One of the most intriguing sources of Edward Bouverie Pusey'sFootnote 1 extensive but largely unexplored writing on eucharistic theology and the philosophical assumptions underlying itFootnote 2 appears to be the influence on Pusey, and on the Tractarians more generally, of various contemporaneous writers and poets, broadly known as the Romantic poets. Brilioth has gone so far as to say that ‘the Oxford Movement is properly to be regarded as a phase of the Romantic Movement’.Footnote 3 These writers included people such as George Byron, William Wordsworth, John Keats and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. A fellow Tractarian, John Keble, also significantly influenced Pusey's developing sacramental and particularly eucharistic theology.
Pusey is credited with coining the word ‘Byronism’Footnote 4 to refer to these Romantic poets. Pusey in writing to his future wife, Maria Barker, describes the Byronist quite bleakly:
As being the god of Epicurus, it becomes in imagination the being of another world, and looks down upon the miseries and struggles of this, and leaves the unhappy wretches to their fate while it philosophizes upon them, or at best it comments with almost a contemptuous pity on the ills it sees.Footnote 5
Pusey was later to detach himself from what he called ‘Byronism’ since he believed that it made the mind ‘unpractical, undisposed to apply the relief of Christianity to the ills it dwells upon’.Footnote 6 Liddon argues that it was the ‘sensualism, coarse or subtle’Footnote 7 that was so repellent to Pusey even though Byron had thrown ‘a strange spell over Pusey as a young man’Footnote 8 and in his quest to marry Maria Barker in the face of his father's opposition to the marriage he expressed in his diary ‘many Byronic overtones of despair’.Footnote 9 It was however in Liddon's opinion ‘the moral lassitude of “Byronism”’Footnote 10 that caused Pusey to abandon him while still accepting the naturalism and realism of the Romantic poets into his sacramental theology.
Forrester is of the view that Byron had an almost pathological concern with his own self and a lasting sense of guilt.Footnote 11 Hare speaks of the contrast between the influence of Wordsworth and Coleridge and Byron stating that:
We whose entrance into intellectual life took place in the second and third decad [sic] of this century, enjoyed a singular felicity in this respect, in that the stimulators and trainers of our thoughts were Wordsworth and Coleridge; in whose practical judgment and moral dignity and a sacred love of truth are so nobly wedded to the highest intellectual power. By them the better part of us were preserved from the noxious taint of Byron.Footnote 12
Perhaps Pusey saw this same problem and detached himself from Byron in particular to avoid any noxious taint. At the same time however, Pusey remained heavily influenced by other Romantic poets, particularly Coleridge, in the expression of eucharistic theology.
It was in the Romantic Movement that Pusey found echoes of the moderate realismFootnote 13 that so affected his sacramental theology. Romanticism saw nature acting as a stimulus to the imagination, with nature being the way to objective reality and to God.Footnote 14 This was an attractive idea to Pusey since he could avoid both rationalism and the dead orthodoxyFootnote 15 he had criticised in Germany by employing the Romantic depths of the spiritual with its view of nature pointing to and conveying the divine, quite apart from and beyond the intellect. Indeed in his unpublished Lectures on Types and Prophecies of the Old Testament of 1836 he expressed this Romantic vision clearly in opposition to rationalism by saying:
Our conviction also is of a compound character and made up of various emotions: in moral subjects it cannot be mainly intellectual: in Divine things, awe, wonders, the absorbing sense of infinity and of purity, or of holiness, infuse conviction more directly than reasoning: nay, reasoning in that it appeals to one faculty only, and that for a time is erected into a judge, and so, as it were sits superior, constantly goes directly counter to the frame of mind wherein belief is received. The chance sight of a flower illumined by the sun's rays or of the starry heavens … impress the feeling of God upon the soul more than any artificial reasoning from final causes.Footnote 16
Wordsworth and Keats, as two of the Romantic poets, have been described as having ‘a sense of fellowship with essence’ and ‘a pantheistic mysticism, where subject and object are fused together, rather than a subjective sensationalism’.Footnote 17 This elevation of the material and the fusing of object and subject are indicators of realism and, as such, influenced many of the Tractarians in the expression of their sacramental theology and in particular eucharistic theology to the extent that they also employed realist concepts.
