One Last Summer

The void within is too often filled with resentment and rage. This spiritual void is also destroying the West as it tears itself apart. But the emptiness is in them because of the absence of the spiritual, a sense of transcendence.

Platonism is an answer and it has two aspects - the spiritual and the secular - the way of beauty and the intellect. The first can serve a large minority, the second the majority. The first is about a sense - or a sensing - of eternity through the beauty of the world, but also through the arts, ideas and even the odd life story. These experiences are more common than we often realise but they only become life changing when they're embedded in a simple but profoundly deep Platonist philosophy which is almost as old as the West itself, dating from the 5th and 4th centuries BC.

Ugliness is the opposite of beauty and has the opposite effect - ending in inner turmoil and destructiveness.

The author illustrates all this in brief essays on poetry, music, paintings as well as biographies of people who have experienced these things, with examples of the ruin caused by their loss. Wordsworth, for instance, is the supreme example of a Platonist poet in English who lost his talent and insights because he had no system of thought in which to preserve them.

Thinkers like Ruskin argued that we can read the health of a society in its arts - and the arts today point to a society in advanced decay. Ugliness rather than beauty prevail, a brutal materialism in place of the immaterial and transcendent.

But Platonism is also the way of the intellect, of the mind expanded by the right kind of learning until it sees life steadily and see it whole. One Last Summer outlines this kind of knowledge, which the modern West is rejecting to its cost. The book illustrates what is meant through characters as diverse as Matthew Arnold and R W Inge, one time Dean of St Paul's.