George Grant: Selected Letters ed. by William Christian (review)

HUMANITIES 323 William Christian, editor. George Grant: Selected Letters University of Toronto Press. xiii, 402. $24.95 This absorbing collection of Grant's private correspondence delivers much of what we seek ill. such documents. It gives us a picture of the man and of the origin of his thought. Above all, it allows us to consider his achievements in the context of his self-declared mission, which in this case was to bring the Christian gospel into a godless secular world. Grant the philosopher, the nationalist, and the rebel who can hurl missiles against the soft underbellies of modernity is very much in evidence. The issues he addresses - the future of the Canadian nation, our deliverance into technology - remam as pressing as ever. But the letters declare that Grant's struggle was first, last, and foremost to defend Christianity. Throughout, he expresses his frustration that friends and foes have ignored his Christian message. He was relieved when finally Joan Donovan's study ofhis work, though critical, approaches him as primarily a religious thinker. He wrote her enthusiastically 'You and I are in agreement that Evangelical Christianity is central.' Grant was relentlessly philosophical, in private as well as in public..He endeavoured to transform everything - other philosophers, periods of history, as well as Canadian elections, departmental politics and his wife's dishwasher - into a Platonic eidos. He philosophized about a snub from his uncle Vincent Massey and complained to William Christian that 'I carmot lift sexual eros into philosophical eros.' But he insisted that his philosophical writing, whether about Leo Strauss or about liberalism, is intended 'to clear away those intermediate questions which prevent people from going to the truth of Christ.' Grant the nationalist and Grant the rebel are similarly subordinate to Grant the Christian. Lamentfor a Nation was at once a cry of despair and a call for resistance on behalf of a Canada independent of the American empire. But in the early 1980s he developed warm feelings for the Reagan administration for its efforts against abortion. Theman whohad denounced America as the harbinger of the universal homogeneous empire was reaching out to the American Right. He wrote that since 'I take abortion to be the greatest immediate issue for the western world,' J[m]y sense of greatness of the USA has been greatly raised by the presence of this anti-abortion movement.' The letters reveal a poignancy in Grant's relationship to Christianity. He wrote Donovan, 'there are those whom God seems to touch directly as a union of love and knowledge,' but, 'I am not one of these.' Hestruggled for a Christian philosophy that would reply to the nihilism of Heidegger, one that would include Platonism which, as he wrote his mother, shows to Jthose who listen' that God exists, as well the religiosity of Simone Weil, 324 LETTERS IN CANADA who he was convinced had the is a phtlm,oP'hv But to me one of the ........l'v..~.~C' of war.' William Christian's SPlen~:l1a and the anC~lWirv Arthur Davis, editor. George Grant and the Subversion Art, Philosophy, and Education Inh1pl"'~lhr of Toronto Press. xvi, $60.00 paper Ever since the ,.........,.-.....,............. Fulton Anderson Grant Canada's me'agJ~e ""'.~L.u.''"'''''''-'I-'''''L.I.'''L''''_ t-"L4.I. ..................... in 1952, Grant has excited little ...