Edward Bouverie Pusey is best known as a leader of the Oxford Movement, famous for his recovery of patristic theology and his teaching on the sacraments. Someone studying Pusey, upon learning for the first time that he was Regius Professor of Hebrew in the University of Oxford, might understandably be surprised that his academic position was in a field apparently far removed from what he is known for, and might easily conclude that it was irrelevant to his mature interests, which lay elsewhere. Consciously or not, this seems to be the way in which much of the literature on Pusey has treated him. The four-volume Life by Pusey’s disciple Henry Parry Liddon confines its discussion of Pusey’s biblical scholarship largely to the second quarter of the first volume, and suggests by its structure a move from biblical scholarship to theological and ecclesiastical concerns.Footnote 1 Colin Matthew, meanwhile, describes Pusey as abandoning (biblical) scholarship for a kind of theological statesmanship.Footnote 2 But such assumptions, however understandable, are mistaken. As Timothy Larsen has pointed out, Pusey considered the exposition of Scripture to be of highest importance.Footnote 3 And this is not merely a matter of parallel interests: in fact, the better-known aspects of his theology are, at their roots, informed by his work and training as a biblical scholar. This does not, however, take the form of an interpretive breakthrough on some pivotal verse. Rather, at a deeper level, the questions Pusey engaged as a biblical scholar set the direction for his theological project, and shaped its development, in ways that I will examine under three headings: Pusey as a hermeneuticist, as a philologist and as a metacritic.
Pusey as Hermeneuticist
Pusey was set on a path towards biblical scholarship by Charles Lloyd, Regius Professor of Divinity from 1822, and later bishop of Oxford, who became the young Pusey’s mentor and patron.Footnote 4 It was at Lloyd’s suggestion, in 1825, that Pusey travelled to Germany to learn the latest methods in biblical criticism. Initially, spurred by correspondence with his atheistic friend Julian Hibbert, he intended to search the intellectual battlefields of German theology for apologetic resources. In Germany, however, exposure to German critical methods, and the threat he saw in them to the English Church, drove him to study the Old Testament, as the primary ground on which he believed the battle for the faith of England would be fought.Footnote 5 At the same time, he also engaged in a number of wider conversations on the history that had brought German theology to this point, leading in 1828 to the publication of his first book, An Historical Enquiry into the Probable Causes of the Rationalist Character Lately Predominant in the Theology of Germany – which is concerned (as the title suggests) with the historical phenomena leading to the emergence of rationalism in German theology.Footnote 6
The definition of rationalism, it should be said, is something of a moving target. Joshua Bennett, in a useful article, has described three phases of conversation around rationalism in nineteenth-century Britain. The first phase, beginning in the 1820s, was concerned with the authority and veracity of Scripture (especially the Old Testament). A second phase towards the middle of the century emphasized moral reason as a means of access to God. By the end of the century – as a final development – the question was raised, whether humanity, having reason, had any need for God after all.Footnote 7 Bennett notes that these phases overlap and are not discrete; but Pusey’ analysis of rationalism seems from 1828 to have stayed ahead of the mainstream conversation in England. His motives for beginning Old Testament study in the 1820s clearly reflect the concerns regarding Scripture current at that time; but already, in the Enquiry (1828), he describes rationalism as collapsing Christianity into a form of moral reason, and in 1867, he articulates the fundamental contrast between Christianity and rationalism as a choice between God and the self-deification of humanity.Footnote 8 Pusey’s own use of the term is complicated further by the fact that after 1830, its sense grows to include what the Enquiry classifies under separate headings as ‘orthodoxism’ and pietism: in his mature usage, ‘rationalism’ seems to denote any approach to theology that makes human reasoning or experience, rather than divine revelation, the ground of Christian truth.Footnote 9
