Lewis the Hookerian, 'patron saint' of ordinary Anglicanism

As we approach the anniversary of the death of surely the most influential Anglican of the 20th century, C.S. Lewis, I share a wonderful extract from his English Literature in The Sixteenth Century, discussing Richard Hooker. While Lewis prefaces this extract with a reminder that "Hooker had never heard of a religion called Anglicanism", what would become Anglicanism, at its best, embodies this Hookerian ethos, in which an exhausting (and inherently deceptive) spiritual search for 'the true Church' is, thankfully, not ordinarily an Anglican concern. As Hooker declared, such searching is the pursuit of "they [who] define not the Church by that which the Church essentiallie is, but by that wherein they imagin their own more perfect than the rest are" (LEP V.68.6).

In this, Lewis was truly Hookerian, his writings demonstrating a catholic spirit free of of such a stultifying, narrow spirit. If there is a 'patron saint' of the ordinary Anglican - content for reasons practical and natural to be Anglican, knowing that here the creeds are confessed, the scriptures read, the sacraments administered, and making no grand, exclusive claims for this communion - surely it is Lewis the Hookerian.

Hooker is never seeking for ‘the true Church’, never crying, like Donne, ‘Show me deare Christ, thy spouse’. For him no such problem existed. If by ‘the Church’ you mean the mystical Church (which is partly in Heaven) then, of course, no man can identify her. But if you mean the visible Church, then we all know her. She is ‘a sensibly known company’ of all those throughout the world who profess one Lord, one Faith, and one Baptism (III.1.3). None who makes that profession is excluded from her. Heretics, idolaters, and notoriously wicked persons may be excluded from the ‘sound’ part of her or from salvation, but they are still members of the visible Church (III.1.7,13). That is why baptism by heretics is valid (III.1.9) and if a heretic is killed ‘only for Christian professions sake’ we cannot deny him ‘the honour of martyrdom’ (III.1.11). In this Church we always have been and still are. We have not left her by reforming ourselves, nor have the Papists left her by their corrupt ‘indisposition’ to do likewise (III.1.10). No doubt many of the questions which Hooker treats are what we should now call questions between ‘denominations’. But that is not how he envisages the matter. He is not, save accidentally, preaching ‘a religion’, he is discussing the kind and degree of liberty proper to national churches within the universal, visible Church.

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