The funeral of John Heywood Thomas

Richard Parry, St Hilary, Vale of Glamorgan

2025 marks ninety years of British critical academic engagement with the writings and suggested life of the Danish clown Soren Kierkegaard. 

I’m sat in a beer garden in the heart of rural Vale of Glamorgan. The Bush Inn is an old pub nestling in the bosom of St. Hilary, a quiet village. Although it’s only May 1^st, today’s heat belongs to mid-August. Everything is bright in the sunshine. People are talking, sat at tables on the grass. Drinks and sandwiches from the dark room inside provide refreshment following the funeral of John Heywood Thomas.  John died a few weeks ago at the age of 98. For the past years, since the death of his daughter Nicola, he’s been living in a nursing home across the road from this pub garden.

Kierkegaard’s fluency in irony, his deep philosophical reading, cultural interests and commitment to central lived realities inside the Christian faith have resulted in English mainstream culture treating Kierkegaard’s life as an outlier –  that of a comedic eccentric.  He is viewed as someone who was, very certainly, far too clever, abstruse, self-confident and undecipherable to be of any practical relevance. Still bearing this casual judgement, formed in hasty and longstanding ignorance, Kierkegaard remains broadly unknown in Britain today.

Calon Lan

The funeral today has marked the life and death of John Heywood Thomas who, unlike Soren Kierkegaard, was modest, precise, analytical, serious, wrote under his own name, enjoyed family life and who partook in mainstream academic education as a student, post-graduate, lecturer, doctor, professor, dean and pro-Vice Chancellor. There appears an obvious gulf between John’s approach to life and writing and the quirky biography and output of his main subject of enquiry, Soren. The gap looms large.

The prawn and mayonnaise sandwiches are very good. I end up eating four.

A copy of Soren Kierkegaard’s book Training in Christianity was given to John as a gift when he left school. The book inspired and spurred John, thinking and acting against the tidal flow of mainstream British culture, to pursue a career in which he taught Philosophy of Religion at the universities of Manchester, Durham and Nottingham. In 1957 John published a book on Kierkegaard announcing that British treatments on the subject since 1935 had all been introductory. His new book would be an in-depth, serious examination. Britain’s first leading scholar of Kierkegaard is a Welsh educated, Welsh speaking, Welsh man. 

The garden is full of folk from the funeral. The death of a 98 year old man has filled the Presbyterian chapel at Trehill with neighbours, friends, family, former colleagues and a new generation of young Welsh philosophers. We’ve sung O Fryniau Caersalem and Calon Lan – hymns, with readings all chosen by John.

Kierkegaard collapsed and died in the street in 1855. He was 42 years old. He had tried to describe for Danish culture what human life offered to individuals and society. He found Danish individuals and society so far from the central offer of the sort of life he prized that he toyed with his readers, battered them, with irony and direct attack, employed oversize imagery, and condemned and exalted them to imagine and seek a full life that they were not yet equipped by their present culture to access or enjoy. He dangled and tantalized them, teased them and ushered them into his circus rings for dazzling acts of the human language, the perils and dynamics of faith, and the opportunity of full life from the Christian tradition offered in a contemporary Denmark. Then, today and always.

The family have put up a tab at the bar. I’m grateful to enjoy a glass of lager in the mid-afternoon sunshine, take off my black tie, and sit down to chat with other attendees. 

Examples of the hilariously ironic approach Soren would take to his work – the provocative nature of his project – include his writing a book that, when published, he reviewed himself under a different name, attacking it. His facility of language, style and range of literary tone was enormous. He put it to use. He lambasted Danish intellectual life’s certainty in the first half of the 19^th century that there were logical systems of both thought and society that underpinned good human life. He poured scorn on this notion. He flew at in rage.

A poetry

I sit at a table with seven people. They all work together. Guy introduces me. They are employed in the care home across the road where John died. For some this is their day off. Others have crossed the road from the nursing home during a break in their shift. They have come to pay their respects to the man they cared for over the past few years. I meet the cook, a kitchen assistant, the head carer, carers and cleaners. I am touched by their coming to say goodbye to John.

John concludes his 1957 book on Soren with these sentences:

“It is abundantly clear that his work is a valuable contribution to Philosophy of Religion in two ways. The first is that we see the complexity of the logic of religious statements in the dialectical way in which he describes faith. The other lesson he has taught us is that the important thing is to live the faith. Faith is living or it is nothing. To understand these two lessons fully is something his poet or “the individual” will do. If we have been able to point the way we shall have done him the service we owe him.”

Today is not the day to begin to explain to you why concepts of dialectic are missing in British intellectual life. But dialectic is in fact alive today in our common, daily lived lives. That is enough to know. We will come to discover in coming years, perhaps in Wales first, what dialectic understanding means for a society.

I express thanks to the people on my table for the care they have given John. Qualities of attention and goodness at the nursing home where he lived were evident on my every visit. I tell them of my gratitude.

One by one people at the table disclose that, in slightly differing ways, it had been their privilege to care for John. They say it has been a pleasure to be with him, to help him and, when required, to nurse him. John, they tell me, has shown a remarkable and unexpected quality of care for them. And taken interest in them. Even when things were difficult for him. Two people say this next thing, and as they mention it others nod. “He has changed us.”

I’m reeling. Disoriented. The sweet lager has gone to my head. The sun is burning my back through my white shirt. There is birdsong in the garden. It no longer feels like a funeral.

The pub garden remains filled with family, friends and philosophers. They are talking about the service, about family, about John, about their memories, about their lives. Some big hitters in Welsh intellectual life are here. I’ve been so grateful to see them gathered to remember John, whose work is admired and respected.

But at this table something else is going on. Something of a different order. 

The American philosopher Michael Sugrue in his lectures on Soren Kierkegaard emphasises repeatedly his view that the principal form of Christian literature is comedy. I haven’t ever heard this simple idea uttered inside a church.

A wave of joy breaks over me and I’m inwardly laughing – on the outside smiling thankfully. A glint in my friend John’s eyes often took the hint of a mischievous twinkle. Soren’s wit was not to pull the whole shop down, but was working tirelessly to encourage to build up life again.

In the middle of this funeral conclusion in St Hilary, Wales I suddenly recognize hitting bedrock in the account of the first miracle of Jesus during a family wedding gathering in Cana, described as happening two thousand years ago. 

Water has been turned into wine. But the wedding guests are unaware of what has happened. They continue to drink, and party, grateful for the celebration’s provisions, oblivious to the miracle. The people who have witnessed the change, alone understand its source. They are the servants, remaining in the background, not involved in societal discourse and celebration. They continue to provide the food and care and cleaning. They alone witness the first miracle. 

We cannot all be ironic superstars. We are not all university professors. Yet the tradition served by John and Soren is available to us all today. It suggests taking our own lives seriously, being acutely conscious and aware of the babble and allure of societal confidence in theories and systems of organised goodnesses and success. In their place we are encouraged to search among the paradoxes of the religious traditions for strange things that speak to us, in the every day, and despite the fact that these things are strange, they confirm us. Privately. And connect us to the eternal. And this life builds communities. At the centre of human existence is the strange certainty of a sort of poetry. And the life it offers, available to all, can be lived. 

It can also be died. 

Richard Parry is the director of the New Library in Llantwit Major and a scholar in residence at Cambridge University Centre for the Study of Platonism.