by Edward Short
Doubtless because he was notoriously partial to confession, as well as the titular head of the Tractarians, Pusey bore much of the brunt when the storm broke over Wiseman’s re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy. As Liddon observes, “His letters at this time are full of expressions which show how thankful he would have been … had it pleased God, to be allowed to lie down and die.”17 Nonetheless, when studying with Maltby at Buckden, Pusey had not yet acquired his later High Church views and agreed with much of his tutor’s Whiggery, favoring, for example, both the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts and Catholic Emancipation, though his view of Roman Catholicism was comically patronizing.
The Roman Catholics, though they have … adulterated the Faith, have yet retained the foundations. I do not mean to deny the practical idolatry into which they have fallen, or that the good works of self-emaciation, hairshirts, flagellations, &c., have not had a merit ascribed to them which interfered with the merits of Christ: yet still, whatever they may have added, they did hold that acceptance was through Christ; and as to the mediation of the saints, it was, in theory, only the same as one asking a good man to pray for us … Yet … there have been hundreds of thousands of sincere men among the Roman Catholics … and … there are many at whose feet it would be happiness to think that we might sit in the kingdom of heaven. There may be much love where there is little knowledge …18
Another important development occurred before Pusey entered Oxford: he fell in love. Maria Barker was a 17-year-old redhead whose uninhibited forthrightness appealed to Pusey’s shy diffidence. Something of her personality can be gleaned from her letters. In one, after being scolded for mocking her mother’s friends, she writes: “Not being … at all solicitous for the favourable opinion of persons I never care to see again, I can always talk nonsense to anyone, and moreover can lead people to talk of that most interesting person themselves.”19 How she was initially attracted to Pusey is a puzzle; when they first met, she was enamored of such heroic figures as Edward the Confessor, Joan of Arc, Robert Bruce, and George Washington—not the sort of people who would remind one of the small, sedentary, burrowing Pusey. She was also infatuated with everything related to the Royal Navy, which prompted her would-be suitor to exclaim, perhaps not altogether truthfully, that one of his favorite biographies was Southey’s Life of Nelson. One reason why Maria and Newman got along so well was that Newman shared her fondness for the exploits of soldiers and sailors.20 Despite the fact that she found Pusey “gloomy,” “grave,” and “stuffy,” Maria recognized something special about the brooding young man who lavished so much welcome attention on her: “You were the first person I ever knew,” she told him, “to whom I fancied myself not incomprehensible.”21
That Oxford did not know quite what to make of Maria is evident from Liddon’s ambivalent description of her. “Besides the attraction of her good looks, Maria was undoubtedly accomplished; while her character although as yet unformed, combined with elements of impulsiveness and self-will, qualities of rare beauty; which Pusey believed himself to have discerned from the first and instinctively.”22 Besides this, Liddon said conspicuously little about the woman who meant so much to Pusey, perhaps because he regarded her eccentricities as unbecoming to his subject’s dignity. In 1883, Newman responded to Liddon’s queries by recalling, “She was a tall, handsome person. Before her marriage she had no interest in religion, but she must always have had qualities of goodness … which only required to be drawn out by Grace. She was however at first, after their marriage, very odd, and I did not like to go to the house. Her oddities were the talk of Oxford: Whately, who was a rough, noisy talker, was open mouthed about it.”23 When Pusey’s father got wind of his son’s attachment to the unsuitable Miss Barker, he flatly forbade him to see her. It was only after an agonizing courtship of nine years—in which Pusey took to identifying himself with Byron—that he finally managed to secure his father’s consent to the marriage. Afterwards, Pusey shared with his wife his prenuptial ordeal. “I scarce ventured to form a hope, believing myself to be to you an entire stranger … Every word, silence, look, action was then of too anxious importance ever to be forgotten. I suppose never was mind so tortured to discover a meaning in what perhaps had none, or heart so racked till the first dawn of real hope beamed upon me …”24 To beguile this long period of lovesick suspense, Pusey began throwing himself into work with morbid abandon. If Byron sought to alleviate his troubles by bedding Italian countesses, Pusey sought to alleviate his by losing himself in relentless reading. “I have lived so retired,” he later wrote to his wife, “that of me is known less than the little which it (the world) ordinarily knows of any one; it has only known that I have been at times intensely employed: it has given me the credit for being so always, and not knowing any of the mixed motives, anything of the distress of mind, which this study was partly intended to cure or at least stupefy …”25 A habit formed in maudlin youth became, with time, unbreakable, and for the rest of his life Pusey would read on average 16 hours a day.
At Oxford, Pusey entered the Christ Church that had been remade by Dean Cyril Jackson, who may have retired in 1809 but whose reforms were still having an impact in the 1820s. Colin Matthew points out that Jackson “made Christ Church an eighteenth-century forerunner of the French écoles: a college intimately linked with politics and administration, with the explicit purpose of creating a government elite of the highest quality. Liverpool, Canning, Peel and Gladstone were the greatest products of the Jacksonian tradition: but with them flowed a constant stream of civil and colonial servants, M.P.’s, lords lieutenant and viceroys. This then was the atmosphere in which the young Pusey found himself: Hanoverian, scholarly but worldly, politically moderately conservative, but flexible: above all, practical.” If Pusey made himself an unobtrusive member of this finishing school for proconsuls—Matthew notes that “he was not known as an unusual undergraduate”—he was far too impractical to follow its prescriptions.26 He renounced the pro-consular path for the more rarefied preoccupations of scholarship. Later, after sitting and winning a fellowship to Oriel, he immured himself in his studies and bid the pro-consular world pass.
