2 - Richard Hooker’s Theistic Naturalism

Summary

In the opening chapters of his Second Treatise of Government, published in 1689, John Locke quotes the Elizabethan divine Richard Hooker at some length in support of his anthropology and his doctrine of the state of nature. Humans, writes Locke, are equal ‘by Nature’, something which ‘the Judicious Hooker looks upon as self-evident’. Locke begins to paint Hooker as a 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 method of rebuttal to those who object to his conception of the state of nature is to paint his opponents as also opposing ‘the Authority of the Judicious Hooker’. Was Locke citing him accurately? Or was he, as Robert Eccleshall put it, ‘unacquainted with the substance of Hooker's thought’, and was instead using him ‘as a stick with which to beat Anglican royalists’? In my estimation, Eccleshall is correct, at least insofar as Locke's motivation for using Hooker, even if he underestimates his familiarity with Hooker's ideas.

Locke's citation of Hooker with regard to the origins of political life gets to the core question of this book. How did the idea of political life become desacralised during the early modern period? And what role did Reformed natural law ideas play in this? In a later chapter, we will consider Locke in more detail, whose thought regarding natural law and the origins of political life effectively removes God from having a role in the foundation of political life. But Locke's use of Hooker raises the possibility that it was Hooker who laid the groundwork for the secular conceptions of political life that were to follow him. The contention of this chapter is that this interpretation is mistaken. As demonstrated below, Hooker's understanding of law and his theory of the origins of society were quite different from Locke's social contractarian ideas. We shall see that Hooker's thought was much closer to that of Calvin than Locke. Hooker had an Aristotelian understanding of humanity's political anthropology, mixed with an Augustinian theological anthropology. Like Calvin, Hooker maintained a sacred understanding of civic existence.