Pusey is accused by Colin Matthew of abandoning the supposed more liberal and broad church vision of his early years and adopting instead ‘a strict, dogmatic, and closed view of faith and scholarship’.Footnote ¹ Matthew accuses him of leaving behind his professional, scholarly and intellectual interests and substituting a ‘dogma’ that was ‘incompatible with the liberal Anglican view of history’Footnote ² and leading Anglo-Catholicism ‘into a dead end’.Footnote ³ For Pusey, says Matthew, ‘any approach not wholly committed to doctrinal catholicity became dangerous’, and so, he spent the rest of his life ‘devoted to the construction of a vast anti-modernist edifice’,Footnote ⁴ which included, in Matthew’s view, a retreat from Protestantism since he argued, perhaps correctly, that Pusey saw Protestantism as too open to individual self-analysis and so untrustworthy. These negative views of Pusey are not universally accepted and others such as David Brown, George Westhaver, Tobias Karlowicz and myself have taken a more positive view of Pusey and his scholarship.Footnote ⁵

Matthew saw Pusey’s dogmatism as explicitFootnote ⁶ in his 1864 lectures on the biblical book of Daniel, entitled Daniel the Prophet,Footnote ⁷ where he says, Pusey specifically rejected the emerging higher criticism of the Bible in the nineteenth century expressed in contemporary works such as Essays and Reviews. Footnote ⁸ Essays and Reviews aimed for free enquiry in religious matters, including a liberal interpretation of Scripture.Footnote ⁹ Pusey described Essays and Reviews as ‘that tide of scepticism … let loose upon the young and uninstructed’.Footnote ¹⁰ For Pusey, Essays and Reviews had taken the position that ‘the old faith was no longer tenable’Footnote ¹¹ and in so doing had undermined people’s faith. Pattison, one of the authors of Essays and Reviews, pointed to ‘the growth and gradual diffusion through all religious thinking of the supremacy of reason’.Footnote ¹² Pusey rejected this thinking in his 1836 Lectures on Types and Prophecies and dismissed ‘the treatment of prophecy as a kind of evidence’ where there is a ‘superficial rationalizing character’.Footnote ¹³ Pusey in Daniel the Prophet denied the view ‘that God should reveal Himself to His creature man, in any other way than by operation of man’s natural reason’.Footnote ¹⁴ Westhaver argues that what Pusey rejected ‘is the type of thinking that combines confidence in autonomous reason with the empiricist view that knowledge is limited to the experience of the senses and reflection on it’.Footnote ¹⁵ For Pusey, this type of thinking resulted in too much emphasis on the rational and empirical where science can easily become ‘as if our faith were to depend upon our knowing the answer’Footnote ¹⁶ or where people were ‘laying down the laws upon which it beseems their Maker to act’ and that when this happens ‘they forget that He is their Maker’.Footnote ¹⁷ Pusey saw reason as much more than this and so rejected any epistemology that defines reason narrowly as scientism or mere sensual evidence. For Pusey, reason involved participation in the divine life, operating as character and perception where there are matters ‘which human reason cannot explain’.Footnote ¹⁸ This is why in the Lectures on Types and Prophecies, he is able to say that ‘our highest knowledge of God must be our indistinctest’.Footnote ¹⁹ Pusey’s epistemology presented a critique of reason that allowed for the supernatural as a way of knowing. For Pusey, Westhaver argues, ‘the study of Scripture requires not simply certain analytical tools and extensive knowledge, but a character which displays likeness with God’.Footnote ²⁰ In Westhaver’s analysis, Pusey believed ‘the Christian seeks understanding by acting on what is grasped only imperfectly and by faith, and by this response of the whole person, the eye of intellect is turned toward the divine light’Footnote ²¹ rather than mere human intellectual contemplation.