Keble himself, as a Tractarian, was also a poet and Professor of Poetry at Oxford University from 1832 to 1841. His famous work The Christian Year,Footnote 18 together with his 1844 Lectures on Poetry Footnote 19 (dedicated to William Wordsworth) reflected this Romantic influence where God is found under the veil of nature. Brilioth argues that the book, The Christian Year, was ‘the connecting‐link between Romanticism and the Oxford Movement’.Footnote 20 Keble, for example in his poem for the Sunday in the Book of Common Prayer called Septuagesima Sunday, says:
The works of God above, below,
Within us and around,
Are pages in that book, to show
How God Himself is found.Footnote 21
There is something of the universal here. What the poet sees is not the product of human imagination or reason, but the universality of God instantiated in nature. The underlying philosophical assumption here is that of moderate realism, where the sign (nature) instantiates the signified universal (God). The poet is offered or comes across signs in nature in order to know the author of nature. Keble pulls all this together in his Lectures on Poetry, when he says:
Poetry lends Religion her wealth of symbols and similes: Religion restores these again to Poetry, clothed with so splendid a radiance that they appear to be no longer merely symbols, but to partake … of the nature of sacraments.Footnote 22
What the poet sees then is, for Keble, no mere imagination as an invention of the mind, but an objective reality present in created things, which gives humanity access to the invisible and to God. Keble is rejecting any subjective concepts and espousing objective reality.
All this resonates with Pusey who expresses much the same thoughts in his Lectures on Types and Prophecies, when he says:
Nor indeed would external reality convey such direct interests to the soul, and that stronger in proportion to the purity of each, unless it had in it somewhat of God; for it acts upon us not by reflection of the understanding, but by direct impression, not by our own reasoning about the wisdom of contrivances and the like, whereby men now deem (as I said) that they ‘ascend from nature up to nature's God’, but by immediate influence: so that nothing exercises so congenial an influence over man's soul, or so harmonized with it, as the visible works of God, except His words or His works in other human souls. …. Instance of this expressiveness of nature in conveying moral and religious truth will have been felt by every one; and they will have felt also, that these religious meanings were not arbitrarily affixed by their own minds, but that they arose out of, and existed in, the things themselves. … A proof that this expressiveness really lies in the objects and is not the work of the imagination, (otherwise than as imagination is employed in tracing out the mutual correspondence of images with their reality, or with each other) is furnished by, that when religious poets (as Wordsworth or the author of The Christian Year) have traced out such correspondence, the mind instantly recognises it as true, not as beautiful only, and so not belonging to their minds subjectively, but as actually and really existing (objective).Footnote 23
For the Tractarians, such as Pusey, the Romantic poets taught them that nature was a living thing, full of symbolic meaning. This belief had much import for the sacramental principle which they employed in the development of eucharistic theology.
Henry Liddon in his life of Pusey suggests the poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge was ‘distinctly contributory to the Tractarian movement’ and that ‘he prepared the English mind to listen to the Oxford teachers’.Footnote 24 Unfortunately Liddon provides no detail of the nature of Coleridge's distinct contribution to the Tractarian or Oxford Movement or Pusey in particular. Liddon however, notes that Pusey had an ability for such observation in nature from an early age and that in 1822 at the age of 22 Pusey's journal reveals ‘a breadth of interest, a delicacy of observation, and an intensity of feeling which are at least remarkable; and, in particular, it exhibits that same enthusiasm for the natural world’.Footnote 25 Such a fascination with the natural must surely be important in the development of a mind such as Pusey's. Pusey in his younger years, according to Liddon, appreciated the sacramentality of the world around him and saw the things of this world as a revelation of the divine.
It seems that the effect of these poets was widely felt in nineteenth century England. David Jasper argues that Coleridge as a poet, theologian and literary critic had a profound significance for English literature and theology in the nineteenth century.Footnote 26 Despite this, the relationship between Pusey's eucharistic theology and the Romantic poets and thinkers remains mostly unexplored even though reflection on the link between the physical and the spiritual has been more widely explored.
