Dr. John C. McDowell

Girton College

Cambridge

(Chorus in Oedipus Tyrannus, lines 1529f.)

‘All’s Well...’ Edgar’s Untragic Theology

Given King Lear’s tragic events there is a sense in which Edgar’s extolling of cosmic justice, understanding it as the gods’ retribution on human sins, heightens the sense of tragedy and waste. Reverberating in one’s memory, at this point, is the fatalistic admission of the play’s other theist, Edgar’s father Gloucester, that "the gods kill for their sport as wanton boys do flies". What kind of justice uses and abuses human lives for divine pleasure?

Certainly the kingdom could be stronger after the deaths of Lear’s two self-serving daughters, Gonerill and Regan, and the agent of the Earl of Gloucester’s misfortune, his bastard son Edmund. But this would by no means be a simple providential restoration of justice. The murdered Cordelia, an unwitting victim of her own honest but loving silence to a father deludedly bathing in the dishonest flattery of her two sisters, remains dead. Gloucester’s gouged out eyes will never return; his friend Lear has died of heartache; and he will always harbour the guilt of his earlier carnal sin, wherein he tragically bore the agent of his destruction. Both Cordelia and Gloucester have paid the price of loyalty to their self-deposed king. Moreover, it is an interesting, albeit speculative, question as to how the scars of remembrance will impact on Edgar’s reign. Indeed, albeit without any explicit revision of his theology, Edgar’s emotions force him to conclude with a partial recognition of the loss. What we encounter in this play, therefore, as Bradley describes, is "the most terrible picture that Shakespeare painted of the world". It is, Hunter recognises, a nihilism of "a world emptied of meaningful [theological?] content."

Is this a world in which hope in the gods is presented as the illusion that the young Nietzsche declared it to be? Indeed, is hope itself a theologically induced escape from seeing the significance of the drama? Of course, King Lear’s setting is a pagan one and any assessment of its theological significance is bound to be inadequate. Could it be, as Speaight argues, an indication merely of "the fallibility of pagan heavenly reliance"? After all Kent and Gloucester’s pagan superstitiousness quickly relapses into a despairing fatalism, followed eventually by a stoical acceptance of fate; and Edgar’s aptitude for believing in divine providence appears misplaced. One must recall, however, the Christian settings of the tragedies Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, for example. Or could the play suggest a degree of Shakespearean theological agnosticism in the face of the barrage of ‘evil’? So Edwards argues that Shakespeare’s tragedies, and King Lear in particular, "are full of religious anxiety and have little religious confidence".

On this question of hope within a tragic world George Steiner’s reflections present interesting reading, especially so for anyone attempting to construct hope from Christian resources. Here is one whose reading of tragic drama is profoundly, and somewhat old-fashionedly, realistic, thereby encouraging certain crossings of the relatively fluid borders between his reading of this literary genre and his more philosophical engagement in cultural and historical criticism. Indeed, the climax comes in the strong connection between Steiner’s darkened Jewish consciousness and his bleak picture of existence, mediated through high Attic tragic drama, and to a great extent echoing the general philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. Hence, pervading his oeuvre is a vision of the ‘tragic’, an understanding of existence’s destructive potentialities informing the events of ‘tragic drama’ that raises complex issues of living in a hostile environment; the very legitimacy of hope itself; and of theology’s place in lighting our way through this darkness. For it is in this tragic sensibility that Steiner leaves his reader gasping for some form of hope - one that is not provided, and whose potential shape he explicitly denies to Christian theology.

As will be narrated later, when hope does lighten the mood it arrives in the form of a faint echo of the early Nietzschean account - artistic creativity and the act of reception of the aesthetic, particularly that of the act of reading. Herein is suggested certain possible ways of presenting a hope capable of facing the tragic vision. Hence he does not follow the nihilistic advocating of aesthetic silence in Adorno’s stark admission of "No poetry after Auschwitz". Where Nietzsche’s reflection particularly significantly recedes is in the fact that Steiner portrays this aesthetic and hermeneutic transcendence in theological colours. This sits uneasily alongside his presentation of the tragic vision, perhaps being an example of Steiner’s own refusal of simple conceptual resolution. However, without providing any resolution to the problem of the tragic, it may be argued that in one sense this discontinuity need not be quite so pronounced since more careful attention to the complexity of the tragic dramas themselves could render this antithesis, along with a more modest claim concerning the incompatibility between the tragic vision and Christian hope, too simple.

