Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Priest & Teacher of the Faith
September 17 · d. 1882
also known as E.B. Pusey, Edward Pusey
Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford for fifty-four years and the leader who held the Oxford Movement together after Newman left it for Rome. Pusey gave his name to a whole party of the church, the "Puseyites," by insisting that baptism and the Eucharist were not bare signs but true channels of grace. Silenced for two years for preaching it, bereaved in his own house, he stayed an Anglican to the end, and the Anglo-Catholic revival was built on his refusal to leave.
Edward Bouverie Pusey was born in 1800 at Pusey in Berkshire, the family seat that gave him his name. He went up to Christ Church, Oxford, took a brilliant degree, and then did something unusual for an English clergyman of his day: he went to Germany to study Hebrew and the new biblical criticism at its source. He came home a master of the field, and in 1828, not yet thirty, he was made Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, a chair he would hold for fifty-four years. The German learning that might have unmoored his faith instead armed him to defend it.
In 1833 a handful of Oxford men, alarmed at a church they thought drifting into mere respectability, launched what became the Oxford Movement. John Keble and John Henry Newman led it; Pusey, the grave young professor with the great reputation, gave it weight. When he put his initials to a long tract on Holy Baptism, the movement gained both a heavyweight and a nickname, for its enemies took to calling its followers Puseyites. He argued, against the spirit of the age, that the sacraments were not empty symbols but means of grace, that baptism truly made a Christian and the Eucharist truly fed one.
It cost him. In 1843 he preached a university sermon, The Holy Eucharist a Comfort to the Penitent, and the Oxford authorities, scenting Rome, suspended him from preaching for two years without even letting him answer the charge. Two years after that, the blow he most dreaded fell: Newman, his closest ally, left the Church of England for Rome, and many expected the whole movement to collapse behind him.
Pusey did not follow. He stayed, and by staying he became the rock the Anglo-Catholic revival was built on. For nearly forty more years he labored, defending the faith in print, hearing the confessions of the troubled, encouraging the first Anglican sisterhoods since the Reformation, and carrying a private grief few saw, for he had buried his wife and a beloved daughter and disciplined himself with a penitent's severity. He died in 1882, and his friends raised at Oxford a house of study, Pusey House, to keep his books and his cause alive.
Pusey is one of the most fully documented churchmen of the Victorian age. His own output was enormous: the Tracts for the Times he contributed to, his Doctrine of the Real Presence (1855), his Eirenicon (1865) pleading for reunion with Rome, and a vast correspondence. After his death his disciple Henry Parry Liddon compiled a four-volume Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey (1893 to 1897), one of the great Victorian biographies, drawing on the papers Pusey left behind.
Pusey House at Oxford preserves his library. Modern historians of the Oxford Movement, who have no shortage of sources, debate his theology and his austere temperament freely, but no one disputes the central facts: the chair he held, the tract he signed, the sermon that silenced him, and the decision to remain that made him the leader of a church party for the rest of his life.
Pusey is commemorated on September 17; he died on September 16, 1882. He is honored as the steadfast leader of the Oxford Movement after Newman's departure, the man who showed that a Catholic understanding of the sacraments and the priesthood could live and grow inside the Church of England rather than only in Rome.
The Anglo-Catholic parishes with their vested altars and sung eucharists, the revived religious orders, and the recovery of private confession in Anglican churches all trace part of their lineage to him. Pusey House remains a center of Anglo-Catholic scholarship and worship at Oxford, and his name still marks the tradition he refused to abandon.
The Doctrine of the Real Presence(English, 1855)
Pusey's patristic defense of eucharistic realism, the heart of his sacramental teaching.
An Eirenicon(English, 1865)
His extended plea for reunion with Rome, answered by Newman.
Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey (4 vols.)(English, 1893-1897)
The monumental authorized life, by Pusey's closest disciple.
Pusey Rediscovered(English, 1983)
A modern collection reassessing Pusey's theology and influence.
Further reading. Pusey's own The Doctrine of the Real Presence (1855) and An Eirenicon (1865) show his mind at full stretch. The indispensable life is Henry Parry Liddon's monumental Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey, four volumes (1893 to 1897). For a modern reassessment, see Perry Butler, ed., Pusey Rediscovered (SPCK, 1983).
Online resources. Liddon's Life of Pusey and several of Pusey's own works are scanned at the Internet Archive.
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52
Almighty God, you gave your servant Edward Bouverie Pusey special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Eirenicon /aɪˈrɛnɪkɒn/