Athens and Jerusalem: George Grant's Theology, Philosophy, and Politics

Jay Newman is a professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph. His
latest book is Pious Pro-Family Rhetoric: Postures and Paradoxes in
Philosophical Perspective.

George Grant is remembered as an assertive Canadian public intellectual,
an eloquent Canadian nationalist and critic of liberalism, an
influential lecturer and teacher, and a lively personality. But there
remains widespread disagreement as to whether he was also a subtle
philosophical and religious thinker with a coherent vision of the
spiritual. This volume contains 16 original scholarly articles on
Grant’s views on the cultural relations of religion, philosophy, and
politics as well as some unpublished notes that Grant prepared for his
university lectures in the 1970s. The articles are thoughtful and
pleasantly written, but only a few of them critically engage Grant’s
ideas on religious and theological subjects, which were in any case
exceedingly vague and sketchy and often little more than the earnest
expression of deeply felt intuitions.

Grant was temperamentally given to the overenthusiastic reception of
the ideas of other thinkers, and articles in this collection address the
influence on him of philosophers such as Leo Strauss, Simone Weil, and
Philip Sherrard. Other articles consider Grant’s debt to Socrates,
Augustine, Hegel, and Dostoevsky, and often it is difficult to discern
what if anything in Grant’s position is original. While several
articles endeavour to articulate some of Grant’s religious views,
particularly with respect to Christ and the theology of the cross, most
of the articles only obliquely consider Grant’s religious conceptions.
Several papers focus on Grant’s distinctive version of Canadian
Toryism, and other pieces look at some of his more well-known views on
modernity and on the need for Canadians to liberate themselves from
American cultural ideals.

Contributors to the collection include William Christian, Graeme
Nicholson, Art Davis, and Harris Athanasiadis. The articles generally
confirm that in understanding Grant’s broader cultural and political
views it is useful to bear in mind his emotional attachment to a form of
Christian Platonism, but unfortunately they do not do much to enhance
Grant’s status as a philosophical and theological thinker. This
collection lacks an adequate preface and useful section introductions,
and there is no index or bibliography.