DOUG BEARDSLEY: Spiders and Bees: Collected Essays of Ron Dart on George Grant; Book Review

CCC Reprint: Island Catholic News, April – May 2009, page 8

‘FLOWERS AROUND HIS TOMB’

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It is no easy task to sum up the 16 essays and occasional prose pieces that Ron Dart has written in honour of George Grant (1918 – 1988), teacher of political science, philosophy, and religious studies and Canada’s “most significant public philosopher.”

Dart takes his title from Jonathan Swift, the 18th century Irish writer who first wrote of the nature of the spider and the bee to illustrate the tension between the Modern and the Ancient way of thinking and being, being and thinking.  Dart’s essays offer a collective overview of Grant’s thought using this tension as a foundation to help us understand ourselves, our society, its concepts of justice, and what constitutes the good.

Ancient philosophy was like the bee, drawing from…innate beauty in a natural process.  In Swiftian contrast, the spider spins “a fabricated web of reality from within itself, then snares others in its sticky fibres and filaments,” an apt metaphor, Swift thought, for Modernity.

George Grant was a firm believer in the Anglican tradition, “deeply grounded in the catholic way.”  From this vantage point, he saw John Rawls, the “chief apologist of liberal modernity…as an alluring angel of light…capturing the naive, uncritical and unwary in (his) web.”

Ron Dart, however, is a different kind of angel of light, dazzling us with his audacious dance, his imaginative leaping, his most striking associations.  Over the course of 200 pages, the author explores Grant’s thought from the contrasted perspectives of C. S. Lewis, Stephen Leacock, Thomas Merton, Ernest Manning, Allen Ginsberg (yes, Ginsberg), and Mahatma Gandhi, while examining Grant’s philosophy in relation to Biblical Judaism, Western Christianity, the Anglican Tradition, Liberalism, and Canadian nationalism, not to mention Hinduism, the Vedanta, and the Bhagavad-Gita.  Space being at a premium, I will make reference to only a few of the most startling essays, and centre on the opening one on C. S. Lewis.

Grant was greatly indebted to Lewis, from whom he learned of the physical truths, mythical truths and spiritual truths in the course of arriving at a contemporary way of experiencing the world.

Dart’s reading of C. S. Lewis as “deeply catholic,” and his comparison of Lewis’s source of shared insight with Grant is illuminating.  The so-called “dark ages of medieval Christian tradition” turn out to be more illuminating than the Enlightenment.  As Dart points out, both men were “deeply suspicious of the modern project.”

It is fascinating to see how Dart’s thoughts echo Grant and Lewis in, among other subjects, education, which all three men see as not simply about facts, techne and information, but “about growing in wisdom, insight and moral depth.”  George Grant, not unlike Orwell, managed to elude “the ethical tribalism… of the political right and left.”

Other highlights include Dart’s essay on Stephen Leacock and George Grant entitled “A Tale of Two Tories,” where the difference between spirituality and religion is clearly defined and where “God is good” is traced back to Platonic philosophy.  In “Thomas Merton and George Grant,” Dart illustrates how Merton’s “truly catholic natural theology (lead him to) a sincere interest in the wisdom and insights of other traditions.”  And then there is that dragon-smoke-leaping-like essay on Grant and Ginsberg.

Grant’s 1965 examination of Canadian nationalism in the light of American imperialism is a theme that runs through many of the essays included here.  Dart’s review of George Grant’s Lament for a Nation sheds light on the current state of affairs in Obama’s America, which seems to model itself on Canadian social democracy at a time when our Prime Minister appears to be moving toward a model of America that no longer exists.

I would be remiss if I did not mention a minor caveat here.  Mr. Dart needs a good editor.  Too many things are “front and centre;” too many ideas are “unpacked and unraveled;” much “is made clear” far too often; too many people “walk the extra mile” or “are on the same page” or “see the writing on the wall.”  And the author often employs two or three adverbs where one would suffice.  However, this is but a secondary irritant in an otherwise fine book of essays brimming with imaginative ideas.

I have know Ron Dart for years as a member of the Thomas Merton Society of Vancouver and I’ve read several of his books, among them The Canadian High Tory Tradition, Thomas Merton and the Beats of the North Cascades and The Spirituality of John Cassian, but I have never read anything of his as thought-provoking, informative and stimulating as Spiders and Bees.

SPIDERS AND BEES: Collected Essays of Ron Dart on George Grant, Forward by William Christian, Fresh Wind Press, Abbotsford, B. C., 2008.

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