'Angelic Intercourse: Richard Hooker’s Account of Prayer' Torrance Kirby, Professor of Ecclesiastical History, McGill University, Montreal

8 pm, Tuesday, 3 March
Pusey House, St Giles

Professor Kirby will speak about Richard Hooker’s description of prayer in Book V of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Policy, and the way in which it is shaped by the tradition of Christian Platonism.  He will consider how the ‘dialectic’ of instruction and praise in Hooker’s account of Common Prayer is also an account of the mediation of the True and the Good, the relationship of God to humanity.  For Hooker, the ‘sensible excellencie’ of orderly worship mediates this relation with respect to the Beautiful. In this way, Hooker stands in the tradition which describes the ultimate end of prayer as union with God and the  enjoyment of God in a complete knowledge by means of a perfect love: “then are we happie therefore when fully we enjoy God, as an object wherein the powers of our soules are satisfied even with everlasting delight: so that although we be men, yet by being unto God united we live as it were the life of God.” (Lawes I.11.2)