Christ the Tiger

By Thomas Howard

This book is a reprint with revisions of one of Thomas Howard's earliest and most popular books. It is somewhat autobiographical; revealing thoughts of a young man who has been seized by the love of Christ and, at first sees dogmas and institutions as obscuring the terrible truth of God's love in Christ. But even at that earlier period, Howard showed his awareness that without those institutions there would be no way of encountering Christ the tiger.

Howard is able to bring out the true vitality of what this faith is and should be, the radical nature of the Christian faith. This book powerfully presents who Christ is and what faith in him means.

"In the fiugre of Jesus we saw Immanuel, that is, God, that is Love. It was a figure who, appearing so inauspiciously among us, broke up our secularist and our religious categories and becokines us and judges us and samned us and saves us and exhinbited to us a kind of life that participates in the indestructible. And it was a figure who announced the validity of our eternal effort to discover significance and beauty beyond inanition and horror by announcing to us the unthinkable: redemption." from Christ the Tiger

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Apr 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781681490908

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Preface

It has been, I think, just twenty-three years since I wrote what the following pages contain. I find myself bemused upon rereading it all. What I wrote at that time was, and is, true, if by this we mean that what I wrote represents one man’s attempt to set down a record of his own unfolding consciousness.

But of course sombre questions press in on any such claim. Was it true, that attempt? What was omitted? What was gilded? What was soft-pedaled? To what lengths did one go to present oneself as motivated, always, by the yearning for Truth? What artifice did one bring into play in order to recommend the image of oneself being put forward? To what extent did one play to the gallery? Is it possible to descry elements of self-congratulation in the sheer bravura of the narrative?

These are the questions that one asks, now, on the threshold of old age, about that record, written by a man scarcely launched into his thirties.

The world has kept on turning since then—not very many times as the world counts its turnings, but countless times as oneself reckons them. Then there was a vista stretching ahead: now there is a retrospect. What lies along that track? Does what one sees there corroborate or contravene what one said at the outset?

Certainly I would not write the same thing now. I couldn’t: the sheer energy animating the lines has spent itself, for one thing. Moreover, the shape of life itself has altered, not only for me, but for the whole world. We did not know then, in the latter nineteen-sixties, that we were at the ridge of a watershed as epochal as the Protestant Reformation or the French Revolution.

From my own point of view, it might be said, Après les 1960s, le deluge. It is certainly too soon to reach any sage conclusions as to the nature of what happened to civilization in that decade. But it may, with no fear of controversy, be admitted that civility, as the Western world had known and guarded that finely-poised thing since Pericles, shall we say, has been dismantled. The taboos and canons of reticence, courtesy, deference, restraint, dress, manners, discourse, and public display that sheltered domestic and civil life as it was lived in the West, have taken their place, along with corsets, cuirasses, and rhetoric, in the museum.

Hence I would find it hard, now, to urge any sort of breaking out at all, even though I must acknowledge that my own efforts toward adulthood did, in fact, oblige me to set on one side various props and training-wheels and safety-nets on which I had counted.

I find a certain piquant irony in rereading what I wrote, and perhaps even more in agreeing to its republication, in that my own overriding set of inclinations now is to do exactly what I felt, at the time I wrote the narrative, must not be done, namely, to ensure the well-being and progress of the Kingdom of heaven in a man’s soul, as it were, by tapping together some scaffolding and system of buttresses to help shore up the edifice. I am, of course, aware that just some such scaffolding is indeed necessary in the early stages of the soul’s progress: the Old Testament law, our parents’ injunctions, our tutors, and all customs and canons of polite behavior—these are all scaffolding which is finally supplanted when charity is perfected in us.

But when you have watched, as I think I have, the collapse of the structures that guarded orderly and graceful human life and hence that made even Christian life liveable, in some sense, what is the note you will wish to strike? Certainly not one that rouses everyone to redoubled accesses of individualism and self-determination. (The mild axioms of Jeffersonian democracy are, alas, no prescriptions for the human soul.) If any word needs to be bruited abroad in the land now, surely it must be Thus saith the Lord! and Ye people, rend your hearts and not your garments!

Yes. But don’t I, in my bones and marrow, believe that sturdy and resilient holiness is attainable in the human soul without the anxious efforts often brought to the matter by ardent sectarians? Or, to ask the question another way, how prepared am I to let my own narrative stand here, in so far as it was, in fact, a call to Christ Jesus the Lord himself, which is what I meant it to be? Do I think he can save us without the canons of politesse which mean so much to me, and without the sectarian scaffolding which frequently shelters his Gospel?

Yes, of course I do. He can save the most unreconstructed barbarian. He can save Attila the Hun, Tamburlaine, and even me with my furious heart. And he can save us all without cultic and sectarian props.

He can: but I have come to believe, along with the innumerable company of apostles, Fathers, martyrs, virgins, widows, confessors, and saints down through the centuries, that this Mighty One who rides on the wings of the whirlwind, does not commonly come upon us in this whirlwind. He came to us in an inauspicious hamlet in an unimportant backwater of the world, and now He comes to us in the structures (yes, structures: disciplines, manners, ceremonies, sacraments, liturgy) of His Church.

