Pusey, tholuck and the reception of the oxford movement in Germany

Abstract

I myself respect and love the Germans.' This is a surprising statement, not only in itself, but because it was made by Edward Pusey as late as 1854; that is, long after his so-called ‘German' period. A statement like this was by no means common in the nineteenth century, when nationalism gradually came to dominate all other discourses in both countries. For example, Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), the famous German Sanskrit scholar and Taylorian Professor of modern European languages in Oxford, stated that Anglo-German relations at the end of the century had become more difficult than half a century before. Many English and German people experienced a sort of culture clash when they visited the other country. On his first visit to England in 1825, for instance, Friedrich August Gotttreu Tholuck (1799–1877) was annoyed by the manner in which people dashing down the road would shout at him: ‘Get moving, get moving!' And when Robert Isaac Wilberforce went to an inn in Bonn he could hardly bear to see the Germans eating, as they ran their knives in and out of ‘their monstrous Westphalian mouths'. These may be comic anecdotes, but people seriously believed that the English and the German peoples were different. For example, Pusey wrote: ‘A German writes because he has something to say; an Englishman only because it is, or he thinks it is, needed.' Pusey certainly did not mean that what the German said was not needed, and that the Englishman did not have much to say. The implication rather must have been that whereas English theology was practical, German theology tended to be speculative. This idea may also be later reflected in the twentieth-century saying: ‘Theology was invented in Germany, corrected in England and corrupted in America. © Cambridge University Press 2012.