George Steiner

DIV“A fresh, revelatory, golden eagle’s eye-view of western literature.” —Financial Times/divDIV Early in Grammars of Creation, George Steiner references Plato’s maxim that in “all things natural and human, the origin is the most excellent.” Creation, he argues, is linguistically fundamental in theology, philosophy, art, music, literature—central, in fact, to our very humanity. Since the Holocaust, however, art has shown a tendency to linger on endings—on sundown instead of sunrise. Asserting that every use of the future tense of the verb “to be” is a negation of mortality, Steiner draws on everything from world wars and the Nazis to religion and the word of God to demonstrate how our grammar reveals our perceptions, reflections, and experiences. His study shows the twentieth century to be largely a failed one, but also offers a glimpse of hope for Western civilization, a new light peeking just over the horizon./div

Grammars of Creation

Velin-Lus-Ro

The supreme being could have chosen to dwell in the uncreated infinity of the void. Creation is, in the strict sense, optional. It enters freely into a diacritical relation with, abstention from non-being or nullity. All religion, all theology could be defined as an endeavour to grasp, to offer thanks for, the gratuitous miracle of creation. It celebrates or, in the case of negative theology, questions the unfathomable choice whereby “there is not nothing.” This other option, although we cannot conceive of it or attach to it even the most spectral of images, can be supposed to have had its own exceeding logic and plausibility. Only nothingness is at perfect rest. There were, moreover (there are) other possible choices. I have referred to the idea of numerous preceding creations, of “rough drafts” from the Maker’s atelier. Aristotelian-Thomist cosmology insists on a single universe, modelling the will and perfection of its architect. Other hypotheses, long judged heretical, invoke a plurality, indeed an infinity of other worlds, of “universes” either analogous to or radically different from our own (la pluralité des mondes, intimated by Giordano Bruno and argued by the Enlightenment). Creating freely, the Deity or first principle can re-create in corrective or playful prodigality. An obvious menace attaches to this liberty: that of subsequent unmaking, or God as Tinguely trashing His own artifact. The Noah-legend, so widespread in diverse mythologies and cultures, is a weak version of such possibility. It is not merely human and animal forms which can be returned to non-being; it is the cosmos itself. There is no guaranteed tenure in the fact of existence. Stars burn out. Hence the anxiety of the major theological and metaphysical doctrines in regard to time. As Plato’s Timaeus seeks to make plain, once created, once in being, the cosmos is everlasting. For Aristotle it is eternal (a rather different concept). Judaeo-Christian perceptions of God look to the rainbow, to the celestial promise that annihilation will not be visited on created being. Does this pious hope not abrogate God’s absolute freedom?

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