Review of William Christian. George Grant: A Biography. University of Toronto Press: Toronto, Buffalo, London, 1993. (Pp. xxiii, 472, and 29 plates. $39.95, Cloth.)
The Review of Politics 57, #1 (Winter, 1995), 173-175.
Unlike the United States, Canada has no religion of herself and has engendered no distinctive religious forms. Still, George Grant (1918-1988), the only political philosopher to become generally known in and identified with English-speaking Canada, took his D. Phil. at Oxford in theology, founded the Department of Religion at McMaster University, and taught in it for the greatest part of his career. At its end, when he was officially teaching Political Science back at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, whence his grandparents had moved to Ontario, his last lectures were direct testimonies to his belief both in the true substantiality of the Good beyond thought and being and in the Platonic Christian account of it. The book which made him English Canada's political thinker, Lament for a Nation (1965), mourned the annihilating absorption of what he took to be a Christian society into the universal homogeneous (and hence secular) tyranny of which he judged the United States to be the imperial center. His first biography has been written by a disciple who, aiming to reduce Grant's thought to his experiences and to make his Platonism refuse all asceticism, concludes by tendentiously taking issue with the homily preached at the funeral! In Canada, as in her overwhelming neighbor, politics, religion and philosophy remain inseparable.
The adulation of the devotee and his fundamentally psychological reading of the life require a detailed account of childhood, youth, education, and, what is regarded as decisive, Grant's experiences in the Second World War. The result has a convincing consistency, but every event with which I was directly acquainted (all during Grant's final years in Halifax) is incompletely or inaccurately represented to assist the interpretation.
Much of what we are shown was important: his Protestant upbringing, maternal domination and ambition, the devotion of both grandfather and father to the triumphant and then fading British Empire, advantageous membership in the ruling and then irrelevant Anglophile Canadian establishment centered in Ontario (an uncle by marriage was Canada's first native born Governor-General), completion of his university education at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar (starting before and finishing after the War), his father's life-shortening sufferings as a soldier in the First World War and his own direct encounter with the evil might of modern technology as an Air Raid Warden in the London docks, his experiential discovery in an English field that God existed. We are intended to find here the root of the contrarieties of Grant's thought, persistently held positions, opposed without reduction, honestly faced.
Certainly, the aporiai increased in power and clarity as his thinking deepened and widened, whether or not these experiences determined them. But we have here also the roots of the overall limitations of his understanding, limitations too much those also of his biographer.
Most of the book is, however, intellectual biography. Grant's real education in philosophy began in 1947, when he was the sole member of the Dalhousie Department; he held degrees neither in philosophy nor in political science. There James Doull explained to him a Plato whom he accepted and a Hegel whom he interpreted later through Kojève and rejected. At first his Christianity was Augustinian and anti Thomist. A quotation he attributed to Augustine, "Out of the shadows and imaginings into the truth", adorns his tombstone (and Newman's). Later he preferred Eastern Orthodox doctrinal and spiritual
forms to Western ones, judging (with Nietzsche and Heidegger) that the fruit of the latter was moralism and the triumph of the endless will to power in the technocratic state. His understanding of the Christian religion was transformed by his discovery of Simone Weil and of the political by his encounter with Leo Strauss. But Grant was no scholar, nor claimed to be one.
Texts, even the most venerated, were largely starting points for his own reflections - determined, the author asserts again and again, by the oppositions in his personal experience (pp. 93, 177, 181, 188, 205, 206, 220, 234, 237, 246-247, 420, etc.). The devotion of the university to research he regarded as a corruption deriving in Canada from the USA. The means he employed in his unbounded opposition to this imperial incursion, and his defeat, made his McMaster department intolerable to him and forced him back to Dalhousie, which proved no more comfortable. For Grant, philosophical teaching and reflection were opposed to historical research. Here again he is characteristically English. Though his mature teaching opposes English-speaking justice and civility to the genealogies of Rousseau and Nietzsche (the latter explicated by Heidegger), Grant refused to attempt a systematic answer based in a better account of the history or in a closer reading of the texts. We are left with opposed intuitions which have not been subjected to scientific reflection though they are also historical judgements.
On the one side, there is the necessity of modern freedom, its benefits entangled with the horrors consequent on its opposition to objective good. Grant is particularly interesting here to Americans because he regards their version of that freedom as the worst, being utterly unlimited by any account of what is good for humans except freedom. On the other side, there is the memory of the eternally normative good preserved in the religious, educational and political traditions of communities maintaining continuity with their European past. The end of British North America is for him the loss of this communally incarnated memory. But are these characterizations and, above all this opposition with its presupposed triumph of totalitarian technocracy as the reality of modern freedom, necessary? Or have we only the psychological conflicts of an ideologue of a declining ruling elite in a provincial backwater? These are not the only alternatives, but William Christian pushes his reader to the second judgement because he reduces philosophy toward psychology. This is unworthy. George Grant's embrace of the mortally painful truth about his world and of the eternal as its alternative was beyond histrionics.
George Grant was not a genius at the creative center of our intellectual world. We will not turn to him to find the needed rereading of the western Christian tradition. His range is too narrow, his judgements are often narrowly, stubbornly and eccentrically personal and derived from single one-sided interpreters (e.g. pp. 232 on Sherrard and 224 on Kojève). Still, his thought deserves to be placed within the dynamic of contemporary intellectual reality not just within his experiences.
There are blind spots. He was not capable - as Canadians frequently are not, their relations being too exigent - of doing justice to the ambiguities in the American "experiment" (e.g. pp. 326-327). The USA is not just the imperial center of the engulfing secular tyranny, she is equally the most vibrant and creative actual Christian society, infinitely more so than the Britain on which Canada depended. The demise of British North America was so tragic because Grant looked to local traditional cultures for the preservation of a Christian knowledge of the human in relation to God. His wife Sheila (before their marriage a Catholic) and he found amongst Catholics their principal allies in their fight against abortion and euthanasia; some conservative Catholic intellectuals in the USA were more sympathetic to his thought than was the Canadian academic establishment. Though he came to despise his Protestant origins and turned to Anglicanism to get part way beyond them, he could not affirm the great international structure of the Catholic Church as a major protagonist in the struggle for a Christian knowledge of the human in the contemporary world (see pp. 34-35, 98, 112, 155, 160, 179, 232, 245, 248-249, 314-315, 346, 349, 353). Nor could he imagine that in the conflict between imperial American Christianity and the Roman one our salvation might be found.
George Grant's art, elegiac and prophetic of a doom which is more certain than 30 years ago when he pronounced it, has greatness. He understood accurately and described beautifully the passing of the world which aristocratically demanded achievement from him. It was a minor provincial world and its passing is not of great importance except to Canadians. His biography demonstrates that only an aspect of what is greatly moving in the contemporary world can be understood from where he lived. But there something of the deeply working necessities of our time can be comprehended. He saw and described many of them so well that no one is likely to do it better relative to that almost vanished world.