God's Order and Natural Law

The Works of the Laudian Divines

Iain M. MacKenzie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351748186
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This title was first published in 2002. This book fills an important gap in the theological interpretation of the Laudian divines. Iain MacKenzie presents the theology of the Anglican theologians of the early 17th century, exploring the concept of order first in God but then in creation in its relation to the Creator, and then examining the working out of this concept based in theology in civil and ecclesiastical structures and practice. Mapping the Laudian divines' perceptions of how order primarily and necessarily resides in God existing as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, this book sets out the essential and necessarily practical application of theology as seen by 17th century theologians, and traces the legacy which they have left. This theological, as opposed to a merely historical or literary, study of this important period for the development of society, will be of particular value to theologians, historians and those concerned with the intellectual history of the 17th century.

Chapter 1
The Concept of Order Generally Accepted

The concept of the order of creation and that order which God is in Himself eternally, and the relation between them, was by no means confined to the awareness and works of the theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The whole appreciation of order coloured the thoughts and expectations of Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline society as a whole.

The subtleties of speaking about that order which God is eternally in Himself, as Father and Son, bound with the bond of eternal love, the Holy Spirit, may have been in their more sublime form restricted to theological works and sermons. Nevertheless, the idea of God as a God of order, and the contingent order of the universe, nature, society and individual identity, vocation and estate, subsequent on God’s creative and sustaining activity, was commonplace. It formed attitudes to every aspect of human thought, endeavour and activity.

E.M.W. Tillyard, writing from the literary standpoint, in his The Elizabethan World Picture,¹ emphasizes in his analysis of the works of men of letters of the period, how much of their outlook rested on this idea of order. It is both explicit and implicit in their writings – and the implicitness shows how much it was taken for granted as an accepted fact in that period. (Tillyard uses the term ‘Elizabethan’ to cover also the Henrican, Jacobean and Caroline times: ‘anything between the ages of Henry VIII and Charles I akin to the main trends of Elizabethan thought’.²) He points out that the pictures of civil war and disorder in the Histories of Shakespeare had no meaning apart from a background of order by which to judge them. When he looked into that background, he found that:

it applied to Shakespeare’s Histories no more than to the rest of Shakespeare or indeed than to Elizabethan literature generally. I also found that the order I am describing was much more than political order, or, if political, was always a part of a larger cosmic order…. Now this idea of cosmic order was one of the genuine ruling ideas of the age, and perhaps the most characteristic.³

‘To look on this age as mainly secular is wrong’,⁴ says Tillyard and criticizes those historians and literary critics who overlook the fact that theological belief was such an automatic and accepted part of life then. He chides them for ignoring that ‘Queen Elizabeth translated Boethius, that Raleigh was a theologian as well as a discoverer, and that sermons were as much a part of the ordinary Elizabethan’s life as bear-baiting’.⁵ The concept of order was not only a basic assumption behind literature – it was commonplace in the general attitudes of the educated populace. If there were no popular awareness of the concept of order, most of the drama of the day would have been totally meaningless to its audience.

As it is, so much of the drama surrounding the question of order takes over theological language and imagery to make its point. The theological language of order and its attendant symbolism is constantly employed by dramatists. It is resorted to particularly in looking at the body politic macroscopically in its relation to the body of the whole fabric of the universe with its interacting elements and spheres, or microscopically in its relation to the human body with its constituent and coherently working members. This employment in the business of the dramatist is without elaboration or explanation, thereby letting us assume that there was a general theological understanding of such devices in the minds of the general populace, which could be taken for granted by those whose business was to attract appreciative audiences.

Without this assumption there could not have been any comprehension on the part of an audience. A few examples may be noted: Ulysses’s speech on ‘degree’ (which equals ‘order’) in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (‘Take but degree away, untune that string, / And hark, what discord follows’) or Menenius Agrippa’s ‘Fable of the Belly’ in Coriolanus (‘There was a time when all the body’s members / Rebell’d against the belly’) or Canterbury’s words in Henry V (‘Therefore doth Heaven divide / The state of man in divers functions / Setting endeavour in continual motion; / To which is fixed as an aim or butt / Obedience; / For so worked the honey bees;’).

This same notion of order is found in many works from different fields. It is the common factor which binds all disciplines of that age. It is as well to remember that many figures, pre-eminent in fields other than theology – Elyot, Tallis, Lawes, Harvey, Raleigh, Francis Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Clarendon, and King James VI and I himself, for example – were held in high regard for their theological erudition, as well as for their other pursuits and skills. The names outstanding in astronomy, mathematics, music, law, medicine, architecture, and all the other disciplines, cloaked the same persons as also appreciators of theology.

Tillyard cites by way of example of this, Raleigh’s History of the World:

For that infinite wisdom of God, which hath distinguished his angels by degrees, which hath given greater or less light and beauty to heavenly bodies, which hath made differences between beasts and birds, created the eagle and the fly, the cedar and the shrub, and among the stones given the fairest tincture to the ruby and the quickest light to the diamond, hath also ordained kings, dukes or leaders of the people, magistrates, judges, and other degrees among men.⁶

Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, in the field of medicine, may be instanced here as well:

Because the glory of one state depends upon the ruin of another, there is a revolution and vicissitude of their greatness, and must obey the swing of that wheel, not by intelligences that is, the supposed souls of planets which were regarded as their motive force] but by the hand of God, whereby all estates arise to their zenith and vertical parts according to their predestined periods. For the lives, not only of men, but of commonwealths, and of the whole world, run not upon a helix that still enlargeth, but on a circle, where, according to the meridian, they decline on obscurity, and fall under the horizon again.⁷

Tillyard again remarks on an exposition of order which is close to that found in Shakespeare’s works, though earlier. This is by Elyot, Ambassador to Charles V, concerning the office of magistrate and the exercise of judicial authority. In the first chapter of the Governor, prime place is given to the notion of order contingent upon God. The prominence accorded to order here is because all that follows is conditional on it – Tillyard asking ‘for of what use to educate the magistrate without the assurance of a coherent universe in which he can do his proper work?’⁸

Elyot looks at order in this way:

Take away order from all things, what should then remain? Certes nothing finally, except some man would imagine eftsoons chaos. Also where there is any lack of order needs must be perpetual conflict. And in things subject to nature nothing of himself only may be nourished; but, when he hath destroyed that wherewith he doth participate by the order of his creation, he himself of necessity must then perish; whereof ensueth universal dissolution.

