A sermon preached for the125th anniversary of the foundation of the Pusey House
31 October 2009
The sinews of Behemoth’s testicles are tightly constricted (Job 40.17)
When this House was founded the impatient, clever, zealous set of young clergymen who had a hand in all those Fresh Expressions of second generation Tractarianism - Keble College, St Stephen’s House, the Community of the Resurrection – sat down for what might now be called a bit of blue-sky thinking. What was the work to be? There was evidently some concern that the project would be just a mausoleum of Dr Pusey’s mindset, consecrated to dusting the books of his library, an impression which that guardian of the sacred flame Dr Liddon did little to dispel. The Times felt it necessary to admonish those responsible for the foundation: "Minds made to suck the marrows out of libraries have a propensity for converting the nutriment to unexpected uses." And of course we now know that the nourishment which their generation drew from that distant, dreamy and defunct Idealism of Green and Bradley brought about the first great bifurcation in the Catholic Revival: the crisis over Lux Mundi. This has an enduring consequence in our own day in the contrived attempt to install that adamantine figure of doctrinal and moral rectitude our first Principal Charles Gore as the patron and inspiration of contemporary liberal Catholicism. But in 1884 this still lay in the future.
As so often in these enterprises it was Henry Scott Holland whose incisive practical reason cleared the ground to articulate a convincing mission for Pusey House, one which was enough to enthuse Gore and extract him from the earnest complexities of his work at Cuddesdon with Dr Furse. Some of the plotting was as amusing as it was fanciful – the scheme for Gore and Edward King to take over the University Church on Sunday evenings, a plot which Holland told them to keep utterly dark, remained in just the obscurity with which it began. But Holland’s instinct for the key themes of the work was utterly sound: there was to be a Church, which would through the work of the Principal "bring Grace near to Men … exhibit to them the fullness of worship; and to offer them the power of the sacraments." There was to be the work of Christian apologetics indeed, but the interior life of the House was to be one of spiritual teaching, carried out straight and undisguised but in an atmosphere of intimacy – the Sulpician ideal of a Christian community carried into the life of the University. And most importantly, the role of the Principal was to be quite distinct from that of a don, even in that age of more affective tutorial relations: "He is to be free from all that cramping necessity of hitting round corners." Well, with all the tedious exigencies of Synod the Principal has plenty of cramping necessities imposed upon him for our benefit, but we can be sure that there is still no hitting round corners at Pusey House.
The proclamation of the Good News of grace; dedication to the fullness of worship; the application of the power of the sacraments: Pusey House has been faithful to these works since its foundation, a fidelity which has borne ample and abiding fruit through seasons of extraordinary change. Firstly, the proclamation of the Good News of grace: the ethos of the House has always been one particularly attentive to the mission of preaching. The manner in which the study of academic theology has matured in this University and in most others of the Anglo-Saxon world proposes the discipline to the young as a formation in the liberal arts comparable to and examinable like any other: thus there is so much literature, so much history, so much language work (preferably involving non-Latin alphabets) and even a smattering of philosophy. We know from that wonderful work Parkinson’s Law that this system is essentially the last survival of the Chinese Civil Service examination, borrowed by Lord Macauley to man the new professional Civil Service of Victorian England. Sacred Doctrine is not so conceived here. Here the Faith is taught by catechesis and preaching as a body of saving teaching, revealed by God and perpetuated in the credal and moral fidelity of his Church, under that most subversive of dedications, Deus Scientiarum Dominus.
Secondly, fullness of worship: has the mission of this House ever seemed more prophetic than in its fidelity to the vision of the Ritualist Movment? This Movement was conceived from the start as having a pastoral purpose: to restore in our Church the dignity of the sacraments and in particular that of the sacrament of the Altar, a re-sacralization of gesture and vesture and setting which was and is a core component in authentic Catholic evangelization. And the fidelity of Pusey House to the classical fullness of this vision, hard won in times of persecution and the object of modish and myopic condescension in more recent times, has been amply vindicated by the Benedictine revival of liturgical tradition, which has placed us at the height of fashion as well as orthodoxy once again. It is not faithful to tradition to assert that the identification of the Eucharist as a meal means that its sacrificial character is best exemplified by a celebration in which the meal-like aspect occludes all others.
Thirdly, to offer the power of the sacraments: here this must mean in particular the dedicated and exemplary way in which successive priests of the House have introduced the young to the practice of sacramental confession. And this has not been in a mechanical or perfunctory way. The ethos of pastoral intimacy, the Sulpician vision of formation through sympathy and friendship, the humane cultivation of the life of virtue in community, all these qualities have underpinned the painstaking work for souls which has always characterized the House. I am a great fan of the portrait of Dr Ursell which hangs in the Hood Room, not least because as a postcard it is a wonderful ice-breaking mode of communication with suffragan bishops, archdeacons and DDOs. Most Oxford portraiture of this sort usually features some dismal example of modern architecture in the background to immortalize the fund-raising expertise of the retiring panjandrum; not so here. We see in the honorand’s hand neither plans for some state-of-the-art tutorial bunker nor indeed some immense tome of inspissated erudition: no, we see instead the University Diary, a discreet monument to a rich landscape of pastoral encounter, pains taken in the expense of time and burdens lifted which exemplifies the mission of the House.
Which leads me inexorably back to Behemoth’s testicles. Pope S. Gregory the Great in his great commentary on the book of Job known to us as the Moralia, took this verse as a type of the perplexed conscience – the constriction of the sinews being the sign of the entangled nature of the moral choices which confront us. You do not need me to tell you that Catholic Anglicans are in a place of acute perplexity at this time. Our mission, the mission of this House and of all those who have served the Movement since its inception, is founded on a confidence that we have an authentic ecclesial mandate grounded in Scripture and Tradition, and sacramental assurance in the ministrations which arise from that mandate. We must be frank when we admit that the great majority of the Churches who name themselves catholic in faith, order and practice have always seen this in us as more a matter of assertion than fact. But for us it has not seemed to be a house built on sand. S. Gregory tells us that if we are hemmed in and held captive, then the best rule is to jump off where the wall is lowest – the shortest fall makes for the softest landing. If we are not to be entirely strangled by our perplexity we are going to have to learn to jump, because the basis on which we have carried out our mission in recent years – the doctrine of a Church of England with two integrities - is coming to an end. Blessed Pius IX told Dr Pusey that he was like a bell summoning people to church but never entering it himself; might we not hope for a better future in a larger room for Pusey House?
The Revd Canon Dr Robin Ward Principal of St Stephen's House Oxford