Once at Oxford, Pusey came under the influence of Charles Lloyd, Regius Professor of Divinity, a short, rotund, prematurely bald, perspicacious man, whose lectures and articles influenced not only Pusey but Newman, the convert Francis Oakeley and other Tractarians.27 (Frank Newman once remarked, apropos his brother and Lloyd: “I always thought it his calamity, that by the premature death of Lloyd … my brother gained so very immature an influence in Oxford.”28 ) At Oriel Lloyd lectured a handpicked number of fellows in his library, where, instead of standing behind a lectern, he strode back and forth peppering his auditors with questions, at the same time that he helped himself to liberal pinches of snuff. Despite his unusual methods, Lloyd had a serious object: he meant to encourage his fledgling parsons to trace their Anglicanism beyond Henry VIII and the Act of Supremacy to the Roman missals and the Breviary.29 This solicitude for the professional knowledge of his charges led Lloyd to push for the establishment of theological colleges like those that would be set up at Durham University in 1832 and at Oxford later in the century. As Lloyd’s biographer remarks: “Whereas a young barrister-to-be went to the Inns of Court and medical students trained in hospitals, there was no provision for divinity students to study theological, liturgical and pastoral matters in any strictly professional and technical way.”30 His concern for the professional standards of Anglican clergy led Lloyd to take an interest in the critical methods that were being pioneered by German theologians. That he had failed to master the language himself only made his interest greater. Nor was he discouraged by the neglect of German at Oxford, where the language was considered intellectually suspect. As one contemporary recalled, “knowledge of German subjected a divine to the same suspicion of heterodoxy which we know was attached some centuries back to the knowledge of Greek.”31 In the spring of 1825, Lloyd told Pusey, “I wish you would learn
something about those German critics.”32 Pusey obliged by visiting the country not once but twice, learning the language, and writing An Historical Enquiry into the Probable Cause of the Rationalist Character lately predominant in the Theology of Germany (1828–1830), in which he charted the evolution of German rationalism. In an extraordinarily capable performance for so young a scholar, Pusey characterized Spener’s Pietism as a reaction against the “dead orthodoxism” of Lutheranism, which emerged from the Reformation, and likened it to Schleiermacher’s emphasis on intuition and feeling (Anschauung und Gefϋhl), which was a reaction against the rationalism of Kant and Fichte. By “orthodoxism,” Pusey meant “a stiff and false orthodoxy … an orthodoxy that clung to the mere letter of a certain sum of credenda without, or with very little reference to anything further.”33 In the lecture-rooms of Germany, Pusey was witnessing religious disputes that were not dissimilar from those that would soon embroil Oxford. He did not draw explicit parallels because, as Liddon explained, “It seemed to him that it would be immodest in a young man of twenty-eight, not yet in Holy Orders, to say in so many words that the attitude of the English High and dry Churchmen towards spiritual religion, and the attitude of English Evangelicals towards theological knowledge, were not without peril to the faith; and that the experience of Protestant Germany, in circumstances different yet analogous, might not be repeated at home.”34
Pusey was not sanguine about the book’s reception: “I do not expect very merciful handling … . The sentiments scattered up and down will fare still worse than the style; and I expect to be thought one-third mystic, one-third sceptic, and one-third (which will be thought the worst imputation of all) Methodist, though I am none of the three.”35 After the book’s release, the High Churchman Hugh James Rose accused Pusey of succumbing to the very rationalism that Lloyd had sent him to Germany to reconnoiter by omitting to recognize that it was the unepiscopal, undogmatical character of German religion that made it vulnerable to rationalism. Pusey eventually took Rose’s point, destroyed all the copies of his treatise that he could lay hands on and left instructions in his will that the book never be reprinted. He clearly saw, once he had fully digested what he had imbibed of the new skeptical criticism, that something of its muddled diffidence had undermined his own settled convictions. What he wrote to Maria, for example, on his return, flatly contradicted those convictions: “I cannot think that while our Saviour was upon earth, it could have been by any believed that He was ‘God manifest in the Flesh;’ it seems to me too tremendous to have been known, nor then useful: all the passages which bear upon this point, while He was upon earth, I consider as nothing more than the germ of the truth, not the truth itself, as preparation for the discovery, not the discovery.”36 Had this been the case, the Incarnation would have been an unaccountable failure. In 1862, Pusey looked back on the controversy with Rose with candid clear-sightedness. He admitted, apropos his treatise, that “I very likely expressed myself badly or vaguely” but reaffirmed that the only object he had in writing the book was to help Germany “throw off the slough of that stiff Lutheranism and contracted Pietism by a fresher, more living faith, the faith of the Creeds.” He also admitted that he resented having rationalists claim that he was himself a rationalist. “I have seen it stated by Rationalizers that I was then rationalizing. The Cambridge Rationalist party took up my book against Rose. I may … have expressed myself vaguely, inaccurately. But, in God’s mercy, none of the unbelief which I studied ever affected me as to any one article of faith. I was ordained soon after the publication of my first book, believing all which I had been taught—the Catholic faith.”37
Apropos Pusey’s repudiation of his treatise, Matthew was rueful: “Pusey stood … in about 1830, as a potentially powerful influence in the understanding in Britain of modern German scholarship, theology, and methodology: had he maintained his views and activities in these fields, it is not altogether fanciful to think that he could have developed into one of the seminal intellects of Victorian Britain.”38 The notion that Pusey failed to become one of the great Victorians because he did not enmesh himself sufficiently in German biblical criticism is risible. Pusey may not have been the most introspective of men but he recognized that in the case of Germany and its religious difficulties, his first impression had been the right one: “I can remember the room in Göttingen in which I was sitting when the real condition of religious thought in Germany flashed upon me. ‘This will all come upon us in England; and how utterly unprepared for it we are!’”39 Germany offered a warning, not a model.
