Ebook: Richard Hooker: The Architecture of Participation

Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity has long been recognised as an influential philosophical, theological, and literary text. While scholars have commonly noted the presence of participatory language in selected passages of Hooker’s Laws, no study to date has traced how participation lends a sense of system and coherency across the whole work. Paul Anthony Dominiak explores how the concept of participation informs and holds together Hooker’s major work.
Dominiak analyses how Hooker uses an architectural framework of ‘participation in God’ to build a cohesive vision of the Elizabethan Church as the most fitting way to reconcile and lead English believers to the shared participation of God. Dominiak first explores Hooker’s metaphysical architecture of participation in his accounts of law and the sacraments. He then traces how this architecture structures cognitive participation in God, as well as Hooker’s political vision of the Church and Commonwealth. The volume culminates in a summary that shows how Hooker provides a salutary resource for modern ecumenical dialogue and contemporary political retrievals of participation.