Book Review The Sermons of Robert Crouse

Robert Darwin Crouse. 2023. The Soul’s Pilgrimage, Volume 1: From Advent to Pentecost. Ed.Susan Dodd and Gary Thorne. London: Darton, Longman and Todd. Review by: Rev’d Dr. Thomas William Ruston. Published in Faith and Worship (Lent 2024) Fr. Robert Crouse (1930-2011) was a priest, and a professor of Classics, whose work was firmly rooted in the history of the Patristic and medieval Church. He had expertise in Augustine, and a renowned authority on Dante’s Divine Comedy. He was someone who also appreciated gardening, music, languages, and poetry. He was born in Novia Scotia, Canada, and was educated at King’s College in Halifax where he read Classics, Philosophy and Theology. For his PhD at Harvard, he produced a critical edition of the ‘De Neocosmo of Honorius Augustodunensis’, after which he was ordained and tutored in theology, Church, and Patristics, until eventually returning to Nova Scotia to join the Classics department at Dalhousie University, and King’s College, Halifax. In the 1980s he established the Atlantic Theological Conferences, and in 1990 he became the first non-Catholic to be invited to teach at Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum in Rome. His other publications include the use Patristic Scholarship by Dr Pusey and the Oxford Movement, and much of his academic work negotiated the relationship between Christianity and Platonism over two millennia Robert Crouse, ‘“Deepened by the Study of the Fathers”, The Oxford Movement, Dr. Pusey and Patristic Scholarship’, Dionysius, 7, 1983, 137–47. Robert Crouse, ‘Augustinian Platonism in Early Medieval Theology’, in Augustine: From Rhetor to Theologian (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992), pp. 109–20.. He is remembered fondly by his students, Anthony Burton remembers him as a ‘somewhat shy man with a deep, smoky voice, a wide range of interests, a great depth of knowledge, and a twinkling, mischievous wit’ Anthony Burton, ‘The Revd. Dr. Robert Crouse Remembered’, Anglican Way <https://anglicanway.org/the-revd-dr-robert-crouse-remembered-2/>.. He was someone who cultivated no less than 129 varieties of roses, restored and played upon baroque organs, all of which cultivated a contemplative spiritual life. These interests and his personality found their way into Crouse’s sermons. Many of his students discerned a vocation to the priesthood through his preaching not least because his contemplative personality shone out through his preaching. This collection of sermons is a work of love for Robert by his students, who after his death in 2011 have curated a collection of his sermons, conference papers, and articles online https://www.stpeter.org/crouse/. This collection is the first volume of his sermons to be published in print, with the second volume forthcoming later in the year entitled ‘The Descent of the Dove and the Spiritual Life’. The sermons collated in this volume were preached between 1975-2005 in various contexts. Here lies something of the value of this volume of his collected sermons because his sermons represent a synthesis between academic theology and parochial ministry. Throughout his illustrious academic career, he was actively involved in ordained ministry. He led retreats for both the laity and the clergy, was involved with production of liturgy for the Anglican Church in Canada, and he preached in various contexts, such as a fishing village in Novia Scotia, to an urban cosmopolitan population, and the chapel of the University College Halifax. In this volume, we can see that Crouse channelled his considerable learning into crafting short, to the point, sermons that are directed to the parochial contexts in which he preached. They are written for worshippers rather than experts in theology. At their heart, Crouse seeks the transformation of the worshipper into the image of Christ and Crouse is a good guide on that pilgrimage. It is an admirable balance. Crouse had a pastoral heart that is evident in his sermons, and which his congregations found beguiling. A former student, Gary Thorne, described his preaching as engaging to someone, who as a young contemporary student of the 70s and 80s, was not interested in formal religion but through Crouse’s preaching came to see the value and depth of the Christian tradition, especially as communicated by the Book of Common Prayer. If there is a ‘project’ in these sermons, then it lies with Crouse’s call to a recapitulation to the treasures of the solid, simple, and profound truth of Christianity conveyed by the ancient theology, liturgies, and traditions of the Church. This call stands contra mundum to the world’s call to constant progress, which is admirable in the arts, industry, sciences and business, but which Crouse challenged when it entered into the theology of the mid-twentieth century where ‘some theologians tell us that we have reached maturity now, and we have no need of the old authority; we are now grown up’ Robert Crouse, The Soul’s Pilgrimage. Vol 1: From Advent to Pentecost, ed. by Susan Dodd and Gary Thorne (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2023), i, p. 55.. Crouse instead argues that Christians are called to be servants of a ‘truth revealed to us long ago’ in the person of the incarnate Christ Crouse, i, p. 55.. This is not a reactionary stance, nor does Crouse expect Christians to believe without reason or question. Instead, his sermons seek to demonstrate that the abiding truth of the Christian tradition address contemporary spiritual needs. Much like the prayer book, the style of Crouse’s preaching is crafted to serve a contemporary congregation in a way that is both ‘local and simple, yet at the same time cosmic and profound’ Crouse, i, p. 32.. His sermons are communicated simply yet they take the listener on a journey with a pastoral spirit through two millennia of Christian tradition and how it has existed in dialogue with aesthetic and philosophical thought. Crouse weaved poetical imagery with Greek or contemporary philosophy and a variety of aesthetic sources, from music to architecture, that was all employed to convey the beauty and joy of human friendship, and friendship with God. Wayne Hankey describes Crouse’s sermons as being akin to musical compositions that establish a poetic atmosphere, he writes that ‘Robert’s lectures, sermons, and scholarly publications were polished works of art characterised by economy, harmonic balance, linguist precision, and structural beauty’ Wayne Hankey, ‘Visio: The Method of Robert Crouse’s Philosophical Theology’, Dionysius, 30 (2012), 