Members only: Nomoth­e­ol­o­gy: Richard Hooker’s Theology of Law

In the first book of his great treatise Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie (1593), Richard Hooker commences his discussion of the origin of law—‘that lawe which giveth life unto all the rest’—with an appeal to two vivid metaphors, one artificial and another natural, a constructed foundation and a nourishing root. As his argument unfolds, it becomes clear that his aim in the Lawes is to show that the Elizabethan religious and constitutional settlement of 1559—the ‘stately house’, as it were, of the established Church and the ‘goodly tree’ of the flourishing Commonwealth—is based upon ‘good lawes’ whose ultimate source is altogether hidden from view—‘in the bosome of the earth concealed’, according to the metaphor. Is this subterranean root or foundation in any way knowable? The metaphor serves to introduce an extended analysis of the origin of law. He goes on to identify this veiled ‘first original cause’ of good laws as that ‘lawe whereby the Eternall himselfe doth worke’. Hooker defines law in general as ‘that which doth assigne unto each thing the kinde, that which does moderate the force and power, that which does appoint the forme and measure of working.’ He goes on to affirm that the highest ‘measure of working’ in the divine activity on the ground that ‘only the works and operations of God have him both for their worker, and for the lawe whereby they are wrought. The being of God he maintains ‘is a kinde of lawe to his working: for that perfection which God is, geveth perfection to that he doth … God therefore is a law both to himselfe, and to all other things besides.’ This identity of worker, the work done, and the activity of working anchor the assertion of his metaphorical speech in a non-metaphorical affirmative proposition, namely that God in himself is essentially law. As Aquinas puts this: ‘the end of the Divine government is God Himself, and His law is not distinct from Himself.’