"For these will bring peace at the last": on why we should read Walton's 'Life of Hooker'

It is easy to mock Izaak Walton's Life of Hooker.  Diarmaid MacCulloch enjoys demonstrating how with Walton's account Hooker "passes into myth", overlooking "slightly awkward facts".  The plain country parson was, MacCulloch reminds us, both wealthy and "rather metropolitan - not to say cosmopolitan".  Hagiography, however, has a value beyond historical accuracy.  The stories told by hagiographers can often capture the purpose and direction of a life and its learning and witness, and these resonate, in a way that later historians can, with some condescension, too easily overlook.

Above all, Walton's portrayal of Hooker painted in an engaging manner the settlement which Hooker sought to defend.  As Hooker states in the opening word of his Preface to the Laws:

that posterity may know we have not loosely permitted things to pass away as in a dream, there shall be for men's information extant thus much concerning the present state of the Church of God established amongst us, and their careful endeavour which would have upheld the same (LEP, Preface, 1.1).

In his summary of the ecclesiastical landscape in which Hooker contended and wrote, Walton admirably illustrated this "present state of the Church of God established amongst us":

The active Romanists, The restless Nonconformists ... and The passive peaceable Protestant. The Counsels of the first considered, and resolved on in Rome: the second both in Scotland, in Geneva, and in divers selected, secret, dangerous Conventicles ... the third pleaded and defended their Cause by established Laws, both Ecclesiastical and Civil; and, if they were active, it was to prevent the other two from destroying what was by those known Laws happily established to them and their Posterity.

Here was the intent of Hooker's apologia, a defence of that which was "happily established" and settled, against activist, ideological minorities who sought the destruction of a settled ecclesiastical order.

The heart of this settlement was the parish, served by the parson, maintaining Common Prayer, sustaining what the Elizabethan Injunctions termed "charity, the knot of all Christian society".  While one might knowingly smile at the depiction of a well-connected, cosmopolitan clerical intellectual as a mere "married Priest" in "a Countrey Parsonage", "a poor obscure English Priest", Walton here points us to the core of that which Hooker defended, the parish church - under the Royal Supremacy - in which was administered the rites and ceremonies of the Book of Common Prayer and the teaching of the reformed ecclesia Anglicana.

As even MacCulloch admits, Hooker's "moderation was important".  This moderation the Laws celebrated as embodied in the Church of the Elizabethan Settlement, against the immoderate claims of Papist and Puritan. Order, conformity, custom, laws: these protected and secured moderation, a moderation rooted in the character of the God of peace.  This is the vision Walton celebrates when he places words on the lips of the younger Hooker:

God abhors confusion as contrary to his nature ... the Scripture was not writ to beget Disputations, and Pride, and Opposition to Government; but Charity and Humility, Moderation, Obedience to Authority, and peace to Mankind.

Walton continues:

And that this was really his judgement, did appear in his future writings, and in all the actions of his life.

That Hooker's defence of conformity was richly patristic, open to the wisdom of the Scholastics, committed to the gift of communal peace, and animated by reason and rationality is seen in words of praise attributed to James VI/I:

I observe there is in Mr. Hooker ... a grave, comprehensive, clear manifestation of Reason, and that back't with the Authority of the Scripture, the Fathers and School-men, and with all Law both Sacred and Civil.

Whether James spoke these words or not is beside the point.  Here Walton summarises the intellectual depth and attractiveness of Hooker's defence of conformity.  

In his closing paragraph, Walton returns to Hooker's apologetic intent in the Laws, to promote the peace of the ecclesia Anglicana through conformity to its godly and goodly order, which also secures the peace and well-being of the commonwealth:

Lord bless his Brethren, the Clergy of this Nation, with effectual endeavours to attain, if not to his great learning, yet to his remarkable meekness, his godly simplicity, and his Christian moderation; for these will bring peace at the last: And, Lord! let his most excellent Writings be blest with what he designed, when he undertook them: which was, Glory to Thee O God on High, Peace in thy Church, and Good Will to Mankind. Amen, Amen.

This is a glorious reminder of how the heart of Hooker's vision was captured by Walton: of how Hooker's defence of conformity, of moderation against immoderate claims, flowed from and returned to the peace and order that is life in the Holy Trinity, that ecclesial and communal life might reflect this peace and order.  To dismiss Walton's work as hagiography is to entirely miss the point.  Walton's Life of Hooker allows us to understand why Hooker so robustly defended "the Church of God established amongst us". As Hooker declared in Book VII of the Laws:

to enjoy the peace, quietness, order and stability of religion, which prelacy (as hath been declared) causeth, then must we necessarily, even in favour of the public good, uphold those things, the hope whereof being taken away, it is not the mere goodness of the charge, and the divine acceptation thereof, that will be able to invite many thereunto (VII.14.18).