Regius Professor of Hebrew and Canon of Christ Church, Oxen

School of Theology, September 18, 1996

I. We give thanks today for Edward Bouverie Pusey, Regius Professor, etc., and the real intellectual leader of the Oxford Movement and the Catholic renewal in the mid nineteenth century Church of England. In many ways Pusey is typical of the leaders of the Oxford Movement. Scholar, Don. preacher. But he had his own unique vision, and in the end it was the power and dedication of his mind which saved the Movement from total collapse. In addition, like no one since John Wesley about a century earlier, he understood how a new appeal to both the evangelical and catholic roots of the church and its faith could, in a new context, bring about something both faithful to the old, and new.

II. Whatever strife and difficulties may have ensued, there were enduring contributions as well dangers in the two great nineteenth century renewal movements for which we continue to give thanks. It may surprise you that I choose this occasion to give thanks for the gifts from both great revivals, but the truth is, it is impossible to imagine the Catholic without the Evangelical preceding it. In any case, Pusey himself embodies both, declaring his fellowship with evangelicals for their love of Jesus and the scriptures.

A. Evangelical

1. A renewed emphasis on scripture and a resulting renewed biblical scholarship — danger — biblicism. Pusey Regius Professor of Hebrew, the only real semitic scholar in the England of his day, and, what may surprise many, something of a defender of the German critical methods then coming into vogue, though he took a more moderate than radical view, and ultimately took a much more reactionary view in the light of increasing German radicalism. We may also note that Pusey was originally somewhat on the sidelines of the Oxford movement, left there for having chastised Newman for being too hard on the evangelicals, whom he preferred to conciliate.

2. A renewed sense of world mission. Danger –religious colonialism.

3. A deep renewal of personal conviction and moral earnestness, which could produce real social reform from the ending of slavery to the first child labor and factory acts– or neglect that in favor of a shallow public moralism covering over a sink of corruption.

4. A strong doctrine of the Atonement, which could degenerate into a nasty legalism and a vicious doctrine of God.

B. Catholic

1. A renewed patristic scholarship lay at the root. It produced original language editions and volumes of translations. It helped deliver scripture from the prison of post-reformation culture. The danger, of core, was antiquarianism disguised as orthodoxy.

2. As a result of #1, a new “Incarnational theology” which has become the hallmark of later Anglicanism. At its best it produces a deep appreciation for God at work in this world. At its worst preciousness and a sentimental triumphalism and false optimism. A strong corollary, of course, is a renewed doctrine of the Church which, at its best is the strongest immediate counter to individualistic pietism, but at its worst is a deadly institutional triumphalism.

3. A renewal of sacramental theology and liturgy. Pusey played no small part here, with his great tracts and sermons on Baptismal Regeneration and the Real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. At its best it has given us a deep and healthy liturgical piety and renewal. At its worst it degenerates into the false medievalism of Strawberry Hill Gothic (named for the pretentious home built by Prime Minister Horace Walpole) and empty and fussy ritualism.

All these gifts, from both renewals, show both the grace and the danger in bringing forth things both old and new from the Church’s treasure. At best it means recovering a usable past which allows us to do something new and creative. At worst it becomes a dogmatic antiquarianism which opposes all real growth.

III. Many of the solid gains might have been lost but for Pusey’s level-headedness, particularly the fact that he stayed the course when Newman “jumped ship” and became, to everyones surprise, including his own, the great liberal of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Pusey held his course, salvaging much of value which might have been discredited and lost in reaction to Newman’s defection. So much did he become the leader of the embattled movement after 1841 that its doctrines came to be called Puseyism, or even “Puseista” by Pius IX. In the end something new was formed, a truly catholic side to Anglicanism which has endured, and earned for Pusey the image of a wise scholar who brings forth from his storehouse treasures both old and new.

But there is one contribution which is really uniquely his — the re-establishment of the formal religious life, the monastic tradition, in reformed Anglicanism,

He had a deep and lasting love for Maria Catherine Barker, with who he enjoyed a wonderful and fruitful marriage. Following her death after eleven years of marriage, Pusey became a virtual social recluse, while remaining a public figure. Increasingly this seclusion took on the rhythms of the classical anchorite life. This tragedy gave impetus for an idea that had been percolating in him and Newman for some time, the re-establishment of sisterhoods in the Anglo-Catholic Church, as he called the English church in an 1839 letter to Keble making the suggestion. On Trinity Sunday, June 5, 1841 he received the vows of Miss Marian Hughes at St. Mary’s, Oxford, the first human being to take a lasting monastic profession in the Church of England since Elizabeth I had suppressed the foundations of Mary’s reign. Miss Hughes began the formal religious life after some years of study in France and the death of her father. She lived as Mother Superior of the Convent of the Holy Trinity at Oxford until May, 1912.