Pusey’s Enquiry into German rationalism narrates its emergence from a series of flawed or misguided movements aimed at reviving German Christianity. Despite the efforts of heroes, such as Luther and Spener – or rather, out of an ill-judged enthusiasm for their teaching – there emerged first the polemical ‘orthodoxism’ (as Pusey called it) of Lutheran scholasticism, which, in turn, generated, by reaction, the narrow moralism of the pietists. These movements, by their narrowness, stifled, respectively, the life and the faith necessary to a whole and vigorous Christianity. As attacks on this weakened Christianity mounted, rationalism emerged – not as a hostile attack on Christianity, but as its last gasp; its misguided reliance on human reason a grasping at straws to prop up faith, when all other supports had rotted. As Pusey summarizes, in the introduction to his 1864 lectures on Daniel the Prophet, ‘rationalism was the product, not of the attacks on the Gospel but of its weak defenders’.Footnote 10
The Enquiry’s narrative concerned German Christianity, but Pusey’s concern in going to Germany was with the Church of England. In German orthodoxism and pietism, he saw close parallels to English high churchmanship and Evangelicalism: the English Church was ripe for the onset of rationalism. If it were to have any chance at resistance, a revitalization of Christian faith and life would be necessary. What Pusey’s narrative draws out, however, is that the interpretation of Scripture is central to this task. Orthodoxism had mutilated Scripture by dismembering it into proof-texts with which to bludgeon opponents, and pietism had in response embraced a narrow moralism wrapped in a merely performative engagement with the biblical text: rationalism’s doubts about Scripture had itself sprung from misuses of it.Footnote 11 And so, if Pusey was to find a way to restore a whole and living faith that could resist rationalism, that path lay through recovering a mode of interpreting Scripture which would nurture, rather than undermine, faith.
How to read Scripture, then, was the foundational question of Pusey’s theological project. The Enquiry expresses a somewhat sanguine view of the prospects of biblical ‘science in the service of orthodoxy’Footnote 12 in this regard – a view espoused by many of his German connections.Footnote 13 But ‘science’ did not prove a reliable vehicle for this project. By the mid-1830s, most of Pusey’s German connections had lapsed either into rationalism or orthodoxism. And already in 1829, Keble – not yet Pusey’s close friend and adviser, but a respected older acquaintance from Pusey’s time as a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford – had pointed out that the method of raising doubts about the biblical text, even for the purpose of answering them (Pusey’s defence of ‘science’ in the Enquiry), was more likely to undermine than to support faith.Footnote 14 I do not think it is accurate to say Pusey abandoned critical methods – the lectures on Daniel and his commentary on The Minor Prophets,Footnote 15 both published roughly three decades later, are evidence to the contrary – but it became clear that ‘science’ was not the answer to Pusey’s hermeneutical question. And so, it is at this point – specifically in search of a hermeneutic – that Pusey turned to the Fathers.
It is, therefore, true in a sense, as Leighton Frappell put it, that ‘Pusey repaired to the Fathers originally in search of a method’.Footnote 16 But what he found there, equally, cannot really be described as a ‘method’. Hans Boersma has described patristic exegesis as a form of theōria or contemplation;Footnote 17 Jean Leclercq, describing the same mode of interpretation among the mediaeval monastics, distinguishes it from scholastic (and, as Pusey would call them, rationalistic) modes of theology as being concerned not with speculation, but with a lived understanding of the faith in which theology is taken up within the life of prayer.Footnote 18 Scripture is thus not an inert text containing truth-objects to be retrieved through the application of a ‘method’ – scientific or otherwise – but rather a living world to be inhabited, a language to be spoken. And so, taken up within the life of prayer, this living world and language becomes the medium, not just of God’s historical revelation, but of his ongoing conversation with the Christian and the Church.
