Edward Bouverie Pusey and the Oxford Movement ed. by Rowan Strong and Carol Engelhardt Herringer (review)

In 1865, three of the leaders of the Oxford Movement met for the first time in over twenty years. Among them was Edward Bouverie Pusey, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford University, canon of Christ Church Cathedral, and the embodiment of Anglo-Catholicism as then practiced within the Church of England. Along with him on that nostalgic afternoon were John Keble—just a year prior to his death—and John Henry Newman, by then England’s most (in)famous Roman Catholic convert who would later be elevated to Rome’s College of Cardinals. The atmosphere of the meeting, which took place in Keble’s parsonage at Hursley in Hampshire, was both somewhat tense and necessarily elegiac. Victorian custom demanded that even highly intimate friends—such as the Tractarian triumvirate had been in the 1830s when the Movement was at its height—must separate socially in the starkest of ways if no longer in theological or religious harmony. Famously, at Newman’s semi-monastic retreat of Littlemore near Oxford, such a separation or estrangement had taken place in 1843: the “parting of friends,” as it came to be called. Such was the power of Victorian religious convention that twenty-two years would elapse before the Oxford band of brothers would meet again, if only briefly, in (strained) fraternal comity.

At this meeting, and in the years both before and after it, Pusey is understood to have been a dour and severe churchman. Humorless and eccentric, Pusey was a patrician killjoy, the epitome of the Tractarians’ doctrine of reserve in all things—including his social and family life. Yet, if his life is probed even a little, it becomes clear that he lived as full and complicated an existence as any of his contemporaries. We ultramoderns do him a disservice if we remain trapped in the prevailing view of Pusey’s supposedly hermetic life at Christ Church.

To that end, Rowan Strong and Carol Engelhardt Herringer’s Edward Bouverie Pusey and the Oxford Movement does much to dispel some of the fustiness that has long clung to Pusey’s reputation for well over a century since his death in 1882. In some ways—and certainly for today’s readership—Pusey’s arcane medieval practices of personal discipline and rarified holiness come across as wholly strange. What can one say in the twenty-first century, for example, about self-flagellation in the service of religious faith? But the eight contributors to this volume manage to humanize Pusey, reviving him as a figure of considerable power and insight into the Church of England and wider Victorian society during one of the most robust and controversial periods in the Church’s history.

Certainly, Pusey’s reputation suffered an almost debilitating blow at the hands of Colin Matthew in “Edward Bouverie Pusey: From Scholar to Tractarian” (1981), which appeared in The Journal of Theological Studies. Matthew argues that Pusey’s foray into German theology in the 1820s during an extended sojourn to the European continent had set him against emergent rationalist currents in the field and pushed him to become an establishment reactionary. The result for Pusey, Matthew contends, was a retreat: both in location, to the reassuring precincts of Oxford and Christ Church, and in doctrine, to the ranks of the nascent Tractarians and their unrelenting campaign to revive the traditionally catholic heritage of the Church of England. Ian McCormack’s essay, in particular, takes exception to what he justifiably sees as Matthew’s monochromatic interpretation of Pusey, which relies substantially on the “partial and one-sided” account of his life offered by David A. R. Forrester in his doctoral thesis, which was published later as Young Doctor Pusey (1989) (17). McCormack succeeds at countering many of the caricatures of Pusey—especially his relationship with his wife and children—that have developed over the years. Along...