the sinner always approaches redemption but, like the book itself, never arrives.
Figure 4. A visual overview of the genealogy of Thomas Hooker’s print sermons on the stages of redemption, culminating in the posthumous publication of The Application of Redemption in 1656 and 1657.
By the same token, the grandiose incompleteness of Hooker’s sermon cycle instructs us that neither is the print version so static as we might imagine nor is the author so much in control. The 1656 articulation merely records one version of an ongoing and communal dialogue about the nature and likelihood of that elusive conclusion, redemption. In his attempts to bring bibliographic certainty to Hooker’s complicated publication history, Herget offers in the same exemplary volume (Writings in England and Holland) parallel passages from the earlier English preaching on redemption (printed from auditor notes) and the later print version of The Application (presumably prepared by Hooker himself). Where the earlier version asks, for example:
Men and Brethren, what shall we doe to be saved? as if they had said, The truth is wee have heard of the fearefull condition of such as have killed the Lord Jesus, and we confesse whatsoever you have said, he was persecuted by us, and blasphemed by us, we are they that cryed, Crucifie him, crucifie him; we would have eaten his flesh, and made dice of his bones; we plotted his death and glorified in it; these are our sins, and haply a thousand more that they revealed[,]
the later version declares:
Men and brethren you have discovered many sins and the dreadful condition of the sinners who are guilty thereof, loe we are the men, thus and thus we have done. By us the Lord was opposed and persued, by us he was derided, rayled upon and blasphemed, by us it was he was murthered, and we are they that have embrewed our hands in his most precious blood: we are they that cryed and desired it, Crucified him, away with him, not him, but Barabbas. Nay they roundly, readily told al[.]28
Herget offers many such parallel passages, characterizing Hooker’s own elaborated rendition as “not necessarily more readable.” While stopping short of expressing a preference for the earlier English preaching, he suggests: “With the greater attention it pays to logic and exactness, with its self-conscious effort to have a more balanced syntax and a greater copiousness of words, [The Application of Redemption] seems more labored where the earlier version is more direct and livelier, more ‘oral.’”29 Although Herget does not elaborate, the characterizations he uses for this judgment conform largely to classical (even contemporaneous) rhetorical criteria; qualities of syntactical balance and copia are those that Hooker—with his Cambridge-educated plain prose style—would have cultivated. In Herget’s estimation, these very qualities impede what we might call the “oral readability” (an oxymoron?) of the print sermon.
Even without a background in seventeenth-century prose preferences, a modern-day reader might concur with what difference Herget finds in these two sermonic explorations between “logic and exactness” and a style that is “more direct and livelier.” Whereas the earlier version based on auditor notes begins the passage literally giving voice to anxiety (“Men and Brethren, what shall we doe to be saved?”) and then elaborating in paraphrase (“wee have heard of the fearefull condition. … we confesse whatsoever you have said”), the latter version offers the precision of simple declarative statements (“Men and brethren you have discovered many sins and the dreadful condition of the sinners who are guilty thereof”), substituting the auditor’s imagined confession with “thus and thus we have done.” The repeated imperative of “Crucifie, Crucifie” is likewise converted into statements of narrative precision, that “we are they that have embrewed our hands in his most precious blood: we are they that cryed and desired it, Crucified him, away with him, not him, but Barabbas.” Most strikingly, though, Hooker’s latter version shows preference for a series of simple but powerful verbs (“opposed,” “persued,” “derided,” “rayled upon,” “blasphemed,” “murthered”) where the earlier (presumed) auditor version mentions only “persecuted” and “blasphemed,” apparently preferring the lurid imagery of Passion (“we would have eaten his flesh, and made dice of his bones; we plotted his death and glorified in it”). Where the latter version summarily refers to the fuller revelation of sins against Christ that the Passion implies (“Nay they roundly, readily told al”), the earlier version seems bursting to reveal the ever propagating list of offenses (“these are our sins, and haply a thousand more that they revealed”). Because the 1656 version is presumed to be the work of Hooker’s own pen, it is taken necessarily to be the more accurate, authentic text. Ironically, that authenticity comes at the cost of traces of the powerful orality for which Hooker (a preacher who, proverbially, could “put a king in his pocket”)30 is best known.
All the essays and scrupulously edited “Documents” in Writings in England and Holland exhibit a similar preoccupation with establishing the authoritative (and authorial) Hooker. Following earlier work on Hooker’s English sermon The Danger of Desertion, for example, George Williams creates a definitive, “composite” text based on two different print versions (one published under a different title) with the aid of a lengthy explanatory introduction, copious notes on variant readings and other textual matters, and parallel passages when the two sources are most divergent.31 Williams proves through topical references that the sermon must have been preached by Hooker in April 1631 and argues convincingly that two different sets of auditor notes, both taken at the same delivery, serve as the sources for the two competing print versions. Hooker’s sermon of April 1631, Williams elaborates, “was transcribed and printed twice, Version T and Version F. We shall refer to the imprint of 1641 as the Traditional version (T). There is some evidence that T, transcribed by a somewhat less attentive listener, was a woman. … At least references to wives, women, and children come out more amply in T than in F. The other version of the sermon is entitled ‘The Signes of God’s Forsaking a People.’ It was printed in London as nineteenth among twenty-nine sermons of William Fenner and expressly ascribed to him by the editor, London, 1657. We shall refer to this as version F.”32 For Williams, concerned primarily with establishing an authoritative text of Hooker’s sermon, neither the subjective conjecture regarding the gender of auditor T nor the blatant piracy associated with edition F seems to raise questions about the fundamental nature of the bibliographic endeavor. For our purposes, the “special circumstance” of this bibliographic problem provides a rare opportunity to consider not the competing accuracy of auditor versus minister but the competing experience of auditor versus auditor. Williams cites “lapses in the auditor’s original notation,” the “conscious decision of the auditor or transcriber or printer to let go or summarize,” “divergent deciphering by the printer of manuscript problems,” and “stylistic preferences of the original notator or transcribers” as possible reasons for discrepancies in the record of what two auditors heard at Hooker’s delivery of the sermon in April 1631.33
These explanations open up a series of provocative questions, the possible answers to which only seem to pose further occasion for contemplation. We may ask, for example, why one version tends toward summary while the other tends toward elaboration, but first we must consider whether the difference reflects the attention span of the two different auditors or simply the preference of the printer or transcriber. If we think that differences of detail and emphasis are attributable to the individual auditor, how far are we willing to conjecture as to the subject position of those auditors and the presumed inclination to amplify Hooker’s “references to wives, women, and children”? If one version uses the term “beloved” while the other prefers “brethren,”34 should we assume that one or both auditors mishear? Might we instead read in the divergent transcriptions the likelihood that variant readings reflect the aural experience more accurately than they aid in the determination of definitive, authoritative texts? T says, “Though my meat seem sour, yet my mind is the will of God”; but F says, “Though my meat seem bitter, yet it is
