THE ANGLOSPHERIC DIFFERENCE:

It should not surprise us, then, that the heart of Hooker's Laws is a sustained meditation on epistemology: what can we know? What can't we? And why are we always so determined to claim to know more than we really can? Hooker was no skeptic, to be sure, and certainly not in matters of religion. He would have had little patience with the epistemological demolition crew that was to appear over the following century: Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and their followers. Hooker begins his Laws with a profound meditation on the eternal law of God, the changeless and transcendent union of the good, and the truth that anchors all morality and guides all of history. He speaks at length of the fixed laws of nature and reason that brook no contradiction and declares his firm confidence in the timeless truth of Scripture and the way of salvation it reveals. 

But he was keenly aware of the chasm separating these changeless norms of nature from the changing conditions of human society. While we might aspire to share the changeless eternity of God, for now we must plot our halting course through the realm of mutability. Law is not amoral; it must be ordered toward the basic moral ends that reflect the realities of human nature. But even as we keep these ends in view, our paths toward them will never look identical in two different times or places.

For this reason, we can be grateful, says Hooker, that the natural law is not merely "mandatory, showing what must be done," but also "permissive, declaring only what may be done; or else advisory, revealing what is most prudent for us to do." The task of human law is to take these three strands and weave them into a fabric strong enough to guide a society toward its common good and supple enough to respond to new insights and new challenges. 

This process is, of course, fraught with uncertainty. Hooker thus invites us to steer our course "whichever way greatest probability leads," as determined by an attentive study of human nature. Hooker models such attention in the penetrating Preface to his Laws, where he acutely traces the paths by which idealistic reformers gain the allegiance of disaffected masses and fall prey to ever more wayward flights of self-delusion. Such delusion arises from misplaced self-confidence, the claim to a unique insight into the "cause of all the world's ills" and to a unique program promising "a comprehensive solution to all these problems." Every age will have to cope with its share of deluded utopians, but the framers of law, Hooker argues, must resist this temptation and have the humility to be guided by the wisdom of others. 

Hence arises the conservative respect for tradition. When it comes to law-making, the wisdom that is gleaned from long study of human nature is indispensable. Good lawmakers will recognize that much more than one lifetime is needed for such wisdom. Tradition, for Hooker, is simply the accumulated wisdom of centuries, which we would be foolhardy to ignore: "Neither may we in this case lightly esteem what hath been allowed as fit in the judgment of antiquity, and by the long continued practice of the whole Church; from which unnecessarily to swerve, experience hath never as yet found it safe." We rightly respect the wisdom of the aged, who "for the most part are best experienced, least subject to rash and unadvised passions."We ordinarily trust their judgments above those of the young, simply because they have had more opportunity to gain knowledge of the world. Just so on the larger stage of history: although age-old beliefs and customs are certainly fallible, they are less likely to steer us wrong than newly hatched schemes and intellectual fads. 

Human laws and institutions, then, rest upon a foundation of tradition, experience, and trial and error. Beneath these, to be sure, is the deeper bedrock of transcendent moral order, but only the long, hard work of human reason and ingenuity can adapt this order to the needs of each society. While law as such carries divine sanction, the authority of particular laws rests chiefly on human authority. Though imperfect and uncertain, such authority is, for Hooker, sufficient. "If we labor to defend such authority as far as the truth will bear, let no one think that we are wasting time on something trivial"; without it, every social, religious, and political institution will crumble before the leveling forces of reform-turned-revolution. 

Yet we must be equally careful not to defend this authority further than the truth will bear. "We all tend to fall in love with our own ideas, and when others contradict them, this only fans our love into a flame and makes us all the more eager to contend, argue, and do everything we can on their behalf." Thus it is that political schemes that might have begun as very sensible ideas are elevated to the level of dogma, brooking no contradiction. Indeed, it was just such confusion of human and divine law in the medieval Catholic Church that lay behind the Protestant Reformation. Many Protestants were prepared to consider many of the trappings of the medieval church, from liturgical customs to papal prerogatives, as plausible policies resting on human authority and potentially suited to the edification of the church; but they resisted the insistence that such customs could acquire the binding force of divine law, to be imposed on every nation by a global super-sovereign. 

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