Although the term ‘Puseyite’ was being applied to followers of the Tractarians by the late 1830s, Pusey has not attracted much scholarly attention. Liddon’s massive four-volume biography published between 1893 and 1897 had surely said it all. Moreover while significant amounts of primary material exist at Pusey House, their sheer amount, coupled with the wide range of Pusey’s ecclesiastical activities, has made studying him a daunting prospect. Added to this, of course, was the widespread perception of Pusey as theologically narrow, little more than an obscurantist biblical and patristic fundamentalist and to boot a cruel husband and father. Attempts to challenge these preconceptions have proceeded in fits and starts, so this workmanlike study examining Pusey’s eucharistic theology is welcome.

In 1983 I edited a collection of essays Pusey Rediscovered, originally planned by the then Principal of Pusey House for the centenary of his death in 1882, but published the following year commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Oxford Movement. While these touched on several neglected or poorly understood areas of Pusey’s life and thought, it did not include a discussion of his sacramental theology. This was partly remedied in a further volume of essays edited by Rowan Strong and Carol Engelhardt Herringer published in 2013 but the contribution on the Eucharist was slight and somewhat speculative.

Douglas’s purpose is an ambitious one, hence the ‘Beyond’ in the title. He aims both to survey Pusey’s understanding of the Eucharist, but also to give a reassessment of his stature as a theologian and present his personality in a more nuanced and sympathetic light. Douglas believes Pusey’s Eucharistic theology has contemporary significance for Anglicans today since it anticipates in many ways much modern catholic and ecumenical sacramental theology. How far this will convince is probably an open question but his case for a less negative view of Pusey’s contribution as a theologian is well made.

The study begins with a helpful concise intellectual biography of Pusey followed by a short survey of Anglican eucharistic thought. The two central chapters take Pusey’s crucial 1843 sermon The Holy Eucharist: A Comfort to the Penitent, for which he was condemned by the university, as a pivot for analysing his thinking up to 1843 and onwards. The fifth chapter is an essay in reassessment which rebuts in some detail the negative view of Pusey found in the literature of the last forty years. In it Douglas argues that Pusey’s theological contribution is both ‘consistent and wise’, in a phrase borrowed from Professor David Brown’s little known but important revisionist article in Anglican and Episcopal History 2002, and deserves greater appreciation.

Douglas writes primarily as a historical theologian. He has written a detailed two-volume study of Anglican eucharistic thought since the Reformation in which he developed a grid to position Anglican theologians with regard to the Eucharistic presence as either ‘realists’ or ‘nominalists’; making a further distinction within those categories between ‘moderate’ and ‘immoderate’. Using this template he locates Pusey as a ‘moderate realist’. Not everyone has found this schema helpful or convincing. For example, I would see different understandings of Christology as significantly shaping a theologian’s eucharistic doctrine. Nonetheless Douglas is right to flag up the importance of epistemology. By setting Pusey’s epistemology firmly within the framework of the imaginative revolt against Enlightenment rationalism and empiricism he opens up an area that would repay further study. This way of thinking appears early in Pusey’s career in his unpublished Lectures on Types and Prophecies of the Old Testament (1836) and Douglas also recognizes both the continuing influence of German theologians and the influence of the Romantics and especially Coleridge in shaping Pusey’s approach.

Although Pusey appears in Alf Hardelin’s seminal study The Tractarian Understanding of the Eucharist (1965), Douglas has utilized a far greater range of primary material, drawing on Pusey’s subsequent eucharistic sermons, his open Letters, especially the neglected Letter to the Bishop of London (1851), the Eirenicon, letters to Newman on transubstantiation, material from his Spiritual Letters and on the book of prayers which was posthumously published in 1883. For the historian of Victorian religion, however, more attention to the wider eucharistic controversy in which Pusey played a significant part would have been helpful. His theology was honed within such events as: the Denison case, the stir surrounding Keble’s tract On Eucharistical Adoration, the travails of his disciple Alexander Forbes, Bishop of Brechin in the Scottish Episcopal Church and the Bennett Judgement. As the de-facto leader of the Anglo-Catholic party until his death people looked to him for guidance and he was generous in giving it. His response to the ‘popularizing’ of his theology among the ritualist wing might also have been an area to discover. There remains more to learn here, for the result of this controversy was a profound and lasting re-orientation in the Anglican understanding of the Eucharist which, with subsequent liturgical change, altered the face of the Church of England and with it the Anglican Communion. Whereas before most Anglicans would have been familiar with the teaching that those who received the consecrated elements with faith received Christ’s Body and Blood, most believed, in Hooker’s well-known words: ‘what the elements are in themselves, it skilleth not’. The successful revival of the patristic teaching that after consecration Christ was indeed present, not carnally but spiritually, in the sacrament before reception and, being present, was rightly to be adored gave Anglican eucharistic life more prominence and a greater objectivity and supernatural quality.

Douglas’s volume is the first in a new series Anglican and Episcopal Theology and History published by Brill with Professor Paul Avis as Editor-in-Chief backed by a distinguished international editorial board. Another volume by Jeremy Morris has since been published and more are in preparation. Alas, although in paperback the cost of these volumes will significantly affect their availability.