I could scarcely believe my eyes. There, in the middle of a cocktail party, in the drawing room of the president of the university, was an indigent: elderly, stooped, stout, with a dirty beard, long unkempt hair, and a trail of cigarette ash tumbling down his chest and settling momentarily on top of his stomach before cascading to his shoes beneath. “Tony,” said President Godfrey, dragging me by the elbow in the old man’s direction, “have you met Professor Grant?”
George Parkin Grant (1918-88) is widely thought to be the greatest philosopher and theologian Canada has ever produced. A student at Oxford following WWII, he was deeply influenced by Austin Farrer and C.S. Lewis at whose Socratic Club Grant first met his wife.
Grant turned out to be much like Lewis – a brilliant and enormously popular teacher who enjoyed a mass audience outside of the university but who was regarded, as a Christian, as incomprehensibly old fashioned.
Unlike Lewis, he was not so much a defender of the faith as a Christian thinker. His questions were always basic ones and were concerned with understanding how the modern world came to be the way it is.
In particular, Grant was concerned that our society had become so puffed up with its ability to control things with technology that we had begun, like Adam, to think that we were gods. Grant recognized that modern society had come to believe that there was no reality beyond the devices and desires of our own hearts, and that most people assumed that good and evil was merely a matter of social convention—‘community values’.
Grant probed with razor intelligence the view that there is no truth outside of ourselves and that truth is a value we create.
He became an Anglican in 1955 but increasingly took the clergy with a pinch of salt, recognizing that they had, for the most part, been taken up in the confusions of the times.
Despite his disenchantment with much of the character of the contemporary world, he loved life and took tremendous pleasure in his children, food, drink, the Nova Scotia countryside, Mozart, Benny Goodman and the afternoon Texaco broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera.
He was a deeply sympathetic and patient person, and at his core he was a mystic, who sought ‘intimations of perfection’ in the world around him. He meditated deeply on the nature of the Cross. It was significant for Grant that God did not intervene at the crucifixion. Like Simone Weil, he believed that the crucifixion showed that God could be present in creation in the form of absence. For Grant the essence of God, and much of life itself, is a mystery.
Grant was buried in the cemetery of a fishing village he loved. On his tomb is inscribed this from St. Augustine: “OUT OF THE SHADOWS AND IMAGININGS INTO THE TRUTH.”