The University of Notre Dame

The Writings of Thomas Hooker: Spiritual Adventure in Two Worlds by Sargent BushReview by: Lawrence RosenwaldNotre Dame English Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Winter, 1981), pp. 81-83Published by: The University of Notre DameStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40062441 .

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The Writings of Thomas Hooker: Spiritual Adventure in Two Worlds By Sargent Bush, Jr. The University of Wisconsin Press, 1980 x + 387 pages. $19.50. Reviewed by Lawrence Rosenwald

Despite its many excellences, this is a frustrating book. Precisely be- cause of its excellences, however, even its shortcomings are illuminating. Considerable intelligence and erudition yield puzzlingly flat and unsatis- fying conclusions; their failure suggests the presence of a fundamental difficulty in assessing Puritan character.

The same intelligence and erudition also yield much of less questionable interest, of course. What Bush is particularly good at is supplying Hooker's texts with contexts. In the first part of the book, which is concerned with Hooker's occasional writings, the contexts to be supplied are historical situations. This task is crucial, not decorative, because it is characteristic of the Puritans' topical writing not to be topical explicitly; tracing and linking occasional writings to their occasions amounts to breaking a code. Bush's persuasive and imaginative situating of The Saints Dignitie and Dutie in the context of the controversy over Antinomianism is particularly helpful. For example, early in that text Hooker cites Titus 2:3-5, a pas- sage on the role and place of women. Anne Hutchinson, Bush notes, had cited the same passage, in which older women are exhorted to teach their

juniors, as a defense of her teaching at private religious meetings; Hooker's

emphasis on the close of the passage, in which St. Paul writes that what the

younger women are specifically to be taught is "the proper ways of sub- mission, love, and other homely virtues" (94), is thus revealed in its po- lemical energy and aim. Similar benefits result from Bush's grounding of certain of Hooker's writings on church doctrine and polity, notably the classic Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline, in the debates of the Westminster Assembly.

The second and third parts of the book are concerned with Hooker's

writings on the ordo salutis, the sequence of steps by which salvation is realized in the individual soul. These writings are commonly said to con- stitute Hooker's major achievement, but are seldom read; Bush's account of them would be immensely useful if only as a judicious and expert sum-

mary. But here also Bush provides the texts with their appropriate con- texts, these being in this case the traditions of ideas within which Hooker was working; particularly profitable are the passages on faculty psychol- ogy, voluntarism, and the preparationist debate. A small example of the

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82 rosenwald Journal

profits they convey is the precision with which Bush is able to define Hooker's sense of the word "heart"; whereas elsewhere it is shorthand for the inner life as a whole, for Hooker, Bush shows, it is particularly asso- ciated with the will. The consequences for reading Hooker's texts are con- siderable. Bush's linking of Hooker's work to the Baconian arid Platonic traditions is less successful, though strikingly learned; one problem (I shall discuss another later) is simply that he is demonstrating not influence but affinity, which is not so great a reward.

Where Bush does less well is in his large characterizations of Hooker as man and artist. Nor is such portraiture idle adornment affixed to solid re- search. Our assessment of the Puritan character in general - that is, of our own past - is composed of our assessments of Puritan individuals. Bush acknowledges this in making his assessments explicit and prominent; but they are not convincing. One cause is an insufficiently discriminating lit- erary judgment. Bush notes that Hooker is fond of metaphor; that does not imply that he is good at it, and while Bush attempts to document the first proposition, he only asserts the second, which is no less important; phrases like "dramatically effective scene painting," "pure poetry," "pulpit mas- tery" (217-18) stand in place of arguments distinguishing the effective metaphor from the otiose.

A weightier cause, however, is Bush's recurrent failure to distinguish the individual from the generic, the cultural, the conventional in reading character from texts. For example - as noted, Bush portrays Hooker as fond of metaphor, and also of homely diction and allegory. Now the pres- ence of these elements in most of Hooker's writings is incontestable. (Their absence from Hooker's account of the last and most exalted stage of the ordo salutis, where they are replaced by strings of abstract and Latinate adjectives, permits Bush to make the interesting suggestion that Hooker's metaphoric imagination could not reach so high as glorification.) But as to Hooker's fondness for these elements, and Bush's seeing in that fond- ness an index of Hooker's concern with reaching an unlearned audience - all these traits of Hooker's texts are also traits of the plain style, which expresses the aspirations, not of an individual, but of a culture; it is, that is, a convention. The expert use of a convention need not imply more than competence. To demonstrate anything else requires a more intricately comparative argument than any Bush makes. Does Hooker, say, use meta- phors in parts of sermons not receptive to metaphor in other ministers' preaching? Do metaphors occur regularly at rhetorical climaxes? Are they disproportionately abundant or scanty in genres other than the sermon, where a more learned audience is being addressed? Investigating such

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Book Reviews 83

questions might make possible a more rigorous assessment of Hooker's literary qualities and their causes. Again, the major problem with Bush's account of Hooker as heroic fuser of the Baconian and Platonic traditions is that it does not exclude the possibility of the fusion's having come about, not through Hooker's "ample intellectual reach" (247), but through the slow and chancy formation of New England Puritanism.

Granted one tentative speculation, I can now explain my earlier sug- gestion that the shortcomings of Bush's work reflect a fundamental diffi-

culty in assessing Puritan character. Is it not striking that the recent efflo- rescence of scholarship concerned with Puritan New England has yielded so few first-rate biographies? The object of study has been the idea, the town, the institution, the text, but not the character. Why is that? A sketch of the answer might go something like this: that Puritan New England was a relatively intentional community, that is, that relatively many patterns of Puritan behavior, and above all of verbal behavior, were the result of de-

sign rather than historical accretion; that in such a community the influ- ence of genre, situation, and role on individual utterance is relatively great in comparison with that of expressive need; and that, in consequence, reading Puritan character from Puritan writing - which is, after all, pretty much all we have - is relatively difficult. If some such notion is posited, the disparity of excellence between Bush's assessment of Hooker's charac- ter and his account of Hooker's background seems explicable; the former task is as complex to execute as it is simple to formulate.

This is in no way to diminish the value of Bush's accomplishment, of course; he has clarified much, and students of Hooker and of the Puritan character are indebted to him. It is rather to suggest the sort of analysis of which Bush's work is the necessary condition.

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