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Vol I No. 10

The Signs are always Propitious

by
Christopher Snook

The ongoing publication of the works of Robert Crouse is a welcome (perhaps urgent) invitation to encounter one of great theological minds of the past half century. For those who knew him, they are also a reminder of his unmatched capacity for clarity and wisdom in the context of what Crouse himself recognized as the perennial apocalypse of world history, recently alluded to in Eucharistic lections for the season of Advent with their end-of-the world anticipations: ‘The signs are always propitious, it seems’ writes Crouse in a sermon for The Second Sunday in Advent, ‘[d]istress of nations, with perplexity, and fearful hearts. These are no uncommon experiences; they are our daily diet’.1R. D. Crouse, The Soul’s Pilgrimage Volume 1: From Advent to Pentecost (Darton, Longman, and Todd, 2023), p 52.

I first encountered Robert Crouse in 1994, while a student in Canada’s first Great Books programme, the Foundation Year at the University of King’s College. Subsequently, as a young Christian seeking a golden thread to lead me from the early Church through centuries of reform and theological development that might sustain me in the apparent wilderness of contemporary spirituality, I encountered Crouse as a priest and pastor before finally, and all too briefly, joining him as a colleague at the College where we first met. In these encounters, brief as many were and as awkward as I was when faced by the astoundingly resonant silence that inevitably accompanied Crouse, I discovered a diagnosis of my own spiritual malaise, was pointed towards its cure, and confronted by an apocalyptic promise that simultaneously judged and freed me. It is this trinity of gifts I would like to discuss.

In 1922, T.S. Eliot published the iconic modernist poem, The Waste Land. An exploration of mass culture in the immediate aftermath of World War I, Eliot’s poem includes any number of themes: the consequences of the war, British urbanization, contemporary romance and its discontents, and all of this in the context of allusions to the medieval quest for the Holy Grail. For Eliot, the poem’s periodically neurotic and plaintive tone suggests a collapse both personal and civilizational, embodied by the work’s bewildering inclusion of fragments from high and popular culture. Crouse referred to this sense of personal and cultural impasse in his renowned annual lectures on Dante’s Divine Comedy in the Foundation Year Program. And not only there, but in essays and sermons as well, he identified a cultural crisis common to both ancient paganism and various modern moralisms. Of the ancients, he writes:

The impasse of pagan idealism is eloquently expressed in the tragic poets and philosophers, and in the various religious movements, of ancient pagan culture. Their universal testimony is simply this: the gulf between the pure and perfect good, which is divine, and the realities of finite human life, is eternally unbridgeable, and man is condemned to endless cycles of aspiration and defeat.2R. D. Course, ‘The Ministry of Reconciliation: Anglican approaches’, in Holy Living: Christian Morality Today (St. Peter Publications, n.d.), p. 52.

Our contemporary moment is much the same:

In modern times, pagan moralism lives, in parasitical relation, upon a certain moral capital inherited from Christianity; but the despair is there, often just below the surface, because the spirit is not in it. And, lest you suppose that I’ve been squandering precious time on issues irrelevantly ancient, I will update the picture with just one of countless modern witnesses; the poignant testimony of Franz Kafka: ‘There is a goal, but no way; what we call way is only wavering.’ The temptation is to multiply modern witnesses, but that one sentence really says it all.’3Ibid

In his Dante lectures, Crouse regularly summarized the ancient and modern tragic visions with reference to T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’:

I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannels trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

For young students already aware of a world-weariness that could erupt even in the midst of youth (‘I grow old’) and acutely sensitive to the distance between what the world is and what it might be, Crouse’s diagnosis of modernity’s malaise was in the end strangely affirmative. It allowed students to discover in their sense that the world might be otherwise and that they themselves might be better than they were not simply wishful thinking, or the remnants of an empty idealism, but an intelligent insight into the nature of things. Namely, that humans naturally desire a supernatural end.

With Crouse, I discovered that disaffection and its attendant restlessness was not simply something to get over. Rather, it was in fact a starting place. The challenge was to use it as a goad, unlike Prufrock for whom it amounts to a kind of paralysis (‘Do I dare to eat a peach?’). Still more, Crouse invited students, congregants, and conference attendees during a lifetime of teaching to beware of one thing: the despair of Prufrock for whom the cosmos sings, but not for him: ‘That is, I think, our one basic moral problem: we lose direction, and we lose heart; we become demoralized, and stand on the border of despair.’

