Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-03T19:26:28.903Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Reason and Revelation in Hooker's Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Robert K. Faulkner
Robert K. Faulkner
Affiliation:
Princeton University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

This essay has two complementary purposes. It seeks principally to clarify the basis of the political philosophy of Richard Hooker, the great Elizabethan divine, and, in so doing, to clarify as well certain of the limits of political speculation itself. We hear quite often now that reports of the death of political philosophy have been greatly exaggerated. If this is indeed a time of its resuscitation, it is important that its limits be recognized and that inquiry be liberated from doctrines which cannot be based on unassisted reason alone. The ancillary purpose of this study is a contribution to such a disentanglement.

Hooker's political thought itself also repays the attention of modern political scientists, if only as a remarkably comprehensive model of pre-modern or “traditional” society. Hooker wrestles with one of the difficulties which had much to do with ending “traditional” society in Europe and in those places Europe has influenced: the bitter and conflicting claims of church and state, and especially of various churches. Hooker's is a revealing endeavor to solve the political problems inherent in revealed religion, without abandoning—as his “enlightened” successors did—Christianity as a decisive constituent of politics or Aristotle as the secular guide of politics.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 59 , Issue 3 , September 1965 , pp. 680 - 690
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1965

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 For very helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay I wish to thank several friends, especially Thomas S. Schrock of Chicago and Walter F. Murphy of Princeton.

2 Hooker, Richard, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, in The Works of that Learned and Judicious Divine Mr. Richard Hooker, arranged by Keble, John, revised by Church, R. W. and Paget, F. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1888), Bk. V, ch. lxxvi, sec. 3Google Scholar; hereafter cited V lxxvi 3.

3 I x 12. See also I v 3, I xi 1, 3, 4, I viii 5 (end).

4 II viii 2, I viii 8.

5 I xvi 1, I viii 9.

6 Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book Five, edited by Bayne, Ronald (London, Macmillan, 1902), p. 594Google Scholar. I viii 3. Cf. Works, II, 539, 239. Sloth in the exercise of reason is the manifestation of man's original sin. I vii 7.

7 I xi 3; cf. I ix.

8 I vii 5.

9 I xi 4.

10 I xii 2; cf. III viii 8; I vii 5.

11 Aristotle, , Metaphysics, XII, viiiGoogle Scholar; I vi 3.

12 Aristotle, , Nicomachean Ethics, V viiGoogle Scholar. Cf. Marsilius of Padua, The Defender of Peace, trans. Gewirth, Alan P. (New York, Columbia University Press, 1951), II xii 7Google Scholar; I iii 4,1 xix 13. See Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 156–64Google Scholar. It is a great pleasure to acknowledge that my interpretations of Aristotle, Marsilius, and even Hooker owe their best parts to Professor Strauss's instruction. Cf. his “Marsilius of Padua,” in Strauss, Leo and Cropsey, Joseph, History of Political Philosophy (Chicago, 1963)Google Scholar.

13 Cicero, , De Legibus (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1928), II viii 1, x 25. Hooker, I ix 2Google Scholar.

14 I xii 3, I vii 7, xi 5, iii 3. See editor's note in Works, I, 222–23.

15 Aristotle, , Nicomachean Ethics, V viiGoogle Scholar. Cf. Aquinas, Thomas, Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Litzinger, C. I. (Chicago, 1964), V L.XII C.1024Google Scholar.

16 Secondary Laws of Reason are not explicitly expounded as such. Only some time after Hooker has stated them (IxlO) does he name them, and he never does call them Secondary Laws of Reason. Yet the principles of section 10, paraphrased in the text, cannot but be those mentioned in section 13. The fact that men have always known them is a sure sign they are Laws of Reason (see I viii 3, 9). Also, they could not be international laws or laws of polity and regiment, the other types of Secondary Laws mentioned in 4 end, 5 beginning, since they precede the establishment of the latter; the former, as well at the latter, are treated elsewhere in chapter x.

17 VII xv 14, I viii 7.

18 The Defender of Peace, I iii 4, I xix 3.

19 I viii 5, 2, 3.

20 I viii 6, 5.

21 Summa Theologica, in Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, ed. Pegis, Anton C. (New York, 1945), III, Q. 94, A. 2, 3Google Scholar; Q. 90, A. 3, ad 3, 4 ad 1; Q. 91, A. 2, ad 2, 3, ad 2; Q. 51, A. 1, 2; Q. 63, A. 1, 2, ad 3; Q. 100, A. 2; cf. I, Q. 79, A. 11, Truth, XI, 1.

