Book Review: Images of Pilgrimage, The Soul’s Pilgrimage

This review first appeared in the July/August 2024 issue of Touchstone

Images of Pilgrimage
Robert D. Crouse
Gary Thorne, ed.
Dartman, Longman and Todd, 2023
96 pages, $18.99, hardcover

The Soul’s Pilgrimage, Volume I: From Advent to Pentecost
Robert D. Crouse
Gary Thorne, ed.
Dartman, Longman and Todd, 2023
253 pages, $37.99, hardcover

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, Georgia. Their spiritual home is King’s College, Halifax, where they were formed under a common spiritual and intellectual mentor, Fr Robert Darwin Crouse (obiit 2011). His name deserves to be better known, and the reader need not take my word for this. Rowan Williams describes Fr Crouse 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 as a beloved spiritual director.

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. 

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 Kalendar. Plenty 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 Spirit in the Church, culminating in the Michaelmas feasts of angels and, set above them, all the saints of heaven.

The content of the compilation is as compelling as the logic of its arrangement. Like the retreat addresses, Crouse’s sermons are rich with scriptural, patristic, classical and literary allusion, though his learning is lightly worn with no hint of mere show. The Soul’s Pilgrimage is essential for anyone who preaches from the Prayer Book Sunday lectionary, would be of great value to anyone who hears or preaches at the Tridentine mass, to Western-rite Orthodox readers, and to laity and clergy of any Western church who wish to recover the lost treasures of their tradition.

All three volumes are handsomely bound and printed without error. They benefit from learned and heartfelt forewords by the editors and Rowan Williams. The Soul’s Pilgrimage also contains full color artworks pertinent to Fr Crouse’s sermons, though these would have been at least as helpful in the unadorned Images of Pilgrimage, where the references are more direct. There is nothing to criticise, though one possible improvement might have been the inclusion of the Prayer Book collects for each feast day in the sermon collections, since these mostly ancient prayers encapsulate so well the meanings of the old lessons. It should be noted that many of these sermons are already published on the Lectionary Central website, but as a long-time user of that resource, I have always hoped for an edition bound in paper, more amenable to meditative reading. These volumes answer that need and, thanks to the editorial forewords and notes, give more besides.

Overall, American readers will find these Canadian spiritual writings somewhat different in tenor from the likes of, say, Thomas Merton. One would have to search hard for references to psychotherapy or Buddhism in these pages. Closer to the spirit of the late English spiritual director Martin Thornton, Crouse’s work is more self-consciously located within the English tradition in its widest sense, reaching down through the English Bible, Prayer Book and poets into the depths of common Western mediaeval and patristic tradition. In this reviewer’s opinion, Fr Crouse’s work represents much of what has been best about Anglicanism: a robust Christian Platonist humanism with spiritual and sacramental roots embedded deep in the universal Church, owning nothing to which a Catholic, Evangelical or Orthodox Christian could not say an honest and hearty “amen.”

For details, see www.worksofrobertcrouse.com.