One Last Summer

Millions of people in the West today live in an empty, meaningless universe. The Platonist way of beauty, eternity and the intellect is the answer.

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.

One Last Summer also briefly traces the route the West has taken, mainly via German Idealism, from the Enlightenment to today's dominant postmodernist ways of thought and the subsequent loss of the culture which allows people "to see life steadily and see it whole".

Platonism can also help revivify Christianity by allowing it to escape the onslaught of reason to which the religion - but not the philosophy - is vulnerable. The book offers ideas about salvation which reason can't readily destroy. Another chapter looks at Christianity from old but forgotten angles.

The author first experienced that sense of eternity at the age of four in the hills overlooking the Lowther valley in rural Westmorland while the Second World War raged in the world outside. But, crucially, it took over seventy more years of hard and wide reading before he found Platonism, the natural religion of the West, to explain and give it a home. Although Platonism is the bedrock of Western civilisation the universities have lost touch with it and today we have to teach ourselves - or lose something of infinite value. Platonism is a guide for life and a glimpse of what comes after it ends.