Anglicans and the via Media
An extreme Anglican seems inherently improbable. Indeed the very concept has something of the oxymoron about it. Moreover, there is a strong tendency to self-congratulation and to celebrate our supposed moderation, with many being likely to cite (what is usually a misunderstood notion of) the Anglican via media by way of elucidation.
This via media idea is certainly not correctly understood if taken to mean that Anglicans must always seek merely to find a middle position between the contesting parties on any given matter of debate, without any anchoring of our own at all. Such a position would ever tend to leave us adrift, seeking merely to find some accommodation in the face of whatever novel innovations our surrounding culture might from time to time come up with — as indeed we see on many matters of importance for how we live today. But worse still, it becomes positively dangerous to the authenticity of our self-understanding as Anglicans when “weaponised” into an intolerance that rejects as somehow illegitimate classical affirmations our tradition has bequeathed to us that are deemed incompatible with the latest demands of an ever changing contemporary culture.
The work of the scholar Ethan Shegan does however demonstrate that this latter trap is not new and that the history of Anglicanism has long had strands that sought to use the ideal of “moderation” as a stick with which to supress authentic diversity of thought in the interests of a highly disciplinarian institutional exercise of power and authority. (See The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England, Cambridge, 2011) Even now it is very possible to find strands of liberalism that profess toleration and the valiue of diversity while being highly intolerant of any dissent and seeking entire uniformity upon that.
But in terms of Anglican theological history it would be altogether more plausible derive an understanding of via media theology from the kind of analysis St John Henry Newman set out. 1 Yet it may be more illuminating still to look at it in relation to the thought of the much earlier figure of Richard Hooker.
There have been not a few who would claim Hooker as the original proponent of Anglicanism understood as a theological compromise in which the doctrine of the Church of England historically came to occupy a theological middle ground between Roman Catholicism and continental Protestantism.
But Professor Torrance Kirby has done much to make clear this is at best a questionable understanding. He argues instead that,
“far from initiating a theological compromise between Rome and continental Protestantism, Hooker is in actuality a proponent of the principles of magisterial reform in England…..
Hooker frames his discourse as an irenical appeal to the hearts and minds of the ‘moderate puritan’ critics of the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559. Hooker addresses his discourse directly to disciplinarian but non separating puritans who seek reformation of the ecclesiastical law of England. He endeavors to persuade his audience by an appeal to standards of doctrinal orthodoxy acknowledged by them as authoritative that a complete reformation has in fact already been achieved. By a concerted appeal to ‘theological reason’ he hopes to secure conscientious acceptance of the (Elizabethan] Settlement….
“Hooker’s overriding apologetic aim as set out in the preface to the Lawes is, at any rate, hardly consistent with an attempt to construct an ecclesiological tertium quid somewhere between Geneva and Rome.
Moreover,
“In order to persuade his audience that a complete Reformation of the church had been achieved in and through the doctrine and institutions of the Elizabethan Settlement, one of Hooker’s chief tasks is to justify the authority of natural law in handling matters of religion. The only possibility of success in this apologetic aim is to offer a demonstration on the ground of theological assumptions shared by those whom he intends to persuade.[namely the Puritans] Thus it should come as no great surprise when, in his account of natural law, he resorts to arguments and authorities employed by Calvin, Luther, and other magisterial reformers. 2
What this points to, is a theological project of considerable subtlety in which Hooker targets his Puritan opponents by using sources that they would have found unimpeachable. In so doing he set out an understanding of Anglicanism as indeed one where the Church in England emerged truly reformed from the Reformation.
But this was not the end of the story because he also implicitly demonstrates, along the way, important levels of deep philosophical continuity with the earlier and indeed the Mediaeval Church.
Such a subtly of method and strategy has much to teach us today, when we have to confront both our ever more secular surrounding culture and forces within the church itself that wish in the guise of a new movement of reformation seek sweep away central truths of our faith.
There had been many who argued – such as Lee Gibbs– that Hooker’s emphasis on the rationality of law was dependent on a teleological perspective derived from Aristotle and Aquinas while the magisterial reformers adhered to a nominalist, voluntarist emphasis on the essence of law as command rather than reason.
Gibbs thus maintained that the controversy turned on “the difference between two natural law traditions and that Hooker stands predominantly within the medieval rationalist and realist tradition represented by Aquinas, while the magisterial Protestant Reformers and their disciplinarian followers stand squarely with the medieval voluntarists and nominalists.” See, Lee Gibbs, introduction to book 1, FLE 6 (1):103. Otto von Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Ages, trans. FW Maitland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 172-73, lays out this distinction between the two natural law traditions; see also Francis Oakley, “Medieval Theories of Natural Law: William of Ockham and the Significance of the Voluntarist Tradition,” Natural Law Forum 6 (1961): 65-83.