Leighton Frappell argues that Pusey’s move from liberal thinking to Anglo-Catholicism was less clear-cut and that there was continuity between the earlier and later periods.Footnote ²² Frappell noted that at the early stage of Pusey’s life, ‘his liberalism was entirely at the service of his orthodoxy’Footnote ²³ thereby suggesting that Pusey was exposed to the influence of liberal ideas but committed at the same time to orthodoxy. Frappell calls this a ‘mediating position’Footnote ²⁴ where Pusey was prepared to accept aspects of what he had seen in Germany, particularly the scholarship and piety, alongside his commitment to orthodoxy. Westhaver agrees with Frappell, arguing that the differences between Pusey’s views before and after his visits to Germany are nowhere near as great as some would argue.Footnote ²⁵ For Westhaver, there is a need to be clearer about the distinction between what Pusey saw as knowledge since religious knowledge was not merely intellectual knowledge, related to a move from liberalism to Anglo-Catholicism, but participation in the divine life.Footnote ²⁶

Pusey certainly rejected modern historical-critical thinking, especially in his lectures entitled Daniel the Prophet, although care is needed here since Pusey’s objections to historical criticism were more about epistemology than biblical theology. Pusey’s concern was to reject an over-reliance on science and empirical method and to place science in right relationship to faith, rather than to reject science per se. Nockles confirms that this was the Tractarian attitude to science and in fact the Tractarians saw scientific discovery as positive and having little or nothing to do with negative reactions to science by the Evangelicals.Footnote ²⁷ According to Nockles, ‘it was not science as such, but the new breed of “gentlemen of science” represented by the activities of the British Association, and the new and radical definition of the meaning and realm of science that they propagated, which the Tractarians repudiated’, since the British Association presented ‘claims to absolute intellectual authority, without regard to the claims of Revelation’.Footnote ²⁸ At the Church Congress in Norwich in 1865, Pusey explained the Tractarian view and delivered a paper related to Scripture and science.Footnote ²⁹ Here, Pusey argued that:

Pusey does not reject science out of hand, rather he distinguishes science from faith and notes that faith is based on the supernatural whereas science is based on the natural. Pusey did not reject human reason but made the point that human reason is not how people come to faith and know the revelation of God. While science and faith were not commensurate in Pusey’s view, each was also seen as a legitimate way of knowing. Pusey’s concern here was about epistemology, that is, with the different ways of knowing for both faith and science, not some conservative rant dismissing science and scientific method altogether. Pusey’s fear was that science, narrowly and exclusively applied, in the form of higher criticism, as he saw it expressed in Essays and Reviews, would ‘supplant historic Christianity by a new religion of science’.Footnote ³¹

Frappell’s position is that Pusey cannot be so easily classified as Protestant at one point of time and then suddenly Anglo-Catholic at another. Frappell also argues that the Oxford Movement involved not only a recovery of the catholic tradition of Anglicanism but that it was ‘also a movement of Protestant regeneration’Footnote ³² since it always stood for the all-sufficiency of Scripture but at the same time took the mediating position of acknowledging the teaching authority of the Church and renewing the connections between credal formularies and the inspired Word of God. In all this, Frappell argues that Pusey was ‘the most Protestant’ since for Pusey, it was always important ‘to prove the ancient credal foundations of the faith against scripture’.Footnote ³³ Pusey took the view that the single witness of the Apostolic and Reformed Anglican Church based its authentic expression on scriptural faith. Such a Protestant reverence for Scripture never left Pusey in his later years and so he moved from a liberal to a more conservative or perhaps more accurately, to a more cautious position, in relation to higher criticism. Frappell argues that ‘Scripture exegesis was … at the heart of Pusey’s divinity’Footnote ³⁴ over his whole scholarly career. This suggests that ‘on inspection Pusey’s “liberalism” often turns out to be a conservative tactic to spike the guns of liberal and evangelical opponents’Footnote ³⁵ since it was the balancing of a seemingly Protestant respect for Scripture with Catholic respect for tradition which involved him in a harmony of Scripture, creed and holiness of life.

