“Canadian Gold”
By the Rev’d Dr. Thomas Plant
Thomas Plant is a priest of the Anglican Church in Japan, chaplain at Rikkyo (St Paul’s) University in Tokyo, and a fellow of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Platonism. He is the author of The Lost Way to the Good (Angelico, 2021).
To paraphrase Nathaniel, good things can come out of Canada, even in today’s political climate and even from the Anglican Church. Though not as well known to the outside world as a Radner, Peterson, or Pageau, a hardy band of traditional Anglo-Catholic Canadians lives on, including the principal of Pusey House in Oxford and the president of the new Ralston College in Georgia. Their spiritual home is King’s College, Halifax, where they were formed under a common spiritual and intellectual mentor, Fr. Robert Darwin Crouse (d. 2011).
Fr. Crouse’s name deserves to be better known, and the reader need not take my word for this. Rowan Williams describes him as “a touchstone of spiritual and intellectual integrity”; Professor Douglas Hedley of Cambridge recounts the “magnificent and serene simplicity” of his writings, and he was hailed in the citation for his Doctor of Divinity as “the conscience of the Canadian church.” A classicist and mediaevalist, he brought his love of ancient philosophy and, particularly, of Dante into his preaching, recently published in three volumes, which confirms his reputation not only as a scholar but also as a beloved spiritual director.
Re-membered into God
The first and smallest tome, Images of Pilgrimage, comprises a series of addresses given at a retreat in St. Augustine’s Monastery, Nova Scotia. These could easily be read in a day and would make a good companion to an individual on retreat or as reflections for a group. In the spirit of the locale, these writings convey Crouse’s own Augustinian and more broadly Platonic sensibilities. As the title suggests, they take the form of a pilgrimage, leading the retreatant from Eden to the New Jerusalem through images both biblical and pagan.
Pilgrimage, Crouse maintains, is a universal and not only Christian symbol for the spiritual life. Homer’s Odyssey conveys this life as a journey of procession and return home, with struggles on the way. Yet Dante shows the ultimate futility of the merely pagan route, a cycle doomed by human hubris to unending repetition.
Taking the reader through biblical symbols and the Confessions of St. Augustine, with occasional refreshment en route from the likes of St. Bonaventure and George Herbert, Crouse reveals the remedy for the waters of Lethe: the manna in the wilderness and the water from Meribah, the sacramental body and blood of Christ, by which amnesia yields to anamnesis and the faithful are re-membered into God. The key to Christian pilgrimage is that fruits of friendship and charity invite paradise into the very wilderness in which we live, yet, crucially, draw us beyond this world to our eternal home.
The West’s Spiritual Imagination
Similar peregrinations continue in the two volumes of The Soul’s Pilgrimage, an anthology of Fr. Crouse’s sermons for the Sundays and other feast days of the church year, arranged according to the church calendar. Plenty of such collections exist, and homilists may wonder why they need another set on their shelf. The most obvious distinguishing feature of Fr. Crouse’s collection is the lectionary it follows. Crouse was an ardent apologist for the old Western lectionary based on the “Comes” of St. Jerome, preserved even now in the Tridentine rite and, with very minor variations, in the Church of England’s 1662 Book of Common Prayer.
This one-year cycle of Epistle and Gospel readings was, until the 1960s, the common lectionary of almost all the Western Church, Catholic and Protestant, and, Crouse avers, it formed the collective spiritual imagination of the West. He makes a convincing case for the logic of its ordering, referring back and forth in his sermons to what is about to come and what has just been read before. This contributes to the sense of being guided, week by week, on a pilgrimage through the church year and so the life of Christ.
The familiarity Crouse evinces with the weekly lessons was formed by many years of annual repetition, which tacitly buttresses his convictions: today’s more common three-year cycle of readings is beyond the natural reach of the human memory and eludes such familiarity as the older order imparts. Crouse also makes clear the relationship between the Epistle and Gospel for each Sunday: each Gospel shows something Christ has done for us, while its concomitant Epistle shows how Christ effects this within us.
This distinction is echoed in the division of the two volumes. The first half of the old lectionary, ranging from Advent to Pentecost and latterly Trinity Sunday, elaborates in time the procession of Christ from heaven to the Virgin’s womb and his return via cross and tomb. The latter half shows his works continued by the Holy Spirit in the Church, culminating in the Michaelmas feasts of angels and, set above them, all the saints of heaven.