Ashes From Burnt Roses: In Memoriam: Thomas Howard

Tuesday, October 20, 2020

In Memoriam: Thomas Howard

This is a little retrospective on Dr. Thomas Howard, author, scholar, English professor, conservative man of letters, and theologian who passed away on October 15^th. In a most beautiful obituary in First Things, titled “Thomas Howard, RIP,” Kenneth Craycraft relates the heart of the man.

Thomas Howard, who passed away on Thursday at the age of 85, made the journey from catholic evangelical to evangelical Catholic as gracefully and admirably as any who have made the journey. Though the adjective and noun changed places, Tom’s heart for the gospel never wavered. Neither did his gracious and generous friendship with all the evangelicals and Catholics for whom his influence was deep and abiding.

I can’t say I was familiar with Thomas Howard for what he’s mostly known for, and that is as a theologian and famous convert to the Catholic Church from Evangelism. I knew of Howard not from his religious writings nor of his famous conversion (which I did learn about later), but of his work on T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets. Howard’s Dove Descending is the definitive book on Eliot’s great poem. More on that later.

There are plenty of retrospectives on Howard for what he’s mostly known for. From Crises Magazine, Michael Warren Davis in “The Last Victorian” writes:

His orthodoxy was beyond question. Before he was one of the most popular and influential theologians in the Catholic Church, he was one of the most popular and influential theologians in the Evangelical movement. The Howards were a family of missionaries, among the most respected Protestant dynasties in the country. His conversion cost him his job at Gordon College and many of his friends. It certainly wasn’t a decision he made lightly. When he finally set off for Rome, it was because he knew he couldn’t really be at home anywhere else.

Getting to know him a bit through conversation and his books, what impressed me most was his love for Jesus Christ and the Christian faith, at once profound and childlike. He was fascinated by our great patrimony, and he wanted nothing more than to share it with everyone who would listen.

In Catholic World Reporter, Dale Ahlquist, who would later also follow Howard’s conversion into the Catholic Church writes in “In the Place of the Tiger” of the impact of Howard’s conversion:

I knew Thomas Howard a lot longer than he knew me. As an Evangelical Protestant, I had been reading his articles for many years in Christianity Today, a magazine that was standard reading fare in the home where I grew up. I got my own subscription as soon as I went to college, and read it faithfully for many years thereafter. But in all those years, one article still stands out from all the others. It was 1985. I will never forget the headline: “Well-known Evangelical Author Thomas Howard Converts to Catholicism”. It was the first of a three-parter devoted to what was an earth-shaking event in Evangelical circles. And I don’t think I can recall being more unsatisfied with anything I’ve ever read. I was shocked. I wanted to know how and why this had happened. I had a thousand questions, and nothing that I read there – including even an interview with Howard – provided adequate answers.

His friend, and also fellow convert, David Mills had perhaps the best tribute in the Catholic Herald, in an obituary titled, “RIP Thomas Howard: 1935-2020.”

First, a description of the man from Mills’ first encounter.

I met him in the late seventies, as a newish and secularish Christian. He invited me to a small reading group he hosted called Beer and Bull. The first book I remember us reading was an Orthodox work called The Way of the Ascetics, all of which was new to me, and a little strange. I also remember being amazed that so lively a man, who loved living so much, took asceticism so seriously. Only later did I see that his deep prayer and liturgical life created the lively man. Behind the effortlessness with which he seemed to move through the world lay a great deal of sacrifice and discipline and self-giving.

What a great name for a book club, the “Beer and Bull.” It beats the boring name (The Catholic Thought Book Club) of my book club. Second, Mills zeroes in on what made the man so compelling, and that had to do with a certain fairness to observation and thought.

Though a man of clear beliefs, he was not an ideologue: because he looked. Not a salesman or a preacher, but a man who shared what he saw and loved — and therefore a very good salesman and preacher.

“Because he looked.” How many of us have a built in bias and don’t really look at issues. A true intellectual should look. Third, Mills summarizes the man’s legacy.

