One of the more intriguing phenomena of recent times has been the revival of interest in the writings of Richard Hooker (1554–1600). Hooker's fame rests on his eight-volume Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, five of which appeared in his lifetime and the other three after his death. His work had relatively little impact on later church controversies, but in the mid-twentieth century, he was rediscovered by enthusiastic American Episcopalians who transformed him into a major theological writer and made him the virtual “founder” of Anglicanism. Some even compared him to Thomas Aquinas, though few people would now go that far. The upshot of this was a new edition of his Laws and a mini-industry of Hooker studies that has emerged in its wake.
Hooker's reputation remains high among American Anglicans, but it has never reached great heights in England, where he remains a respected but somewhat minor figure. This revised doctoral dissertation from the University of Durham is thus unusual, and Dr. Dominiak's approach to his subject is both original and independent of most of what has gone before. His contention is that although Richard Hooker cannot be described as a systematic theologian or philosopher in the usual sense of those terms, he nevertheless had a coherent pattern of thought based on Platonic models that can be compared to significant theological syntheses in the Eastern Christian world.
Dr. Dominiak argues that the theme of “participation” in God is both the fundamental principle underlying the Laws and the link concept that connects Hooker to the Eastern Orthodox tradition of deification (theosis), which has enjoyed a remarkable revival in recent times. In his opening chapter, Dr. Dominiak attempts to define what terms like “participation” and “deification” mean, and it soon becomes apparent that this is no easy task. Both words were used sparingly by Hooker himself, and both have a range of possible meanings that makes it difficult to say which of them best suits Hooker's own mental outlook.
Dr. Dominiak recognizes that the Eastern Orthodox doctrine of theosis is more closely defined than anything that can reasonably be attributed to Hooker, and he accepts that although the term has enjoyed a certain vogue among modern Orthodox thinkers, it is by no means universally embraced even among them, let alone by Anglicans and other Western Christians. He also points out that what the Eastern Church calls “participation” and “deification” is frequently expressed in Western Christianity by terms such as “union” with God and as “adoption” in Christ. Once that is understood, it becomes much harder to separate Hooker from mainstream Reformed Protestantism. Hooker may have been a dedicated defender of the status quo in the English Church, but the language and concepts that guided his thought are closer to the Reformed scholasticism of his age than to ancient or medieval theology.
In this book, Dr. Dominiak sets two goals for himself, one of which is considerably easier to reach than the other. The easier task is to establish that Hooker had a coherent pattern of thought that underlies his writing, even if it is seldom expressed in so many words. The other more speculative and controversial aim is to offer Hooker as a model for reconciling different conceptions of participation and deification in Anglican-Orthodox dialogue and for recovering what he calls “participatory metaphysics.” Dr. Dominiak conceives Hooker's approach as an attempt to contain two different types of Platonism, one of which is linked to Augustine and the other to Pseudo-Dionysius. The Augustinian Hooker is fully in line with the Reformed doctrine of justification by faith alone, whereas the Dionysian Hooker seeks to construct a series of mediating principles that link the created order to God.
In Hooker's mind, God is the source and perfection of all law and reason, with imperfect human analogies that seek to connect with the divine on earth. The Incarnation of Christ is the principal link between God and man, with the human nature of Christ representing the ideal that Christians seek to emulate in the process of sanctification. To the imputed grace of justification there is added an infused grace of participation in the divine, which can be called “deification” even though the creature is never absorbed into God.
The book is divided into five chapters, all of which focus on different aspects of participation. The first chapter deals with definitions, concepts, and the place of Hooker in theological thought. The second outlines what Dr. Dominiak calls the “metaphysical architecture” of participation—in other words, the evidence that he can find for claiming that the idea of participation underlies Hooker's work, even when the Laws do not explicitly say so. The third chapter attempts to explain how finite creatures can know God and participate in him at different levels of being. The fourth chapter applies this to contemporary politics by trying to show that Hooker's defense of the Elizabethan Settlement was philosophically coherent and did not require further “purification” along Scriptural lines. The final chapter is a short conclusion in which Dr. Dominiak draws the threads together and attempts to demonstrate that participation in God provides a framework (“architecture”) that gives coherence and a certain intellectual grandeur to the whole enterprise of the Laws.
Dr. Dominiak has developed a bold thesis and raised Hooker studies to a new level of sophistication. Whether it will persuade many readers remains to be seen, but it will certainly stimulate them to further thought and perhaps to a more realistic assessment of Hooker's place in English and ecumenical theology than has sometimes been the case.