In 1826, on his second trip to Germany, which Pusey made at Lloyd’s urging, he undertook the study of the Hebrew cognates, Arabic, Syriac, and Chaldee. “I purpose,” he wrote, “using … all the aids which I can find for the better understanding of the Old Testament, and contributing what I can myself from my knowledge of Eastern language allied to Hebrew.”40 For two years, he studied Arabic under Georg Freytag, the premier Arabist in Europe. In 1828, in recognition of Pusey’s prodigious learning, the Duke of Wellington appointed him Regius Professor of Hebrew. Pusey’s scholarly undertakings were far-ranging. He purchased important Hebrew manuscripts for the Bodleian, including the Oppenheimer collection, the greatest of the Hebrew collections in the library; together with his older brother Philip, he founded scholarships for the study of Hebrew; he founded a Theological Society for young fellows and supported other theological colleges, most munificently Salisbury Theological Study, to which he gave £2,500; and, for nearly six years, he worked to complete the catalogue of oriental manuscripts in the Bodleian Library begun by his predecessor. “The Catalogue,” Freytag wrote Pusey, “will be an irrefragable proof for those who come after us, both of your talents and of your rare industry.”41
Pusey also completed the monumental Lectures on Daniel the Prophet, which, despite its unfashionable conservatism, commanded widespread respect. As the Evangelical historian Timothy Larsen observes, “Daniel the Prophet was so formidable that, in Britain at least, it was unanswerable.”42 Most reviews of the book in British religious journals were laudatory. Prof. Larsen quotes the Old Testament scholar Rev. J. J. Stewart Perowne, who praised Pusey in the Contemporary Review for bringing to bear on his subject “a perfect encyclopedia of learning … He has cast into his volume the labour of a lifetime. It is by far the most complete work which has yet appeared, no Continental writer having handled the subject with anything like the same fullness or breadth of treatment. In England we need scarcely say it is unrivalled. Few men amongst us could have produced such a book.”43 Since the Hebrew chair included the canonry of Christ Church, Pusey had to be ordained to the priesthood, and so nine days after his appointment, on Sunday 23 November 1828, at All Saints, Cuddesdon, Bishop Lloyd ordained him priest. It should be remembered, however, that, unlike Newman and Keble, Pusey never had the practical responsibility of caring for a parish, which had important implications for his understanding of the via media. It also deepened his constitutional vagueness, which was the aspect of the man that John Ruskin, who entered Christ Church in 1837, found most striking. In his autobiography, Praeterita, Ruskin recalled Pusey as “not in the least a picturesque or tremendous figure, but only a sickly and rather ill put together English clerical gentleman, who never looked one in the face, or appeared aware of the state of the weather.”44
Shortly before and after his ordination, Pusey suffered terrible personal losses, which exacerbated his accustomed melancholy. In April 1828 his father died, and in May of the following year, Charles Lloyd went, after catching cold at an anniversary dinner of the Royal Academy in Somerset House. And then, as though to prove that sorrows come not single spies but in battalions, Pusey’s infant daughter Katherine died. Newman had performed the child’s baptism—“the only service which we dare perform with a rejoicing conscience and a secure mind”—and when he learned of the loss he sent Pusey a letter of condolence that his friend always prized. “Of course only parents can tell the sorrow of the loss of a child,” N
ewman admitted, “but all persons can see the comfort contained in it—to know you have given eternal life and happiness to an immortal spirit … You have done for her what you could—you have dedicated her to God, and He has taken the offering.”45 As the lives of the two men unfolded, the experience of loss would become a shared sorrow, though Newman never regarded his losses with Pusey’s luxuriant self-reproach. “The impression has come gradually upon me,” Pusey wrote to his wife on the third anniversary of his daughter’s death, “that the loss of our dear Katherine was not merely a trial of my cheerful surrender of her … but a chastisement of me.”46 Whether this was humility or persecution mania, Pusey rarely differentiated suffering from retribution.