George Parkin Grant, who died in 1988 at the age of 70, was world-famous in Canada—at least, that was the jest frequently made at the philos
"But even as he defended Canadian sovereignty, he regarded the nation as an instrumental good at best. We love our nation, he wrote, because it is our own, but the love of one’s own is only the first step on the ladder that culminates in a love of the good that transcends the local. As Simone Weil wrote, “we must make of our own country, not an idol, but a stepping-stone towards God.” Grant insisted that we come to love God, who is none other than goodness itself in his Platonic theology, only by first learning to love our own, for it provides our initial experience of being beholden to something greater than ourselves.
People sometimes speak of loving humankind or loving the planet, but these are pale and tepid abstractions compared to our love of the full-blooded people and things that give our lives texture and meaning. “People who are savagely bitter about their own, but love universal justice are often, to me, dangerous people,” Grant once observed."