IV. It is hard to imagine the Anglican communion or the Episcopal Church without our religious, even though many of our members are unaware of their existence. But what would Oxford, and now the American Cambridge be without Cowley, or the Caribbean without Bishop Gore’s Community of the resurrection, from which Father Peter Allen comes to visit us in Holy Week, let alone what would South Africa be without that order and its great living saint, Bishop Trevor Huddleston. What would Sewanee be without St. Mary’s, or the earlier presence of the order of the Holy Cross?

Let’s dispose of a couple of things. (1) In Anglicanism there is no cult of virginity, no spiritual superiority of celibacy, but vocational issue. (2) Monastic spirituality not imposed as normative on the laity, nor on the clergy, beyond the overall Benedictine shape of the BCP. As John Tauler pointed out long before the Reformation, it is a dreadful mistake to try to turn a home into a convent. Though we have purely contemplative orders, most have a serious mission in the world — St. Mary’s in the highlands of the Philippines and Tennessee, and the streets first of Memphis and now of Los Angeles. Many of the early sisters of the Oxford foundations accompanied Florence Nightingale to the Crimea. Pusey himself always spoke of the restored sisterhoods, and he hoped eventually brotherhoods, as having the purpose of making the gospel real and visible in new places and new ways to all ground up by or lost in sin.

But it is the regular disciplined common life of prayer and intercession which holds up these societies to the rest of us as the sacrament of lives devoted wholly to God and the inbreaking of God’s reign. George Connor story.

In the end, I don’t know why the religious life is so important even to those of us leading a secular life, just as I really don’t know why prayer works. I know only that both are vital to the Christian life as I understand it and both have been grace to me.

These words of Pusey from an address to a retreat of the Companions of the Love of Jesus, dedicated to Mother Marian Hughes, Foundress of that devotional society as well as the Society of the Holy Trinity, give as fine an Anglican view of this essential mystery as I know, however Victorian and genderized we now find the prose:

What have we to do with estimating the value of our prayers? As if we could keep a debtor and creditor account with God, and, if we thought our prayer earnest, then God was bound to do something in return for it; if otherwise, then little or nothing! O that weary endless round of self! shall we never be free from that sickening contemplation of self? Prayer is especially the province of faith. From first to last, it is inscrutable. It is part of that wondrous harmony whereby he has bound up our freewill with his own omnipotence. It is part of that love, whereby he would bind in one the work of the creature with his own omnipotence! Men stumble at prayer, because they sever what God has united, the will of God was the God-enabled will of man. What were the will of the highest seraph, that he should change the mind of the author of all? But does the fire burn less mightily, because God has assigned it the fuel which it should convert into itself? Does the river sweep to the ocean less strongly because God has appointed the channel for its tide? We are the fuel; the fire is the love of God: we are the channel; the tide is his perpetual flow of grace. Only let us be persuaded that it is God’s voice in us. Only remember we, that our dear Lord has pledged his own almighty word, “Ask, and ye shall receive!” We spoil and defeat our prayers by thinking of ourselves. Apart from the waste of time, in which unknown graces might be won, we are forgetting the All-prevailing Intercession of Christ at God’s right hand, the intercession of God the Holy Ghost in us, in the thought of our miserable selves. God’s command is Pray! This is ours: the rest is his. . . .

When God puts it into our hearts to pray, he is admitting us into the near relationship of friends to Him. He might have contrived other ways, but they did not satisfy his love. Nothing would satisfy him, who “arranges the services of angels and men in a wonderful order,” but to employ his creatures, as far as they could be employed, and associate them with himself. Think we then nothing of ourselves. If we could feel but as that organ which peals forth the praises of God, yet yields no note, but as it is attuned and as those notes of joy are elicited from it, then we should indeed pray as God wills, then God would thank us, that we had done what he longed for us to do, and had been the last link in the salvation of the soul which he longed to save.