The Romantic poets, such as Coleridge and Wordsworth, provided a link in their work between the physical and the spiritual. For these poets there was ‘the classic English statement of a relationship which is explored repeatedly in European Romanticism, recognising both the illumination which the spiritual casts on the physical and that the spiritual only has sense in relation to the physical’Footnote 27 and where the ‘recurring theme of Romantic criticism is poetry as a channel for divine revelation’.Footnote 28 Coleridge ‘developed the idea of the poet as the mediator of the divine’ where ‘the divine is evident everywhere and particularly’Footnote 29 and where ‘the notion of the prophet was deeply embedded in Romantic thought’.Footnote 30
Pusey's writings in the largely unexplored Lectures on Types and Prophecies of the Old Testament resonate with the language of the Romantic poets, especially Coleridge. Here Pusey distinguishes between the prophecy and poetry of the Bible, speaking of the ‘relation between animate and inanimate, rational and irrational creation’ acting in the contemplation of humans as ‘images’ where such imagery ‘implies that one class, whereon these qualities are less forcibly impressed, furnishes as it were “images” or representations of that higher class, which possesses these qualities more fully’.Footnote 31 For Pusey, this means that God's ‘natural works … in numerous instances convey the same truth which He afterwards expressly declares … so that the relation between the image employed by revelation and the truth declared is an inherent correspondence between image and truth, not a mere external likeness’.Footnote 32
Not only is this indicative of moderate realism where there is correspondence between image and truth or sign and signified but at the same time there is a denial of any fleshy or carnal scheme of sacramental theology since the correspondence is not mere external likeness such as a fleshy realism implies and where in eucharistic terms the bread is equated to real flesh and the wine to real blood, as opposed to the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist: that is a moderate realist presence. All this has much in common with the writings of Coleridge. The emphasis on natural works conveying truth is something shared between the Tractarians, including Pusey, and the Romantic poets where ‘the symbolic character of nature is not mere invention of the imaginative mind, but an objective quality inherent in creation’.Footnote 33 The Romantic poets saw nature as alive, with a ‘stress on imagination’ that was as ‘far removed as possible from the dry lucidity’Footnote 34 sometimes found in theology and which Pusey firmly rejected as ‘dead orthodoxy’ in his comments on the state of theology in Germany. The Romantic period developed the notion of organic form with the development of the idea of the symbol. This was in stark contrast to the eighteenth century which was focussed more on the individual and the particular rather than the general or the universal.
Coleridge for example in his work entitled The Statesman's Manual Footnote 35 works to draw the whole out of attention to the particular. For Coleridge this worked as ‘the appointed medium between earth and heaven’ that reveals spiritual truths and ‘yield a free passage to its light’.Footnote 36 Specifically applicable to Pusey's argument about the role of prophecy pointing to a fuller revelation in The Lectures on Types and Prophecies was Coleridge's view that in the Bible, important truth, efficient, practical direction and warning, pre‐exists in a way that is sound, intelligible and comprehensive.Footnote 37 This resonates with the way Pusey points to the types of the Old Testament as analogies of the archetype, the New Testament. Coleridge believed that ‘particular rules and prescripts flow directly and visibly from universal principles, as from a fountain: they flow from principles and ideas that are not so properly said to be confirmed by reason as to be reason itself’ so that ‘from the very nature of these principles, as taught in the Bible, they are understood in exact proportion as they are believed and felt’.Footnote 38 This epistemological commitment to ways of knowing other than an exclusive appeal to human reason was important for Coleridge as indeed it became for Pusey in the expression of eucharistic theology.