Commentators are right to draw attention to the importance of Steiner’s Jewish sensibilities, in particular characterising him as a central European, post-Auschwitz Jewish intellectual. In other words, this philosophically informed literary critic’s identity has been formed with the haunting death knells of Auschwitz and Belsen ringing in his ears.

Without intending to conceive of bygone eras after the manner of Edenic golden ages, Steiner indicates that the recent story of human self-mutilation that pummels his imagination leaves its indelible mark by calling into question the whole humanist heritage of the most recent centuries, particularly this present one. Smashed are the liberal dreams of human progress through technological advance. After all, Steiner emphasises, as well as being incapable of making the "future less vulnerable to the inhuman"

These statements are left without further elaboration or justification, as if the mere mention of twentieth century history clearly supports Steiner’s claims. Indeed, David Tracy argues that

Steiner’s question of what it is that reduces human beings, particularly those who pride themselves on their rational, and aesthetic heritages to the status of beasts, poses itself as intractable. And yet, he argues, consciousness of it places an intolerable strain on late twentieth century speech and culture. If Nietzsche’s madman called into question the legitimacy of living as if God was not dead, Steiner calls into question procedures of avoidance of the carnage in the contemporary formation of human identity. "We cannot pretend," he exclaims, "that Belsen is irrelevant to the responsible life of the imagination" since "We come after, and that is the nerve of our condition."

Of course, it was not only in the narrative of the Gay Science that Nietzsche’s madman was not heeded and his lessons not learned. In certain quarters the song may still be heard that science and technology offer increasing possibilities for control (over self, society, etc.), particularly in relation to the future, an optimistic liberal spirit that Nietzsche contrasts with the tragic vision. This is an indication, to cite Steiner, that "absolute tragedy" cannot be easily endured. Fukuyama, for example, according to Lash,

However, avoidance, a not wanting to ‘think the worst’, of the problem of the human projects of genocidal dehumanisation leads one into self-exile through the nebulous realm of fantasy and illusion. Hence, these painful realities are either replaced by imaginative construals of progress, or are eclipsed by the banality of apathy. Beck’s comment appears pertinent: "Where there is no escape, people ultimately no longer want to think about it" (hence the hedonistic escapism of ‘drug-cultures’). Darker still, by inadequately facing these disruptive stories humanity condemns itself to continue populating the chamber of horrors.

In Steiner’s oeuvre there is no Nietzschean attempt to joyfully (albeit Nietzsche’s is not a naïve joy) proclaim "the greatest recent event" of the death of God at humanity’s hands, or to "vanquish God’s shadow" through providing a Zarathustrian replacement which necessarily learns "the art of this-worldly comfort first". Nevertheless, there is an indirect refusal to accept any simplistic theological answers that refuse to look into the void and permit the sight to permeate their consciousnesses. After all, Belsen and Auschwitz are essential stains on identifying humanity.

Particularly troublesome religious imagery and symbolism haunt his reflections on the human disaster that was the Shoah. Those dark days of the mid twentieth century raise the whole question of God in a manner that renders any attempt at a theodicy problematically facile. Since if, as Moltmann claims,

how much more six million people? Expressed is Steiner’s almost unutterable horror over a God who "suffers the gusts of murderous exasperation at the Jews". He quickly changes this image, somewhat, as if this thought is too shocking to even entertain. While the dark mood remains, the divine exasperation at human self-mutilation becomes equally disturbingly depicted as producing the sigh of lethargy and increasing passivity. In a medieval Polish parable, recited in The Death of Tragedy, God is depicted as being found by a Rabbi sitting in a dark corner in a small synagogue. On being questioned as to why he was there, God replied, "with a small voice: ‘I am tired, Rabbi, I am tired unto death’." So it is "When God’s back parts are towards man, [that] history is Belsen".

