Richard Hooker

Richard Hooker is perhaps the most influential exponent of what became known as ‘Erastianism’ in the Anglican tradition. The eighth book of his Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, published posthumously from notes he made rather than from a finished text, seeks an alternative to the apparent disloyalty of Allen’s papalism and Cartwright’s separationism. After all, as he argued, in Elizabethan England the Church and the Commonwealth could not be distinguished by differences in membership:

‘We hold that seeing there is not any man of the Church of England, but the same man is also a member of the Commonwealth, nor any man a member of the Commonwealth which is not also of the Church of England, therefore as in a figure triangular the base doth differ from the sides thereof, and yet one and the selfsame line, is both a base and also a side; a side simply, a base if it chance to be the bottom and underlie the rest: So albeit properties and actions of one kind do cause the name of a Commonwealth, qualities and functions of another sort the name of a Church to be given unto a multitude, yet one and the selfsame multitude may in such sort be both and is so with us, that no person appertaining to the one can be denied to be also of the other.’ (VIII.i.2)

What the rather clumsy metaphor of the triangle illustrates is that for Hooker it is the ‘properties and action’ and ‘qualities and functions’ that distinguish church from commonwealth, not the membership. It is, firstly, a matter of looking at the same thing from different angles, and, secondly, of discerning different actions carried out by the same people. As Hooker understands it, the church is after all that society which maintains the true religion as Israel had done of old. He will happily admit that prior to Constantine, the church of Rome and the commonwealth of Rome were two different societies. However, when the state embraced Christ, that separation could not be maintained:

‘The Church and the Commonwealth therefore are in this case personally one society, which society being termed a Commonwealth as it liveth under whatsoever form of secular law and regiment, a Church as it hath the Spiritual law of Jesus Christ, forasmuch as these two laws contain so many and so different offices, there must of necessity be appointed in it some to one charge and some to another, yet without dividing the whole and making it two several impaled societies.’ (VIII.i.4)

The theological lynchpin of Hooker’s account of church and state is his direct unmediated comparison of the ‘Commonwealth of the Jews’ with the ‘Commonwealth of England’. He asks:

‘If therefore with approbation from heaven the Kings of God’s own chosen people had in the affairs of Jewish religion supreme power, why not Christian Kings the like power in Christian religion?’ VIII.iii.4

Like David, Asa, Jehosaphat, Hezekiah and Josiah before her, the Christian monarch could assume supremacy over ecclesiastical affairs – calling together general councils and the making of church laws. Futhermore, kings were to be exempt from subjection to Ecclesiastical Courts. For Hooker, the complete overlap between the commonwealth and the church meant that the analogy with Israel was obvious and decisive.