This dual function, however, entails a multiplicity of interpretations and meanings within the biblical text. In patristic and early mediaeval readings of the Old Testament, this often took the form of exegesis according to the ‘four senses of Scripture’, elucidated at length in the twentieth century by Henri de Lubac.Footnote 19 There is at least one sermon of Pusey’s which offers something quite close to this four-fold exegesis.Footnote 20 De Lubac also makes the point, however, that what is fundamental is the principle of spiritual meaning that operates in conjunction with the literal interpretation of the text.Footnote 21 This is paired with a similar interpretation of the created order as a whole – the theōria physikē – considered by modern monastic writers to be one of the most difficult aspects of their inheritance.Footnote 22 These principles were given expository treatment in Pusey’s Tract 67 on Baptism (briefly in 1835, more fully in the revision of 1839),Footnote 23 and are the subject of his 1836 ‘Lectures on Types and Prophecies of the Old Testament’.Footnote 24 Just as importantly, both the spiritual (or allegorical) interpretation of Scripture and the theōria physikē are characteristic of his sermons from the 1830s onwards, and the spiritual interpretation is particularly prominent in his sermons on the Old Testament, as well as in his commentary on The Minor Prophets. In fact, this sort of spiritual or allegorical interpretation is evident already in his earliest published sermon.Footnote 25 There are, admittedly, other potential sources within historic Anglicanism for similar modes of interpretation, and this sermon lacks the extensive patristic footnotes often found in Pusey’s later homiletics. But taken together with the in-depth exposition he gives in 1835–1836, it provides a strong suggestion that Pusey was already seriously exploring patristic exegesis no later than 1832 – immediately following his engagement with German theology and its question of how to read the biblical text.Footnote 26
Pusey as Philologist
Reading the Fathers was not new in the Church of England, but what Pusey found in them startled his contemporaries. In part, this was a matter of Pusey’s nineteenth-century context: the ascendant Evangelicalism of the age had drifted from Anglicanism’s roots in late mediaeval humanism in ways which made that heritage seem unfamiliar; while at the same time the influence of romanticism (and Evangelicalism) on Pusey’s thought gives his ideas more warmth, and more intensity, than would have been found in earlier English divines (especially those of the preceding century). But Pusey’s use of the Fathers was also startling, because he turned to them not merely for doctrine but for a hermeneutic; and because he interpreted that hermeneutic not merely as a historian, but as a philologist, which, in turn, entailed that his study in patristic exegesis was not merely an exercise in understanding the past, but was rather a stimulus towards a radical re-envisioning of the nature of meaning, communication and creation itself.Footnote 27
Pusey’s linguistic studies are a commonplace in his biographies: tutoring in Greek and Latin prior to beginning his undergraduate studies, the University’s Latin essay in 1824 and his rapid mastery of Hebrew and the cognate Semitic languages during the period of his German studies. The ease with which he corresponded in both French and German later in life is less remarked upon, but no less pertinent. The significant facility with languages implicit in these accounts, however, is often overlooked. Pusey’s linguistic ability is important to his theological development, however, not just because it aided his reading of the Fathers, but because it fostered a deep grasp of the nature and workings of language. Pusey’s philological prowess, as displayed in his mature work on Daniel, has been described by Timothy Larsen as ‘brilliant’;Footnote 28 but it is the same profound understanding of the nature of language, of the word, that Pusey brings to bear on his engagement with patristic exegesis.