In 2007, Crouse received an honorary doctorate from the University of King’s College, with which he had been associated for some sixty years. He also delivered an address in which he articulated what had in many ways been the substance of his priestly and pedagogical vocation – the suggestion that despair is the fruit of forgetfulness and thus the work of the Church, on the one hand, and of the university on the other, is recollection: ‘The past is always and inevitably here, and our choice is only whether to posses it consciously in recollection, or to possess it in the form of unreflective prejudice, devoid of understanding.4Address, https://ukings.ca/alumni/events/encaenia/2007-encaenia/the-reverend-doctor-robert-darwin-crouses-convocation-address/

It is not altogether obvious, perhaps, that the work of recollection is an antidote to the various forms of despair shaped by and shaping contemporary culture. These despairs are institutional and personal, from the mental health crises precipitated by an almost endless proliferation of technological forms of alienation, to the expanding bureaucracies that replace love of neighbour with statistical forms of population management, to the persistence of any number of social inequalities. Even the Church and the university, the fields of Crouse’s labours, appear increasingly hostile to any work of recollection that does not sift the past in light of contemporary preoccupations, producing in the end an ‘empty present’ that is ‘a virulent form of hell.’5Ibid The combined weight of these negative forces can seem, at times, to engulf the world.

But the pedagogy of Crouse invited countless people to discover a world richer, more dynamic, and ultimately far more inclusive than those conjured by contemporary anxieties. In the university, for example, Crouse’s lectures expanded the inner capacities of his students precisely by amplifying and articulating the historical content of their own subjectivities. The tensions of the past, its glories, questions, disputes, victories, and failures – all constituted a common inheritance that could reveal the ‘substantial dimension’ of ‘the present, fleeting moment.’6Ibid And in this sense the agonies of what even the youth of my student days perceived as a cultural call to endless self-fashioning were relieved through the discovery of a personal life not simply one’s own but shaped in constant conversation with proximate and distant voices. This secular communion (what G.K. Chesterton calls, famously, the ‘democracy of the dead’) worked as a kind of proto-evangelion – a preparation for the Gospel that hinted for students like me at a fundamental truth as simple as it is urgent: we are not alone.

In the life of the Church, this call to recollection is evoked again and again by Crouse in addresses, sermons, and lectures intended to edify the faithful in a time of ecclesiastical amnesia. At its most fundamental, Crouse discerns in his writings that the Church is constituted by acts of recollection which, more than simply memorializing past events, in fact make them present, chiefly in the sacrifice of the Holy Communion: ‘Do this in memory of me.’

But Christ’s word in the Eucharist in fact gathers up all of the calls to remember scattered throughout the Scriptures: the annual Passover’s remembering of the Israelites’ deliverance from slavery in Egypt; the prophets’ insistence that, though humans forget God, the Lord will remember his people; and the much larger work of recollection which is the Incarnation of the Son of God. As Crouse writes:

As memory is in personality, so is tradition in the Church’s life. Tradition is the Church’s memory. … All this is clearly illustrated in the Scriptures, both in the Old Testament and the New. Israel is faithful when, and only when, Israel remembers: ‘Thou shalt remember that thou was a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the Lord thy God redeemed thee.’ The very heart of religious life under the Old Covenant consists in recollection: ‘Thou shalt remember.’ Passover recalls Israel’s deliverance from bondage, and that commemoration of the past defines both Israel’s relation to God in the present, and Israel’s messianic expectation. And the New Israel also remembers, for we too celebrate a Passover, to remember, to commemorate God’s saving work in Jesus Christ, and to anticipate the fullness of his kingdom. Anamnesis is the technical term: the presence of the past in all its virtue, the historical past as present reality for present understanding and adoration.7R. D. Crouse, ‘Tradition and Renewal’ in Tradition: Received and Handed On (St. Peter Publications, n.d.) p 92.

Thus, memory becomes the matrix of personal, ecclesial, and even cultural renewal. But its shape is, in the sermons of Crouse, always the same: firstly, a recollection by faith of Christ’s saving work for us (our justification) and, secondly, an appropriation of that work through the exercise of grace (our sanctification). At a cultural moment when practices of mindfulness have become prescriptive for everything from overwork to depression, Crouse amplifies this secular iteration or echo of ancient nepsis (watchfulness) by supplying its content: by faith, we possess:

an inner space of reconciliation; the knowledge of our justification; an inner space of peace and clarity, in which the Spirit teaches us the patience to look upon our trials … in the perspective of eternity … We do possess, in faith, a vision of the pure and perfect good, which is no mere vision, but our home; a vision in which all the scattered leaves of hopes and prophecies are bound together, as Dante says, into one volume, in the charity of God.8Crouse ‘Reconciliation’ pp 55-56.

