Editor’s Note: Part of our series marking the 800th birthday of Thomas Aquinas, this is the second part of a two-part essay. Part One may be found here.
Having discussed, in the first part of this essay, how both Hooker and Aquinas perceived the origin of law in God, we turn now to different kinds (genera) of laws and the continuing areas of similarity between Aquinas and Hooker. Readers will recall that Hooker distinguishes between a “First” and a “Second” Eternal Law. The second is the ordering “voice” of divine Wisdom, that is, law as God’s utterance proceeding from the ineffable unity of the First Eternal Law and comprising within it all derivative species of law. According to Hooker, the Second Eternal Law, whose “voyce is the harmony of the world,” comprises the manifold divine order as “kept by all his creatures, according to the severall conditions wherewith he hath indued them” (Lawes, I.3.1). This law has a variety of “names” depending on the different orders of creatures subject to the one divine government.
The two principal derivative kinds (or genera) of the Second Eternal Law are (1) the natural law and (2) the revealed law of the Scriptures. Hooker sometimes calls the revealed law of Scripture the “divine law,” but this should not be confused with the eternal law. The entire system of the laws comprised within this Second Eternal Law thus expresses the twofold motion of creative procession from (proodos) and return to (epistrophē) the original unity of the eternal law as expressed by this primary distinction between the natural and the revealed orders of law. This twofold motion emerges from the thought of the fifth-century Greek philosopher Proclus. Both of these two primary genera — Natural Law and divinely Revealed Law — are further participated in by multiple derivative and dependent forms.
The natural law, by way of a further procession, comprises in turn subordinate species of law. These include the “celestial law,” which governs angels, and the “law of reason,” sometimes identified simply as the “natural law,” which orders rational humankind. All these subspecies represent the outward unfolding or processio ad extra of the Second Eternal Law: “reaching from one end to the other mightily.”
Conversely, the law of God’s special revelation, that is, the revealed law of the Scriptures, presupposes the disorder introduced into the cosmos by the Fall. It is provided to secure final restoration or return of the creation to its original condition of unity under and within the primordial first eternal law. Hooker’s distinction between these two summa genera of natural law and divinely revealed law corresponds to the cosmic logic of procession and return. This distinction also reflects the epistemological distinction of a twofold knowledge of God (duplex cognitio Dei), namely by the light of supernatural revelation and by the natural light of reason: in addition to the “Book of the Eternal Wisdom” there are the “Book of Nature” and the “Book of Scripture,” three books corresponding to three genres of law. There are, moreover, composite species of law — such as human positive law and the law of nations — which derive from a conscious, pragmatic reflection upon the general principles contained in the natural law.
Throughout this complex legal discourse, Hooker presents the human creature as the imago dei at the focal point of the cosmic drama of procession from and return to the original fount of order established in the divine simplicity of the First Eternal Law. The exitus-redditus structure found in this generic division of law in Book I of the Ecclesiasticall Politie shows that Hooker has read Aquinas on law very closely, as indeed numerous scholars have noted. Hooker’s distinction between the first and second eternal laws constitutes, nonetheless, a highly significant departure from the Thomist scholastic model. The effect of the distinction between these two aspects of the eternal law is simultaneously to widen and to decrease the distance between the creator-lawgiver and the created cosmos. The outworking of this can be seen in Hooker’s theology of salvation, a decidedly Reformed soteriology.
For Hooker, though, the form of law “to be kept by all creatures according to their several conditions” comprises three summa genera — the eternal law, the natural law and the divine law — where the latter two species are understood as comprehended within the first, and yet nonetheless distinct both in their operation and in our knowledge of them. Together these summa genera constitute a comprehensive division of the many diverse “kinds” of law.
Seen from the standpoint of their divine principle of origin — i.e., in the first eternal law where “the being of God is a law to his working” — these three summa genera of law may be considered as simply one. The predication of law to God is not metaphorical for Hooker. Law is a perfection of the divine being and can consequently be affirmed literally so long as we understand that what God is “in reality” is not to be confused with what he is “in idea.” Our intellect apprehends God in the manifold manner of his Wisdom. Seen from below, that is from the standpoint of mortal finitude, the original unity takes on the aspect of articulated multiplicity of kinds that nonetheless all “participate” and “proceed from” the undivided unity that is their common source. This account of the simultaneous unity and diversity of law in its multiple species lies at the very heart of Hooker’s vision of law as an expression of the divine governance:
Who the guide of nature but only the God of nature? In him we live, move, and are. Those things which nature is said to do, are by divine arte performed, using nature as an instrument: nor is there any such art or knowledge divine in nature herself working, but in the guide of nature’s work (Lawes, I.3.4).
Hooker begins with metaphors of “the nature of law in general” — law as the root of a flourishing tree, law as the foundation of a stately house, law as a wellspring or fountain, all hidden “in the bosome of the earth.”And he proceeds to identify these underlying, hidden sources with the primordial Wisdom of God. This Wisdom is in turn presented metaphorically as hidden “in the bosome of God” and the “bowels of the divine mercie,” and manifest in the “voice” of cosmic harmony.
In effect, when we mix these metaphors, what is “hidden in the bosome of the earth” is in actuality “hidden in the bosome of God.” The conclusion for Hooker is that God, in some literal sense, is Law. His law is not distinct from himself, and therefore it becomes possible to move beyond metaphor to a more literal affirmation. This predication must be interpreted cautiously — it is composite in form, but refers the theological understanding to an essential simplicity, the ineffable unity and simplicity of all law in the divine self-regulating activity: “the being of God is a kinde of law to his working,” and on this working diverse laws depend. On this Richard Hooker and Thomas Aquinas are in full agreement.
