I have mentioned this passionate sermon because, if it were ignored, the wholly different tone of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity might give a false impression both of Hooker’s personal, and of his literary, character. But his other minor works cannot be noticed here, and I must now turn, at once, to the Polity.
The adventures of this text are among the strangest in literary history. The first four books (as we now know, but Walton did not) were published in March, 1593. The fifth followed in December, 1597. Hooker died in 1600. In 1604, Dr. Spenser, President of Corpus Christi, Oxford, in a new edition of the Polity, stated that Hooker had finished the three further books he intended: that certain persons had rifled Hooker’s study after his death, abstracted the fair copies and left only “unperfect and mangled draughts;” from which draughts, nevertheless, “there is a purpose” of publishing the best text now possible. After this, nearly forty years of silence. Then, in 1648, we have an edition containing Books VI and VIII. In 1662, Bishop Gauden, a man suspect to the High Church party, brings out an edition which, for the first time, includes VII; its matter unsatisfactory to high-flying episcopalians. In 1666, we have an edition which contains Walton’s life, discrediting the three last books. Walton wrote at the request of Gilbert Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury.
What lies behind this mysterious story has been dug out by brilliant scholarship in our own time, but it is far too complicated to be retold here. Nor do the stolen fair copies concern the literary historian: if they ever existed, at least neither we nor our fathers have ever read them. What does concern us is the authenticity of Books VI to VIII as they exist, and of this, in a general sense, there is now no doubt. Book VI is only a fragment, and VII and VIII have not reached the perfection which Hooker would have exacted from himself before he published them. What is a little disquieting is that Dr. Spenser spoke of bringing his “mangled” materials to “a reasonable perfection,” words which might imply a sort of editing frowned on by modern scholars. Certainly, at one place (VII.v.8), a gloss has “crept into the text.” The internal evidence, however, suggests that nearly all we read in these three books is pure Hooker: his style is not easily imitated. It is true that they, sometimes, differ, in one particular respect, from the manner of Books I to V: they are sharper, more sarcastic, less tranquil. But, then, so are Hooker’s manuscript notes on the Christian Letter of 1599…
From: English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama: The Completion of the Clark Lectures, Trinity College, Cambridge, 1944 by C. S. Lewis; The Oxford History of English Literature 3 (F. P. Wilson and Bonamy Dobree, editors) (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1954), pp. 452-453.
C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) was one of the most famous Christian authors of the 20th century. The book quoted from here represents Lewis performing his “day job,” that of a Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature, first at Oxford, then at Cambridge.