Pusey’s more mediating style acknowledged that the intellect was never enough in a life of faith. This is why Frappell suggests that any liberalism on the part of Pusey was in fact a conservative tactic to establish his mediating position more firmly. What seems to be commented on less is that through the whole German period and into his later life, Pusey maintained a continuity with his commitment to the Fathers of the early Church.Footnote ³⁶ Any discontinuity in Pusey’s thinking may not be as clear cut as some might suggest.

Instead of decisively leaving his liberalism behind, Pusey actually adopted it long after his early years. Pusey’s transition from liberal Protestantism to Anglo-Catholicism seems less related to moving from a liberal position to a conservative one and more to the development of a cautious mediating style. It was the study of the Fathers that convinced Pusey of ‘catholic truth’, since for Pusey, this encompassed a reverence for Scripture free of modern dependence on reason alone. This did not mean that Pusey became uncritical but rather it meant that he embraced a wider epistemology and rejected intellectual reason alone as a source of knowledge.

Even as early as 1836, Pusey was taking this mediating position in his Lectures on Types and Prophecies of the Old Testament where he used the Scriptures, the analogical approach of the Fathers, the insights of the Romantic poets and the creative assumption of realism to argue for a rediscovery of sacramental efficacy, while at the same time taking the account of the Old Testament seriously as a type of the New Testament. Frappell picks this up as he comments that for Pusey, the incarnation was the centre of this work, ‘expressing his sense of mystery and awe at God’s condescension in a developed sacramentalism’.Footnote ³⁷ For Pusey, this seems to be re-appraisal or perhaps a development in theological understanding and epistemology rather than a clear-cut change.

Those who see Pusey only through the lens of obscurantism and conservatism will usually cite Pusey’s lectures on the Book of Daniel, entitled Daniel the Prophet, as evidence to support such a view, since it is here that Pusey distances himself from any higher criticism of the biblical text.Footnote ³⁸ Avis argues that Daniel the Prophet was a witness to ‘the betrayal of the light’. Pusey had seen as a young scholar in Germany and that the work is an ‘acceptance of a life-rejecting spirituality and theological defensiveness’.Footnote ³⁹ Forrester refers to these lectures as ‘monumentally conservative’,Footnote ⁴⁰ but for Pusey, the choice of the Book of Daniel as the subject of a biblical commentary was a test case, since the emerging higher critics saw the Book of Daniel as a vindication for their views against conservative views.Footnote ⁴¹ Pusey himself admitted this when speaking of ‘unbelieving critics’ who ‘considered their attacks upon it [The Book of Daniel] to be one of their greatest triumphs’.Footnote ⁴² Pusey, however, set out ‘to meet the pseudo-criticism on its own grounds’Footnote ⁴³ taking the words of Jesus on Daniel as recorded in the GospelsFootnote ⁴⁴ as the end of the matter. In Pusey’s view, if these words of Jesus were dismissed, then this is no true prophecy since Jesus could not have said something erroneous. Pusey believed that the modern critics had questioned the prophecies of the Book of Daniel on historical grounds but this was no argument for Pusey since the historical portions of the Book of Daniel were for him ‘no history’Footnote ⁴⁵ and ‘the Book of Daniel has nothing to do with secular history’Footnote ⁴⁶ but is rather a record of God’s supernatural events where ‘whatever details are given, the prophecies are neither chronology nor history’.Footnote ⁴⁷