Allegorical interpretation, as I have noted, at its most basic level, asserts a duality of interpretation between the literal and the spiritual sense. In the fathers (and continued in the monastic tradition up through Bernard of Clairvaux), this is applied both to Scripture and to the natural world.Footnote 29 But Pusey observes that the theōria physikē is not, in fact, a uniquely Christian spiritual practice, nor are Scripture’s own uses of it some unique form of revelation. Rather, finding deeper meanings within the physical world is simply how literature, and especially poetry, tends to function. And it is not merely the general principle of layered interpretation, but as often as not specific interpretations, that seem to be universal. ‘Thus a broken flower’, Pusey observes, ‘as designating one untimely cut off; mown corn as manhood cut down; the course of a river as cleansing …; a bubble as vanity; spring as youth, winter as old age, and the like, will be found in every language, i.e. by every nation these analogies have been perceived and held true’ – and the ‘Lectures on Types’ contain a discussion of Arabic poetry to prove the point.Footnote 30
So multiplicity of meaning, and specifically this duality of interpretation, is in fact a common function of language as such; and despite its obvious openness to variety, it, in fact, tends to show a regulated consistency (not necessarily a uniformity) in the meanings conveyed. The allegorical interpretation of Scripture, therefore, is simply an application of how language naturally functions. Its readings may be varied and indefinite, but this is where its richness lies: if we are ‘content with nothing but the mid-day sun’, Pusey maintains, we will lose ‘all sympathy for the refreshing hues of its rising and setting light, and those glimpses into a far distant land, which, indistinct though they may be, open a wide range of vision’.Footnote 31 But Pusey presses still further: it is not merely the nature of literature and language to operate, by default, with this duality of interpretation; a kind of duality is intrinsic to words themselves. A word is a physical object – an assortment of visible markings on a surface, or a complex combination of differing vibrations in air. But it is never merely a physical object, however complex; it is always more than its mere physical existence – because it carries meaning. A word is, fundamentally, an outward, material sign of an inward, immaterial sense.Footnote 32
Now, up to this point, I would stress, I have not yet been discussing theology. So far, I have simply summarized Pusey’s analysis, as a scholar and thinker immersed in language as such, of the relationship between patristic allegory and the functions and nature of language more broadly. But it is this analysis that generates and provides the foundations for his sacramental theology. A word is, as I have said, an outward, material sign of an inward, immaterial sense. But Pusey observes, commenting on the first chapter of Genesis, ‘To speak was to create, and so creation was God’s speech’.Footnote 33 Thus, the entirety of the created order, and each element within it, is an outward and visible sign of the spiritual grace of divine revelation. And ‘the Word was made flesh’ (Jn 1:14) not unnaturally, as an exception, but supernaturally, as the fullest manifestation and telos of what a word actually is.
But the revelation of God in the created order and the manifestation of God in the incarnate Word are, of course, not the same. While there is a general sacramental duality to the whole created order, there is within the creation a hierarchy of grace and of revelation, by which in varying degrees God gives himself to humanity and makes himself known. Nature and Scripture are both vehicles of divine revelation, but Scripture is more definite in what it communicates. With Scripture, as more definite means of revelation and more specific means of grace, stand the various sacraments and sacramentals of the Church; and above these, though under the incarnation itself as the pinnacle of the whole system, stand the dominical sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist as means, not merely of grace and revelation, but of union with Christ; and as vehicles of his presence.Footnote 34
This ‘sacramental vision’,Footnote 35 however, also has its bearing directly on Pusey’s view of Scripture. Pusey’s early doctrine of Scripture had reflected the mainstream view among high churchmen, that Scripture was inspired with regard to religious truth – roughly, faith, order and morals – but with some leeway on the interpretation of strictly historical matters.Footnote 36 What seems, however, to be evident in Pusey’s more developed thought is a kind of plenary verbal inspiration of Scripture, though still (in its truest meaning) for purposes of religion.Footnote 37 This stems from a theological argument on Scripture which reflects his wider ‘sacramental vision’. If the Bible is (1) the historical record of God’s saving work, but also (2) God’s means of speaking to us today, then the entirety of Scripture has, or at least is capable of, at least two levels of meaning, literal and spiritual; and one aspect, at least, of the spiritual sense, is by definition manifold, being addressed to each Christian.Footnote 38 The wide variety of interpretations fostered by allegory is fitting for a text that reveals the infinite God.Footnote 39 The fact of revelation, however, means that this multiplicity of meaning and interpretation nonetheless conveys ‘definite truth’:Footnote 40 God is infinite, but God is One; and God is fully revealed in Christ, who is the archetype and original of all other types, biblical or natural, and to whom the various spiritual meanings all ultimately point.Footnote 41 And therefore, since God’s purpose in revelation is to make himself known in Christ for the salvation of the world, the primary truth of a passage may in fact lie in its spiritual sense.Footnote 42 However, as de Lubac points out, the spiritual sense of Scripture is always in principle allegoria facti, an interpretation of things actually done, which grounds the allegory in the literal sense of the text.Footnote 43 Thus, while Pusey rejected more wooden treatments of Scripture’s supernatural qualities, he is, in his mature work, very resistant indeed to anything which might challenge the literal reading of the text.