Symbols were for Coleridge harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths. Indeed Coleridge identified these symbols as ‘living educts’ or ‘conductors’Footnote 39 as he spoke of the image of the wheels in the book Ezekiel chapter 1. Coleridge speaks of them saying:
These are the Wheels which Ezekiel beheld, when the hand of the Lord was upon him, and he saw visions of God as he sate among the captives by the river Chebar. Withersoever the Spirit was to go, the wheels went, and thither was their spirit to go: for the spirit of this living creature was in the wheels also. The truths and symbols that represent them move in conjunction and form the living chariot that bears up (for us) the throne of the Divine Humanity. Hence, by a derivative, indeed, but not divided, influence, and though in a secondary yet in more than a metaphorical sense, the Sacred Book is worthily intitled the Word of God. Hence too, its contents present to us the stream of time continuous as Life and a symbol of Eternity, inasmuch as the Past and the Future are virtually contained in the Present. According therefore to our relative position on its banks the Sacred History becomes prophetic, the Sacred Prophecies historical, while the power and substance of both inhere in its Laws, its Promises, and its Comminations. In the Scriptures therefore both Facts and Persons must of necessity have a two‐fold significance, a past and a future, a temporary and perpetual, a particular and a universal application. They must be at once Portraits and Ideals.Footnote 40
Coleridge's underlying philosophical assumption here is that of moderate realism where the conductor or the living educt signifies the universal application. As Westhaver argues: ‘in describing types as symbols, Pusey appears to have been drawing on the ideas of S. T. Coleridge as well as the Fathers. Coleridge uses the term “symbol” to describe the participation of words or things in an eternal reality’.Footnote 41
Coleridge's use of symbol is what he describes as ‘tautegorical’ that is ‘expressing the same subject but with a difference’.Footnote 42 Pusey expresses the same philosophical assumptions in his 1836 Lectures on Types and Prophecies in his use of type and archetype in relation to Eucharistic theologyFootnote 43 where the type participates in the archetype but is not numerically identical with it, nor, in Pusey's scheme, are the particulars numerically identical, even though the universal is numerically identical (‘the same subject’) in both instantiations of the type and archetype. Coleridge appears to have significantly influenced Pusey's symbolic theory of type where the type partakes of the infinite and eternal reality – what Pusey calls the archetype. It is Coleridge's argument ‘that in all finite Quantity there is an Infinite’ where ‘the latter are the basis, the substance, the true and abiding reality of the former’Footnote 44 that so resembles Pusey's talk of type and archetype and the subsequent implications he draws from this in his Lectures for eucharistic theology. It is also remarkable that Coleridge's, and in turn Pusey's thinking, is reflected in the expression of eucharistic theology in the modern ageFootnote 45 and in modern secular philosophy.Footnote 46
Indeed for Coleridge there is a clear distinction between the moderate realism he proposes and those who advocate a nominalist analysis.Footnote 47 Coleridge points out that: ‘In all ages of the Christian Church … there have existed individuals … who mistake outlines for substance, and distinct images for clear conceptions; with whom therefore not to be a thing is the same as not to be at all.’Footnote 48 For Coleridge, and for Pusey, there is a distinction between the ‘thing’ as a particular and the universal. The link between the substance and the thing, or the sign and the signified, cannot therefore be a strict identity, such as an immoderate realist view would dictate and yet the link cannot be broken, and so for both Pusey and Coleridge the moderate realist view applies and the nominalist analysis is rejected. The sign instantiates the signified but not as a strict or literal identity, although of course the universal is present in both the sign and the signified as an instantiation in a moderate realist analysis.
For Pusey there seems to be something much deeper in his sacramental theology than mere likeness and he remarks that ‘the province of the true poet has been not to invent likenesses, but to trace out the analogies, which are actually impressed upon the creation’.Footnote 49 This suggests that Pusey, along with the Romantic poets, developed the concept that the spiritual can only be perceived in relation to the physical, while the physical can only be understood in the light of the spiritual. Coleridge described this as ‘the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal’.Footnote 50 This tracing out of analogies is not the product of human imagination, even though ‘they cannot be perceived without imagination’, rather ‘they are planted in the world by God’ and are ‘signs of the continuing goodness and harmony of things’.Footnote 51
It is this very point however which marks some divergence between the views of the Romantic poets and the Tractarians, since as Allchin points out, the Tractarians made their ‘position clear against some tendencies in Romanticism which gave to the imagination a creative power rather than a capacity for recognition’.Footnote 52 Newman for example, while distancing himself from Coleridge, nonetheless acknowledged his contribution to what he called ‘Catholic truth’. Newman states in his Apologia concerning Coleridge that:
While history in prose and verse was thus made the instrument of Church feelings and opinions, a philosophical basis for the same was laid in England by a very original thinker [Coleridge], who, while he indulged a liberty of speculation, which no Christian can tolerate, and advocated conclusions which were often heathen rather than Christian, yet after all instilled a higher philosophy into inquiring minds, than they had hitherto been accustomed to accept. In this way he made trial of his age, and succeeded in interesting its genius in the cause of Catholic truth.Footnote 53
Newman points to something deep within the thinking of Coleridge which was a higher philosophy, a moderate realism, where the particular instantiated the universal. This Newman admits is very original thought but he rejects the idea of what he calls speculation. For the Tractarians, including Pusey, there is an ‘essential role played by type and sacrament in the process of revelation … into which we are called to enter’ rather than the speculation that Newman and indeed Pusey seem to suggest was responsible for ‘transforming it into a mere conceptual scheme of our own devising’.Footnote 54 For Pusey, nature works to express moral and religious truth, not arbitrarily affixed by human minds, but which ‘arose out of, and existed in, the things themselves’.Footnote 55 This rejection of nominalism and the inherent moderate realist sacramental theology of the Tractarians seems to owe much to Coleridge's higher philosophy. Indeed as Jasper points out in relation to the incarnation, for Coleridge, ‘Christ's individuality in history is the necessary particular through which the universal is perceived, his temporality a reflection on the eternal’.Footnote 56 Pusey would certainly have agreed.
