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Richard Hooker was born in Devon, near Exeter in April 1554; he died at Bishopsbourne, Kent on 2 November 1600. From 1579 to 1585 he was a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and read the Hebrew Lecture at the University during this period. In 1585 Queen Elizabeth I appointed him Master of the Temple Church at the Inns of Court where he engaged in a preaching struggle with his assistant, Walter Travers. Their disagreement over the theological and political assumptions of the reformed Church of England as defined by the Act of Uniformity of 1559 and the Book of Common Prayer led to Hooker's composition of his great work Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie (1593). The treatise consists of a lengthy preface which frames the polemical context, followed by eight books. The first four books address what he terms “general meditations”: (1) the nature of law in general, (2) the proper uses of the authorities of reason and revelation, (3) the application of the latter to the government of the church and (4) objections to practices inconsistent with the continental “reformed” example. The final four address the more “particular decisions” of the Church's constitution: (5) public religious duties as prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer (1559), (6) the power of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, (7) the authority of bishops and (8) the supreme authority of the Prince in both church and commonwealth, and hence their unity in the Christian state. Hooker grounds his apology in defence of the Elizabethan Settlement in his claim that God is law—‘The being of God is a kind of law to his working.' (Lawes I.2.2) As ‘first originall cause’, this divine ‘aeternal Law' contains within itself all derivative species of law; ‘as ofspringe of god, they are in him as effects in their highest cause, he likewise actuallie is in them, thassistance and influence of his deitie is theire life.' (V.56.5) Hooker distinguishes, moreover, between a ‘first' and a ‘second' eternal law. The latter comprises all derivative species of law which participate the eternal law as discrete emanations ordered dispositively in hierarchical ‘procession', while the former is the original, self-constituting divine source as it remains concomitantly and ineffably simple, at unity within itself—i.e. ‘verie Onenesse’. Hooker's account of eternal law as simultaneously unity in simplicity and participation of that unity by a multiplicity of derivative forms of law recapitulates the account of causality set out by Proclus in his Elements of Theology whereby ‘every effect remains in its cause, proceeds from it, and reverts upon it.' (prop. 35) Hooker anchors his elaborate defence of the Elizabethan religious settlement in a metaphysical theory of law which itself assumes a Neoplatonic ontology of ‘participation' in the Proclean tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Richard Hooker's (1554-1600) adaptation of classical logos theology is exceptional and indeed quite original for its extended application of the principles of Neoplatonic apophatic theology to the concrete institutional issues of a particular time and place-the aftermath of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement of 1559. Indeed, his sustained effort to explore the underlying connections of urgent political and constitutional concerns with the highest discourse of hidden divine realities-the knitting together of Neoplatonic theology and Reformation politics-is perhaps the defining characteristic of Hooker's distinction mode of thought. Hooker's ontology adheres to a Proclean logic of procession and reversion (processio and redditus) mediated by Aquinas's formulation of the so-called lex divinitatis whereby the originative principle of law remains simple and self-identical as an Eternal Law while it emanates manifold, derivative and dependent species of law, preeminently in the Natural Law accessible to human reason and Divine Law revealed through the Sacred Oracles of Scripture. For Hooker, therefore, 'all thinges'-including even the Elizabethan constitution in Church and Commonwealth, are God's offspring: 'they 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.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 2 April 1535, Robert Singleton, chaplain to Queen Anne Boleyn, preached a sermon at Paul's Cross. The unique, surviving printed copy of the sermon is housed in the Wren Library of Lincoln Cathedral. From 1533, Singleton had been a member of the circle of avant-garde evangelicals gathered at the margins of the Tudor court under the patron- age of Thomas Cromwell. His sermon at Paul's Cross contributed to an orchestrated campaign in support of Cromwell's legislative programme, then proceding through Parliament, to sever all links of ecclesiastical jurisdiction with Rome and to confirm Henry's headship of the Church of England. The sermon interprets Paul's allegory of the earthly and the heavenly Jerusalem in the Epistle to the Galatians as a model for thinking about the distinction between the invisible and visible Church. Singleton harnesses Pauline ecclesiology in an apology for the royal supremacy. Presented here is a transcribed copy of the original printed version. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]