Pusey as Metacritic
Pusey’s embrace of patristic allegory as a hermeneutic, and his specifically philological analysis of it, affected not just the content of his theology, but his mode of theological discussion as well. The Tractarian concept of ‘reserve’ involved withholding the deeper mysteries of the faith from those not morally prepared to receive them. John Boneham has pointed out that the priority the Tractarians placed on this practice meant that allegory became a means of doing theology that allowed such subjects to be discussed, but in a manner that was in a sense veiled from the casual reader.Footnote 44 And indeed, this is characteristic of Pusey’s theological writing, to the point that it is at least as important, when engaging Pusey’s theology, to read his imagery as his explicit arguments.Footnote 45
The idea behind ‘reserve’, however, is that it is ultimately a person who is reading Scripture or doing theology. And persons are not just rational intellects, but moral beings. As moral beings, they bring with them values, dispositions and habits, which, in turn, can shape their reasoning: to engage profitably in a given conversation, a person’s character must first be formed, in a manner proportional to the nature and difficulty of the subject. This is not only true of theology – it takes a measure of humility to accept, for instance, some of the stranger conclusions of twenty-first-century physics – but it is especially true of theology, which is, ultimately, concerned with the transformation of human nature and the relationship between God and humanity.
Tractarian ideas on ‘reserve’ were most fully explicated in Isaac Williams’s tracts nos. 80 and 87, dating from 1838 and 1840, which Pusey thought were the most valuable contributions to the Tracts for the Times.Footnote 46 But Pusey already makes use of similar concepts in the 1836 ‘Lectures on Types’, where he argues against the ‘evidence theology’ of William Paley that the purpose of Scripture is not to create faith by providing proofs of the supernatural, but to inform and enrich it – at least in part, precisely because questions of faith are, in large part, prior to rational inquiry.Footnote 47 In addition, with regard to allegory, he cautions against dismissing interpretations of the text which do not seem at first obvious to the modern reader. ‘Either we must see too little, or they too much; and we have taken upon ourselves to decide in our own favour’.Footnote 48 The interpretation of the biblical text, especially in conversation with patristic readings, depends a great deal on the disposition of the reader.
It is in this sense that I want to consider Pusey as a metacritic: that is, as a scholar who was not only engaged in the study of the biblical text and thereby in questions of hermeneutics and language, but who was also engaged with higher-order questions about the nature and methods of his academic discipline. This begins with the groundwork laid in the ‘Lectures on Types’, which I have just summarized. But it reaches its fruition in Pusey’s lectures on Daniel the Prophet.