Alas. How unworthy of this Mighty One. Well (we must ask), is it more unworthy than the stable and the manger? Or the Cross?

To the Romantic imagination, there is a tumultuous appeal in the spectacle of Faustian man tussling with heaven and daring to enter into contract with Satan in the name of courage and individual authentication. Christ’s appeal is, at least on the surface, less dramatic: Follow me. Learn of me, for I am meek and lowly of heart.

Since I wrote what I wrote in the first edition of Christ the Tiger, I have been received into the Roman Catholic Church. This is the logical (I would say inevitable) end of a mortal man’s salvation on this earth. The Church is as tatterdemalion as its worst enemies suppose it is—and as glorious as Christ says it is when He calls it His Bride. I have written elsewhere of my pilgrimage toward ancient liturgical and sacramental structures. But I would wish any reader of this record to know that the Christ who calls from the last pages of the book is the One who gave His life for His Church and who promised that hell would not prevail against it.

Thomas Howard

Beverly Farms, Massachusetts

Introduction

Things have a way of falling to pieces. The shingles blow off the roof. The chrome rusts through and the exhaust pipe drags. Cuffs fray, nylons run, hair falls out, joints stiffen, and wattles appear under our chins. Nothing is exempt, not even our ideas.

Athens begins with a great and democratic vision, and finishes in ruin and ignominy. Arthur begins with a high vision of knightly fellowship, and it all ends in perfidy. Washington and Jefferson have an exhilarating idea for a new kind of nation, and it progresses to the tumidity and bathos of the Great Society.

Political vision is not alone in this wry tendency. The highest of all ideas, religious dogma, is subject to the assault of time and evil. There was a noble law for human intercourse given at Sinai, and within a few hundred years it had deteriorated at the hands of its practitioners to a cynical array of functions. There was a new and energetic law announced in Judah, and within a few centuries it had calcified into a brittle and gorgeous objet d’art, or so some might say.

The process is not only historic. It occurs in one’s own consciousness. We begin with something which we take to be pure and inviolable, and within a few years we find ourselves a thousand miles from where we began.

This is especially so in the case of someone who is born into a tradition of dogmatic orthodoxy, no matter what that particular orthodoxy is. (Let it be noted here that the terms dogmatic and orthodoxy are not pejorative: dogmatic implies simply the reference to a system of thought, whether that be Keynesian economics or radical egalitarianism; orthodoxy implies the effort to keep your dogma intact—that is, to keep it in its early form.) A person in this situation begins life with a set of certainties that accounts for everything. It is axiomatic that his tradition is the correct one. It is also understood that his particular sector of his tradition is the only pure one.

Then he stumbles out into the great glittering world. He is threatened and dazzled and frightened and intoxicated. There is more occurring in human existence than he had thought. There are compelling alternatives to his certainties. There are obvious rewards to be had by simply leaving his categories behind.

In one form or another, this is the experience of a great many people. The process of becoming adult seems often to involve the corollary process of disavowing not only one’s childhood, but everything attached to it.

This book is the story of one man’s experience. The dogmatic orthodoxy was that of Christianity in its conservative Protestant form.

There is, however, one odd note: up to the time of writing, I have not done the expected thing. I have not disavowed Christianity. The pulling and hauling has not convinced me that God was not in Christ. It has, on the other hand, led me to suspect that we are involved in something wild and unmanageable, and in nothing that can be entirely accounted for in any dogmatic orthodoxy.

I have a friend who, in any discussion about any topic at all, intones with liturgical regularity, That’s where the whole thing breaks down. She is usually right. For there is a point, or a thousand points in any system, at which that system is mortally vulnerable.

This is one reason why I find the Incarnation compelling. For in the figure of Jesus the Christ there is something that escapes us. He has been the subject of the greatest efforts at systematization in the history of man. But anyone who has ever tried this has had, in the end, to admit that the seams keep bursting. He sooner or later discovers that he is in touch, not with a pale Galilean, but with a towering and splendid figure who will not be managed.

Part One

One way of describing my childhood would be to say that it was a massive effort to get cozy. My earliest recollection is of myself down under the covers of my cot, blanket clips and all, during my afternoon nap. My mother had a renown of sorts for having contrived the perfect nightgown for babies, with a very long skirt and a drawstring in the bottom hem to be tied around one of the struts at the end of the cot. This gives the baby freedom to move around, but prevents his plunging over the sides or crawling out of the covers and freezing. This way the baby stays warm, and mother isn’t up and down all night long wondering if the covers are still on.

In any case, I began in a cozy way, and kept trying to stay cozy. I wanted things to be safe and warm and tidy. I remember once spending a long time arranging meticulously on a table top a great array of my trinkets, and it was to my dismay that I was told that this would not do. They were better off back in their drawers. But I liked the look of them sitting there in rows.

I had a yellow tricycle, and I used to get a pleasant sensation when I would stoop down to