LENT · 29 MARCH & TRINITY · 16 SEPTEMBER Priests & Confessors · Fathers of the Oxford Movement
John Keble & Edward Bouverie Pusey
Priests & Confessors · Fathers of the Oxford Movement · d. 1866 & 1882
Keble — KEE-bul · Pusey — PYOO-zee · Tractarian — trak-TAIR-ee-an · Hursley — HERZ-lee · The Christian Year — 1827 · Tracts for the Times — 1833–1841 · Newman — NYOO-man · Assize — ah-SIZE
O God, who by thy servants John and Edward didst recall thy Church in England to the fullness of its Catholic inheritance and teach it that apostolic faith and evangelical fervour are not enemies but partners; Grant that we, who worship thee in the tradition their labours recovered, may hold that tradition with the same tenacity and offer it with the same love; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
The Anglican tradition this archive serves — Anglo-Catholic, committed to the 1928 BCP and the People’s Anglican Missal, ordered by the liturgical calendar with its colour and its season — is the tradition of the Oxford Movement, and the Oxford Movement begins on 14 July 1833 when John Keble (KEE-bul) preached the Assize (ah-SIZE) Sermon at the University Church in Oxford. John Henry Newman (NYOO-man) called it the start of the movement; Keble himself would have resisted the description. He was the least self-promoting of men, a country priest who had refused every preferment offered to him, including the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford which he held for ten years and which he used not as a platform but as a responsibility. He had already published The Christian Year in 1827 — a collection of devotional poems for every Sunday and holy day of the church year, based on the BCP collects and epistles and gospels, which went through a hundred and ten editions in his lifetime and became the devotional companion of the Victorian Anglican world. The Oxford Movement was, at its heart, an attempt to recover for the Church of England what Keble had already demonstrated in verse: that the Catholic tradition — the sacraments, the apostolic succession, the Fathers, the liturgical year, the interior life — was not a Roman importation but the authentic inheritance of the Church of England, embedded in its prayer book and its history.
Edward Bouverie Pusey (PYOO-zee) was the Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, a man of prodigious learning in the Patristic and biblical tradition, who joined the Tractarian (trak-TAIR-ee-an) movement in 1835 and became after Newman’s departure to Rome in 1845 its dominant figure — so much so that opponents of the movement took to calling it Puseyism. He held the movement together through fifty years of controversy, prosecution, and defection, never wavering, never departing, never losing his conviction that the Church of England was a branch of the one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church and that its Catholic inheritance could and must be recovered without recourse to Rome. His sermons, his biblical commentaries, his translations in the Library of the Fathers (which put the Patristic writings into English for the first time), his sponsorship of the first Anglican sisterhoods, his long pastoral correspondence with those in spiritual difficulty — all of it undertaken while under constant attack from both liberal Protestants who thought him a crypto-Papist and Roman Catholics who thought him merely confused — constitute one of the most sustained acts of theological fidelity in the history of the English Church. He died in 1882, ninety-one years old, having never left Oxford, and his library of thirty thousand books went to Keble College, founded in Keble’s memory in 1870.
The relationship between Keble and Pusey was one of the great spiritual friendships of the nineteenth century: Keble the poet-priest of Hursley (HERZ-lee), Pusey the scholar-professor of Oxford, complementing each other precisely as Donne and Herbert had complemented each other two centuries earlier — one working in the beauty of language, the other in the rigour of learning, both in the service of the same tradition. Keble’s Christian Year gave the movement its devotional form — the liturgical year as the framework of the Christian life, the collects as seeds of meditation, the seasons as the rhythm of the soul’s journey — and this archive is in direct line of descent from it. The meditations in this series follow the same principle: the feast day as the occasion, the season as the colour, the collect as the key, the saint as the teacher. Keble invented this form for Anglican devotional writing, and we are working in it still. Pusey gave the movement its theological nerve — the insistence that the Catholic tradition is not optional but essential, that the Fathers are not museum pieces but living voices, that the sacramental life is not a Roman peculiarity but the inheritance of the Church of England. The archive’s Patristic series — Ignatius to John of Damascus — is itself a Puseyite project: the recovery of the Fathers as living conversation partners for the Anglican Church.
Keble’s feast falls on 29 March in Lent — the season of recovery and return, precisely right for the man whose whole vocation was the recovery of what had been lost. Pusey’s feast falls on 16 September in Trinity, in the long season of faithful daily labour, precisely right for the man who spent fifty years holding a movement together by sheer scholarly tenacity and prayerful persistence. Between them they frame the whole of the tradition this archive serves: Keble providing its devotional imagination and its liturgical form, Pusey providing its theological backbone and its Patristic depth. The 1928 BCP which this archive uses was itself a fruit of the Catholic revival they championed; the People’s Anglican Missal which stands beside it is a direct expression of the Anglo-Catholic tradition they made possible. Every meditation in this archive, every prayer in the Lauds service, every note of the liturgical year’s colour and season, is in their debt. They are the last pair in the series, and in one sense the closest to home.
O Almighty God, who by thy servants John and Edward didst recover for thy Church in England the fullness of its Catholic inheritance and show that the tradition of the Fathers is the living possession of every generation that will receive it; Grant that we, who stand in the tradition they defended at such cost, may hold it humbly and offer it generously, knowing that what they gave us was not their own but thine; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.