Jewel (following Vermigli and Augustine) a‘visible word’(verbum visibile), the
public sermon, as the primary instrument of religious persuasion, comes to be
regarded as an‘audible sacrament’(sacramentum audibile).^77
For Hooker, the semiotic demarcation between the inner, private realm of
individual conscience and the outer, public demands of institutional order
calls forth an arena ofpersuasio—a‘forum’of trial by argument, discussion,
and interpretation—as the necessary means of mediation between the osten-
sibly incommensurable demands of these two realms of existence and religious
identity. In an invocation of the nascent public sphere in the Preface to the
Lawes, Hooker states that his purpose in composing the treatise is to address
the consciences of those disgruntled with the Elizabethan Settlement and who
seek‘further reformation’:‘my whole endeavour is to resolve the conscience,
and to shewe as neere as I can what in this controversie the hart is to thinke, if it
follow the light of sound and sincere judgement, without clowd of prejudice, or
mist of passionate affection’.^78 As an apologist of the 1559 Settlement, Hooker,
like Jewel, is intent on defending a complex system of visible ecclesiastical
signs which referred to an invisible mystical order of heavenly gifts and
promises. The moral–ontological endeavour of this apology, again like Jewel’s,
was to maintain a distinction between signs and things signified, while at the
same time affirming the dynamic possibility of their conjunction through an
appeal to the conscience. To this end Hooker employs all of the persuasive
devices of his apologetic as instruments to bridge the gap of disenchantment
opened up by the apocalyptic narrative, which placed great emphasis on the
gap between the sign and the thing signified, and he asserts the continued
possibility of mediation so‘that posteritie may knowe wee haue not loosely
through silence permitted thinges to passe away as in a dreame’.^79 Apoca-
lyptic narrative is characterized by vigorous affirmationofanunremitting
struggle between potent opposites—between Christ and Anti-Christ, Jerusalem
and Babylon, God and Satan, and ecclesiastically between the true church,
as an invisible community of the godly, and the false church, for Foxe an
oppressive institutional hierarchy emanating from the papacy at Rome,
portrayed by him as the historical embodiment of the Anti-Christ.^80 For
(^77) Jewel,Apologie(1564), sig. Cviiv. See also Peter Martyr Vermigli,The Oxford Treatise and
Disputation255. Augustine,On Christian Teaching31. J. C. McLelland,The Visible Words of God:
An Exposition of the Sacramental Theology of Peter Martyr Vermigli(Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd,
1957). Carter Lindberg,The European Reformations(Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 179.
(^78) Lawes, Pref.7.1; 1:34.20–3.
(^79) Lawes, Pref.1.1. On the tension between apocalyptic and apologetic narratives, see Richard
Helgerson,Forms of Nationhood, 249–94.
(^80) See Andrew Escobedo,Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee,
Spenser, Milton(Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell University Press, 2004), esp. ch. 3 and Katharine
R. Firth,The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530– 1645 (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1979). See also Richard Bauckham,Tudor Apocalypse: Sixteenth
116 Torrance Kirby