Larsen tells us that Pusey in Daniel the Prophet puts the case for the date of this book as early (around the sixth century BCE). Modern scholars reject this traditional date and argue for a later date (around the second century BCE).Footnote ⁴⁸ Pusey, however, took the view that the stories in Daniel were divinely inspired prophecy and so raised the question of conflict between criticism and faith.Footnote ⁴⁹ This in itself suggests a mediating position where there is balance between scholarship and experience and the idea that for Pusey, there is a moral question about how Scripture functions in the church and the lives of people and about the relationship between the two testaments and the nature of prophecy and how that works. Pusey, as Seitz observes, is therefore concerned about the text, the church and the world,Footnote ⁵⁰ and these allow us to see his concern for the whole text of Scripture operating in the church and the world, without making any judgments about whether Pusey was right or wrong about matters of dating. Pusey had convinced the Book of Daniel was either divine or an imposture and so believed that the position adopted by the higher critics must rest on a dogmatic, reasoned denial of the possibility of predictive prophecy.Footnote ⁵¹ Seitz argues that this meant for Pusey that the ‘Christian faith, insofar as it is reliant on Scripture’s two-testament presentation, is under massive and unprecedented assault, and Pusey is standing on a fault line of enormous proportions’.Footnote ⁵² Pusey’s earlier criticism of the theology of Germany and his belief in the typological approach to the Old Testament, therefore, led him to reject the higher criticism and to affirm the Book of Daniel as a prophetic work with the traditional date, but did not lead him to reject a mediating style. Larsen says that it is not sufficient to dismiss Pusey’s Daniel the Prophet as obscurantist simply because it is conservative in its dating and instead argues that what is needed is an examination of this work, as cogent biblical analysis, and with its contents in context.Footnote ⁵³ This meant, as Seitz argues, that ‘for Pusey, the scriptures in their entirety required a consistent view of prophecy and miracle, on the one hand, and on the other, the record of the second testament was used as a guide to the proper interpretation of the first’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The wisdom of Pusey’s work relates more to the consistency of his position and the quality of his linguistic work than to his aversion to higher criticism and its overly intellectual approach. As Knetsch concludes: ‘What remains constant in Pusey’s thought is a rigid rejection of the “orthodoxism” that simplifies the Christian faith into a purely propositional form’.Footnote ⁵⁵ For Pusey, as I have argued elsewhere, it was a question of degree rather than complete rejection of liberalism and reason, and it was this preparedness to embrace a mediation between reason and a more conservative view that distinguishes him and his method and prevents a too simplistic analysis of rapid change or conversion during his early years from a liberal to a more conservative view in subsequent and later years and marks the work Daniel the Prophet as a remarkable piece of scholarship which remained current for many years.Footnote ⁵⁶ A sole reliance on the propositional nature of the intellect was never sufficient for Pusey, since mystery and the supernatural were not dependent on empirical methods, inevitably focused on physicality in relation to the sacraments, and it is here that the epistemological focus in Pusey comes to the fore.

Pusey’s mature theology was based on an epistemology emphasising biblical and patristic models of typology, as well as catholic and Anglican tradition. Pusey’s epistemological commitments also valued the mystical experience beyond scientific methodology. An examination of these epistemological commitments is an important way of reassessing Pusey as a theologian since it was here that Pusey employed creative thought in exploring ways of knowing, and it is also here that Pusey’s work has much in common with modern thinking. These epistemological commitments hold out the hope of assessing the depth of Pusey’s theological output in ways that move past the psychological caricatures of Pusey which seem to divert the study of Pusey’s work into character assessment alone.

For Pusey, George Westhaver observes, there was a vital ‘distinction between a higher kind of reason which offers an intuitive vision of spiritual and supra-sensual realities and a lower form of discursive or analytical reason’.Footnote ⁵⁷ It was this spiritual and supra-sensual higher kind of reason that underlay Pusey’s epistemological commitment to realist sacramental theology and at the same time his rejection of empiricist methodologies. Pusey, in his rejection of the higher criticism of the Bible, was rejecting the emphasis on the empirical – both evidence and method in the study of theology, but not reason per se. He was objecting to the type of epistemology that focussed on the intellect alone and so under-valued the spiritual, the supernatural and the mystical to be found in a sacramental ontology.