Although Steiner does recognise the post-1989 light that has begun to shine over the end of the century, he is wary of attributing too much to it and claims that

Steiner’s is a sensibility darkened by a Jewish memory. Correspondingly, he is painfully forced to conclude that

In this image that expresses the darkness of history, alluding to the post-gas chamber incineration of the executed, hope can no longer be considered to be an option. As Bell argues, with reference to the macabre journeying of this century’s history, "the world ... holds absolutely no consolation for human beings".

It is this sensibility that fuels Steiner’s appreciation of tragic drama since in the latter, read ‘realistically’ and ‘mimetically’, one encounters a tragic perspective on the nature being in the world. For here is one whose Jewish post-Auschwitz sensibilities and his reading of tragic drama interrogate the shortened memories of liberal optimism, and raise the problem of hope in a world whose memory is punctuated by humanly caused devastation. And yet Steiner’s early paintings of hope characterise it in an optimistic vein, allowing it to stand, therefore, in stark contrast with his reading of tragic drama’s tragic vision. It is only later, when hope is taken beyond the scope of all optimisms and pessimisms, that it is able to play a more important role in his imagination.

Defining the Complex?

Reflection on tragedy is a risky business. Not only does it invoke a psychology of phobos (‘fear’) over the dramatic events that is the spectator’s or reader’s lot; but also the multifariousness of the different plays that constitute the generic expanse named ‘tragic drama’ contain so many rhythmic and thematic variations that conceptually discovering a single melody appears to be impossible. As Kaufmann recognises therefore, "theories of tragedy always run the risk" of activating Procrustean tendencies to excise those elements which stubbornly refuse to fit.

However, in Wittgensteinian mood, a number of scholars follow MacKinnon in being able to "at best ... discern a family resemblance between them", provided one avoids "a blind indifference to the multiple complexity of those works...". Steiner is one who, while recognising this difficulty in defining tragedy, attempts through several parallels to detect and explicate a certain core or thematic pulse. Hence, during The Death of Tragedy’s autopsy on tragic drama’s corpse, a distinct image of tragedy implicitly forms, one in which the spectres of Schopenhauer and the early Nietzsche in particular may be more than faintly discerned.

The pattern that he weaves highlights tragic drama’s high Attic background, although here he presumptively and rhetorically presents a homogeneity of the three dramatists. While he has good precedent for looking to Attic drama, controversially and without explicit justification, he proceeds to classify only a few of the extant plays as utterly unique "high tragedy", "absolute tragedy" or "tragedy in the radical sense". These works alone truly fulfil his explicitly unstated literary ‘rules’ of tragic drama, albeit in King Lear and Timon of Athens Steiner does, at one point and yet revises the judgments on another, perceive that the Shakespearean mould of tragicomedy is broken by the "dramatic ontology" of the "tragic vision". Certainly from a purely literary perspective, Steiner appears to have Procrusteanly selected tragic dramas according to a pre-defined "tragic vision" of "absolute Tragedy", failing to acknowledge the basic nature of the Athenian texts themselves in canonic-categorisation. The reason for his doing so is because of his perception of the tragic ontology.

According to Roochnik the overall mood of tragic drama is optimistic, "both illuminating and affirming of the value of human life". By this he appears to intend the fact that through the unfolding of the tragic events the protagonist undergoes a process of learning and repenting of her tragic mistake while suffering nobly. Lear, for example, arguably develops in stature through his struggles with his sanity on the heath. Reunion, albeit momentary, with the daughter he had foolishly estranged is his ‘reward’.

For Steiner, on the contrary, the proper (philosophical?) core of "absolute tragedy" "is a terrible, stark insight into human life", one that is "almost [so] unendurable" to human sensibility and reason that it is infrequently "vigorously professed". The performance of tragedy’s dark Leitmotiv "entails" what is named a "stringent nihilism" and "a stringently negative, despairing view of man’s presence in the world".

Two synoptical citations seminally encapsulate this account of tragedy’s "annihilating terror": that of Sophocles’ Silenus, which similarly animates Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, "it is best not to have been born", and second best, to die young; and the fatalistic expression of King Lear’s Gloucester, "the gods kill for their sport as wanton boys do flies". These are reinforced further by Kafka’s haunting summa, "there is abundance of hope, but none for us".