19–40 (p. 19).. This poetic atmosphere is particularly evident in Crouse’s sermons for Advent and Epiphany. In them he conveys the realm of nature declining into darkness, deep in the ‘frozen sleep of winter’ Crouse, i, p. 41.. It is a world gripped by the realities of sin and death. Crouse writes that the divine judgement is not to leave this world cold, but into which God will come, and Christmas represents the thawing of the world. This is conveyed through his use of Dante’s Paradiso ‘For I have seen how the first wild-briar shows Her sprays, all winter through, thorny and stark And then upon the topmost bears the rose’ Crouse, i, p. 104. Through such poetry, Crouse uses the concept of seasons and time to communicate how the manifestation of the divine is reflected in nature, when the light begins to shine into the world, and life again begins to return. In one of his poetically richer sermons on Epiphany, Crouse reflects on TS Eliot’s poems ‘Waste Land’ and ‘Journey of the Magi’, itself as paraphrasing of Lancelot Andrewes’ Sermon on Christmas Day. The ‘Journey of the Magi’ is seen by Crouse to be a parable of everyone’s pilgrimage to Christ. The magi journey through the ‘the ways deep and the weather sharp, the very dead of winter’ and at the journey’s end they behold in the birth of Christ their own death to sin, using the words of TS Eliot, ‘a hard and bitter agony for us, like death, our death’ Crouse, i, p. 70. Crouse, i, p. 71.. Crouse identifies that the birth of Christ is inseparable from Good Friday; in which Christ’s birth is the beginning of our death to sin, and in Christ’s death is our birth to eternal life. Christ was born so that he may die upon the cross for our salvation. In this light, faith is a journey through the waste land to find the word of God hidden behind all the ambiguities of human life. This journey of faith is our conversion, and like the Magi returning to their kingdoms we shall find ourselves transformed by the ‘renewal of our minds’ (Rm.12:2). This brings us to an important underlying theological theme in this collection of sermons, and one which highlights their significance. Crouse believed that the lectionary itself was a spiritual discipline that take the Christian on a pilgrimage of faith, hence the title of the book Pilgrimage of the Soul. This book is structured according to the epistles and gospels allocated for Sundays in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer; and it was Crouse’s belief that this lectionary preserved the lectionary of the ancient Church. The contemporary Church may regard this as romanticised vision, but this collection is a good reminder that worldwide Anglicanism draws from the rich traditions of the patristic, medieval, and reformation eras represented by the deposit of Christian writings, such as Irenaeus, Dante and Aquinas, all of whom Crouse quotes in his sermons throughout the Christian year. In the sixth century, the Christian year emerged to provide a logical and coherent framework for proclaiming the life of Christ. The Book of Common prayer adopted this eucharistic lectionary from the Sarum Rite, and Crouse believed that since the influence of Vatican II Roman Catholicism upon the common lectionary only the Book of Common Prayer preserved this ancient lectionary. Liturgical scholars may question Crouse’s historical genealogy, but this does not belay the fact that this volume of sermons is valuable for appreciating the spiritual significance of the eucharistic lectionary. For Crouse, the year’s structure is the basis for Christian preaching in which from Advent to Trinity Sunday the lectionary testifies to the ‘works of God’ wherein the mind and heart of God are manifest in Jesus Christ ‘and what God has done and does for us: his incarnation, his epiphany, his Passion and resurrection, his bestowal of the Holy Spirit’ Crouse, i, p. 224.. The lectionary forms a design for sanctification; through celebrating the feasts of the year we have the revelation of the mystery of divine love in the life of Christ. As I was discerning my call to ordained ministry, I spent a year following the lectionary of the Book of the Common Prayer in my daily prayer, and I found that the pattern of Christ’s life was woven into my own life. As Rowan Williams indicates in his preface ‘my own story of how I have grown to be the person I am now is taken up into an incalculably larger story, the narrative of how God brought God’s own life to be’ Rowan Williams, ‘Preface’, in The Soul’s Pilgrimage: Vol 1: From Advent to Pentecost, by Robert Crouse, ed. by Susan Dodd and Gary Thorne (London: Darton, Lxongman and Todd, 2023), p. 17.. For Crouse, the direction of the Christian year has as its end the adoption by grace into God’s own life, that is participation in the person of God, in whom we are to be partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). The Church Fathers called this theôsis. Crouse wrote that the first six months of the year have their culmination on Trinity Sunday, in which the point of Christ’s saving acts is ‘summed up with the celebration of what is the whole point of it [i.e Christ’s life]- the divine life of God himself, in which we are called to share: adoptive sons, by grace, ‘heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ’ Crouse, i, p. 228. Reading this collection of Crouse’s sermons has been something of a spiritual recapitulation, in which I have been able to discover anew how the liturgical year in its proclamation provides a basis for our deification by laying out with deft skill how our life relates to the life of holiness in Christ. Thus, any Christian will find their spiritual lives enriched by reading this volume. The volume is handsomely set out, replete with the artwork that Crouse refers to in his sermons, and I appreciate that the editors have included bibliographical notes at the end of the volume. Such notes could distract from the sermons themselves if they were in the text, but placing them at the end is a helpful reference. If there are any weakness, it is that the sermons are rather unremoved from a particular parochial context, and if a preacher wanted to draw inspiration from these sermons they would have to think about how to apply it in their context. But one must ask, what is the purpose of such a collection of sermons? The sermons are general theological sermons rooted in a contemplative eucharistic spirituality, and there is a depth and richness to Crouse’ preaching that makes this collection essential devotional reading as a spiritual classic. I look forward to reading volume II.