Tonsor Remarks at Regnery Memorial

Henry Regnery

Stephen A. Tonsor*

Memorial Service for Henry Regnery

St. Chrysostom Church

Chicago, Illinois

*These remarks are printed here by the courtesy of The Intercollegiate Studies Institute. They were printed in Modern Age, Vol. 38, No. 4, Fall 1996, pp. 314-315. Permission to use them must be granted by them.

I wish to speak here about the way in which Henry put on immortality rather than what he did to become famous. We are all of us beneficiaries of Henry’s actions in the public realm. Those deeds are the stuff of obituary notices. They do not give us the man, however, and report only those deeds that are of public interest. They are the fabric of history and not the essence of immortality. These reports can not give us the man we loved and respected. They can not teach us what we ought to learn and remember from Henry’s life.

That as a publisher he lived much in the public eye and acted in the public interest is deceptive for his nature was essentially contemplative, and among the writers he reverenced and read, Plato, Meister Eckhardt and St. John of the Cross, he passed the boundary from contemplation to mysticism. He greatly admired TS. Eliot and he liked to quote a friend who said that Eliot was “a saint.” Henry understood what being a saint meant; that it was often aspiration of the most intense sort rather than achievement–aspiration and attunement to the Divine without which there can be no center to our lives.

Henry was a spirited, a “pneumatic” man in the Greek-stoic and Christian sense. To spend any time at all with him was to be caught up in his enthusiasms, which now and then had something of the character of the enthusiasms of Mr. Toad in The Wind in the Willows. There were always great projects, exciting new manuscripts to read, the dream of buying an added forty acres of land, of planting a vineyard and making wine, or the special trees he planted and tended.

One of the collects of the day repeatedly recited in the course of the year begins, “God our Father, You created us for joy. However, disappointment and sorrow accompany our lives.” Henry’s life was not an exception to this Christian affirmation of the mystery of the Cross. There were disappointments and sorrows in plenty which Henry transmuted into laughter and if not joy, into gratitude. After recounting a particularly heavy run of difficulties and sorrows Henry would add triumphantly, “but we have much to be grateful for.” This constant refrain in his conversation and letters was an affirmation of his abiding trust and gratitude.

Henry’s interest in literature, art, and especially gardening and music were not simply aesthetic enthusiasms but ways in which he touched the seamless robe of the eternal. To these things he brought a passionate quest for order, harmony and beauty. This quest he physically enacted. He was never simply a spectator and consequently when he could no longer make music he did not want to listen to it on the CD player.

He was an accomplished musician but in this, as in all of his other undertakings he was a man of great humility always believing that someone else could bring a greater mastery to the task than he could. It was not that he distrusted his own powers but rather that he was not vainglorious, and respected so profoundly the abilities of others. This deep humility amounted nearly to undervaluation of his own achievements.

Henry’s personality was one in which charity and love prevailed. His generosity of spirit was equaled only by his expenditure of money and time in behalf of people and worthy causes. About these he was very quiet so that his left hand did not know what his right hand was doing. His capacity for friendship and love was extraordinary as was his contempt for mean and uncharitable conversation.

He had taken the admonition of St. Paul seriously: “Whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, gracious, if there be any excellence, if there by anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

In remembering Henry we call to mind the quality of Henry’s life and we model our own on these sure virtues.