This collection of essays, broadly clustered around the theme of virtue in the works of Richard Hooker, originated from a call in 2016 by the veteran Hooker scholar Arthur Stephen McGrade for further work to be done on Hooker’s views on the classical Christian virtues. It is part of a recent resurgence of interest in Hooker’s virtue ethics and broader moral theology, which includes Alison Joyce’s Richard Hooker and Anglican moral theology (2012), Peter Sedgwick’s The origins of Anglican moral theology (2019) and Luke Zerra’s 2022 doctoral thesis on the virtue of religion in Hooker’s moral theology. Only two of the present chapters have been published previously, including McGrade’s article on Hooker’s non-authoritarian concept of law as a contribution to the character of Anglicanism, with participation in public worship understood as an exercise of the supreme virtue of godliness or piety.

The two chapters by David Neelands provide the core coverage that readers would expect of Hooker’s treatment of the cardinal and theological virtues. As Neelands notes, Hooker provides no extended discussion of these subjects, but rather refers to them incidentally and significantly in various places. In the first chapter Neelands includes a section looking at the way Hooker was attacked in 1599 for suggesting that the moral virtues are rightly taught other than in Holy Scripture, and the accusation of Pelagianism that lay at the heart of this. Neelands carefully evaluates Hooker’s manuscript response, and explores how his virtue ethics is related to his Reformed account of justification and sanctification. Neelands’s second chapter looks further at Hooker’s views on grace, justification and participation in Christ, including a short but important discussion of his recent discovery of Hooker’s late use of a short work on predestination by Chrysostomus Javelli.

The philosopher Dan Kemp undertakes a significant analysis of Hooker’s virtue ethics in comparison with the work of modern virtue ethicists such as G. E. M. Anscombe. Kemp’s focus is on how Hooker integrates a teleological account of virtues, as dispositions which contribute to a thing’s natural end, with his conception that in so doing humans are governed by the law of reason (which itself participates in God’s eternal law). He argues that, for Hooker, when rational agents obey the law of reason, their end is not merely the good proper to their natures, but good qua good, for no other reason than because it is good. For Hooker, therefore, being a good human requires pursuit of the good itself, and law not only orders the means by which that end is attained, but directs us to that good itself. If this interpretation is correct, it would make for a fascinating response to those modern ‘radical’ virtue ethicists who are critical of an ultimate place for law in ethical theory.

Torrance Kirby takes aim at Alison Joyce’s recent study of Hooker’s moral theology, accusing her of failing to appreciate the centrality of Hooker’s Reformed soteriology for an understanding of his moral theology. Kirby is of course quite correct to argue that Hooker’s soteriology, throughout all his writings, is (as I have argued myself ) grounded on the Reformed doctrine that we are justified through faith by the alien righteousness of Christ, and that therefore any full account of Hooker’s handling of the cardinal and theological virtues must recognise the distinction this imposes between justification and sanctification. Joyce in fact briefly discusses this herself, leading me to surmise that Kirby’s real point is that Joyce fails to appreciate the sharp divide this imposes between Hooker’s thoroughly Reformed virtue ethics, and the virtue ethics of later generations of English theologians who abandoned the Reformed doctrine of justification by faith alone. In this respect, Kirby’s article made me recall C. FitzSimons Allison’s The rise of moralism (1966), which essentially castigated Anglican theologians from Jeremy Taylor onwards for abandoning the Calvinist understanding of justification of an earlier generation of Anglican theologians, and for adopting a Pelagian moralism characterised by works righteousness. Given that Joyce, all too simplistically, associates Thomist influences on Hooker’s moral theology with a turning away from the Reformed tradition, Kirby accuses her of assuming the standpoint of John Henry Newman that Hooker changed his views on justification later in his life (although Joyce herself in fact never makes that claim). Setting aside for now the complex question of a development in Hooker’s thought, given that Kirby does not examine it here himself, what I found lacking in his account was any sense, so strong in the Lawes, of the cardinal and civic virtues as being genuinely found in so many non-Christian peoples and societies, even while as a result of sin we cannot make ourselves perfectly just in God’s sight. The key point, as Paul Dominiak remarks in his chapter, is that ‘Hooker refuses Augustine’s hyperbolic assertion that acquired moral virtues divorced from the theological virtues are ultimately vicious cases of pagan pride.’ Kirby remains committed to a view of Hooker as holding to an orthodox Reformed understanding of humanity’s total depravity (a point made clearer in the extended version of this chapter published in Reformed identity and conformity in England, 1559–1714 (2024)), but as many past scholars have observed, it is hard to square this with the actual text of the Lawes itself.

Paul Dominiak examines Hooker’s theological commitments to the intrinsic good of civil society and how religious practices cultivate civic virtues, building on his recent study Richard Hooker: the architecture of participation. As in that book, he argues for the central place of participatory metaphysics in Hooker’s thought, and concludes by examining what we can learn from Hooker’s thought today about religion, civil society and civic virtues. His focus for comparison is here again the participatory metaphysics of John Milbank’s Radical Orthodoxy, to which he sees Hooker as offering a truly liberal political alternative.

I wholeheartedly endorse Bradford Littlejohn’s analysis that, for Hooker, at the heart of Puritan pride and presumption lies ‘a disordered quest for certainty’ – a theme he explores in his well-judged chapter on the vice of intellectual ‘curiosity’. I would only add that I think Hooker’s critique is more radical and far-reaching than Littlejohn realises.

I very much enjoyed André Gazal’s chapter on the virtue of repentance, looking at Hooker’s use of the discussion of repentance in book iv of Peter Lombard’s Sentences to criticise later scholastic understandings of penance. The relevant passages in book vi of the Lawes are still little studied, and this is a valuable contribution on this topic. Similarly, I appreciated the final chapter by Daniel Graves, analysing Izaak Walton’s Life of Hooker as a carefully constructed virtuous life, and was interested to learn that he is working on a biography of Hooker – no easy task given the relative paucity of documentary evidence.

This is in general a commendable collection of essays, which enriches our understanding of Hooker’s theology, and of his ethical and political theory.