More recently the connection between the Romantic poets, especially Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Pusey, has been freshly explored in a doctoral thesis by George Westhaver.Footnote 57 Here Westhaver affirms that Pusey drew on the ideas of Coleridge, especially the works Aids to Reflection Footnote 58 and The Statesman's Manual,Footnote 59 in writing his Lectures on Types and Prophecies of the Old Testament of 1836. Pusey quotes from Coleridge's Aids to Reflection in the Lectures as is reported by one of the people who attended the Lectures, Edward Marshall in his Lecture Notes.Footnote 60 Marshall's notes reveal the following as coming from Pusey in his lecture:
This shews that we must not look for conviction in the way of Reason – Coleridge in his ‘Aids to Reflection’ says that the great fundamentals of our Religion, in Christian countries are taught so early and with such associations that the words ever after bring to us Realities, not thoughts or sensations … We hear in after life the Proofs of these with the same feelings that a Prince at a Coronation listens to the Champion as he is calling upon non‐existent opponents. Doubts may be driven out at first by our Lord's words. The looking for Proof only tends to encourage doubts. A man's implicit belief as it is not founded on the understanding cannot be spared by that. The belief arising from Reason is like unbelief. What will overcome the belief of a child, who has not learnt to doubt.Footnote 61
The words Marshall quotes are very similar to the text in Coleridge's Aids to Reflection who says:
The great fundamental Truths and Doctrines of Religion, the existence and attributes of God, and the Life after Death, are in Christian countries taught so early, under such circumstances, and in such close and vital association with whatever makes or marks reality for our infant minds, that the words ever after represent sensations, feelings, vital assurances, sense of reality – rather than thoughts or any distinct conception. Associated, I had almost said identified, with the parental Voice, Look, Touch, with the living warmth and pressure of the Mother, on whose lap the child is first made to kneel, within whose palms its little hands are folded, and the motion of whose eyes it's [sic] eyes follow and imitate – (yea, what the blue sky is to the Mother, the Mother's unpraised Eyes and Brow are to the Child, the Type and Symbol of an invisible Heaven!) – from within and without, these great Truths, these good and gracious Tidings, these holy and humanising Spells, in the preconformity to which our very humanity may be said to consist, are so infused, that it were but a tame and inadequate expression to say, we all take them for granted. At a later period, in Youth or early Manhood, most of us, indeed, (in the higher and middle classes at least) read or hear certain PROOFS of these truths – which we commonly listen to, when we listen at all, with much the same feelings as a popular Prince on his Coronation Day, in the centre of a fond and rejoicing nation, may be supposed to hear the Champion's challenge to all the Non‐existents, that deny or dispute his Rights and Royalty.Footnote 62
Both Pusey's use of Coleridge and Coleridge himself are arguing against total dependence on reason, although of course they do not deny the role of the proofs of reason at a particular time in life. What they call the great fundamentals, it seems, are not always taught by reason, but can to infant minds be taught be in the form of sensations, feelings, assurances and the sense of reality and then in later life known through words. Coleridge's example of the infant learning through voice, look and touch on the mother's lap suggest that these can be a type of some more eternal reality. It seems that Pusey was struck by this and employed the idea of the type being a prophecy of the more universal reality. This has significant implications for sacramental theology which it seems Pusey even realised in the way he spoke of his early life and of learning all he knew about the Eucharist and the Catholic faith at his mother's knee.Footnote 63 Pusey was not claiming that he learnt all the developed knowledge he knew about the Eucharist at his mother's knee, but he was claiming that this learning, as a sensation or feeling, was a type of the doctrine to come, containing within it the essential reality, even though he as a child did not appreciate all the depth that he would gain as a mature adult. The sensations and feeling he felt at his mother's knee could be said