Chapter Six. Rhetoric and apologetics

Abstract

As the A Christian Letter remarks, Richard Hooker was merely one of those ?Poetts, Philosophers, Rhetoricians, Phisitians, Schoolemen, and whatsoever? who depended on his own wit rather than on the grace of God to discover and share the truth. As those early protestant readers saw Hooker?s work as rhetorically grounded, so too should a focus on rhetoric help the contemporary reader enter into the world and the self Hooker constructs in his apology for the Elizabethan established church. There are many ways Richard Hooker would have understood the task of rhetoric as he determined how to proceed with the project which became the Lawes . This chapter focuses on three fundamental aspects of rhetoric. Hooker?s rhetorical training would have encouraged him to think deliberately about the form or disposition of the material in his analysis of the presbyterian alternative to the established church in England. Keywords: A Christian Letter ; apologetics; Lawes ; rhetoric; Richard Hooker