Here is an account in which human beings are presented as discovering themselves imprisoned within an inhospitably suffering and destabilising cosmos. In such a universe humanity can exist only as Unheimlichkeit, "one who is thrust out of doors", as "unwanted in life" and "an unwelcome guest in the world", deliberately echoing Steiner’s discussion of the Jews. As did Schopenhauer, Steiner indicates a "daemonic negation" and "tragic rift, an irreducible core of inhumanity ... [which lies] in the mystery of things", something particularly perceivable in the Attic poets’ admission of the cruelty of the malevolent gods. This negation operates blindly, but necessarily, as a cruel "autre" or "outside" at whose hands humanity, as unwitting "intruders on creation", suffers in the most complete and horrific manner in the ensuing conflict. In such an existence, "non-existence or early extinction are urgent desirates", Silenus’ wisdom. Here Steiner moves beyond the Nietzschean reading of tragedy by implying not merely that the world is not evolving toward an ultimate goal or redemption of present horrors, but rather existence itself is ultimately cruel. Nietzsche, on the other hand, even in the Birth of Tragedy, a work in which the hand of Schopenhauer may be felt, can invoke the image of an amoral child-god in capricious yet playful mood in her creative activity. His later discussions clearly implicate not so much existence’s hostile nature toward human aspirations, as its utter indifference "beyond good and evil".

Although Steiner’s account of tragedy primarily portrays the tragic confrontation of humanity with the cruel unhuman autre, he does not completely fail to make us "face the brutality within the human". Hence, he announces that the heroic nature of the protagonist "does not make ... [her] innocent" of the unwitting creation of her metabole (reversal of fortune), and that personal activity and destiny are interconnected. The enormity of this suffering, however, entails that this concordance is often difficult to make out, with there clearly being no poetic justice (e.g., Lear, Oedipus, and Cadmus in The Bacchae). The reason for this is that what generally appears to be treated almost banally as Aristotle’s named tragic ‘flaw’ in some writers receives a much more radical and Schopenhaurian treatment in Steiner, therein appearing more as kakia (radical defect or wickedness) and ‘original sin’ than mere flaw. So in speaking of the hero’s ‘sacrilege’ (Frevel) in overstepping the limits of individual action, Steiner refers to a mysterious "fall" and locates tragedy in some fatality of over-reaching or self-mutilation structurally inescapable from human nature. Here, the newly born become unavoidably entangled in a conflict beyond their control, so that their actions are tragically infused by their mere existing. After all, in his lamentations over this century’s "carnival of bestiality" and the enduring scars of the Shoah the Jews, Steiner argues, have only "committed the crime of being", although he does elsewhere claim that the Jew brings humanity face to face with an unflattering and threatening Other.

Even apparently pure and innocent actions have consequences far beyond their horizon, as Cordelia discovered to her cost. Hence, the well-intended Oedipus, as an apparent plaything of the gods, could justly echo Lear’s torment of being "a man more sinned against than sinning". After all, he had unwittingly both committed patricide in his act of self-defence against an ambushing stranger, and become involved in incest. And these ironically occurred because he had attempted to flee the prediction of these events in the first place.

Tragedy itself provides no answers as to what this is and why this happens. Lear’s occasional cries to the gods and citations of fate or the planetary motions, as if they were the actors in the piece, appear to issue as projections in a momentary escaping from admitting personal responsibility (a process that Lear later reverses). Moreover, anti-fate speeches are put into the mouths of those evil characters who appear to be mentally alert (e.g. Edmund), in contrast with the honest characters who are presented generally as being less than mentally capable (e.g., Kent and Gloucester). Therefore, exclusively attributing the action to a transcendent power, for example, as Georgopoulos does, is difficult to maintain, particularly in King Lear. And yet, particularly in certain Greek tragedies, with their greater complexity than Elizabethan on the nature of the action’s source, ‘fate’ almost does occasionally appear above the stage as another principal actor. Vickers probably goes too far in the opposite, Hegelian, direction, however, when claiming that "Greek Tragedy is about people, and what they do to each other". Similarly, Lloyd-Jones erroneously declares that "the part played by the god [in Homer] can always be subtracted without making nonsense of the action". Vickers is more accurate when asserting that Aristotle’s silence on the issue is more of an indicator "that the Greeks did not evaluate tragedy with these rigid concepts". So, precisely in his attempt to escape his predicted destiny of parricide and mater coniugium, Oedipus tragically creates it for himself by his very flight. Antigone speaks of Oedipus’ "destiny", and the leading of the gods; and Oedipus himself makes a similar complaint on one occasion, while on another enmeshes divine causality and his own responsibility. Where The Bacchae presents the divine destruction of the human this is understood to be the punishment for the human offence by Pentheus of the deity Dionysius, although the nature of Dionysius appears suggestively arbitrary.