A rationalist, realist account of law like Hooker’s would thus then by definition incompatible with the assumptions of Reformation theology. But for Gibbs, Hooker’s more optimistic view of human nature enabled him to close the breach between reason and revelation, nature and
grace, which had been opened by the magisterial reformers and maintained by the more radical disciplinarian puritans. (FLE 6 (1): 124.
This argument would leave Hooker as essentially a neo-Thomist, where regard for natural law as a revelation of the divine nature would be to depart from the established bounds of Protestant orthodoxy into the territory of scholastic divinity or, “the darknesse of schoole learning.” (FLE, 4:65:1)
However, as Kirby demonstrates, Hooker’s position is dialectically complex featuring a simultaneous disjunction and conjunction in the relation between the two kingdoms, the two kinds of discourse, and the two ways of righteousness.
Thus, the knowledge of God as creator must be distinguished from the knowledge of God as redeemer; even though they are by no means separable, and thus they cannot be denoted as simply ‘disjunctive.’
The natural law and the revealed law of scripture are as it were distinct modes or aspects of the eternal law, yet they are nonetheless inseparable in origin. But both are expressions of the one eternal law.
Yet these distinct orders or realms of law are understood to be united in the (formal) simplicity of their common divine source as well as in our knowledge of them.
For most of the magisterial reformers, knowledge of God is attainable through a contemplation of both the splendour of creation and the written word of the scriptures. And so too for Hooker as for Luther, Calvin, and the others, there was a necessary conjunction of the orders of Grace and Nature, both in their divine author and in the souls of rational creatures.
And this meant that, despite a very different popular understanding the doctrine of sola scriptura being extant it could be upheld in this way without prejudice to the legitimate authority of the light of reason.
Hence Hooker argues (without parting company with his target audience and indeed most of the Reformers) that:
Injurious we are unto God, the Author and giver of humane capacity, judgement and wit, when because of some things wherein he precisely forbiddeth men to use their own inventions, we take occasion to disauthorize and disgrace the works which he doth produce by the hand, either of nature or of grace in them. We offer contumely, even unto him, when we scornfully reject what we list without any other exception then this, the brain of man hath devised it. (LawesVII.11.10, 1:210.27-211.6)11)
In this way therefore, in the end Hooker can be understood to stand in continuity with the natural law tradition on the one hand, but do so within the limits of the Protestant orthodoxy as his target Puritan hearers had received it on the other..
This should be recognised as quite a feat of intellectual ingenuity!
And this is seen on full display when we see Hooker quote Calvin’s own ‘judgement of philosophie” in a letter to Martin Bucer, when making a profound claim for the role of philosophical reason —-with which it is appropriate to conclude this short discussion:
As truth is most precious, so all men confess it to be so. And yet, since
God alone is the source of all good, you must not doubt, that whatever
truth you anywhere meet with, proceeds from Him, unless you would
be doubly ungrateful to Him; it is in this way you have received the
word descended from heaven. For it is sinful to treat God’s gifts with
contempt; and to ascribe to man what is peculiarly God’s is a still greater
impiety. Philosophy is, consequently, the noble gift of God, and those
learned men who have striven hard after it in all ages have been incited
thereto by God himself, that they might enlighten the world in the
knowledge of the truth. 3
1. For the classic formulation of this idea see John Henry Newman and the historical interpretation by H. D. Weidner. The ‘Via Media’ of the Anglican Church, with notes by J. H. Newman Oxford:1990, xxxiii-vii. And in application to the interpretation of Richard Hooker’s theology, see Aidan Nichols, The Panther and the Hind:A Theological History of Anglicanism, Edinburgh, 1993, 37-52; and also William Haugaard, introduction to Hooker’s preface to the Lawes in FLE 6 (1): Elizabeth’s Reign: Crucible for an Emerging Anglicanism, 2-22.
2. See W.J.T. Kirby, “Richard Hooker’s Theory of Natural Law in the Context of Reformation Theology”, The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 30, No. 3, Autumn, 1999, pp. 681-703; this quotation from p. 684.
3. Calvin, Letters, ed. Jules Bonnet and trans. David Constable, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Thomas
Constable, 1855-57), 2:198,199; Epistolarum et responsorum (Lausanne: Excudebat Franciscus le Preux,
1576), 179,180;Jean Calvin, Opera quae supersunt omnia (Corpus Reformatorum), ed. G. Baum, E.
Cunitz, and E. Reuss (Braunschweig: Schwetschke, 1863-1900), 48:530.This passage from the letter is quoted by John Booty in his commentary on ACL and is attributed to Calvin
FLE 4:65.11-12. Cf. LawesVII.11.10 (1:210.27-211.6).