Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of Royal Supremacy in the Church of England

Abstract

The article deals with the doctrine of Royal Supremacy in the Church of England as formulated by Richard Hooker (March 1554 — 3 November 1600) in his opus magnum ‘Of the Laws of the Ecclesiastical Polity’. An attempt is made not only to describe the basic tenets of the doctrine, but also to identify the sources used by its author. It’s demonstrated that there’s an essential link between Richard Hooker’s soteriological and ecclesiological teachings, on the one hand, and his vision of the state-church relations in England, on the other hand. The Royal Supremacy remains a major element in the structure lying at the heart of identity of the Church of England. The connections between the English monarch and the English church emerged during the Anglo-Saxon period of the British history and were developed throughout the Middle Ages. They survived a turbulent century of reformations and took new shape and acquired new foundations without having lost the former ones. The authors also show that Richard Hooker’s doctrine of Royal Supremacy was heavily influenced by the legal tradition of civil law, formulated by Bartolo da Sassoferrato (1313 — 13 June 1357) and Henry de Bracton (c. 1210 — с. 1268), which was instrumental in assuring a degree of continuity with the medieval legal thinking on royal patrimonial dominion over a national church as well as in creating an essential link between that intellectual tradition of civil lawyers and the 16th century theological apologies of the Divine Right of kings. The Hookerian doctrine is reviewed against a particular historical background embodied in one of the fruits of the Elizabethan religious settlement, namely, the tradition of ecclesiastical conformism, which was widely held throughout the reformed English Church in the late 16th — early 17th century. Contrasting the former with the latter serves the purpose of demonstrating Richard Hooker’s innovative approach to the doctrine in question.