In 1990 George Steiner was invited to give the Gifford lectures at Glasgow University. They were well received. In fact, in Donald MacKinnon’s words, they were ‘an outstanding series’. They are as yet unpublished. While we still await their publication, the paperback version of Real Presences, his most outstanding explication so far of a theology of culture, has appeared. Furthermore, in 1993 John Hopkins University Press are publishing, under the editorship of Nathan Scott, a collection of essays on various aspects of George Steiner’s work. This article attempts to assess the preoccupation with theological issues evident in Steiner’s work from the beginning.

That culture and its meaning are underwritten by God is a thesis with a long history in literary studies. From the Greeks to Proust, from the Torah to Thomas Mann, the argument that the great artist is ‘inspired’ and communicates that which transcends both himself/herself and his/her public is an ancient one. When George Steiner began defending this argument (in opposition to the formalism of New Criticism in the States) in the late Fifties and early Sixties, he might appear therefore as a late believer in the traditions of liberal humanism. He could be seen as a man ascending a path into the mountains well- trodden before him by the likes of Coleridge, Ruskin, Arnold and T.S.Eliot. Aware, from his examination of the work of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky of ‘genius [who] had fallen into the hands of the living God’ (T.D. p.44), he began by exploring the frontiers of language. In 1961 we find him writing about ‘the retreat of the word’ in contemporary culture in an essay with that title. Silence threatens, he prophesies. But it is the silence of the meaningless, the illiterate; the silence of ossified cliche. In the early Sixties we find him preoccupied with this silence and countering it with another form of silence—the silence of the Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus of Dante’s Paradiso—where language arches back towards its origin, ‘where the word of the poet ceases, [and] a great light begins’ (L.S. p.59). In 1966, in the remarkable essay ‘Silence and the Poet’ Steiner goes on to make the claim that here at the frontiers of language is ‘proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the world. . . [W]e experience the certitude of a divine meaning surpassing and enfolding ours. What lies beyond man’s word is eloquent of God’ (L.S.p.58).