Steiner’s interpretation of the fall enables one to legitimately notice that the world is one in which the well-meaning and the innocent are implicated in this arbitrary suffering, as is the case with Cordelia. Following Aristotle’s comments that the fall of someone "innocent" is merely shocking but not tragic, and that tragic drama displays the fall of a great but flawed character, many commentators have softened the horror of her hanging through either textual amputation, in favour of engrafting a Hollywood style ending (Holingshed, Spenser, Dr. Johnson and Nahum Tate), or a search for Cordelia’s hamartia, thereby restoring some sense of ‘poetic justice’. For example, Coleridge sought it in her pride, Muir in her obstinacy, and Cavell in her wilfulness and hardness. Such an evasion from the tragic supports Steiner’s claim of its unendurability. However, without any simple justification of Cordelia’s behaviour, thereby making her into some model of perfection, it must be suggested that this slavish worship of Aristotle is unbecoming to King Lear, as well as a number of Greek tragedies. Aristotle’s is a sufficient observation only of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and The Women of Trachis, and Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes, Persians and Agamemnon.

This nihilistic account is accentuated by Steiner’s discourse about ‘endings’ within tragic drama, and it is here that his reflections on the nature of Christian hope (and by extension, the eschatology that determines it) arise. From pressing these almost parenthetic comments on the relationship of tragic drama (dramatising this world) and Christian hope (apparently imagining another world), the doors swing wide open into the caverns of questions of Christian identity and practice in the face of the indications of the tragic.

Tragedies, in direct contrast to the trajectory of comedies, climax in an irresolvable catastrophe, and frequently portray a descent from prosperity to suffering and chaos. Redemption is either too costly or too late. There is no "compensation" or adequate healing of wounds, only "irreparable" damage. For example, in contrast with Steiner’s detection of a "liturgical-grace note" in King Lear, one could note that Lear’s joy in the ‘dream scene’, albeit pervaded with shame in the acquired recognition of his folly, is quickly shattered by subsequent events which are all the more "dark and comfortless" because of the hint of redemption that has preceded it. Moreover, Edgar’s theological eulogy on divine and cosmic justice, understanding it as the gods’ retribution on human sins, strikes one as seriously misplaced and naive in the context of the drama.

According to Steiner, only Aeschylus’ Oresteia ends in an affirmation of unequivocal progress, and it is a very special case, although what that entails he does not elaborate. Redemptive themes are also present within Aeschylus’ Eumenides and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, but care in interpreting their significance is cautioned.

Therefore, there can be no ‘rationalistic’ thought of a resolution of the tragic conflict through the restoration of eternal justice or order within the drama (e.g., Antigone, Oedipus the King), as is so recognisable in Hegelian dialectic. This Hegelian "vision of an affirmative reconciliation", Galle regards as an example of the post-Enlightenment’s optimistic disjunction of the tragic, and Hodgson takes to be Hegel’s "forgetfulness" of evil.

Christianity is similarly presented as offering an optimistic escaping of the tragic vision by its essential "happy ending". While Steiner does claim that Christian hope can be at best tragicomic or melodramatic since "within its essential optimism" there is "episodic or partial Tragedy", for example in the Gospels’ account of Easter’s following the cross, these moments of defeat remain only temporary and provisional in the ascent to grace. Here, he is not raising the question as to the ontological status of the dark eschatological themes of Judgment and Hell, but is rather making the claim that Christian hope, and indeed Steiner’s image of hope lying in ash implies any hope, takes the form of an optimistically unqualified ‘All shall be well’. It is this optimistic form of hope for an eschatological way out, a righting of the wrongs, a "compensating heaven", that resists the tragic. Whereas "Real Tragedy" is the torment of the too-late and the uncomforted solitude, according to Steiner, there is never a too-late in Christianity. In it, as also in romantic meoldrama, the tension is already released.