This appropriation of God’s work for us is the ground of the growth in friendship between ourselves and Christ which, ultimately, sanctifies our soul, both instantiating in us the life of heaven in the midst of the world and fitting us for the perfection of love in the world to come.

At least in my experience, the ministry of Crouse constantly solicits me to abandon the various iterations of despair that so easily and so often cloud my spiritual vision. In its place, his work feels like a kind of singing, calling the soul to remember the dignity and loveliness conferred upon it by Christ its spouse, and inviting the soul to sing what the Psalmist calls ‘the song of ascents’ as we make our way to the heavenly Jerusalem.

A dear friend of mine had a mug for many years at the base of which these words appeared: ‘It has a happy ending’. The words were taken from an unpublished question and answer period following Crouse’s contribution to an evening lecture series on Augustine’s influence in the history of philosophy. Having presented a paper on the Augustinianism of Descartes, the floor was open for discussion. In response to a question which presupposed an unknowable or ultimately tragic conclusion to the cosmos, Crouse responded with a powerful assertion of a fundamental Christian insight that has provided me with a touchstone for some thirty years: the cosmos ‘has a happy ending’.

That the world is ultimately comic and not tragic; that it tends not towards dissolution but towards the fulfillment of God’s providential plan; that the Cross itself is the shape of history, God’s constantly at work to draw even our sins into his redemptive plan, is a promise that constitutes both a kind of judgement and liberation.

As Crouse knew well, to hope for less than a final restoration of all things – a mending of all that is broken – is to betray not just the greatest aspirations of the human spirit, but it is to ignore the declarations of God himself, manifest in Word and Sacrament. Crouse never tired of pointing out that even the secular ambitions of political utopians are echoes of that more fundamental aspiration for an end that exceeds the possibilities of worldly harmonies. It is this exceeding of all worldly expectations that makes of Christian hope a foil to the inevitable tyrannies that arise from the efforts to realize paradise now. And it is also this hope that allows us to praise the Lord even in the midst of tribulations. Christ comes with a Kingdom not of this world, and so this world’s crises and conflicts (which do indeed demand of us prayer and service) do not ultimately determine our aspirations or anticipations:

Our Christian hope is surely established in the promises of God; our despair is all our own, and of our own making. We know not the day nor the hour of hope’s fulfillment; nor do we know the precise manner of it, nor the form it will take. We can only sow in hope; the harvest is God’s business, and he will give the increase. ‘But you must know’, says Meister Eckhart, in his wonderfully paradoxical way, ‘that God’s friends are never without consolation, for whatever God wills is for them the greatest consolation of all, whether it be consolation or desolation’.9R. D. Crouse, ‘Hope Which Does Not Disappoint: The Path to Genuine Renewal’ in Anglican Essentials: Reclaiming Faith within the Anglican Church of Canada, (Anglican Book Centre 1995) p 290.

The promise of the publication of the works of the Revd Dr Robert Crouse, beginning with the first two volumes, is that the Church will again be called to a renewal of faith, hope, and love by a singular voice of immense spiritual authority – and at a moment when, indeed, the time is propitious.

Footnotes

  • 1
    R. D. Crouse, The Soul’s Pilgrimage Volume 1: From Advent to Pentecost (Darton, Longman, and Todd, 2023), p 52.
  • 2
    R. D. Course, ‘The Ministry of Reconciliation: Anglican approaches’, in Holy Living: Christian Morality Today (St. Peter Publications, n.d.), p. 52.
  • 3
    Ibid
  • 4
    Address, https://ukings.ca/alumni/events/encaenia/2007-encaenia/the-reverend-doctor-robert-darwin-crouses-convocation-address/
  • 5
    Ibid
  • 6
    Ibid
  • 7
    R. D. Crouse, ‘Tradition and Renewal’ in Tradition: Received and Handed On (St. Peter Publications, n.d.) p 92.
  • 8
    Crouse ‘Reconciliation’ pp 55-56.
  • 9
    R. D. Crouse, ‘Hope Which Does Not Disappoint: The Path to Genuine Renewal’ in Anglican Essentials: Reclaiming Faith within the Anglican Church of Canada, (Anglican Book Centre 1995) p 290.
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