Writing in Providence, Timothy Cutler identified eighteenth-century political philosopher Edmund Burke as an “Anglican theologian,” principally relevant today for having understood “the theological underpinnings of our social order,” with Burke himself having been “a defender of the institutions of Christian civilization.” In 2023, the historian Richard Whatmore, in The End of Enlightenment, argued that in Burke’s lifetime the Enlightenment, for all its promises of radically improving the world according to universally accessible Reason had failed, resulting in the French Revolution and resultant Napoleonic Wars.
While it’s true that Burke defined Britain’s response to the French Revolution in his deployment of Anglican arguments, it’s also true that the Anglican Church heard Burke and was itself changed by his articulation of the role of Christianity in the life of a nation. This shift in response to the events of the late 18th and early 19th centuries came to be called the “Catholic revival” or the “Oxford Movement” in 19th-century England. The dialogue between the Church of England and the British state, wherein both institutions mutually shaped one another in response to the crisis of the French Revolution, is highly instructive for us today.
The Oxford Movement, or the revivification of high church practices within the Church of England from the 1830s onwards, is usually understood as an attempt to inoculate the Church from the (Whigs’) compression of Church and state by re-emphasizing the Church of England as part of the one holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church. This could, however, be turned on its head: the Oxford Movement was, in fact, about emphasizing the God-ordained role of England in its particularity, but also the role of all Christian nations as unique and loved by God in their individuality while remaining part of a universal church. That nations are at once both part of and answerable to a universal whole while simultaneously being individually sovereign and indissoluble gives philosophical grounding to Burke’s arguments for gradual political and social evolution over revolution. Nations and their particular histories must be appreciated and therefore cannot be radically changed according to universal ideas – at the same time, there does exist an objective Good toward to which nations must reform themselves.
The Protestant theologian Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800–82), Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Oxford for more than fifty years and figurehead of the movement after John Henry Newman’s withdrawal in 1842 and later conversion to Roman Catholicism, exemplifies the Oxford Movement and deserves more attention as one who exerted massive influence in Victorian Oxford. He was for the extension of liberty through an alliance of Church and state. In turn, Edward Bouverie Pusey’s worldview was, in a sense, built by Edmund Burke.
Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, famously, rejected revolution in favor of a conservative conception of liberty. In that work, Burke wrote that “liberty without wisdom, and without virtue,” without respect for the nation and its past, its institutions, property, and religion, “is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.” As such, he believed, piecemeal reform is better than revolutionary change.
E. B. Pusey was a member of the ruling elite to whom Burke had addressed Reflections. He was born, three years after Burke’s death, at Pusey House, which is a large country house outside of Oxford. As a young man, Pusey’s biographer wrote, he was a “Whig, if not a Liberal […] and the two brother Puseys […] raised the standard of a Liberal rebellion in the most Tory of households.”
As was always for the case for members of the ruling elite at that time, Pusey went on tour to complete his education. In his case, he went to Switzerland and to Küsnach, the purported birthplace of William Tell, the legendary father of the Swiss Confederacy. He went to the chapel, and
leaning over the altar by means of which his countrymen have blended the feelings of patriotism and religion, I could not but address a prayer to our Common Father for my own country, that it might long enjoy freedom unpolluted, that it might cultivate the virtues, which alone merit that choicest gift a nation can receive, and without which it cannot be sustained.
This proves what another biographer, David Forrester has claimed: “having sprung from the ranks of the upper classes, [Pusey was] influenced by the writings of Edmund Burke.”
Pusey read Burke in the shadow of the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath. In his school days, he and his friends heard news of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the Battle of Leipzig (‘The Battle of the Nations’), and the Battle of Waterloo. And he would later refer to the way in which France had produced a form of “Anti-Christ”, an “enemy of God” which threatened Europe as a whole, but from which Britain most especially had been spared. Britain had a job to do as a result.
According to the worldview of Pusey and his peers, as thrashed out in politics and in pulpits across the land, Britain was called upon to lead the new Europe which arose from the ashes of the Napoleonic wars. How? As Prime Minister George Canning put it shortly before coming into office in 1828, the British statesman should “hold a middle course between extremes.” Their “duty” is to not adopt “hasty or ill-advised experiments,” “airy insubstantial theories,” and yet not reject “generous and liberal principles” if they are pressed into the service of the nation and the world with “sobriety and caution.” Pusey welcomed Canning’s “glorious,” if short-lived, Tory alliance with the Whigs. He supported liberal causes, including the emancipation of the Catholics in Ireland – his conviction was “very strong” – because he believed in “enlightening” that part of the Kingdom.
In Pusey’s mind, however, ultimate Enlightenment would come when Christian nations adopted the English Church’s style of Christianity because it was demonstrably the best way to “cultivate the virtues” which lead to liberty, properly conceived. He wrote, “The love of liberty” often means “for the most part nothing more, than the love of being one’s self free.” His Burkean conception of liberty, on the other hand, implied fidelity to a particular community, and the English one seemed to work best.
So, Pusey had special influence in Victorian Oxford. One Anglican minister wrote in November 1844, what a problem it would be if Dr. Pusey converted to Rome. While Newman’s conversion would be of some consequence, it was felt that at least 30 important members of Oxford University’s faculty would follow Pusey in converting to Catholicism, “and who shall say how many undergraduates!” “I should not wonder if 100 members of our Church were to secede between now and Christmas”, which would reverberate all over “Christendom”. Pusey had standing in the University because he was drawn from the ruling classes and was basically Burkean in his approach to the nation.
Burke’s influence on the Oxford Movement via Pusey is significant because, as history books tell the story, the Oxford Movement was a response to the threats to the established Church posed by Whig politicians on the state side of the equation. An alternative reading is one of mutual interplay between Church and state, and conversation between the Burkean leaders who inhabited both. Men such as Canning promoted a catholic vision of Britain that men such as Pusey in the Church took on for themselves.
It is true to say that Burke was an Anglican theologian; it is also true that Anglican theologians like Dr. Pusey were Burkean Whigs. And at the end of the Enlightenment, into the 19th century, Burkean Whigs helped build for Britain a better story of itself. Britain would lead the world, and the way in which that vision came about, through constructive dialogue, is instructive for us today. Christian civilization could do worse than aspire to learn from the example of Pusey and his peers.
Edmund Burke formed Edward Bouverie Pusey’s worldview, and hope in the nation, pride in its past, and trust in its promise was the result.