Editor’s Note: Part of our series marking the 800th birthday of Thomas Aquinas, this essay draws on a chapter published by Dr. Kirby in Ephraim Radner and David Ney, eds., All Thy Lights Combine: Figural Reading in the Anglican Tradition (Lexham Press, 2022), 75-96.
To what extent did Richard Hooker draw on the thought of Thomas Aquinas? One avenue to explore is Hooker’s concept of Law. In the first book of Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie (1593), Hooker discusses the origin of law with an appeal to two vivid metaphors, one artificial and another natural: one a constructed foundation and the other 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” of the established Church and the “goodly tree” of the Commonwealth — is based on “good lawes” whose ultimate source is hidden from view. These metaphors serve to introduce an extended analysis of the origin of law.
Hooker identifies this veiled, hidden “first original cause” of good laws as that “lawe whereby the Eternall himselfe doth worke” (Lawes, I.1.3). He 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.” Hooker adds that God is a law both to himself and to all other things besides (Lawes, I.2.2), and he uses images of the worker, the work done, and the activity of working to anchor the assertion of his metaphorical speech in a non-metaphorical affirmative proposition, namely that God in himself is essentially law. This is similar to Aquinas when he says, “the end of the Divine government is God himself, and his law is not distinct from himself” (Summa Theologica, Ia IIaq q.91. art 1).
At the end of the first book of the Lawes, Hooker summarizes this argument in a striking passage, one evocative of the hymns to Holy Wisdom in the Scriptures:
Of lawe there can be no lesse acknowledged, than that her seate is the bosome of God, her voyce the harmony of the world, all things in heaven and earth doe her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power; both Angels and men and creatures of what condition so ever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all with uniforme consent, admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy. (Lawes I.16.8; 1:142.9)
As Rowan Williams has observed, Hooker’s use of the feminine pronoun in explicit reference to law “would alert any scripturally literate reader to the parallel with the divine Sophia”— and indeed, what Hooker claims on behalf of Law, the sapiential books of Proverbs, Job, and the Wisdom of Solomon, affirm of the very Wisdom of God: “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.” “Wisdom reacheth from one end to another mightily, and sweetly doth she order all things.” God, according to Hooker, is his own Wisdom; God in himself is therefore law.
God is a law both to himself, and to all other things besides … All those things which are done by him have some end for which they are done; and the end for which they are done is a reason of his will to do them … They err, therefore, who think that of the will of God to do this or that there is no reason besides his will. (Lawes I.2.5; 1:60.17-18)
This claim bears comparison with Thomas Aquinas, for whom “the end of the Divine government is God himself, and his law is not distinct from himself.”
For Hooker, the primordial Wisdom is the law that “God hath eternallie purposed himself in all his works to observe.” Hooker agrees with the apophatic approach of Aquinas when he speaks of the radical simplicity of God in himself. In the first book of his Lawes, Hooker writes that God is “one, or rather verie Onenesse, and meere unitie, having nothing but it selfe in it selfe, and not consisting (as all things do besides God) of many things.” Of the divine simplicity, Hooker says,
our soundest knowledge is to know that we know him not as in deed he is, neither can know him: and our safest eloquence concerning him is our silence, when we confesse without confession that his glory is inexplicable, his greatnes above our capacitie to reach. He is above, and we upon earth, and therefore it behoveth our wordes to be warie and fewe.” (Lawes 1.2.2)
As “first originall cause,” the First Eternal law has “her seate in the bosome of God.” Simultaneously, this original “Eternal Law” in its unity contains within itself a plurality of multiple derivative species or kinds of law — “as ofspringe of god, [all things which God hath made] are in him as effects in their highest cause, he likewise actuallie is in them, the assistance and influence of his deitie is theire life” (Lawes, I.3.1). And so it is with original law and its diverse derivative laws. Hooker proceeds to distinguish between a “First” and a “Second” Eternal Law. The latter is the ordering “voice” of the divine Wisdom, law as God’s utterance proceeding from the ineffable unity of the First Eternal Law and comprising within it all derivative species of law that “participate” in the eternal law as discrete emanations ordered dispositively in hierarchical “procession.” The First Eternal Law is the original, self-constituting divine source as it remains ineffably simple, at unity within itself, or as Hooker puts it, as God’s “verie Onenesse (Lawes, 1.2.2).”
By law eternall the learned for the most part do understand the order, not which God has eternallie purposed himselfe in all his works to observe, but rather that which with himselfe he has set down as expedient to be kept by all his creatures, according to the severall conditions wherewith he has indued them … All things therefore, which are as they ought to be, are conformed to this second law eternall, and even those things which to this eternal law are not conformable, are notwithstanding in some sort ordered by the first eternall lawe. (Lawes, I.3.1)
It is the Second Eternall Lawe whose “voyce is the harmony of the world,” as distinct from that prior law centered in the “divine bosome.”
For Hooker, as for Thomas Aquinas, all reality is in the One, proceeds from it, and returns, is converted back toward its source when it achieves its proper good. In Hooker’s formulation, this double motion of procession or emanation and return (exitus/redditus) is remarkably similar: “every effect doth after a sort conteine, at least wise resemble the cause from which it proceedeth: all things in the worlde are saide in some sort to seeke the highest, and to covet more or lesse the participation of God himselfe.” (Lawes, I.5.2; 1:73.7-10).
It should be noted, though, that both Hooker and Aquinas are indebted in this regard to the fifth-century Greek philosopher Proclus. Hooker therefore anchored his elaborate exposition and defense of the Elizabethan religious settlement in a metaphysical theory of law which itself assumes an ontology of participation, an ontology also embraced by Thomas Aquinas. As Hooker writes, “All thinges are therefore pertakers of God, they are his ofspringe, his influence is in them” (Lawes, V.56.5).
In the second part of this essay, I intend to show how Hooker, informed by Aquinas, approached three kinds of law: the eternal law, the natural law, and the divine law.