Daniel, I should note, has been opposed to the Enquiry (most notably by Colin Matthew) as evidence of a reversal in Pusey’s thinking, at some point in between the two.Footnote 49 This is inaccurate: Daniel’s introduction, as noted above, restates the Enquiry’s argument; and in fact Daniel, which marshals the full force of Pusey’s critical abilities in defence of the traditional date of the biblical book, is (together with Pusey’s commentary on The Minor Prophets, published in the same decade) precisely the kind of ‘science in the service of orthodoxy’ countenanced in the Enquiry. This is not to say Pusey’s views did not change over the thirty-six years between the two, but the shift is not, as Matthew argues, a rejection of the supposed liberal academicism of his youth for a later traditionalism. It is, rather, a moderation of his youthful optimism about the prospects of biblical ‘science’, precisely with regard to this question about the reader. ‘I have conscientiously read every thing which has been written against the book of Daniel,’ Pusey states (boldly, but plausibly), ‘and have met every argument in those writings’. This he does with a degree of critical rigour admired by Pusey’s successor as Professor of Hebrew Samuel Driver as ‘very learned and thorough’.Footnote 50 But, Pusey continues, ‘my own conviction is, that the point really at issue remains, when they are answered’.Footnote 51 Ultimately, if the argument is (as it was in Pusey’s day) whether or not Daniel is an instance of miraculous prediction, the decisive question is whether or not the reader believes in miraculous prediction – and this is not a question of scholarly argumentation, but of pre-existing dispositions and intellectual commitments, outside the critical process. Thus, in addition to its direct arguments on the dating of the biblical text, Daniel also contains (or, more accurately, constitutes) a second-order argument on the nature of biblical criticism. In the end, critical methods are not an objective means to the truth of the biblical text: they are a tool in the hands of the critic, and their use will reflect the critic’s wider values and ‘prejudices’ (Pusey’s word, in the passage just cited), including faith or scepticism.
Interpreting the biblical text, then, is not primarily the result of a method, but the work of a reader. And a Christian reading of the text is a matter of the reader having been formed by and in the Christian tradition in a way that produces readings that cohere with the communal understanding of that tradition – that is, with catholic consent. To some extent, this conclusion simply states that the Bible is a text, and as such, interpreting it is a humanistic, rather than a scientific, process. But with regard to the question of how Pusey’s biblical scholarship informed his theology, it should be noted that this emphasis on the role of the reader points directly to matters of Christian formation and sanctification.
The previous two sections aimed to show how two aspects of Pusey’s biblical scholarship – as hermeneuticist and as philologist – formed, more or less directly, prominent characteristics of his theology. That would be difficult here, because the pursuit of holiness is so integral to Christian practice: Pusey is known to have been earnest about religion from an early age, and this tendency in his personality was only reinforced by the deepening of his sacramental theology in the 1830s. Three things, however, can be noted. First is the degree to which Pusey’s centring of the reader in the interpretation of Scripture similarly reinforces and intertwines with his existing concern to promote Christian holiness. Second, since Christian holiness is, in Pusey’s theology, the fruit of the Christian’s union with Christ in baptism, the emphasis on the reader’s own formation in the Christian tradition is not merely humanistic, but suggests, theologically, that Christian biblical interpretation is the mind of Christ in the Christian (indeed, in the whole body of the Church) seeking the revelation of Christ in the text.Footnote 52 And finally, the three main aspects of his spirituality – compunction for sin, the practice of charity and longing for GodFootnote 53 – suggest a hermeneutic which laments our blindness in interpreting the biblical text, learns to recognize Christ wherever he may be found, and approaches Scripture seeking Christ.Footnote 54 This is, it should be noted, a hermeneutic very near to patristic allegory; and insofar as placing reliance on self over trust in God is a moral, rather than a methodological error, it also provides Pusey’s answer to rationalism.
The study of Pusey’s work is a small field; but of what has been written very little of it has come seriously to grips with what actually defined him as a scholar, and what was among his foremost concerns throughout his career – namely, his work to interpret the Bible for Christians of his day.Footnote 55 Nonetheless, those areas of his theology for which he is better known are, in fact, deeply rooted in his scholarly engagement with Scripture. Questions about hermeneutics drove his turn to the Fathers, and his philological reflections on what he found there laid the foundations of his sacramental theology. Even his well-known concern for the spiritual life, though it cannot be grounded solely in his biblical scholarship, cannot be disentangled from his awareness of the limitations of methodology in interpreting Scripture, and the resulting need to form Christian readers who would read well. Without Pusey’s biblical scholarship, he would never have formed the theological perspective that he did: a deeper appreciation of Pusey as a biblical scholar is therefore essential, not only to a well-rounded understanding of him as a scholar and thinker, but also to our comprehension of his theology.