If tragedies end in catastrophe, and the hero knows that this is to be her fate is it heroic or merely foolish to live on? May not this very knowledge paralyse human activity? Is this what Plato saw in the tragedies when he rejected them as morally pernicious? Steiner’s discourse of the dignity and heroic nobility of the sufferer "in the very excesses of his suffering", of being hallowed "as he had passed through flame", in part echoes Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, and partially avoids Schopenhauer’s belief that

Nevertheless, this anti-ethical concern over pessimism remains.

However, surely Lear at least does not and cannot, in his short-sightedness, foresee the consequences of the opening scene’s folly (can any of the others?). Indeed, Lear even entertains the hopeful possibility of reimbursing his disavowed daughter in the "come let us away to prison" speech. There is still hope, while the story has not ended for them. And yet it is precisely a tragic ending to history that Steiner’s reflections on tragic drama appear to provide, a pessimistic foreclosing of future possibilities and a premature proposing of tragedy as the ultimate category of history. However, even the audience cannot anticipate at least Cordelia’s death, given the commentators’ shock over her hanging. Moreover, Oedipus’s natural mother (Jocasta) specifically attempts to avoid the oracle’s prediction of tragedy by sending him away at birth; and Oedipus later flees from Corinth for the same reason.

Steiner’s ‘too-late’ could occur only as a death-bed lament when the cup of possibility runs dry (or a post-historical observation of the ending of previous events). Where that hope is fulfilled, even if limitedly, one certainly steps beyond the boundaries of tragedy. But even here the fulfilment does not provide an adequate compensation. Events have moved too far, as Exum argues with respect to Job. The restoration of Duncan’s royal house in his son (Malcolm) bears the weight of remembrance and the scars incurred over both the loss of his father (Duncan) and of the adept military commander (Macbeth). How much of a loss for Scotland these are one can only conjecture.

The tragic may be "a religious-metaphysical" "world-view" which mimetically springs from "outrage" and "protests at the conditions of life". But, as Steiner further notes, it is unendurable for human sensibilities. One recalls his Silenus sounding lament on the advantageousness of both suicide and renunciation of child-bearing.

However, a different sensibility is perceivable in his writings on hermeneutics, which moves beyond both the Schopenhauerian account and the nihilism of Adorno’s stark prescription. This sits uneasily with his presentation of the tragic vision, perhaps being an example of his own refusal of simple conceptual resolution. His published studies are too thematically sporadic, occasionalistic, and interrogative to be systematically contained. This forms a link to the style of Donald MacKinnon, a theologian whose own occasionalism manifests

Without identically repeating the Nietzschean pattern of redemption through artistic performance, Steiner does insist that the process of creativity itself is transcendence. Indeed, he later complains about the loss of the primary sense of creativity to the parasitic stress of contemporary academia and journalism on review and commentary. With its welcoming of "those who can domesticate, who can secularize the mystery and summons of creation.

In contrast, in the mid 1960s Steiner presents artistic creativity as dangerously rivalling the divine creativity and speaks of there being at the frontiers of language a "certitude of ... divine meaning" and a proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the world".

And yet his enigmatic theology of culture is qualified, and even bears testimony to a mysterious Being, or "metaphysical scandal" of the incommensurability of the categories God and humanity. Here in the late sixties and early seventies Steiner begins to consciously situate his thoughts between two positions: firstly, the logocentric sacramental portrayal of the "Word’s [real] presence in the word"; and secondly, what 1989’s study, Real Presences, explicitly identifies as pertaining to a "deconstructive and postmodernist counter-theology of absence" that is characterised by the "broken contract" of the relation of linguistic expression and the referential sayability of the world:

Avoiding this second is an interesting move since it shows how Steiner, despite his presentation of the tragic and his approval of Elie Wiesel’s advocacy of silence in the face of the unspeakability of Auschwitz, is not content with cultural and hermeneutical nihilism.

