Edward Bouverie Pusey - Later Life and Legacy

Later Life and Legacy

In private life Pusey's habits were simple almost to austerity. He had few personal friends, and rarely mingled in general society; though bitter to opponents, he was gentle to those who knew him, and his munificent charities gave him a warm place in the hearts of many to whom he was personally unknown. In his domestic life he had some severe trials; his wife died, after eleven years of married life, in 1839; his only son, who was a scholar like-minded with himself, who had shared many of his literary labours, and who had edited an excellent edition of St Cyril's commentary on the minor prophets, died in 1880, after many years of suffering. From that time Pusey was seen by only a few persons. His strength gradually declined, and he died on 16 September 1882, after a short illness. He was buried at Oxford in the cathedral of which he had been for fifty-four years a canon. In his memory his friends purchased his library, and bought for it a house in Oxford, known as the Pusey House, which they endowed with sufficient funds to maintain three librarians, who were charged with the duty of endeavouring to perpetuate in the university the memory of the principles which he taught.

Pusey is chiefly remembered as the eponymous representative of the earlier phase of a movement which carried with it no small part of the religious life of England in the latter half of the 19th century. His own chief characteristic was an almost unbounded capacity for painstaking work. His chief influence was that of a preacher and a spiritual adviser. As a preacher he lacked all the graces of oratory, but compelled attention by his searching and practical earnestness. His correspondence as a spiritual adviser was enormous; his deserved reputation for piety and for solidity of character made him the chosen confessor to whom large numbers of men and women unburdened their doubts and their sins.

He was more a theological antiquary than a theologian. Pusey was in fact left behind by his followers, even in his lifetime. His revival of the doctrine of the Real Presence, coinciding as it did with the revival of a taste for medieval art, naturally led to a revival of the pre-Reformation ceremonial of worship. With this, Pusey had little sympathy. He protested against it (in a university sermon in 1859) and, though he came to defend those who were accused of breaking the law in their practice of it, said that their practice was alien to his own. But this revival of ceremonial became the characteristic of the new movement, and "Ritualist" thrust "Puseyite" aside. Pivotal in his own teaching was the appeal to primitive antiquity, which proved influential.

Pusey edited a series of translations of the work of the Church fathers. Among the translators was his contemporary at Christ Church, Charles Dodgson. He also befriended and assisted Dodgson's son "Lewis Carroll" when he came to Christ Church.