When I returned to Oxford in 1945 I had decided to
study theology rather than law, which had been my pre-war study; and I was very
disappointed by the lectures on biblical scholarship of the narrowest kind on
the one side & very vulgar positivist philosophy (A.J. Ayer, etc.) on the
other. Somebody told me that there was a meeting in the hall of my college
& I went. It was the first Socratic meeting of the year so C.S.L. was
speaking. What sense! What clarity! What importance! It was just what I had
come back to Oxford to hear. My breath was taken away with gladness. From then
on the Socratic club was a centre for me. My wife & I courted at it as she
attended and, as a student of English, had gone to Lewis before the war &
attended his English lectures. It was so good to see somebody whom one might
have seen behind the counter of an old fashioned butcher’s shop, speaking in
his wonderful, articulate way, and without the least bit of pretension or
pride. Later in life, I found I had disagreements with some of his thought,
particularly as it was not very interested in the philosophical questions I
became interested in. But I think I was wrong in that, because there is no
point in arguing with fellow Xians who express Xianity beautifully, because the
common loyalty to X is the main thing & everything else is secondary. It is
important that many of us should see our vocation as trying to express Xianity
with clarity, but I am sure not much good is done by arguments within that common
loyalty. And, of course, one of C.S.L.’s greatnesses was to avoid polemic in
this way while using it when some issue of principle was at stake.
George Grant: Selected Letters (1996) no. 282
The virtue of George Grant is he is in the
lineage of Lewis but distinctly and thoughtfully Canadian. If you want to understand Canada better I highly
recommend his Lament for a Nation: The
Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (1963) or the essays in Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (1969). He
really is brilliant.
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