Thomas Howard lived a life of integrity and honor — and less importantly, achievement — whose character influenced an astonishing number of people and therefore the people they influenced, in a knock-on effect that will continue for generations. It’s not many people of whom that is true. The world saw a very gifted man, but people who knew him saw first a very good man.

As I said at the opening, I know of Thomas Howard from his book, Dove Descending: A Journey into T. S. Eliots Four Quartets. Let me provide three short excerpts, which I hope captures the man, his thought process, and his elegant writing style. First from the Preface.

In my own view, this sequence of four poems—or this one single poem: it is not easy to settle even this elementary question—represents the pinnacle of Eliot’s whole work. He worked on it (them?) over a period of several years in the late 1930s and early 1940s, after a long period of having produced a number of dramas. The work (let us settle for the singular, without arguing the point too shrilly) lies on the hither side of the Himalayan watershed from the early poetry that had made him the giant of English poetry in the twentieth century: Eliot had converted to Orthodox Christian belief several years before he embarked on Four Quartets. (Ignatius Press Edition, p. 14-5)

Three lovely and elegant sentences which reflects the elegance of the man described by Warren Davis, Ahlquist, and Mills. When I searched around for excerpts of Howard’s writing, what struck me the most was the beauty of his prose. Second, looking at Eliot’s poem from an overarching view in the chapter Preliminary Remarks, Howard had this to say.

If we can venture, at mortal risk, to attempt a theme for it all (readers will sigh, having heard that word too many times from their English teachers), we might say that it all has something to do with the odd business of being mortal, that is, intelligent creatures existing here and in time, when all the while we are profoundly dissatisfied with this dismal sequence of past, present, and future. Time, in other words. The trouble with time is that it drains things away. We mortals have “intimations of immortality” and wish things would stay put, but they don’t. Houses burn down. Fields are bulldozed into highway interchanges (“bypasses”, in British English). We die and are buried. (p. 20, italics are Howard’s emphasis)

Why of course! So simply put. If you have not read the Four Quartets you will not realize how that perfectly captures the heart of the poem, a poem of the highest modernist complexity that has baffled many a reader. I have spent years reading that poem and could not find the succinct words to explain it. I have read other literary criticism of the poem, and no one has put it so simply and so accurately. No one, I dare say, has conceptualized the totality of the poem like that. And now you know. So, if you haven’t, go read the poem!

Finally I want to highlight a section of Howard’s commentary on a particular passage in Four Quartets, this from the second quartet titled East Coker. First the passage from Eliot’s poem.

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,

The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,

The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,

The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,

Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,

Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,

And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha

And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,

And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.

And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,

Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you

Which shall be the darkness of God. (lines 102-114 of East Coker of the Four Quartets)

And now for Howard’s commentary.

Readers should have no difficulty with the first nine lines. When men die they go into the dark. That would seem patent. The jolting thing about Eliot’s particular listing of death’s conscripts is the (typically Eliotonian) “unpoetic” nature of the roster. All these successful citizens. The Almanach de Gotha is the register of European royalty and nobility. The Dirctory of Directors (there is one) seems particularly ironic.

And of course we all go with them. But what about this “silent funeral, / Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury”? Well, for a start, most funerals are silent, more or less. Not much clashing and clanging of cymbals and so forth. But “Nobody’s funeral”? You have to have a body for a funeral, surely? Yes, but the point is that by the time you tot up all the funerals there are, you find yourself concluding that whose funeral any particular funeral is unimportant. They are all the same. Dead men are, as far as this world is concerned, Nobody. “No one to bury”? Again, this duke or director or distinguished civil servant has joined the anonymous ranks of the dead. We are burying a nonentity. (p. 77, italics are Howard’s emphasis)

Well, Thomas Howard has now gone into the “dark, dark” himself. He is not a “nobody.” He was a brilliant, courageous, and elegant man. Let us hope that he now has passed the darkness and entered the eternal light. May he rest in peace.