to be infused into his being as a type and later in life recognised as a mature and reasoned response. The prophetic nature of the type was for Pusey no less real and indicative of the working of God in a deeply sacramental manner, although not dependent at the early age on human reason alone. Pusey's epistemological commitments here firmly value the experiential and the learning known through feelings and sensations. His commitments also seem to value reason at particular stages. The important realisation for him seems to be that both experience and reason are legitimate ways of knowing and this commitment leads him to value both ways and yet at the same time not over‐value the rational.
Westhaver agrees with this line of thinking arguing that instead of dependence on rationalism and evidences, Coleridge is arguing for ‘belief which is already present, “the belief of a child,” which accepts the arguments of evidence writers, at their best, part of pageant where belief is already enthroned’.Footnote 64 For Coleridge, and Pusey, ‘the sense of benevolence is proof’ since ‘prophecy is given to direct and guide faith, not create it’.Footnote 65 For Pusey, in Westhaver's assessment, ‘reason involves more than an attempt to retrieve a patristic model [typology], reaching back behind intervening developments’ and also a ‘dissatisfaction with the Enlightenment appeal to reason which one finds in the “Lectures”’ and that this dissatisfaction was ‘a common theme of the Romantic movement’.Footnote 66 Part of this dissatisfaction in Coleridge's Aids to Reflection was the failure to distinguish reason from understanding in Enlightenment thinking. For Coleridge, understanding is ‘the Faculty judging according to sense’Footnote 67 and as such is a faculty used to compare, reflect and generalise.Footnote 68 Reason on the other hand is for Coleridge the faculty of the supersensuousFootnote 69 where ‘Reason is the Power of Universal and necessary Convictions, the Source and Substance of Truths above Sense, and having their evidence in themselves’.Footnote 70
This corresponds well with Pusey's thinking in the Lectures where he speaks of ‘the higher mind or illumined sight which perceives spiritual things as distinguished from natural reason or rationalizing’.Footnote 71 This is exactly how Pusey describes it in his 1856 sermon, ‘All faith the Gift of God’.Footnote 72 Here Pusey says:
If man arrived at faith through the mere use of his natural reason, accepting or rejecting what is proposed for his belief according as the evidence is or is not adequate to satisfy his natural reason, then undoubtedly it would be through unaided exercise of that same natural reason that his faith must be maintained, strengthened, enlarged, defended; or, if it have been unhappily shaken or lost, then, by that same mere exercise of the understanding must it be consolidated or recovered. If, on the contrary, God works faith in the soul, not without grounds which satisfy reason illumined by His Holy Spirit, but Himself acting, not simply on the reason, but on the will also and the affections, disposing, preparing, arousing, helping, illuminating, justifying, sanctifying, the whole man, then faith, being the gift of God by grace, must be retained in us through grace; then faith will grow with the growth and enlargement of grace; or it will wane through whatsoever lessens grace; and if faith be impaired or destroyed, it cannot be demonstrated into any one by mere force of argument, nor can we recover it for ourselves by mere diligent study of human proof, but it must be regained by regaining the lost grace of God.Footnote 73
There is for Pusey a power that grasps truth which is not accessible to the senses and is dependent on the grace of God. What is observed with the senses, such as the eyes or by the evidence of natural reason, is not always the truth. This has great implications for any sacramental theology dependent on moderate realism since the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, for example, is not a matter for sense or evidence alone but is rather above and beyond sense and evidence – a spiritual or illumined sight – where the presence of Christ is real but not physical or fleshy, nor is it, to borrow Pickstock's phrase, a mere textual calculus of what is real.Footnote 74
