RDC’s Atlantic Theological Conference Papers

By Dr. Neil G. Robertson

Neil G. Robertson is an associate professor in the Foundation Year, Early Modern Studies and Contemporary Studies programs at the University of King’s College, Halifax.

“You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Augustine addresses these words to God in the opening of his Confessions, trying to articulate the most basic motivation of his life. And this Augustinian insight into the human condition is at the centre of Robert Crouse’s theological vision. In these terms - restlessness seeking rest in God - the human condition is seen as pilgrimage. And the pilgrimage that is at the centre of Fr. Crouse’s theology and spirituality is the pilgrimage of love – amor – in the Latin that Fr. Crouse so often used. The pilgrimage of amor is an image of God’s relation to all of creation, and an image of God’s own inner life as the life of the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The Works of Robert Crouse publication project has already drawn this central theme to our attention by making available a series of clergy retreat addresses, The Images of Pilgrimage, and also a number of his sermons arranged according to the Prayer Book lectionary as The Soul’s Pilgrimage. I, together with my co-editors Lawrence Bruce-Robertson and Susan Dodd, are at work on a further volume in this series, A Theology of Pilgrimage. This new volume gathers together the papers that Fr. Crouse gave at the Atlantic Theological Conference from its inception in 1981 until 2007, the last year he was able to make a contribution to that still active annual gathering in the Maritime Provinces. Together these papers provide a wonderful adumbration of the theological vision of Robert Crouse in all its depth and richness, addressed not to academics or professional theologians, but rather to an educated general audience - both clergy and laity.

Robert Crouse’s theological vision is at once perfectly simple - a theology of the pilgrimage of amor - and yet it is also multifaceted and profound. For Fr. Crouse, theological vision inherently involves the history of theology and indeed the history of the Church and of Christian culture broadly considered. In this sense, Fr. Crouse saw memory or recollection as integral to the work of theology today, and indeed basic to living the life of Christian faith with hope in the contemporary world.

At the heart of Fr. Crouse’s theology of pilgrimage, stands the theological standpoint of Augustine, for it is really Augustine who crucially explicates the theology of pilgrimage as a pilgrimage of amor. Key to this account is that amor or love is not just in the desire and longing of the restlessness of the human heart but amor is itself also the rest, the peace and fulfillment of that heart. Augustine portrays this as the sabbath rest of the City of God, humanity reconciled in and through the love of God, and with this he concludes the Confessions. Pilgrimage is thus not only the way to unity with God, but it is also our life in God and God’s very own life. For Fr. Crouse, to understand the pilgrimage of amor is to understand both who we are, the nature of our soul as love, and to understand God in in his divinity as love. In this we come to see our souls, our selves, as reflections of God as Trinity, and we understand that our fulfillment is finding our trinitarian life in God’s life mirroring the eternal inner self-giving pilgrimage of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

For Fr. Crouse, Augustine's account of the pilgrimage of amor is the fullest theological reflection of the Early Church’s reception of what was revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, but it is at the same time the foundation for the theological and spiritual development of the Middle Ages culminating in the high medieval synthesis, expressed poetically in Dante’s Divine Comedy. But, as readers will see, there is a further culmination of what Fr. Crouse called “the Augustinian Tradition” in the spirituality of Classical Anglicanism, above all in the Book of Common Prayer.

There is so much that could and should be said of how Fr. Crouse develops the theology of pilgrimage, but that is why reading these papers can be so helpful and reading them collected together can provide wonderful opportunities to see connections and interrelations among those contributions. I would suggest that Fr. Crouse’s theological writings might allow us each to find the road of pilgrimage and our way out of the dark wood in which we have become lost.