Reason and Revelation in Hooker's Ethics

This essay has two complementary purposes. It seeks principally to clarify the basis of the political philosophy of Richard Hooker, the great Elizabethan divine, and, in so doing, to clarify as well certain of the limits of political speculation itself. We hear quite often now that reports of the death of political philosophy have been greatly exaggerated. If this is indeed a time of its resuscitation, it is important that its limits be recognized and that inquiry be liberated from doctrines which cannot be based on unassisted reason alone. The ancillary purpose of this study is a contribution to such a disentanglement.Hooker's political thought itself also repays the attention of modern political scientists, if only as a remarkably comprehensive model of pre-modern or “traditional” society. Hooker wrestles with one of the difficulties which had much to do with ending “traditional” society in Europe and in those places Europe has influenced: the bitter and conflicting claims of church and state, and especially of various churches. Hooker's is a revealing endeavor to solve the political problems inherent in revealed religion, without abandoning—as his “enlightened” successors did—Christianity as a decisive constituent of politics or Aristotle as the secular guide of politics.