Westhaver believes that ‘like Pusey, Coleridge describes this human faculty which beholds God as a divine power and knowledge as participation’.Footnote 75 So Coleridge is able to say that ‘Reason is pre‐eminently spiritual, and a Spirit, even our Spirit, through an effluence of the same grace by which we are privileged to say Our Father!’.Footnote 76 For Coleridge, and for Pusey, truths ‘are perceived by an Intuition or immediate Beholding, accompanied by a conviction of the necessity and universality of the truth so beholden not derived from the Senses’.Footnote 77
Coleridge also warns against the situation where understanding, so defined as the exercise of the senses, usurps its bounds and ‘the mind of the flesh is made the measure of spiritual things’.Footnote 78 In Pusey’ Lectures he speaks of the ‘undisciplined intellect’ which tends ‘to different forms of unbelief or misbelief’.Footnote 79 In terms of eucharistic theology an undisciplined intellect usurps its bounds and proposes an immoderate realism, that is, the mind of the flesh, where the sign is too closely associated with the signified such that the particulars of the Eucharist, bread and wine on the one hand and Christ's body and blood on the other, can be seen to become numerically identical, such that bread and wine are seen to be literally flesh and blood. Such a sacramental theology relies on the senses alone and both Coleridge and Pusey reject this notion. Moderate realism, on the other hand, is dependent on the reason God supplies and implants in the sacramental nature of the world and material things and where types are prophecies of archetypes and where the identity and life of God can be present to spiritual and illumined sight through an effluence of grace that is not dependent on the senses alone.
The Romantic poets, in particular Coleridge, allowed the Tractarians, like Pusey, to form their ideas within the thinking processes they offered. Christopher Snook in a dissertation concerned with Pusey's sermons, argues that ‘Coleridge offered the Movement both a language and a theory of knowledge in which to articulate its increasing sacramental vision of the world, and one which corresponded closely with its notion of God's “reserved” manifestation of Himself in nature, the Sacraments, and the Church’.Footnote 80 Such a ‘reserved manifestation’ is one that depends on the difference accessible only to illumined sight in the way of the spirit. For Pusey in his Lectures of 1836 and his discussion of types and prophecies of the Old Testament he is speaking about much more than the interpretation of the Bible, but rather an alternative approach to theology where nature is the means that God uses to reveal spiritual truth. As Westhaver observes concerning Pusey, the ‘type as a “living symbol” offers an organic description of the way in which types contain the substance of the Archetype, distinguishing his view from “the mechanical views of prophecy” which he found in the apologetic school. This is Coleridgean language, evoking Coleridge's view of symbol as a “living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative”’.Footnote 81
Douglas Hedley points out that ‘Coleridge's symbol theory is Neoplatonic’,Footnote 82 and so in this way the Romantic appropriation of patristic sources has elements of Christian Platonism which Coleridge seems to have used, and which also influences Pusey.Footnote 83 As Westhaver further argues:
Coleridge offers a theological and philosophical framework which illuminates Pusey's theory of knowledge and the spiritual faculties, and his understanding of the way in which types, or symbols, reveal the eternal in the temporal, or communicate spiritual truth through sensible images. His description of a symbol as that ‘which partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible’ illustrates Pusey's understanding of type. When he describes Christian types as images of heavenly realities, Pusey suggests that at least some types, namely the types which are also sacraments, confer a participation in the substance which they ‘contain’ and from which they are ‘derived’.Footnote 84
Pusey in his Lectures on Types and Prophecies of the Old Testament is offering theological knowledge about the sacraments based on typology as moderate realism where the type instantiates the archetype and where the type functions as prophecy. The influence of the Romantic poets, especially Coleridge, is apparent in Pusey's writing as he argues for a typology where the types are both sacramental and sanctifying. Moderate realism is the basis of the work on the sacraments of both Coleridge and Pusey, and is the assumption underlying their eucharistic theology in particular and there appear to be significant links between the Romantic poets and Tractarians such as Edward Pusey.