Hath not God set degrees and estates in all his glorious works? First in his heavenly ministers, whom he hath constituted in divers degrees called hierarchies. Behold the four elements, whereof the body of man is compact, how they be set in their places called spheres, higher or lower according to the sovereignty of their natures. Behold also the order that God hath put generally in all his creatures, beginning at the most inferior or base and ascending upward. He made not only herbs to garnish the earth but also trees of a more eminent stature than herbs. Semblably in birds beasts and fishes some be good for the sustenance of man, some bear things profitable to sundry uses, other be apt to occupation and labour. Every kind of trees herbs birds beasts and fishes have a peculiar disposition appropered unto them by God their creator; so that in everything is order, and without order may be nothing stable or permanent. And it may not be called order except it do contain in it degrees, high and base, according to the merit or estimation of the thing that is ordered.⁹

Tillyard writes that: ‘The conception of order described above (he also notes Spencer’s Hymn of Love as a poetic description of creation, emphasizing as it does the relations within creation and the relation of all to God) must have been common to all Elizabethans of even modest intelligence.¹⁰ He also claims that Hooker’s work ‘assures us that he speaks for the educated nucleus that dictated the current beliefs of the Elizabethan Age’. Hooker, it may be said, is insistent on the concept of order, seen in terms of categories of Law – Law which is divine, cosmic, earthly and domestic.

Tillyard reminds us that the men of that age were merely repeating in their respective disciplines what the theologians had long stated. When Shakespeare places man ‘in the traditional cosmic setting between the angels and the beasts’, this was ‘what the theologians had been saying for centuries’. He then quotes:

Nemesius, a Syrian Bishop of the fourth century… ‘No eloquence may worthily publish forth the manifold pre-eminences and advantages which are bestowed on this creature. He passeth over the vast seas; he rangeth about the wide heavens by his contemplation and conceives the motions and magnitudes of the stars… He is learned in every science and skilful in artificial workings… He talketh with angels yea with God Himself. He hath all the creatures within his dominion.’¹¹

The concept of order pervaded, captivated and moved the minds of the age. And this was a general phenomenon throughout all fields of learning, which worked its way down to the awareness of the populace at large. ‘Order’ was indeed one of the genuine ruling ideas of the age, and perhaps the most characteristic. It was the harmony of the interaction of the minds of men of the period employed in many disciplines in the whole orchestration of knowledge. A unitary way of thinking, whereby the relation of all created things to each other, and the relation of the whole to the Creator, is the hallmark of the way of thinking in that period.

There is no area of human vocation and activity which is not scrutinized from the vantage point of this concept of order by the divines of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Explicit or implicit, order is the standard by which all things are judged. It is the cantus firmus which dictates the shape and harmony of every line of theological thought concerning every aspect of existence and circumstance. Because of this, the two great broad themes of the order which God is eternally in Himself and which He has revealed in the incarnation, and the resultant idea of order applied to created existence which is practically expressed in the tenets of Common or Natural Law, echo throughout every area of theological concern.

It is necessary to realize that in this the unitary way of thinking, creation and Creator, time and eternity, are profoundly bracketed together in an unconfused but inseparable relation. This means, first, that all created rationalities are contingent to and from God. That is to say, they depend totally upon God for their beginning, their sustenance and their fulfilment, yet, in this dependence they have their identity as things of a dimension qualitively different from God. They cannot be understood apart from a consideration of this relation. It means, secondly, that any study of the order of that created dimension will take into consideration that relationship to God’s eternal Order and the fact that in the light of that relationship, Natural or Common Law is seen to be expressed in a broad sweep covering all aspects of human activity and endeavour and created entities. The two interrelated themes of the Order which God eternally is in Himself, and the Order of created realities which, contingent on the Divine Order, is expressed in Common or Natural Law, cannot be considered narrowly, as if they existed in neat compartments in the mentality of the age. Their proper significance can only be understood when it is realized how all-pervading these concepts were. It is therefore necessary to look at the way in which that menta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Concept of Order Generally Accepted
• Chapter 2 Order and Theological Method
• Chapter 3 Order, Creator and Creation
• Chapter 4 Order, Knowledge and the Rationality of Man
• Chapter 5 Order, Monarchy and the One Body Politic
• Chapter 6 Order, the Rule and Law of Man and the Rule and Law of God
• Chapter 7 Order, Monarchy, Parliament and Church
• Chapter 8 Order, Uniformity, Preaching and Sacraments
• Chapter 9 Order, Natural Calamities and Evil
• Chapter 10 Order and the Nature of Political Unrest
• Chapter 11 Order: The Knowledge and Being of God and Humanity
• Chapter 12 Order: The Holy Spirit and the Centre of Human Existence
• Chapter 13 Order: The Spirit’s Gifts and the Relation of Existences
• Epilogue
• Appendix A Principal Seventeenth-century Authors Quoted
• Appendix B Note on John Swan
• Bibliography
• Index