22 Allen, J. W., A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (London, Methuen, 1941), pp. 188ffGoogle Scholar. See also Shirley, F. J., Richard Hooker and Contemporary Political Ideas (London, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1949), p. 80Google Scholar.

23 II viii 6, III vii 2.

24 V lxxi 2. Cf. Summa Theologica, I II, Q. 63, A. 1, 2 ad 3; Q. 51, A. 1. Preface, i 3; Works, III, 613. Preface, vi 6; cf. vi 3.

25 “The soul of man being therefore at the first as a book, wherein nothing is and yet all things may be imprinted; we are to search by what steps and degrees it riseth unto perfection of knowledge.” I vi 1.

26 II viii 6. “The Apostle St. Paul having speech concerning the heathen saith of them, ‘They are a law unto “themselves.”’ His meaning is, that by force of the light of Reason, wherewith God illuminateth every one which cometh into the world, men being enabled to know truth from falsehood, and good from evil, do thereby learn in many things what the will of God is; which will himself not revealing by any extraordinary means unto them, but they by natural discourse attaining the knowledge thereof, seem the makers of those Laws which indeed are his, and they but only the finders of them out.” I viii 3.

27 I viii 1, 5; cf. 6, 7.

28 Cf. I viii 6 with Nicomachean Ethics, I vii 13–16.

29 I viii 7.

30 I xi 5, 1. See I x 6, I xii and Works, III, 598ff., 609, and editor's note, 626–7, 641. Church, R. W. notes that “… the doubtful explanation of the shortest and easiest way is a favorite one with Hooker.” Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Bk. I, ed. Church, R. W. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1905), p. 121Google Scholar.

31 V xxxv 2.

32 Works, III, 511, 615–16Google Scholar. “That sovereign good, which is the eternal fruition of all good, being our last and chiefest felicity, there is no desperate despiser of God and godliness living which doth not wish for. The difference between right and crooked minds, is in the means which the one or the other do eschew or follow.” Works, III, 599Google Scholar; cf. I, 648, 697, 511.

33 Nicomachean Ethics, V vii.

It is true that Aristotle in Book II, vi, 18, remarks that certain acts such as adultery are always “extreme,” which implies that they are absolutely wrong. But is is not certain that this brief remark represents Aristotle's developed doctrine as presented in Book V. Compare the treatment of adultery in Politics, VII, 1335b, 38.

It is also true that Aristotle does speak in the Rhetoric, I, 13, of laws “based upon nature.” His bare references there, however, occur but incidentally to his task of providing materials useful for persuasion—especially when positive law is against the advocate. In addition, neither of his illustrations occurs in his own name, but rather as a quotation from other writers. Neither illustration, moreover, seems free in the original from an association with divine, rather than natural, origin. At least one implies a doctrine—all slavery is unnatural—with which Aristotle elsewhere expressly disagrees.

34 See Strauss, Leo, “Marsilius of Padua,” in History of Political Philosophy, p. 243Google Scholar. Cf. Strauss, , Natural Right and History, pp. 156–64Google Scholar.

35 I xi 5, cf. ix 1, II viii 2; Works, III, 599, 619Google Scholar. I viii 8, 11, III ix 1, VII xv 14, V ix 1, lxxxi 4, IV lx 5, 6, 7.

36 V i 2, 3, lxxi 2, II i 2.

37 Works, III, 594–95Google Scholar. Cf. II iv 7, vii; III viii 7–10, esp. 11, 12–17.

38 VII xviii 10, cf. xxiv 5.

39 V lxxvi 2, 3, lxxvii 14; VII xxiv 18; V xv 3, 4; V xv 5 lxxix 14.

40 Works, III, 702Google Scholar. Hooker expands upon all the evils occurring in “private families,” “greater societies,” and the Church. He then says that by “ … naming pride, we name the mother which brought them forth, and the only nurse that feedeth them. Give me the hearts of all men humbled; and what is there that can overthrow or disturb the peace of the world? wherein many things are cause of much evil; but pride of all.” Works, III, 606Google Scholar, cf. 647, 614. Cf. Aristotle, , Eudemian Ethics, 1240b, 21–24Google Scholar.

“The good man never finds fault with himself at the moment of his act, like the incontinent, nor the later with the earlier man, like the penitent, nor the earlier with the later, like the liar.”

41 V lxxix 8.

42 I x 5.

43 Works, III, 615ff.Google Scholar; cf. I ii, iii.

Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.