In partial agreement with this second identified approach, he prevents the provision of a "theological insurance or underwriting" when noting the density of divine absence, admits that disclosure is partial in a hiddenness-in-revealedness paradox of the semantic act, and recognises that artistic creativity may be "eroded or possibly falsified by human transcription". Language, after all, is not only used to communicate "But to conceal, to leave unspoken". Steiner is acutely sensitive to the difficulties involved in any act of translation, whether that be the translation of other grammars into one’s own, or the act of interpreting the discourse of an other speaking from within one’s own grammatical frame. The Adamic linguistic divine presence was lost through the "fall" that was Babel’s confusion and there then developed a "pluralistic framework" of "mutually incomprehensible tongues". To a great extent human being is now estranged from the speech of her fellow human in the Babelic multifariousness of linguistic discourse. The need to translate is an indication of humanity’s exile from herself. This diversity, "linguistic differences and the profoundly exasperating inability of human beings to understand each other have bred hatred and reciprocal contempt."

Moreover, Steiner emphasises the "undecidability of unbounded sign-systems", with their weave of incommensurable connotation even in the formalisations of literature, and the excess of the signified beyond the signifier. There are always further layers to be excavated, deeper shafts to be sunk into the manifold strata of inception in the archaeology of sense and meaning, without sterile punctuation through the "undecidability of unbounded sign-systems", as if figuration and representation can arrest hermeneutical openness in final closure.

Nevertheless, although meaning cannot be totally grasped, he asserts in contrast to the deconstructive indeterminacies of tracings, that the artistic products "have in them the live vestiges of transcendent intrusion", an "edge of presence". In 1979 Steiner introduces discourse about reading

What is presented here is a moral, rather than theoretical or empirical, way or leap beyond hermeneutic nihilism, an approach that is as "liberating as ... [it is] does not engage finality. It does not confront in immediacy the nihilistic supposition." Steiner cites Descartes as an example of this approach since the latter

Steiner continues,

It is in this context that a Pascalian sounding notion of a "wager on transcendence" that might be "wholly erroneous" is expressed, responding tentatively to Steiner’s own admission that

The admission of reciprocal encounter with the other (Other?) in the hermeneutic act is thereafter depicted through the language of faith, trust, risk and hope, or that of Kantian regulative ideals, since it is the as if of the "presence[s] of a realness" operative in the text. This is particularly so since Steiner admits that there may, in the end, be no convincing arguments that remain irrefutable against deconstruction, against the epilogue, the after-Word. It is this wager that grounds the somewhat bold and controversial claim that "There is language, there is art, because there is ‘the other’."

Interpretation is encounter with the meaningful and authentic, but such things cannot be verified or legislated for. Steiner is well aware of the plural forms involved as consequences of the act of reading, and the provisionality, fragileness and risk that thereby ensues for any hermeneutics (and similarly for the act of translation since translation can never be accomplished but must nevertheless be pursued). Reading is a "never fully to be realized ideal of all interpretation and valuation". The language of trust is vital to Steiner’s account at this point:

A fruitful analogy for what Steiner is doing here could be found in Jürgen Habermas’ ‘ideal speech situation’. This situation is usually a counter-factual that serves to provide regulation and critique of all conversations, and a content and shape to all our strivings for authentic conversation. It does this by providing a vision of what communication could and should be, a goal to aim at. Tracy argues that although "we never find ourselves in the ideal speech situation", the "regulative model is useful for sorting out the ambiguities of all actual communication.

Language of ‘meaning’ becomes appropriate when the reader learns new ways of seeing and reciprocally encountering the textual ‘other’ in an welcoming openness that transcends oneself and embraces that which is other. Indeed, this answerability to the text, depending in some sense on presence-in-absence, is necessary for an ethical reading inseparable from the aesthetic, an inseparability that deconstruction has severed. As Fuchs argues, "The texts must translate us before we can translate them." In this vulnerable encounter with the other, one’s self-possession is undermined by our entertaining the stranger, a hermeneutical process for which there can be no closure. The risk is that the entertained "guest may turn despotic or venomous", and yet the gamble of cortesia in the communicative act is worth making.

This journeying, reminding us of our visitors’ visas in existence, leads Steiner into a rich depiction of the eschatological significance of temporality which opens up the space for human hope in creative process. In Real Presences Steiner’s reflections on the necessary place of hope in human life thereby suggest that his darkly painted view of existence is, or has to be for the sake of human survival, fundamentally incomplete. Language, as the future tense implies and expresses, knows no conceptual or projective finality.

