Richard Hooker and Magna Carta

Richard Hooker and Magna Carta

Sir Robert Worcester, chairman of the Magna Carta 800th Committee, who can trace his family back to the Pilgrim Fathers describes Magna Carta as "England's greatest export", and reels off the key tenets it has bequeathed to the world – "due process of law; no one is above the law; justice delayed is justice denied; no taxation without representation; the English Church shall be free".

We gather this evening, on Richard Hooker’s day, in Boscombe Church, where Hooker served from 1591 to 1595, and began writing his Ecclesiastical Lawes. He had just left The Temple Church in London and his preaching to lawyers.

We look forward to the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta next June, particularly in Salisbury Cathedral, which has the best of the four originals. So, it is fitting that we consider what Hooker might have said about the Magna Carta, and what he might say to us today.

I would like to propose three theses:

First, Magna Carta reminds us – and all the despots of the world – that no human or group rightly exercises arbitrary power, and Hooker tells us why.

Second, Magna Carta and Hooker remind us that Christ alone is King of the world, and that, therefore, all human law rightly points beyond us to Christ’s sovereignty in every home, every community, every tribe, and every nation.

And third, Magna Carta and Hooker remind us that those laws that contribute to the good order of both church and society have a binding character, though they may be changed through due process (by the authority that enforces them) with an eye to that which is prudent in its own historical context.

1. No human or group may justly exercise arbitrary power

Perhaps the most important precedent established at Runnymede in 1215 was the principle that no human may rightly claim arbitrary power over other humans. That’s the fundamental assertion that the barons made to King John. There are limits to royal power. In Hooker’s time, the debates concerned the limits of a female monarch over the Church, as well as whether or not the Church of England should have bishops.

For Hooker, the eternal law is not mediated hierarchically, as taught by the Roman Catholics, but directly by the presence of “Christ dwelling in the soul of man”. This means that, when viewed from the perspective of human access to knowledge of God, all humans are equal. Recognition of this equality before God shaped Hooker’s reasoning about how best to order the Church of England. If all are equal before God, then certain kinds of political orderings are warranted. Recognition that all humans are created equal before God led Hooker to argue, in Aristotelian terms, for a vision of the Church of England ordered as a constitutional government.

The rightful ordering of the church and commonwealth consists of a government in which all both rule and are ruled because God and Reason rule. Hooker imagines a church and commonwealth whose members live in harmony but not unison; a plurality, wherein rich and poor are united and made into a community by education, characterised by friendship, and in which all rule because all are ruled by ‘guardians’ of the law authorised by all.

In short, the equality of our access to knowledge of God, and of our election in Christ, does not mean that we are equal in the gifts and graces most conducive to the fruitfulness of the church. Our differences matter, and our ecclesiastical polity rightly presupposes a high valuation of the judgment of the wisest. Our universal election in Christ entails a gift of a political identity shared by the elite and the common multitude, creating our belongingness to a particular society of souls whose governance scheme is a democratically-inclined polity which places a high value on the diversity of our gifts and graces.

2. Christ alone is King of the world

Hooker derives the natural law and all human laws from the Eternal Law which is the Logos, none other than Christ the Creator and Governor himself. This sets up the rhetorically crucial claim that human laws – such as the ecclesiastical laws of England – have the same origin as Holy Scripture. For Hooker, this can be summarised as follows: the objective content we encounter historically and actually in the wondrous works of nature, and through the fruits of “worldly experience and practice,” is not some abstract law or ‘first cause’, but none other than Jesus Christ himself.

The eternal law – the Word made Flesh – is manifest in the natural law, known universally by humans through the faculty of reason. This natural law is itself manifest in unwritten form as ‘common sense’ and, for the providential governance of political societies, in the four kinds of positive law that order individuals, communities, nations, and the Church.

Yet, since, sadly, the natural way to our goal of eternal blessedness is blocked by the original and persistent reality of sin, God delivers humans through the special revelation of God in Christ as encountered in scripture and the sacraments (what Hooker describes as the ‘divine law’). Thus, both the natural law and the divine law are derived from, and express, the eternal law; they collectively constitute God’s creative and governing will within the created order.

The key finding here is that, for Hooker, all creatures encounter Christ as Creator and Governor, which means that the natural law that all creatures encounter is Christ himself. Christ is the concrete universal.

