But this does not rule out the naturalness of politics in Hooker's thought. For Hooker, the natural law is in operation both before and after the Fall. The Fall does not destroy the natural law; it simply alters its operations. And therefore, the role of human government is altered too. It is still natural and is also required by natural law, but it has an altered role in the face of postlapsarian human sin.Footnote 115 In conclusion, Hooker is neither a conventionalist nor an Aristotelian on the question of the origins of political society. He is a political naturalist in a different channel to those two schools of thought. Indeed, you could say he represents a via media, albeit one that is different to the middle path usually attributed to him.
