Real Presences:

...sustains all things...

...Like Hegel's celebrated owl, "it is at twilight, in the penumbra of epilogue, that this radical provocation has taken wing...

...for he writes out of the venerable tradition of the Word, the Logos, in an age which, he concedes, is that of the "afterword," the "epilogue...

...The undeniably real presences of their musical offerings were grateful acknowledgments of the Real Presence who originates and sustains all things...

...Between the Good Friday of common human experience and the Easter Sunday of explicit Christian faith stands the in-between time: "the long day's journey of the Saturday," quickened by the poem, the painting, the song...

...Argument's distinctive mode of thought is, for Peirce, the playful meditation which he terms "musement...

...Understanding of, yet unapologetic to, the cultured despisers of religion, Steiner declares his almost scandalous intent from the first page of his text: "any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God's presence...

...that deconstruction's "real absence" is as feasible a proposal as the tradition's "real presence...

...The book concludes with an evocation of humankind's messianic hope...

...In some respects Steiner's procedure is reminiscent of that advocated by the great American philosopher and logician, C.S...

...Which is to say, very plainly, that it is the enterprise and privilege of the aesthetic to quicken into lit presence the continuum between temporality and eternity, between matter and spirit, between man and "the other...

...And is not an ethics of reception, at its heart, a eucharistic ethics: receiving all, thankfully, as grace...

...We are, Steiner insists, "monads haunted by communion...

...For if the Logos tradition confesses: "In the beginning was the Word," deconstruction declares: "there was no beginning...

...It is in this common and exact sense that poiesis opens on to, is underwritten by, the religious and the metaphysical...

...In this remarkable essay, the single note I find discordant is Steiner's view that artistic creation is "counter-creation": agonistic and rival to the primordial creation...

...He maintains that this epochal repudiation fully dawned in Western consciousness toward the close of the nineteenth century and has culminated in our own day in the literary and philosophical movement known as "deconstruction...

...I would not hesitate to call Steiner's argument "mystagogic": he evokes the memory of the masterworks so that their embodied meanings might play forth intimations of transcendent mystery, of a source and destination beyond the range of the human...

...For should not the artist be the prime practitioner of the ethics of reception...

...No wonder he anticipates bemused incomprehension...

...The spiritual discipline of attention, respect, tact, and trust, which Steiner advocates, owes much to the sensitivities of Jewish thinkers like Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas...

...Steiner sums up the requisite attitude in the word "cortesia," that courtesy of heart which allows one to be touched by the other, to enter then into communication with the other, in the hope of realizing communion...

...In Steiner's view modern times represent a fundamental negation of the Logos-tradition of the West, a breaking of the covenant between word and world which had governed the aesthetic, intellectual, and religious sensibilities of Western culture since its origins in Israel and Greece...

...This almost Promethean insertion seems to me to fit poorly with Steiner's own argument, compromising its consistency...

...Much has been made in reviews of Steiner's book of his admission that, in these ultimate considerations, no "proof is possible...

...But it supports no irrational faith, no mindless leap...

...However, I think to leave the question there (as these reviews tend to do) misses the heart of Steiner's essay...

...And they were certainly not being self-referential...

...Without them how could we be patient...

...Hence, in counterpoint to those strains of the tradition, cited by Steiner, which celebrate the artist as alter deus, another god, I would invoke the more orthodox practice of Bach and Haydn...

...In it is displayed pure nihilism: in which the analogical imagination cedes to an equivocal cleverness, a "do-it-yourself hermeneutics," suitably tailored to the age of computerized consumption...

...Steiner's argument moves by such musement upon the great artistic creations of the Western tradition, not to impress by his erudition (which is astonishing), but to persuade by appeal to authoritative witnesses...

...Rather, with the Logos-tradition, Steiner holds that more basic to the human is the will to interpret, the unrestricted desire to understand, which itself subserves the will to enter into relationship, not dom-inatively, but for the sheer joy of being together...

...In face of the radical challenge deconstruction poses, Steiner mounts an argument whose purpose is to affirm that the "real presences," which we encounter in the classics of literature, art, and music, anticipate and point to a Real Presence which subtends and sustains them...

...In one of the most sensitively compelling sections of the book, he limns an "ethics of reception," the stance of the receiving subject before the significant otherness of the work of art...

...Peirce in his essay, "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God...

...only the play of sounds and markers amid the mutations of time...

...And what these classics bespeak All good art and literature begin in immanence...

...Robert P. Imbelli George Steiner, professor of English and Comparative Literature at Geneva, Extraordinary Fellow at Cambridge, polymath author of such studies in language and culture as In Bluebeard's Castle and Language and Silence, prolific reviewer for The New Yorker, has written an impassioned essay, both luminous and dense, brilliant and bothersome, suffused with references to the masterworks of Western culture from Homer to Picasso (with even a passing tribute to Edith Piaf), but whose single, ineluctable concern is the reality of God...

...What is at stake is an appreciation of the human, of its unique nature and responsibilities...

...They serve as the promise of an integral word and the foretaste of a completed communion...

...whether it affords the human a meaningful home...

...Correlative to Steiner's insistence upon the objective givenness of the work of art and the fecund yet finite range of meaning it opens is his stress upon the subjective responsibility incumbent upon the one who encounters the classic expression...

...For Steiner, art's discernment and articulation of Logos encourages the wager of faith in the face of the threat of ultimate anomie...

...Thereby, he repudiates modernity's postulate that the defining trait of the human is the will to power...

...George Steiner Real Presences is the sacramentality of human existence, its spiritual seriousness and density...

...When, at the end of his musical composition, Bach inscribed "Soli Deo Gloria" and Haydn "Laus Deo," they seem not to have been concluding a cosmic competition or metaphysical rivalry...

...In deconstruction we meet no mere "negative theology": a critical purification leading to a chastened affirmation...

...What is at stake is the very character of the universe: whether it is hospitable to human endeavor...

...But they do not stop there...

...For it is not a matter of demonstration, but of discernment...

...Peirce distinguishes between argument and argumentation, contending that argument may proceed cogently and coherently without employing argumentation's more restricted and less fertile logical analysis...

...but it also calls to mind the monastic lectio, in its radically contemplative sense of what is due the stranger, the other-in this case, the artist-who is to be welcomed as a guest and as a bearer of blessing...

...In this hypothesis the artist enters the lists as maker confronting Maker, striving to bring forth a personal cosmos out of chaos in what verges upon a self-recreation...