Robert Crouse

Robert Darwin Crouse (1930-2011), was a Canadian religious philosopher.

Receiving his primary and secondary education in the village school of Crousetown and at King’s Collegiate School in Windsor contributed much to his love of music and of learning. One writer at the Collegiate School judges him the most outstanding scholar it graduated in its 223 year history. He arrived at Dalhousie University and King’s College in 1947, the year James Doull began teaching in the Classics Department. Robert graduated in Classics in 1951 and then spent a year studying philosophy at Dalhousie and theology at King’s. He organised at King’s a “revolutionary cell” of the Society of the Catholic Commonwealth, devoted to bringing together Marxism and Anglo-Catholicism; members read Aquinas and Marx. The authorities of the Anglican Diocese and King’s were unable to decide which was the more subversive and established a body, labelled the “Inquisition” by the students, to root out the theological and politically erroneous. It continued its work into the 1960s.

When Robert decamped to Harvard to read Divinity, he moved into the Cambridge Oratory of the Society. He broke with it in 1953, although he continued to inspire students to read Das Kapital, and his cousin, Dr Gary Ramey, now the socialist member of the Provincial Legislature for Lunenburg County, reports that his last meeting with Dr Crouse was when Robert dropped by to contribute to his campaign. He and the satirist Tom Lehrer were roommates at Harvard and from him Robert handed on the lyrics of “The Vatican Rag” and “God Bless Free Enterprise, System Divine.” In the Harvard Divinity School, Harry Wolfson pushed him to add German to his Greek, Latin and French. Robert consolidated it with a year of study at Tubingen in 1955. By way of his work on Dante, and his years of teaching in Italy at the Ambrosianum and the Augustinianum, he acquired Italian. Robert was a paradigm of the union of complete rootedness in his birthplace and international sophistication which has characterised seafaring Nova Scotia with its face to Europe, its right arm extended to Boston and the Caribbean, and its back to Canada. Harvard granted him an S.T.B. (cum lauda) in 1954 and he was ordained priest by the Anglican Bishop of Nova Scotia. Nonetheless, the Diocese of Nova Scotia and the Canadian church never ceased suspecting him of subversion.

As the liberal and neo-liberal revolutions spread north from the USA, Robert remained an unflinching adherent of the traditional liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer together with its lectionary, valuing its Patristic origins and structures. When the tactics of the ecclesiastical revolutionary authorities turned totalitarian, he became a tireless missionary for the liturgical, musical, and spiritual heritage. In this he kept faith with Anglo-Catholic inner-city parishes and with priests of the most impoverished fishing villages of the Maritimes, in some of which he served as a divinity student and when first ordained. Later he united in the same cause with Evangelicals from what once seems the opposed wing of the Anglican church. After Harvard, Robert moved to Trinity College, Toronto, where he was a Tutor in Divinity for three years and earned a Master of Theology (First Class Honours) in 1957. Trinity awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Divinity in 1983. Trinity’s citation celebrated him as the “conscience of the Canadian Church”; one both that church and the author of the citation took great care was not heeded.

Robert’s full-time teaching career began with an appointment as Assistant Professor of Church History and Patristics at Bishop’s University, in the Province of Quebec. When he returned to Nova Scotia in 1963 to join the Classics Department of Dalhousie, several of his former students at Bishop’s followed him; one of them, the Augustinian scholar Dr. Colin Starnes, became Professor of Classics and President of the University of King's College.

At Dalhousie, together with James Doull, Robert played an essential role in creating a distinctive way of presenting Classics. Lovers of the ancient languages and masters of these and of philology, they subordinated them to bringing out the argument of texts so as to expose their logic, allowing it to persuade the attentive student. The scholarly sciences were used, not to enforce historicism, but to break down the barriers between past, present, and future. With both teachers, question and silence were fundamental. Their vision of the scope of Classics—for Doull and Crouse it must include Hellenism’s relation to the Middle Eastern cultures with which it united to form our actual historical realities—, and the priority they gave to the argument of ancient and mediaeval texts enabling them to speak to us now, have made the Department exceptionally successful both within Canada and internationally.

Professor Crouse was neither an Anglican nor a Christian theologian, but, simply, as he tirelessly made clear, a theologian, tout court; practicing the science the Greeks invented. He situated himself at the present terminus of the tradition of Homer and defined his work as creative recollection of the whole movement. When theology turned from myth to science, what Robert called his favourite theological book appeared early: Book Lambda of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. For him the fundamental question of the science was stated best by Plato: how the coming forth of the Many from the One and the union of the Many with the One are thinkable. Like Plato himself, Plotinus, and Boethius, Robert understood that this thinking was not possible apart from the grace of the One and this depended on prayer. His theology of grace was that of the old Hellenes, the Fathers and the Mediaevals: grace and works were two sides of a single divine-human activity.

Together with Hilary Armstrong and Patrick Atherton, in 1977, Crouse and Doull founded Dionysius. In 1981 Robert helped establish St Peter Publications in Charlottetown and the Atlantic Theological Conferences, both of which continue strongly. For five decades Father Crouse delivered uncounted theological and spiritual addresses, conferences, and retreats and guided the hundreds who came to him for help. The extent of his labours, which embraced North America and Europe, was suggested when the Diocese of Saskatchewan made him its Canon Theologian.

In 1970 Robert became a PhD of Harvard University; his dissertation was a critical edition of the De Neocosmo of Honorius Augustodunensis. He supervised scores of MA theses at Dalhousie and directed and examined dozens of doctoral dissertations there and throughout North America and Europe. His lectures, sermons, and scholarly publications (he published over seventy articles, reviews, and translations) were polished artefacts characterised by the greatest economy, precision, and beauty of language. He served as Chairman of the Department of Classics from 1971 to 1976 and was made full Professor in 1976. He retired as Emeritus Professor in 1996. In 1990 the Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum in Rome named him Visiting Professor of Patrology, a post he took up repeatedly until 2004; he was the first non-Roman Catholic to be given this distinction.

In 1972 he joined other members of the Department of Classics, as well as members of the Departments of German and Sociology, at Dalhousie University, as the first co- ordinators responsible for the structure and lectures of the Foundation Year Programme at King’s. At the time, the College was bankrupt in every sense and this Programme became the basis of its eminently successful reconstruction: intellectually, religiously, and financially. His Section on the Middle Ages was a model of the integration of literary, philosophical, religious, social and artistic culture. With camera in hand, Robert crisscrossed Europe bringing back the history of Romanesque and Gothic architecture. His lectures on architecture and music opened many students to hitherto hidden mysteries. His lectures on Dante’s Divine Comedy in the Programme were so loved that he continued them well after retirement, giving his last series in 2003. Former students returned annually to hear them. Suitably his last lectures in the University were delivered on the Confessions of St Augustine in 2004 in the Foundation Year Programme.

At King’s he was a Carnegie Professor from 1979 and Clerk of Convocation between 1972 and 1994, responsible both for the choice of honorary degree candidates and the conduct of the Encaenia ceremonies; he served as Vice-President for two years and Director of the Foundation Year Programme for one. King’s awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Divinity in 2007.

References

• Dodaro, Robert (2007). "Preface". Divine Creation in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Thought: Essays Presented to the Rev'd Dr. Robert D. Crouse. Brill. ISBN 9004156194.
• Hankey, Wayne. "Visio: the Method of Robert Crouse's Philosophical Theology" (PDF).

External links

• The Recollected Pastor