3. Our human laws are not to be understood as timeless absolutes

Magna Carta teaches us that human laws are not to be understood as timeless absolutes by virtue of the fact that we celebrate it as a key historical moment in our life together, yet all but three of its sections have been repealed! (Repealed in Great Britain; New Zealand, for example, retains the preamble and clause 29 only). Those not repealed concern: the freedom of the English Church, ¹ Clause 1, the freedom of the English Church:FIRST, We have granted to God, and by this our present Charter have confirmed, for Us and our Heirs for ever, that the Church of England shall be free, and shall have all her whole Rights and Liberties inviolable. We have granted also, and given to all the Freemen of our Realm, for Us and our Heirs for ever, these Liberties under-written, to have and to hold to them and their Heirs, of Us and our Heirs for ever. the ‘Ancient Liberties’ of the City of London, ² Clause 9 (clause 13 in the 1215 charter), the "ancient liberties" of the City of London: THE City of London shall have all the old Liberties and Customs which it hath been used to have. Moreover We will and grant, that all other Cities, Boroughs, Towns, and the Barons of the Five Ports, as with all other Ports, shall have all their Liberties and free Customs. and due process in law. ³ Clause 29 (clause 39 in the 1215 charter), a right to due process:  NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right.

Hooker sees the mutability of human laws as very important. Our human laws are binding, but, precisely because they are our dialectically discerned approximations of the good, they are not to be understood as timeless absolutes. They may be changed by those in authority with due process.

For Hooker, discourse is the primary means by which Christ - through Nature - tutors us. Whatever principle we choose as our subject, “it was at the very first found out by discourse, and drawn from out of the very bowels of heaven and earth”. “The law of reason or human nature is that which men by discourse of natural reasons have rightly found out themselves to be all for ever bound unto in their actions.” Good laws are those “draw[n] from the laws of nature and God, by discourse of reason, aided with the influence of divine grace.” Whereas, the “mysteries of heavenly truth” are taught readily in Scripture, “… all kinds of knowledge else have that virtue in themselves whereby they are able to procure our assent unto such conclusions as the industry of right discourse doth gather from them.” That most reliable token of goodness, most commonly referred to by Hooker as “the voice of men”, is the trajectory of conclusions reached by men through the time-honoured process of rational and communal discourse.

For Hooker, the dialectical nature of principles derived from human experience of the eternal law arises from the probabilistic nature of human judgments and the contingency of the good. Hooker’s opponents erred in their opposition to certain ecclesiastical laws as a consequence of their habit of lifting general principles from scripture and applying them without due regard to the particularities that rightfully determine whether, and how, such principles may be applied. Such generalities do not illuminate but instead are like “cloudy mists cast before the eye of common sense”.

Hooker borrowed the Aristotelian virtues of episteme (knowledge or science) and phronesis (wisdom) in order to differentiate between those laws which are worthy of our clinging to and those which are merely a means to that which is so worthy. These virtues help us recognise the potential to create idols out of the signs and tokens of grace by confusing our practices and ordering of our common life with the eternal realities into which they draw us. The distinctions are helpful because Hooker is engaged in a dispute about such signs and tokens of the good; questions, for example, about whether the Church of England should have bishops, whether a female queen can head the church, and whether certain ecclesial practices are warranted. Today, perhaps, about women in the episcopate...

Hooker's deployment of episteme (knowledge or science) and phronesis (wisdom) enables him to clarify that such questions are not, with certain exceptions, of the category of things which are eternally given (that which is good and the only thing worthy of our clinging). Rather, they are of the category of questions about that which is conducive to the good. This enables Hooker to claim that multiple paths are consonant. The wisdom-like character of ecclesial laws means that they are not universally applicable, but particular to a concrete community such as the Church of England. Our decisions about that which is conducive to the good are offered with the humility which recognises that such laws are necessarily mutable because of the vulnerability to probabilistic error that attends all practices derived from natural law. Rome can be Rome, Geneva can be Geneva, and England can be England. To those who argued that the Elizabethan Church should conform to the norms of the emerging Reformed consensus which took its lead from Geneva, Hooker argued that it is right and proper for the Church of England to make decisions about its self-ordering which diverge from the paths of both Geneva and Rome.

A Widening Conclusion

A counter-illustration of failure to adapt law may be hardened Sharia law in Islamic societies, though Islam had, and has, her own philosophers who are as subtle as Hooker, and who also drew on Aristotle.

Avicenna, born in Iran, died in 1037; and Averroes, born in Córdoba, Spain, died in 1198. In twelfth century Spain, as well as Averroes, there was another subtle philosopher. Maimonides was Jewish and was also born in Córdoba: he worked in Cairo and died there in 1204. The Catholic theologian, Thomas Aquinas, was born slightly later in Italy in 1225. The head of his Dominican order asked him to write a text book for missionaries to evangelise and dialogue with Muslims in Spain. This was his first great work Summa Contra Gentiles.

So, Muslim (Averroes), Jewish (Maimonides) and Christian (Aquinas) philosophers of renown and respect. Hooker lies in this grand tradition.

This address was one of three delivered on 3^rd November 2014 in Hooker’s Church, St Andrew’s Boscombe, Wiltshire where Hooker served 1591-95. It was given by Bishop Graham Kings. The other two addresses were by Judge Keith Cutler and Robert Key, former MP for Salisbury.