The Revd Dr Nicholas Cranfield writes:
EDWARD Armitage Robinson, who died at home in Exeter on 30 May,
was born in 1921 to a family with strong clerical links. His
father, Arthur W. Robinson DD (1856-1928), was a canon of
Canterbury, and in 1902 wrote The Personal Life of the
Clergy. He later produced a widely used explanation of the
Church's Catechism for confirmands. Edward's uncle, after whom he
was named Armitage, was Dean successively of Westminster and of
Wells (from 1902 to 1933). Edward's grandfather George Robinson had
been Vicar of Keynsham in Kent. For ten years from 1959, his elder
brother John, who died 30 years ago, was Bishop of Woolwich.
After Marlborough and Christ Church, Oxford, Edward's career as
a classicist took him into schoolmastering, first in England and
then in Zambia, where he was a headmaster for 15 years. Africa was
his first love. It was on that great continent that he was able to
pur-sue his keen botanical interest as a plant collector, mostly in
Zam- bia, but more widely in South Africa, Malawi, Tanzania, and
the Congo.
According to Gunn & Codd, E. A. Robinson is commemorated
with at least eight taxa that do not appear in southern Africa.
Many of these specimens, which include Euphorbia,
Cyperacea, Dracaenaca, Leguminosa,
Hydrophyllaca, and Convolvuli, which he collected
between 1953 and 1965, he presented to Kew.
On one trip back to Africa, he met Wendy Flintoff on board ship.
She was on her way to set up a teacher-training college in
Bechuanaland, and was clutching a copy of John Robinson's
Honest to God (1963). He did not let on that it was his
brother's book, but admitted that reading it was like "trying to
eat soup with a fork". She took it as a good sign that he was
reading Carl Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul.
They married in August 1964, and their first two sons were born
in Africa. Back in England in 1967, where his third son was born,
the distinguished marine biologist Sir Alister Hardy, knowing his
interest in taxonomy, invited Robinson to join him in Oxford at the
Religious Experience Research Unit in 1970. He later succeeded
Hardy as the unit's second director. (The unit has been at Lampeter
since 2000.)
It was his work with the unit which produced his best writing,
as he sought to explore an apophatic understanding of God:
Living with Questions (1978) and The Original
Vision (1983), which is a study of the religious experience of
childhood. Much of his thought derived from a fondness for Nicholas
of Cusa.
Robinson's views on education remained profoundly theological;
in a lecture in 1985, "The Experience of Transfiguration", whose
title, he admitted, was a lecture in and of itself, he argued: "If
we are going to justify religious education, especially in these
days when the cultural argument no longer has the weight it once
did, we have got to see it as fulfilling a unique and irreplaceable
function; we have got to show that it can help us to understand
life spiritually."
Robinson was also a notable sculptor, using his creative powers
to reflect on how the fragmentary nature of our day-to-day world
can be drawn together in a harmonious whole. He wrote that "All
works of art may be thought of as forms of silence," and, after a
period as artist in residence at the Othona community in west
Dorset in 1996, he held exhibitions there, and at Exeter,
Canterbury, and, shortly before his death, Westminster Abbey,
"Forms of Silence".
Aptly, his funeral was held at the Society of Friends' Meeting
House in Exeter on 13 June.