For Pusey, there was much more at stake than mere intellectual activity. The epistemology that he adopted in his rejection of higher criticism displayed a deep dissatisfaction with the Enlightenment appeal to reason alone, narrowly defined, and in fact what Pusey creatively demonstrated was a critique of reason which inspired a mediating position where he pointed to ‘the inadequacy of speculative reason in matters uncognizable by sense’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Speculative reason and empirical methods were not sufficient for Pusey, since, he argued, they could never understand how the Scriptures and the sacraments worked in a supernatural, mystical or spiritual way. Rather for Pusey, what was necessary was to listen ‘to the voice of nature, the revelation of God within them, and to seek as the direct result of consciousness, the truths which speculation was unable scientifically to justify’.Footnote ⁵⁹

This is why Pusey, in his Lectures on Types and Prophecies, spoke of much more than the exclusive power of speculative reason but instead of ‘awe, wonder, the absorbing sense of infinity, of purity, and of holiness’ which could ‘infuse conviction more directly than reasoning’.Footnote ⁶⁰ In was in so speaking that Pusey perceived God in the natural world by faculties other than the intellect alone. For Pusey, God could not be reduced to concepts alone and to a matter of mind alone. For Pusey, knowing God involved a ‘frame of mind’Footnote ⁶¹ that involved not only the intellect but also the will, affections, conscience and imagination. ‘This frame of mind [worked to] impress the feeling of God upon the soul more than any artificial reasoning from final causes’ such that this impression is ‘made upon us incidentally’ in the sense of ‘wondering awe’Footnote ⁶² rather than any search for evidence or strategies which ‘make conviction their professed object, and recall our minds from the contemplation of these works to reflect on their own convincingness’.Footnote ⁶³ So for Pusey:

Westhaver helpfully observes that Pusey ‘describes prophecy as appealing to “feelings” rather than “reasons”’.Footnote ⁶⁵ For Pusey, this is ‘feeling and following after the Infinite’,Footnote ⁶⁶ and in his discussion of the life of ancient Israel, he believed that this can apply to the rites and institutions as ‘feelings which were to them as sense’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Pusey had earlier confirmed the same in his Theology of Germany I where in a critique of reason and seemingly, with influence from the Romantic poets, he said: ‘the original seat of religion is in the feeling, not in the understanding’.Footnote ⁶⁸ In the material associated with Pusey’s Lectures on Types and Prophecies, entitled ‘Emblematic Language’, Pusey says: ‘And thus our very words are two-fold; they are taken from material things, have a material substance, yet act invisibly, have an immaterial meaning, as they are received by the eyes and ears but act on the soul’.Footnote ⁶⁹

For Pusey, knowledge of God was something to be found and into which to grow, through the grace of God in the Scriptures, in the tradition and in the sacraments, rather than something built on scientific evidence and intellectual activity alone. This analysis puts a new light on Pusey’s so-called conservatism and places his thought firmly within an ontological framework where there is a preparedness to mediate between intellect and experience. Pusey’s epistemology was prepared to accept that knowledge came to people through a variety of sources. This was not to deny the value of science or even higher criticism, but rather in a mediating fashion, to argue that these were not the only ways that humans come to know. For Pusey, as he points out in his Spiritual Letters and Private Prayers, the knowledge of God gained experientially through Scripture and the sacraments was just as important as any knowledge gained by the scientific endeavour, or through the senses, and there was no purpose in Pusey’s mind to deny the spiritual, supernatural and mystical and to affirm only that which could be known through empirical methods.Footnote ⁷⁰

Pusey does not abandon reason but rather seeks a critique of reason. Pusey does this in his mediating style, where he embraces the hermeneutic of Catholic truth, valuing the experience of the individual seeking God through Scripture and the sacraments. Pusey had a place for the supernatural and the mystical in coming to know God and refused to exclude these ways of knowing in the pursuit of empirical purity. In doing so, Pusey’s work and legacy are far from a dead end and in fact fertile ground as part of a chain of knowing in the continuing critique of reason in the modern world. Hence, it is right and good that we consider him in this way in this series of talks.