(From the River Thames Beach Party)
Brothers, we have lost a giant.
The Reverend Dr. Crouse, Patristics scholar and Anglican theologian passed away in his sleep last week. Dr. Crouse was a professor and mentor to a number of people currently on the board of the Prayer Book Society in the United States, and without his instruction and influence Anglicanism in North America would be in much greater disarray than it currently is. It is our fervent prayer that in future years Dr Crouse’s multiple essays on classical Anglican and Patristic theology will serve to guide those who desire to continue within the Anglican Way.
The following paragraphs are excerpted from the obituary written this week by Dr. W. J. Hankey, a colleague and long time friend in the Classics Department of Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
On the night of Friday the 14th, in his 81st year, the Reverend Professor Robert Darwin Crouse died in his sleep in his childhood home in Crousetown, Lunenburg county, where his family has been established for more than 200 years. He had been very ill for several years, but played the organ for the Liturgy at St Mary the Virgin, Crousetown, the Sunday before last. His contributions of the highest level to the Classics Department of Dalhousie University, to the University of King’s College, and to their students, to international scholarship, to the Anglican Church of Canada, and to the musical life of Nova Scotia make his passing momentous. The Department of Classics has received condolences from many parts of Europe and North America.
In 1981 Robert was the founder of St Peter Publications in Charlottetown and of the Atlantic Theological Conferences, both of which continue. For five decades Fr 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.
Harvard granted him an S.T.B. (cum laude) in 1954. After he was ordained priest by the Bishop of Nova Scotia, Robert moved to Trinity College, Toronto where he was a Tutor in Divinity for three years and earned a Master of Theology (1st class Honours) in 1957. Trinity awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Divinity in 1983.
In 1970 Robert became 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 characterized by the greatest economy, precision and beauty of language. … 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 Classics, as well as members of the Departments of German and Sociology, as the first co-ordinators responsible for the structure and lectures of the Foundation Year Programme at King’s. His Section on the Middle Ages was a model of the integration of literary, philosophical, religious, social and artistic culture. With camera in hand he 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 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. … Outside of the classroom his greatest contribution there was in the Chapel. His celebration of the liturgy and his sermons had enormous influence on the lives of students and faculty. Moreover, he established the choir for the Thursday Solemn Eucharist which is now the foundation of the musical renaissance at King’s.
Robert’s gifts as an organist and choirmaster, were extended not only to parishes (notably in his home parish of Petite Riviere, Holy Trinity, Bridgewater, and St James’, Halifax) and chapels. Soon after he returned to Nova Scotia, he assisted in the rescue and restoration of an early 19th century tracker organ which became the centre of forty-seven years of Summer Baroque concerts at St Mary’s Crousetown. While such concerts of early music have now become staples of our Summer fare in the Maritimes, Robert was a pioneer.
After the concerts, receptions at his house allowed musicians and their audiences to admire Robert’s extraordinary gardens. He was always an organic gardener, and inspired many to imitate his practices; his salads provoked awe, and his rosary, with 129 varieties, delight. … He eschewed radio, television, and telephone. Around the walls of the room where Robert spent most of his time, [there is] carved in Carolingian Latin, an inscription from Scripture. They are words St Bernard took from Isaiah for the habituations of his Cistercian monks and nuns who keep silence strictly, they translate thus: “The solitary place shall be glad, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the lily…and a highway shall be there and a way, and it shall be called the way of holiness” (Isaiah 35.1-9) At the heard of all Robert’s apparently endless practicality lay a carefully guarded silence which enabled the depth of his thought, his communion with God, nature, and humanity, and his unmovable independence of mind. Among his greatest gifts as a teacher was his communication of the necessity, goodness, and beauty of contemplative silence.
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