Pondering the Permanent Things

A review of a collection of Thomas Howard's essays along with recollections of Howard by Fr Dwight Longenecker who knew him.

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Fr Dwight Longenecker

Pondering the Permanent Things: Reflections on Faith, Art, and Culture, by Thomas Howard, edited by Keith Call (336 pages, Ignatius Press, 2023)

It must have been the late 1990s. Stratford Caldecott had invited me to participate in a symposium at Oxford. Barbara Reynolds—the friend and colleague of Dorothy Sayers—was the keynote speaker, and Tom Howard and his wife Lovelace were present. Tom had also been invited to give a presentation, and it was our first opportunity to meet. (For those who are unfamiliar with Tom Howard, take time to go here to read Joseph Pearce’s homage, written at Howard’s passing in 2021.)

The closing event of the conference was a fancy dinner in the hall of Christ Church and I found myself seated next to Tom at the high table. He had read a couple of my books, and I had known of him not only by virtue of his volumes Evangelical is Not Enough and Chance or the Dance?, but also because my sister Denise had been his student at Gordon College.

Tom remembered Denise and was surprised to learn that she had moved to England and married an Anglican priest, but was not surprised to learn that she had published a couple of books and become an established authority on the seventeenth-century poet Thomas Traherne.^[*]

What I remember most about that evening was Tom Howard’s delight with the conference, with Oxford, with England, and with life generally. At one point he leaned over and chuckled, “Look at the two of us. Just a couple of fundamentalist nobodies—a Wheaton grad and a Bob Jones boy—and here we are seated at high table like Oxford dons. I feel somewhat of a fraud, don’t you?”

I laughingly agreed. I have recently reminisced about my own extended stay in England in my autobiography—always reflecting that my twenty-five years in the land of the Inklings was something of a pipe dream. When I returned to my native USA to become a Catholic priest in 2006, I felt like Rip Van Winkle waking up. Tom sympathized, for we bumped into one another a couple more times and had the chance to compare notes now that I had not only joined him in the Catholic Church, but also been ordained as a Catholic priest.

Knowing of my friendship with Tom Howard, Keith Call, who was working as an archivist at Wheaton College, got in touch with me as he was collecting some of Howard’s incidental writings.

Ignatius Press has published the collection as Pondering the Permanent Things. Like most anthologies of essays, it is a book to dip into. Here you will find the account of Howard’s meeting with C.S.Lewis, his thoughts on Mozart and T.S.Eliot, his homage to Evangelical heroes like John Stott and Billy Graham, and his musings on liturgy, church architecture, hymns, and drama. All the essays sparkle with Howard’s gentlemanly style—an inimitable blend of erudition, wit, and wonder. Alas, alack—the bow-tied professor was never tongue-tied. He chuckles over Tolkien, laughs with Lewis, enthuses over Eliot, and ponders the poetry, prayers, and prose that were the stuff of decades of teaching English to undergraduates.

While Howard’s style was always lighthearted, his content was never lightweight. The foundation of this delightful collection is Howard’s important essays on Art and Religion. He sees the integral importance of the incarnation to Christian art, and while he praises the historic Catholic integration of art and worship, he gently upbraids and challenges his Evangelical audience to consider why their abstract and cerebral experience is so often lacking in beauty. Why is Protestantism so suspicious of splendor? Why is there so little great Protestant art?

Howard traces the lack to a kind of gnosticism that worries perhaps too much about “worldliness,” which in an attempt to avoid vanity and excess, also sidesteps splendor and dismisses the experience of beauty in worship. Hilaire Belloc observed that “every argument is a theological argument,” and Howard identifies Protestantism’s austerity as a misunderstanding and minimization of the doctrine of the incarnation. While he doesn’t accuse his Evangelical friends of explicit Christological heresy, he finds a weakness in their application and acceptance of the full implications of the incarnation. There is a suspicion of the flesh—a kind of gnostic dualism that runs like a dark thread through Protestantism, from the Puritanism of the Reformers to the stark former supermarkets that house America’s mega churches.

Howard’s witty, learned, and profound reflections on the incarnation and art provide the groundwork for the rest of the essays in the collection. Once we grasp the importance of the incarnation of the Son of God, we will understand the implications for art, architecture, sacred music, liturgy, poetry, prose, drama, and virtually all the arts—and by extension to the whole of culture.

In the wasteland of our contemporary culture, in both the church and the world, students and seminarians would do well to read Tom Howard. These essays will give them a fresh perspective, deeper insights, and a broader vision. They will also learn the art of writing a fine essay, expressing oneself in an entertaining way and making complex ideas accessible to the less learned. They will also encounter the wit, the wisdom, and the joyous humility of one of America’s great Catholic thinkers.