Life, and we must add even tragedies themselves, contains forms of human joy and creativity in ways that cannot be specified in advance or legislated for. Creative and unlimited possibilities are open. Of course, by way of qualification, one must point out that the merely futural is not necessarily the stuff of hope. After all, the thoughts of the future can be the places of dark and fearful imaginings, and even certain possibilities dreamt by some can bring destruction to the humanness of others. Nevertheless, bearing this qualification in mind, Steiner’s point is that the future can be the inspirer of hope, expressed in the language of the counter-factual, but also in relating hope and discourse about the tentativeness involved in trust, risk and the fragility of these.

Subsequently, he metaphorically draws on the temporality of the Easter weekend, partially reflecting the triduum mortis of von Balthasar’s Mysterium Paschale, in order to present the temporality of human hope. Friday is portrayed as the day of solitude, failure and pain. And, indeed, Steiner would do well to recognise that it is a day of death, that boundary-limit of humanness and all forms of creativity. Sunday, by contrast, is a day of liberation, resurrection and justice, the ‘resolution’ of all our Good Fridays, although MacKinnon’s writings indicate that the sense of ‘resolution’ should be theologically qualified so as not to exclude, reverse or undermine the prior consciousness of rupture. It is "The lineaments of that Sunday [that] carry the name of hope", that provide propulsion to all our creative imaginings.

Steiner is using this theme in a specific way, reflecting on humanity’s perspective and vision of temporal and eschatological possibilities after the original Easter. Of course, for Jesus, Easter Saturday was not a day of journeying. Rather, Friday had ceased his life movements. Saturday was his day of death and hell, the day of the coldness and silence of a body beginning its decay in the grave. It is for this reason that Sunday’s events can only be portrayed through language of miracle, eschatological novum, the unexpected.

But Steiner does not delineate his sources of his hopefulness, or examine or describe its genealogy. He admits that his wager is "itself in need of a clear foundation", and it is here that theological questions cannot be so easily bypassed if hope is not to succumb to self-induced delusion. Indeed, Steiner’ eclectic use of religious images and theological themes suggest a purely regulative ideal, implying a non-realistic picture of God. His reflections centre on providing a hermeneutics beyond deconstructive nihilism and the presence of the Logos in meaning. As a consequence, ‘hope’s’ character is developed, and it is here that his work serves to critique certain Christian versions of hope.

This perspective of hope’s refusing to shy away from an appropriately defined tragic vision enables one to utilise tragic sensibilities in order to interrogate all easy optimisms that refuse to taste the bitterness of rupture. Here, tragedies, in identifying and presenting certain dramatic instances of the tragic vision, can perform the critically interrogative function by asking us just what day we imagine today is. They present themselves as, what Wyschogrod names, "kind[s] of perpetual moral wakefulness", asking about the complexity of motives, the wisdom in decisions, the characters we develop, and the importance of external factors in shaping events, to name a few features of our narrative identities. Highlighted, herein, by Nussbaum is the "fragility of goodness" and the risky delicacy of human self-control and movement toward all forms of possession (be they psychological, economic, political, intellectual, etc.), and hence "our vulnerability to evil". In other words, human limitations in a world of contingency and inhospitability. Kekes claims that in such a world "The best we can do is to plan our lives so as to minimize their [i.e., the conditions that create tragedies] influence", assuming, of course, that we can adequately identify them all.

They do not answer any philosophical or theological questions, for instance those that Steiner’s reflections on tragic drama are prone to solve about the ultimate condition of the universe in an Archimedian perspective denied by his hermeneutics. The very multiplicity and diversity of the dramas themselves speak of the problem of transcripting tragic experience into theory, and thereby disrupt easy coherences of thinking about the whole of reality. Instead they raise questions in acute fashion, particularly over any created securities of meaning and value. Tragedies can teach, then, less by didactic or conceptual means, but, as Ricoeur argues, by "more closely resembling a conversion of the manner of looking" through destabilising interrogating which therein reorients action. As such they profoundly critique Christian hope’s mood of discourse, reminding it of its long Saturday in which the hope for Sunday’s dawning regulates and shapes its fragile agency for the sake of the humanisation and dedemonisation of the world. Changing the image from Saturday to the Garden of Gethsemane, Lash argues, that

Therefore,